Dr. Carrie-Ann Biondi of Marymount Manhattan College will be speaking on “Mike Rowe and Ayn Rand: Somebody’s Gotta Do It.” Dr. Biondi won Marymount Manhattan’s teaching excellence award in 2012. A video of her acceptance speech is here. According to my colleague Shawn Klein, who is organizing the talk, Dr. Biondi’s focus is actor Mike […]
Professor Carrie-Ann Biondi to speak at Rockford University Read More »
The opening of my latest column at EveryJoe: “Strange times for free speech. “A century ago, Germany was the authoritarian nation. Kaiser Wilhelm was presiding over its efforts in World War I, and young Adolf Hitler was working toward his opportunity in World War II. At the same time, Britain and America were havens of
Is Free Speech Dead in Universities? [new The Good Life column] Read More »
“When you lay out a picnic, you get ants. When you hand out more wealth through government, you get lobbyists. The federal budget is the biggest picnic in history.” That amusingly perfect analogy is from page 241 of Boaz’s The Libertarian Mind.
David Boaz on lobbyists Read More »
Levante o tópico dos monopólios, e a discussão resultante rapidamente evidenciará deficiências ideológicas. Um colega com quem lecionei nas áreas de negócios e capitalismo enviou-me, de forma entusiasmada, esse artigo escrito por Paul Krugman, um economista vencedor do Prêmio Nobel. Krugman ataca a Amazon e clama por algum tipo de intervenção sobre suas atividades. A Amazon,
Quem realmente liga para os monopólios? Read More »
[Below is the text. Here also is a PDF version.] John Maynard Keynes, The End of Laissez-Faire (1926) The disposition towards public affairs, which we conveniently sum up as individualism and laissez-faire, drew its sustenance from many different rivulets of thought and springs of feeling. For more than a hundred years our philosophers ruled us
Keynes’s “The End of Laissez-Faire” (text) Read More »
A standard argument for mandatory schooling is that it reduces crime. Behind that argument are claims that formal education civilizes and/or that schooling gets kids off the streets where they otherwise might be. That is to say, in economics-speak, that education has positive externalities beyond whatever other value one already ascribes it. I’m still re-reading
Does schooling reduce crime? Read More »
O tema de uma pesquisa recente entre principais artistas e críticos de arte de nossa geração tratou de quem foi o artista mais influente do século XX. Quem venceu? Se você chutou Pablo Picasso — boa tentativa, mas ele ficou em segundo. Antes de identificarmos o vencedor, vamos refletir sobre a importância do 1º lugar
O artista mais importante do nosso século Read More »
The standard claim is that philosophy begins with Thales. When I teach this to my students, it’s a hard sell, for here are the founding texts in philosophy — ascribed to Thales by Aristotle: “The first principle and basic nature of all things is water.” and “All things are full of gods.” You can imagine
Why Philosophy Begins with Thales Read More »