At the Hoover Institution’s site, an anecdote about contemporary mores: “Hanson was in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart one day when he saw a young woman struggling to move a big screen television into her Honda. When he went over to help her, he noticed that she was holding an EBT card, a government-issued
Food stamps and big screen televisions Read More »
From a book within a book:
“He said that architecture was truly the greatest of the arts, because it was anonymous, as all greatness. …
Did you build that? Read More »
Here are Acton’s famous words: “I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption, it is the other way, against the holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make
Power does not corrupt Read More »
An instructive trio of essays by economists at Cato Unbound about Austrian economics’ reputation — especially Mises’s praxeological version — for being strongly a priori rationalist: Is Austrian economics anti-empiricist? Steve Horwitz says no. Bryan Caplan says yes. George Selgin also says yes. To Selgin’s series of quotations from Mises, I’d add this one from
Are Austrian economists anti-empirical? Read More »
I was struck by this philosophical economist’s connecting the Aristotelian solution to the so-called naturalistic fallacy to the question of the value of money. “This approach hints at the fact that a key element in this work is the treatment given to questions surrounding the ‘naturalistic fallacy.’ The basic reasoning here is that in regard
Zelmanovitz on philosophy of money Read More »
Kant’s dictum Ought implies can is true — except when you’re drunk.
Deep thought on Kant’s “Ought implies can” Read More »
And symphonies discriminate against the deaf. I mocked that view in criticizing last year’s lawsuit against Chipotle: Chipotle Mexican Grill versus egalitarianism. Turns out, though, that it’s cutting-edge civil rights law based on the Americans with Disabilities Act: “Justice Department Settles with Sacramento, Calif., Public Library Authority Over Inaccessible ‘E-Reader’ Devices”. The library had acquired
Libraries discriminate against the blind Read More »
I learned this week that my Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault will be used this academic year as a textbook in philosophy courses in New York, Canada, and South Africa. How cool is that.
Explaining Postmodernism as university textbook Read More »