Notes on Hayek and the Common Law

This month’s issue of Cato Unbound features a pretty good discussion of Hayek’s conception of spontaneous order.  Timothy Sandefur’s first critique in the lead essay is provocative, but has some flaws.  On Hayek’s description of how law is constructed, Sandefur writes: “No system of law,” Hayek admits, “has ever been designed as a whole, and [...]

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Remembering Communism

Today marks the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Unfortunately, there are some real morons getting a voice today. The New York Times is giving voice to an out-and-out totalitarian. It bums me out that Žižek’s status, like Noam Chomsky’s, is that of an admired and respected intellectual and not an obviously [...]

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Bush, The Wall and Dragos

Paul Hollander writes an excellent piece in the Washington Post about the momentous events of November 1989.  Hollander escaped the communist hegemony in 1956, and he writes about the oppression and murder committed by the statist regimes of the last century. While greatly concerned with communism in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Americans — [...]

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Golf Clap for Idiocy

We all know Michigan’s economy is craptastic; it’s become proverbial, like the Pope crapping in the woods.  (Is that a joke anyone makes besides my dad?) Michigan’s a poisonous mix of high, progressive taxes, union influence, and “investments” in public money-sinks like education, public works, and corporate subsidies. From the WSJ Meanwhile, the new business [...]

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A (Pride) Day in the Park

This weekend a good friend of mine came to town.  She’s been one of my best friends for years, but she wasn’t coming exclusively to visit me.  While we don’t always (or even rarely) see eye-to-eye on social issues, there’s one we can agree on.  It’s pretty indefensible to keep homosexuals from having legally binding [...]

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Moral Question for Lefties

As a philosophy major, I’m prone to indulge silly questions from time to time.  From the previously mentioned, and excellent Bourgeois Virtues, I got my mind tangled up with this question:  Is the redistributive state inherently amoral, as it violates Kant’s second categorical imperative to never treat people as means?  Quoting Feser’s On Nozick: Respecting [...]

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The Last of the Golden Days

California is collapsing.  The Guardian has an outsider’s perspective on the downfall of the world’s eighth largest economy.  The Golden State is fading. California has a special place in the American psyche. It is the Golden State: a playground of the rich and famous with perfect weather. It symbolises a lifestyle of sunshine, swimming pools [...]

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Responding to a call for socialized health care

Take a look at this video. The video is useful because the producer really tries to strip away many confusing aspects of the health care industry, and in doing so, presents a very clear case for single-payer, government-run, socialized health care. The clarity is a strength and a weakness, because the argument is exposed for [...]

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