Against sin taxes and soft prohibition
"An oppressive government is more to be feared than a tiger, or a beer." ~ Confucius Matt Yglesias and Mark Kleiman both think that taxing beer at much higher rates is a good idea....
Monthly Archive: March 2010
The chloroformed mind: the case against teaching math
Peter Gray has a fascinating piece in Psychology Today arguing, quite counter-intuitively, that in order to improve math scores we should stop teaching math – at least at the elementary level. He gives the...
Lesson One: Don’t Respond to Book Reviews
Here’s the story of an extraordinarily petty response to a review of a book. The reviewer, Caleb McDaniel, is an old friend of mine from grad school, and I don’t believe him remotely guilty...
Dragonlance
“This book was one of my earliest introductions to fantasy and thus to the limits (or lack of limits) of the imagination. I read Dragonlance before I read Tolkien, and was just amazed by...
Anti-statists and the current regime
Bob Cheeks asks: “Do you see yourself, in some degree, to be anti-statist? What is your opinion of the current regime?” Well I suppose I do consider myself to be anti-statist, but I’m also...
New institutions.
Chris Hayes and Reihan Salam had a Bloggingheads discussion the other day about their latest articles in Time. Both wrote short essays about an “important trend”: Hayes diagnoses a collapse of authority in our...
I Need a Good Story
So I had a cut on the side of my nose the other day that has scarred over in a way I didn’t expect, making it look nastier than it really was. I need...
Triple Bank Shot Foreign Policy Theories = Very Bad Policy: Bombing Iran Edition
And now for something completely non Philip Blond related…. A foreign policy rant. (I don’t know what Blond’s foreign policy views are anyway). Veteran readers of mine (both of you) will recall that David...
In defense of sandwiches; or, Rise of the Bread Tories
“Surely, a loaf of bread is the centre of the parable of life” ~ yet more G.K. Chesterton I do love a good sandwich. Indeed, there are few things I love more than a...
‘A braintrust of Other Ways’
“In short, the democratic faith is this: that the most terribly important things must be left to ordinary men themselves — the mating of the sexes, the rearing of the young, the laws of...
The First Rule of Rice Cooker
The first rule of rice cooker is that you do not talk about rice cooker. The rice cooker probably knows more about your emotional state of being in the kitchen than anything or anyone...
For Non-Blonds
I’ve learned one thing from listening to Phillip Blond’s recent talk at Georgetown: I’m no Red Tory. My turning point came about halfway through the lecture. Blond had thrown out a few zingers here...
The Sarah Palin Effect
Personally, I’m a Palin agnostic, but this line in an article in the recent Catholic Register cracked me up: “(T)he American-born professor also warns that a close association between conservative, reactionary politics and religion...
Sophocles “Oedipus Rex”
Oedipus Rex is an extraordinarily cruel play. Oedipus has seemingly done nothing wrong and lacks the fatal flaw that would justify the way that coincidences and events align against him. The punishment is completely...
The Polls and the Polis
In a really crackerjack post, Mr. Dierkes, writes: “The hallmark of the liberal procedural republic according to Sandel is that citizens are treated as consumers. The market becomes the dominant form of thought and...
Unable to Clear The Derivative Deck
Peter Atwater writes (concerning the fears of a double dip recession): Unfortunately, from my perspective there have been two very distinct recoveries. The first one is a recovery in asset prices — which I...
Push Comes To Shove
I said awhile ago that, despite some early promisnig signs, the real test of whether Governor Christie is taking our state’s budgetary problems and tax problems seriously would be in the details of his budget...
Comment of the Day
Goes to JosephFM (comment #5) to my earlier post on Philip Blond and Michael Sandel.
An ‘antique liberal’ by any other name
David – I wonder if what Blond is trying to do is to bridge the divide between the modern liberal state and the sort of Aristotelian or anti-modern philosophy of MacIntyre or the radical...
Blond with Sandel(s)
Two of the League’s brethren attended Philip Blond’s lecture at Georgetown last week. Will’s review here, David’s here. For those interested, Blond’s thought has been a source of numerous posts in the League’s annals...
