Standard theory views government as functional: a social need arises, and government, semi-automatically, springs up to fill that need. (see Murray Rothbard) Furthermore, and this is always true, whether or not the “need” is satisfactorily met by government action, the newly hired government employees will be the first (and sometimes the only ones) to benefit [...]
Archive for June 2009
Limits of central government
June 28, 2009Mortimer Adler on Multiculturalism
June 28, 2009“The world, certainly, is multicultural, and so we should be taught about its cultural diversity. But this, it seems to me, is the time to ask whether society as a whole or its educational institutions should be multicultural in all respects, or only in some. If only in some, I propose that the word transculturalism [...]
Khomeini/Khamenei, lest we forget
June 28, 2009During the Iran-Iraq War, the Ayatollah Khomeini imported 500,000 small plastic keys from Taiwan. The trinkets were meant to be inspirational. After Iraq invaded in September 1980, it had quickly become clear that Iran’s forces were no match for Saddam Hussein’s professional, well-armed military. To compensate for their disadvantage, Khomeini sent Iranian children, some as [...]
Liberalism
June 27, 2009It’s much, much older than we thought. It doesn’t date to our own FDR nearly 100 years ago, nor to Rousseau, Voltaire and the other liberal thinkers of the French Enlightenment in the 18th. century, nor to John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government and his three Letters on Toleration, published between 1689 and 1692. In [...]
Men are born free and sheep are born carnivorous
June 26, 2009The forcing of freedom on others may or may not have begun with the French Revolution. But it’s been going on ever since. George Bush made it the highlight of his presidency and never seemed to understand that it couldn’t be done. Why, he would say to himself, doesn’t everyone want to be free? Well [...]
In Iran, the old man and the people
June 25, 2009James Coleman in a passage written for The Public Interest, some 32 years ago, well before the Shah’s overthrow and the ascendancy of the Ayatollah Khomeini, had this to say while discussing John Rawls’s and Robert Nozick’s widely different ideas on inequality: Whereas for Rawls, a central authority is entitled to distribute the fruits of [...]
Why were these ideas of James Coleman, written down in the Public Interest in the Fall of 1967, allowed to die?
June 23, 2009Toward Open Schools by JAMES S. COLEMAN Since the publication, in July, 1966, of the Office of Education’s report to Congress and the President on “Equality of Educational Opportunity,” there has been much speculation and discussion concerning the policy implications of the report. The report itself, which focused principally on inequalities experienced by Negroes and [...]
“Costs are keeping patients from care.”
June 21, 2009In today’s Boston Globe I read that “Costs are keeping patients from care.” Think about it. I’m certain that you would never see headlines like the following: “costs are keeping drivers from cars,” or “costs are keeping buyers from houses.” So what’s the difference between buying medical care and, say, buying shelter or transportation, or [...]
In Iran, would that it were history in the making.
June 19, 2009What is it about Iran that I, and probably most Americans who read and follow the international news, find so fascinating about that country? Right now it’s the struggle, a death struggle for some, between the Iranian people and their Iranian oppressors. And the latter, for the moment anyway, hold all the clubs. David and [...]
Take refuge by listening to opera
June 10, 2009President Obama has just appointed a “Compensation Czar” whose job it will be to determine the salaries and bonuses of some of the top executives in America, including Kenneth D. Lewis, the chief executive of Bank of America, Vikram S. Pandit, the head of Citigroup, and Fritz Henderson, the chief executive of General Motors, all [...]
