Property & Plague
I probably don’t need to enumerate the many illnesses that are wreaking havoc worldwide at the moment, some with more traditionally plague-like features than others. I have followed with great distress...
View ArticleThe Many Lives of Ayn Rand
Sometimes I think the fact that so many Christians slavishly devote themselves to Ayn Rand is part of her infernal punishment. I imagine Satan periodically delivering her reams of praise for her work,...
View ArticleThe Shape of Things
In high school I went through a Cormac McCarthy phase. When I read books I read reviews of them obsessively, mostly to see if there’s anything useful about them I’m missing because I’ve trained myself...
View ArticleOwnership/Access
A friend wanted me to look at this Daily Beast piece on ownership versus access. Very interesting! Here is what I understand to be the dominant argument: “Without an ownership society, where citizens...
View ArticleProhibition, Affirmative Consent
California now has an affirmative consent law, which has been billed by some as the “yes means yes” law, as though at some point yes did not mean yes. The law mandates the following standard of consent...
View ArticlePlease Help
For a comprehensive play-by-play of how the Ebola crisis in West Africa spiraled out of control, read this amazing piece at the Washington Post. It illustrates very clearly the severity of the...
View ArticleSalt
Down there, for a moment, I thought The great, formal affair was beginning, orchestrated, Its colors concentrated in a glance, a ballade That takes in the whole world, now, but lightly, Still lightly,...
View ArticleCoercion & Charity
Some people say this: “Care for the poor should be handled by private institutions like the Church, because it is morally wrong for the state to coerce charity.” I find it weird this is trotted out as...
View ArticleMoms & the EITC
What is the earned income tax credit? It’s a refundable tax credit that functions as a low income wage subsidy. Here’s how it works: The earned income tax credit (EITC) subsidizes low-income working...
View ArticleOr You Live as You Think
Paul Bourget wrote that “one must live the way one thinks or end up thinking the way one has lived.” The point being: it’s not really stable or tenable to maintain a values system that’s completely...
View ArticleFoolishness, Poverty, Mobility
Couple days ago Rod Dreher had a go at a poor teenager in New York City and his family. He titled the column, “Poor and Foolish.” It’s about all the things poor people do — like having children out of...
View ArticleResisting Christmas
I’m one of those Christmas people. I am not a Christmas cheer evangelist; I am not trying to convince you to be thrilled that Christmas is approaching. It’s more the reverse: throughout the long year...
View ArticleKiss the Kochs
If I ever had enough money to wedge my way into the Washington Post to do nothing more than write a love letter to my wealthy co-aristocrats, I would dump money into charitable programs until I no...
View ArticleCharity & Ministry
There’s an interesting species of Christianesque argument against welfare that goes like this: “by replacing aid that could be given by community members who are Christian, welfare programs prevent us...
View ArticleProperty-Based Ethics
A while ago, when I was writing about Christian legal realism, I pointed out that one of the problems with the veneration of private property rights is that they play such an integral role in the...
View ArticleThe Language of Charity
Short post today: I’m trying to get better at these. It’s fair to say that modern welfare ‘evolved’, in some ways, from the charitable projects maintained by the Church in the middle ages. How that...
View ArticleProperty Theories & the Buffered Self
When you think about how to measure whether or not the institution of private property is functioning correctly, there are two different approaches you can take. 1.) A property rights approach, in...
View ArticleBusinesses & Moral Obligations
Back in the day, the push among those who did not much like the idea of state welfare was to argue that benefits should come through the employer. This was pretty popular in a lot of Catholic worker...
View ArticleDisavowal Politics
There is a paradox in mass movements wherein a person or group of people will commit some terrible act, claim an association with a particular movement, and then people outside the movement will demand...
View ArticleOnce More, Without Feeling
In this Slate post on race science, William Saletan tried to convince his liberal readers to buy into the notion that, on the whole, black people are genetically inferior to white people. At the time...
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