An article in the New York Times Magazine this weekend considered a proposal to pay poor folks for “good behavior”—things like staying in school and on the right side of the law. I’ll confess, I couldn’t get one line from a certain (distinctively non-worksafe) Chris Rock routine out of my head: “What do you want, […]

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I’d meant to say something about last week’s debate at Campus Progress over Barry Goldwater, with my friend Dana Goldstein defending her soft spot for the late Arizona senator and Brown student Justin Elliott ridiculing the idea that Goldwater’s legacy contains anything for progressives to admire. I tend to think they both rather miss the […]

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I went to see Ronald Dworkin speak on Tuesday about his new book Is Democracy Possible Here?, about which I’ll presumably have more to say once I’ve actually read it. One thing that struck me, though, had to do with his principle of “equal concern,” which is one of two he thinks should structure all […]

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I just skimmed a BeliefNet interview with La Coulter in which she discusses her newest screed about how the anti-American heathens are something something something. It is, as you might expect, roughly equal parts puerile jokes and total batshit craziness, but I did raise an eyebrow at this bit: Is it possible to be a […]

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Apropos of Brian Doherty’s reportage on the tensions between “purists” and “reformers” in the LP, I see that the arbiters of purity over at LewRockwell.Com ran at least three articles on that theme last week: “In Defense of Libertarian Purity,” “Principles,” and “Evicting Libertarian Party Principles.” Each seems to be built on a premise that […]

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Here’s something that’s always puzzled me a bit about libertarian thought: Over at Hit and Run, Jesse Walker links an appraisal of the Greenspan legacy by libertarian Baltimore Sun columnist Jay Hancock, who writes: But I do know that central economic planners tend to mess up. I know that economies are like ecological systems: Intervention […]

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I found myself arguing the justice of international trade with a few leftish college students last week (and was slightly horrified to discover that it’d been so long that some rather elementary economic points took rather longer than they ought have to rouse from their slumber in the corners of memory). One allowed that foreign-owned […]

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Via a circuitous route, I came across an old post by Paul Hsieh explaining why he agrees with the Catholic (i.e. West Coast) Objectivist position that it’s not halal for good Randians to make common cause with—or, indeed, be seen in the general vicinity of—libertarians. Paul offers a parable in which a surgeon is offered […]

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Careful Matt, sound too wary of government intervention and you’ll get tagged as a fascist.

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Will Wilkinson has posted the third in his “Letters to a Young Objectivist” series, this time dealing with Rand’s ethics. I was never really an Objectivist, as Will was, but did also grapple with her ideas back in the day—something I still think was a useful exercise. I was intrigued to note, though, that the […]

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