Like all wealthy countries, the United States has made a policy commitment to ensuring that everyone, regardless of  income level, has access to enough food to sustain their health. One way we could make good on that commitment is by a system of compulsory food insurance: Everyone pays in, either via plans purchased on the […]

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The ruling rejecting the Google Books settlement suggests, plausibly enough, that any general solution to the problem of orphan works is more properly the task of Congress than any kind of private agreement. I’ll admit to being a bit puzzled about why this hasn’t already happened. I take it for granted that our current lunatic […]

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A pretty brilliant response to the merry bilious little band from Westboro Baptist:

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This is put a bit more bluntly than anything Hayek says, but I do think there’s a strand of it running through some of his arguments: What Rawls doesn’t see is how [a society based on the Difference Principle] would create conditions for an uncontrolled explosion of resentment: in it, I would know that my […]

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This actually seems like it might be a legitimate subject of regulation: “When people come together, germs can come together too,” said Dr. Anne Schuchat, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. “There are not that many studies about flu spreading on airplanes and trains, but anytime people are close together, […]

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Megan McArdle approvingly quotes Tyler Cowen on the bailouts: Without the bailouts we would have had many more failed banks, very strong deflationary pressures, a stronger seize-up in credit markets than what we had, and a climate of sheer political and economic panic, leading to greater pressures for bad state interventions than what we now […]

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In a previous post, I suggested that the most adequate conception of a purported right to health care is as really consisting of two distinct elements: a distributional right to a fair share of social resources—with the understanding that one’s fair share can depend on the other burdens and misfortunes one faces, so that the […]

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I’ve suggested before that the best version of progressivism—by which I mean, the most internally coherent version—would not include a distinct right to health care for competent adults as a moral or theoretical right, though it may in practice recommend that some degree of access to publicly provided or subsidized health care be afforded as […]

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Conveniently tying together two recent posts, Dworkin has an extended discussion of courtesy in Law’s Empire, which he uses to illustrate some points about the interpretation of social institutions, but which has some independent interests. On the familiar account of somewhat ritualized behavior like tipping your hat to people you encounter, or saying “Please” and […]

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I don’t have particularly strong views either way about health care reform, but it’s depressing that the one part of the Obama plan that seemed like an obviously, unambiguously good idea has become a casualty of the requirement that all political disagreement be cast as a war between good and evil. There are not a […]

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