Philosophy and Methodology

John Gray is Ayn Rand's nightmare come true. Once a classical liberal, he now finds the inanities of Tony Blair's "Third Way", 

Lew Rockwell asks us to think of a robber who promises to stop coming through your front door if you promise to leave open the back door. So it is with the state that promises to stop taxing your income if you let it tax your consumption. The issue is not the method; it is the amount.

When intellectuals teach the children of nonintellectuals to hate their own civilization, and regard its achievements as acts of villainy, writes Steven Yates, they only invite waves of understandable anti-intellectual reaction.

Professor Stephen Tonsor said of John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton that "it is a pity that American historians so rarely read him."  And it is hard to dispute that conclusion. Lord Acton's collected works, writes Gary Galles, provide us with plenty of wisdom, now all but forgotten.

Most academics in the social sciences assume that civilization is saved by attacking such antiquated and anti-egalitarian notions as property rights and freedom of association, writes Chris Westley. This is notable because universities used to be concerned with the business of discovering and teaching the truth.

It is hard to understand the vague and ill-defined laws Martha Stewart and Sam Waksal are accused of violating. But the premise of the law is not hard to divine: Competition in capital markets must proceed from a level playing field. All investors are entitled to the same information advantage irrespective of effort and abilities. In a word, socialism!

Those who have written in favor of distributism on moral grounds appear to revel in their ignorance of economics--as if a discipline devoted to the application of human reason to the problems of scarcity in the world could actually in itself be antagonistic to ethics and faith.

The statement given by the Bush administration to Congress and now available online, entitled "The National Security Strategy of the United States," must be read to be believed, writes Joseph Stromberg. Its historical points are dubious, its economics misleading, and its social theory a heap of dangerous half- or third-truths.

Those who think ethics is bogus, and there are literally thousands of them in universities and colleges across the globe, seem unwilling to apply moral ambiguity where it actually does apply. For example, why are capitalist institutions so often subjected to blanket moral condemnation?

 

Modern Americans live lives considerably less simple than that of Henry David Thoreau on Walden Pond. But Thoreau's insights in "Civil Disobedience," writes Gary Galles, are more important in our far more complex world.