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Farewell to St. Paul’s

By on July 7, 2017 1

For a long time, one of my most idyllic memories has been of the summer of 1980, which I spent in the St. Paul’s School Advanced Studies Program in Concord NH.

St. Paul's School

Now it turns out that St. Paul’s has been a hotbed of sexual abuse against students for decades, with at least 23 faculty members (and possibly as many as 34 – at a school where the total number of faculty is only slightly over 100) being guilty of everything from “clear boundary crossings to repeated sexual relationships to rape” – and with the administration having been despicably (though, alas, not atypically) recalcitrant and blame-the-victim-ish in addressing the problem for many years. Some of the named perpetrators are faculty I’d remembered with fondness from my time there.

Well, there’s that memory tainted. Ugh.

I always thought that someday when I could afford to, I’d donate money to St. Paul’s. Well, I still can’t afford to, but if I could – sorry guys, nope.

Numerically Distinct

By on July 2, 2017 0

So Carlos Valdes and Tiffany Smith have been seen in the same place at the same time:

Well, there goes that theory.

Whrothbard

By on July 2, 2017 0

So apparently Rothbard is Doctor Who now:

Well, that explains his conversion from lefty to paleo: it was a regeneration! Kind of like from Five to Six.

Mirror Images

By on July 2, 2017 1

DEONTOLOGIST: You say we should do whatever has the best consequences; but what if Awful Action X had the best consequences?
CONSEQUENTIALIST: But Awful Action X wouldn’t have the best consequences in any realistic scenario.
DEONTOLOGIST: It doesn’t matter; as long as your theory is committed to saying that Awful Action X would be okay if it did have the best consequences, your theory is defective.
CONSEQUENTIALIST: Well, darn it!

 
 

CONSEQUENTIALIST: You say we should do the inherently right action even if it doesn’t have the best consequences; but what if the action you say is inherently right had Awful Result Y?
DEONTOLOGIST: But the inherently right action wouldn’t have Awful Result Y in any realistic scenario.
CONSEQUENTIALIST: It doesn’t matter; as long as your theory is committed to saying that Awful Result Y would be okay if it did come about from the inherently right action, your theory is defective.
DEONTOLOGIST: Well, darn it!

Agent of Shields

By on March 26, 2017 5

In a recent defense of mandatory national service, establishment media apparatchik Mark Shields writes:

Contrary to Ayn Rand, we all do owe much to each other and to our country. And mandatory two-year national service – civilian or military – is imperative to help us understand the responsibility, as well as the rights, of citizenship and build our connections with our fellow citizens. Two years, with no deferments and no exemptions.

It’s an unintended compliment to Ayn Rand that Shields feels the need to bash her in order to defend slavery.

Left-Libertarian Economic Anthology Published

By on March 11, 2017 1

[cross-posted at BHL]

I’m pleased to announce (belatedly) a new anthology from the Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS): Free Markets & Capitalism?: Do Free Markets Always Produce a Corporate Economy?, edited by Cory Massimino and James Tuttle.

One third of Free Markets & Capitalism? (not to be confused with C4SS’s earlier anthology Markets Not Capitalism) reproduces an online exchange from last year among Kevin Carson, Derek Wall, and Steve Horwitz on the question of whether corporate capitalism would indeed wither away in a genuinely freed market, as left-libertarians contend, or whether instead, as both capitalist and socialist critics of left-libertarianism maintain (whether cheerfully or gloomily), market incentives would tend to reproduce much of the structure of corporate capitalism even without state intervention to support the process.

The other two-thirds of the book are devoted to background readings (most by Kevin Carson – including his classic, The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand – but also a couple by me, and one by the late Roy Childs) expounding the left-libertarian position on the issue.

Buy a copy today! Buy two copies tomorrow! Buy four copies the next day, and eight the day after that, and so on ….

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