The next time someone tells you that the BP oil spill shows the dangers of a free market and/or the necessity of government intervention, send them to:
Please let me know in the comments section about other good commentaries I may have missed!
On a related note, this sign from an actual BP station is priceless. (The pic below is just a detail; click to see the whole thing.)
The entry on Ayn Rand that Neera Badhwar and I co-authored for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is now online.
While we each wrote a bit of everything, Neera was the principal author for the sections on ethics and social-political philosophy, as well as for the biographical section, while I was the principal author for the sections on metaphysics, epistemology, and aesthetics.
Looking the piece over I see that we devoted something like 35 paragraphs to metaphysics and epistemology, 34 paragraphs to ethics, and only 11 to social-political. That seems about right to me, but will probably surprise many readers who are accustomed to thinking of Rand as primarily a political thinker.
Check out the latest on C4SS’s media outreach plans.
If you’re interested in signing a petition asking Rand Paul to support Red & Black Café’s right to bar cops from their premises, click here.
(I don’t know how thrilled the Café would be with Paul’s support – but I doubt they’re at much risk of getting it ….)
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Larry Arnhart has a blog post about my article (original draft here, revised but shorter version here) on libertarian themes in Confucian thought.
A caveat: as you’ll see, Larry seems more sympathetic to the Burkean side of Confucianism than I am; on the issue of tradition I think the Confucians take a genuine piece of the truth and blow it up to be much more of the truth than it is, at the expense of the recognition that a great deal of tradition is oppressive and needs to be combated. As I say in the original article, “the Confucians can all too often be preachy, hidebound, starchy apologists for an authoritarian status quo”; so I get a little worried when Larry takes the moral of my article to be the need to respect the “communitarian authority of social traditions.”