Here’s a scary story, just in time for Hallowe’en!
Well, okay, it’s not that scary. But hey, I wrote it when I was 12.
Speaking of scary, check out what Brandon’s coolly done to my pic. Or if it’s gone by the time you read this, check it out here.
Here’s a scary story, just in time for Hallowe’en!
Well, okay, it’s not that scary. But hey, I wrote it when I was 12.
Speaking of scary, check out what Brandon’s coolly done to my pic. Or if it’s gone by the time you read this, check it out here.
Our quest for world domination continues!
For my readers in the Auburn area: the Auburn Philosophy Club will be hosting a panel discussion on the subject of “The State” this coming Wednesday, October 12th, 5:00-7:00 p.m., at the Gnu’s Room (the used bookstore and coffeeshop next to Amsterdam Café, near the intersection of Samford and South Gay; map here). The choice of topic is partly in honour of the PPE (philosophy / poli sci / econ) program we’re developing.
There’ll be brief presentations from two or three faculty members (including your humble correspondent) and two or three students, followed by general discussion. (My presentation will focus on how, contra Locke, the undesirability of people being judges in their own case is actually an argument against the state, not for it.)
These meetings tend to be fairly popular, and the Gnu’s Room’s meeting space is not exactly enormous, so those interested should try to arrive early to be sure of finding a seat. (Also make sure to try the coffee – it’s the best in town.)
My BHL post on Ron Paul’s healthcare answer is receiving favourable comment from both Andrew Sullivan and the National Review, and less favourable comment from Matt Yglesias. (CHT Matt Zwolinski.) I posted the following comment at Yglesias’s blog:
This response is pretty drastically missing my point. Suppose there are two possible ways of helping a patient, one much more effective than the other. The better way, A, is forbidden by law; the question is then asked whether the inferior way should be mandated by law. The libertarian (or at least the good libertarian) says: “no, don’t mandate B; instead, stop forbidding A.” That hardly counts as saying the patient should die; on the contrary, the libertarian thinks (rightly or wrongly) that the patient is less likely to die if the government stops forbidding A.
Now what the conservative generally says is “don’t mandate B, but don’t stop forbidding A either.” So I think it would be fair to charge the conservative with being willing to let people die. But that’s just a different position.
Part of the problem here is that non-libertarians tend to treat “let’s do something about X” and “let’s have a government program for X” as equivalent, and so tend to hear anyone who rejects the latter as rejecting the former. By contrast, libertarians generally think of governmental solutions as the least effective ones, and so for them treating “let’s do something about X” as equivalent to “let’s have a government program for X” would be like treating “let’s do something about X” as equivalent to “let’s sacrifice some babies to the moon god in order to address X.”
I have a new post up at BHL: The Libertarian Three-Step Program. It addresses good and bad ways of answering the healthcare question that Wolf Blitzer asked Ron Paul.
Sheldon has a nice post on why proper individualism is not atomistic – wherein he cites Aristotle, Spencer, and … me!
In related news, I’ve argued elsewhere that it is the least atomistic forms of individualism that have the strongest claim to be called radical individualism.
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