Philosophy and Methodology

When individuals are not owners of resources, they are not able to assess their value; and when resources are publicly owned, their use will be systematically hasty and imprudent. When we realize that public ownership leads to systematic haste and imprudence, we get a hint that the inability of assessing the value of resources has deleterious consequences for most of us, with no one to blame except perhaps those who insist on keeping the institution of public ownership in force.

One's chance of winning a top prize in one of the rigged state lotteries is so close to zero as to be indistinguishable from zero. In California's feverish drive to take more money from a citizenry that is already overtaxed, officials are looking for an even better bet for the state: selling tickets to games that have already been decided.

Now that the economy is in a slump, many of the workers who gave up their welfare benefits are finding themselves without a job.  Many of the industries that were most likely to hire former welfare recipients have been those worst affected by the recession. These workers are finding that they have no legal right to a resumption of welfare payments because the disgraceful Aid to Families with Dependent Children program was abolished.

The American nation state has effectively served as the church of this religion in the United States.  The American "Vatican" is Washington, D.C., also a unique governing jurisdiction within the boundaries of a nation-state, like its Roman counterpart.  Led by its economic priesthood, the American government administers the affairs of the nation to achieve a secular salvation for all its citizens--the attainment of a new heaven on earth.

In uncertain times such as today, it is too easy to look the other way when the federal government expands its power and curtails our freedoms. In a fit of rhetorical frenzy, the attorney general himself told a Senate panel that those who scare "peace-loving people" with "phantoms of lost liberty" are themselves aiding terrorists.

Successful people who earn their wealth through free and peaceful exchange may choose to give some of it away, but they'd be no less moral and no less debt-free if they gave away nothing.  It cheapens the powerful charitable impulse that all but a few people possess to suggest that charity is equivalent to debt service or that it should be motivated by any degree of guilt or self-flagellation.

Readers of this journal will probably be most interested in Nozick’s views on ethics, especially as they relate to libertarianism, and it is on these that I propose to concentrate.

The events of September 11, and the response to them by the Bush administration, make Elizabeth Anscombe’s classic essays newly pertinent. Her essays present the most influential account 

Athletics, like economics, is an endeavor of human action. While we can see scores and statistics, there is no true way to quantify how good or bad a team may be. Indeed, if the computer polls with their mathematical formulas were so accurate and useful, then one would hardly see the need for a championship game after all. 

In the weeks immediately following the World Trade Center and Pentagon disasters, commentators were quick to predict in apocalyptic terms that television and movies would never be the same again. It is still too early, however, to tell whether there really has been a sea-change in the American psyche. Paul Cantor explains.