Florida Senator Rick Scott recently kicked over a beehive when he included an income tax increase for most Americans in his 11-point plan to ‘Rescue America.’ The fifth point of that plan, titled ‘Economy/Growth,’ included ‘All Americans should pay some income tax to have skin in the game, even if a small amount. Currently over half of Americans pay no income tax.’
Mendacity is worse than dishonesty. According to one essay on mendacity, “Mendacity connotes a mixture of dishonesty, hypocrisy and audacity.” Mendacity is an important theme of the play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, by Tennessee Williams. “What’s that smell in this room? Didn’t you notice it? Didn’t you notice a powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity?
Having been lied into war in Iraq in 2003, the American public swore it had wised up. Sure, it went on to drop the ball by supporting the Libya intervention, itself prefaced by lies, and supported the government’s intervention in the civil war in Syria (or at least didn’t mind it), even though the US sided with the very Sunni extremists it had been fighting a few years before in Iraq.
Sometimes people wonder whether philosophy is of any use in understanding daily life. Aren’t philosophers “in wandering mazes lost”? Away with such nonsense, say some. Elaine Sternberg illustrates by her example that this view is wrong. In her excellent Economic Affairs article “Defining Capitalism,” she shows in convincing fashion that providing an exact definition of pure laissez-faire capitalism is of great help in responding to many common objections to the free market.
Global supply shocks are historically rare events. All the more extraordinary to have two such shocks in quick succession—the second arriving even before the first has entirely faded away. That is what the world now experiences in the form of the Great Pandemic followed by the Great West-Russia economic war. The most visible symptom of the supply disruption is the sky-high price of energy and a range of other commodities.
