Readers interested in our dysfunctional higher education system might be interested in an essay from one of the websites of Liberty Fund. I’m certainly not implying that the lower levels are functioning at even a minimal level of competence, but the issues are somewhat different though overlapping. In any case, I can’t add anything of … [Read more…]
Human beings think and feel and act and do so in response to what lies around them. As various communities have advanced in the way of civilization, they’ve done so—thought and felt and acted—in response to some more or less plausible worldview covering created being in its abstract realms as well as this concrete realm. … [Read more…]
In a short essay recently published on the Web, the political thinker Ken Masugi tells us about political scientists needing to recognize the validity of philosophical modes of thought. They’ve drifted away from reality as a result of their efforts to become quantitative empirical scientists. In that essay, Political Scientists Bow to the Laws of … [Read more…]
Those who have been following the Obamacare mandate mess will know of the prayers of American-Catholics, led by their bishops, for religious liberty. Apparently, the religious liberty, even the very lives, of Syrian Christians is of little interest, nor were the liberties and lives of the Christians living in other ancient communities which have been … [Read more…]
The economist William Baumol warned us about one of the problems which human beings create under conditions of prosperity, Baumol’s cost disease: Baumol’s cost disease (also known as the Baumol Effect) is a phenomenon described by William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen in the 1960s. It involves a rise of salaries in jobs that … [Read more…]
Historians have noted that approaching crises typically take longer to arrive than the more prescient of the victims-to-be would expect. And then they are typically far worse than the more pessimistic of the victims-to-be would expect. I fear the truth that might lie in the above claims because we of the West, and many in … [Read more…]
Recently, I wrote still another post, prophesying into a vacuum of sorts, in which I explored some of the dangers of assuming that Christians, or any others with strong moral beliefs, can enter fully into shared medical insurance programs or even basic medical systems with those who hold differing moral beliefs. That essay, Through the … [Read more…]
I want to ask a simple question of the bishops of the American Catholic Church: Why is it acceptable for Federal agents to fondle the breasts of American women, probe the genital regions of American children, and publicly remove the diapers of incontinent elderly Americans but beyond the moral pale to force those violated Americans … [Read more…]
I’m coming to the end of this scattered series of essays inspired by Kenneth Minogue’s profound book on modern politics, The Liberal Mind. My thoughts have developed so that my understanding of liberalism has taken on a surprising form, but no form of liberalism seems to me plausible or rational. I’ve taken a position that … [Read more…]
In an essay I recently posted to this blog, Let’s Hear It for Amateurs, That Is, for Lovers, I used a quote from The Liberal Mind by Kenneth Minogue, to argue along a slightly different line than Professor Minogue had intended. This is the quote from The Liberal Mind which was the beginning of my … [Read more…]