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(Apologies for the absurdly sparse blogging of late – the beginning of the semester has kept me quite busy since returning from New Jersey. The following are my notes on the fifth chapter of Caritas in Veritate, and I’ll plan to have my final set of notes up some time tomorrow. The archive of my [...]
Filed under: Caritas in Veritate, foreign affairs, government/law, reading groups, religion
The other day a commenter recommended David Goldhill’s article on health care reform from the forthcoming Atlantic, and let me now do the same. It’s a long piece, and not easily excerpted, but absolutely worth reading carefully and in its entirety. Here’s a quick summary of what I take to be its most important points:
1. [...]
Filed under: economics, government/law, health care
I know I’ve been a pretty awful blogger of late, but this afternoon I did manage to record a pretty interesting Skypecast with Scott Payne and my former Culture11 colleague Joe Carter, in which we took up the topic of policing and criminal justice, jumping off from this post of Joe’s on l’aiffaire Gates, which [...]
Filed under: civil liberties, government/law, personal
The central themes of this chapter are the nature of gift and gratuitousness, and what it means to have a market economy – whether domestic or global – built on love and ordered toward integral human development. A helpful way to think about this challenge is in terms of the distinction drawn in sec. 36 [...]
Filed under: Caritas in Veritate, economics, government/law, morality, reading groups, religion
Read Alex Massie, James Surowiecki, and Reihan. I think Surowiecki’s worries about balanced budgets and procyclical vs. countercyclical fiscal policies raise some real problems for an all-out federalist approach along the lines of what Alex is suggesting, but Reihan’s compromise strikes me as spot on: have the feds sign the checks, and let each state [...]
Filed under: government/law, politics
There is still a need for people to contact their representatives concerning HR 2749.
Filed under: agriculture, food, government/law
A friend sends along this notice, from the blog of Ron Paul’s Campaign For Liberty:
URGENT ACTION: Stop the NAIS, Anti-Family Farms Bill
HR 2749, the All Industrial Agriculture bill, could be voted on in the House of Representatives Tuesday. Please call your Congressman immediately and request that he or she reject this bill. Normal voting rules [...]
Filed under: agriculture, food, government/law
by JL Wall
We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I’ve warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would [...]
Filed under: environment, government/law
Or did Jody Bottum just describe the possible prosecution of interrogators who violated even the Bush administration’s laws governing the treatment of detainees as a way of “criminalizing policy differences”, and accuse Eric Holder of attempting a coup?
Filed under: government/law, torture
A Dish reader objects that allowing people to sell their kidneys – as per Virginia Postrel’s thought-provoking Atlantic piece – might lead families facing foreclosure or struggling to feed their children to, well, sell their kidneys:
People are doing everything they can to stay in their homes, and/or to feed their children. I can only imagine [...]
Filed under: government/law, morality