thoughts in and out of season
Talking about what people should and shouldn’t do is a sticky business. Pascal was obviously right when he said that it’s difficult to speak humbly of humility or chastely of chastity, and it’s conventional to accuse obtrusively pious and moral people of hypocrisy. During my unfortunate stay in the Episcopal Church I noticed that people … More ...
I just finished reading Stanley Milgram’s Obedience to Authority. The book’s an account of his famous experiment that tested the willingness of ordinary people who had volunteered to participate in a psychological study to inflict painful electric shocks on another volunteer (who was in fact an actor who was not being shocked at all). … More ...
The Blair government is issuing regulations implementing a statutory prohibition against discrimination in the provision of “services.” The regulations say you can’t discriminate against homosexuals, no exceptions. Among other things, that rule will require Catholic adoption agencies to treat sex as irrelant to intimate human relationships (and consequently engage in PC child abuse) by … More ...
A standard jibe from proponents of “gay marriage” is that marriages don’t eat each other up, so John and Mary’s can’t be affected by Ron and Barry’s. As one blogger puts it, “I can’t help but feel sorry for people whose families are so fragile as to be destroyed by someone else’s decision to make … More ...
Wilhelm Roepke’s book A Humane Economy is intended to lay out the conditions for the existence and well-being of a free economy and indeed a free society. Those conditions are rather demanding. Here are some quotations:
… More ...The market economy, and with it social and political freedom, can thrive only as a part and under the
I just finished reading The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, by George H. Nash. It’s out now in a new 30th anniversary edition, although the text hasn’t changed much if at all since 1976 except for the addition of an epilogue.
The book covers the familiar ground. The postwar conservative movement was … More ...
I’ve been reading the first couple of chapters of Wilhelm Roepke’s A Humane Economy, and they call up mixed feelings.
The book is generally a good one. It’s an attempt to place free-market economics in a civilizational setting. That setting is classical bourgeois society, especially as it existed in European villages and small towns … More ...
Something minor can sum up a situation. An example is a recent comment by George Will (referenced by Lawrence Auster) to the effect that America is founded on John Locke, not Jesus Christ, so America is not a Christian country and it’s illegitimate to disfavor Muslim immigration.
There we have the whole of what … More ...
There’s definitely been a bump up in aggressively anti-religious agitation in the years since September 11. If you look back though there’s been no real change in the beliefs of those who consider themselves entitled to determine the order of our public life. Here, for example, is the terminally prominent and mainstream Arthur M. Schlesinger, … More ...
An article at LewRockwell.com today provides, with libertarian clarity, an example of a basic vice of liberal and libertarian thought. One of their writers complains about opposition to a local measure to extend the hours of liquor sales. For him, opposing such a measure is the same as “telling the voters … to their faces, … More ...