Last time I wrote about what I was reading, I said I would next read a new book entitled Anti-Capitalism by Simon Tormey. I changed my mind and have waded into the second of a projected four volume work (maybe six) by Deidre McCloskey. The first was Bourgeois Virtues and was the beginning of a detailed historical and […]
Archives
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Book Reviews and Such
07 Oct 2013
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The Day After in DC: Random Thoughts
02 Oct 2013
The old saying is “Another day, another dollar” and it certainly applies to the Federal workforce here in DC, only without any official work (some would say, there is no difference between now and before). I have gained some interesting insights (maybe just observations–I need to be modest here) about the Federal government, including Congress, […]
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The jury is still partly out on the immediate fate of the Affordable Care Act. After the heroic filibuster of Ted Cruz, the Senate ended debate and voted overwhelmingly to re-insert the funding language for “Obamacare” into the overall spending bill. The vote was 79-19, so there were many Republicans voting with all of the […]
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Government Tyranny and Economic Life
27 Sep 2013
There was an interesting article here by Peter Gumbel http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2013/09/25/with-unemployment-high-france-forces-stores-to-close-early/ earlier this week on what France is doing in the face of high unemployment. Before you read, remember this is France, since the nineteenth century, one of the most socialist (small “c”) nations in Europe, allowing for brief intervals of sanity. It appears that Parisian officlals–the only […]
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Nudge, Nudge
25 Sep 2013
Economics is often thought of as a quasi-hard science; a field where number crunching and rationality yield positive and true results. While Ph.D.s in the field acknowledge that it is often hard to account for all the variables, in the past they would argue that if it were possible to account for all factors, a mathematical […]
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Study War No More? No, More.
19 Sep 2013
Washington, DC, aside from its various political denizens, is always full of opportunities to hear interesting lectures, speeches and debates on myriads of topics. Last night my daughter and I attended a debate at the Library of Congress entitled “Freedom, Security and America’s Role in the World.” It was sponsored by the Koch Institute and […]
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Explaining the Christian World(View) of Politics
15 Sep 2013
Our Bereans@thegate blog has as its aim the engagement of Christian thought with the spheres of politics, economics and culture. But it has occurred that perhaps the readers of the blog may not have a full sense of why and how we write what we do. In other words, many of the posts are about […]
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Capitalist Virtues: An Oxymoron?
12 Sep 2013
I am in the middle of reading a couple of really interesting and controversial books on capitalism. One is Deidre McCloskey’s The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for An Age of Commerce. University of Chicago Press, 2006. This is a big book on big subject, a grand sweep type of book with high ambition. McCloskey is currently a […]
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Back to Obamacare
11 Sep 2013
It’s hot here in DC, really hot–96 degrees and humid. How did people function here before air conditioning? Wait, they didn’t. Government was much smaller and those who could left town for the summer. Jefferson had two homes in Virginia. Congress had a longer vacation. Those were the good old days. But here we are […]
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Christianity, Culture and Russell Moore
10 Sep 2013
I had the privilege of attending the inauguration in Washington, DC of Russell D. Moore as the new president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. The service (and it was a worship service more than merely an inauguration) at the historic Capitol Hill Baptist Church. Speakers included a former […]
Bert Wheeler
Jeff Haymond
Marc Clauson
Mark Caleb Smith
Tom Mach