It is Constitution Day once again, but because it fell on Saturday this year, I haven’t seen as much publicity. That does not mean that we ought to overlook it. It has now been 229 years since the new United States met to overhaul its first constitution (the Articles of Confederation) and ended up proposing […]
Archives
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Happy Birthday US Constitution
17 Sep 2016
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It has been pointed out by historians and journalists that political campaigns have always been a little bit or a lot vicious, with a good deal of “over the top” rhetoric. Witness the Adams-Jefferson campaign of 1800. It was pretty overheated on both sides. But I see something different at work now among liberals, or, […]
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The Majority Wins: But What?
06 Aug 2016
Well, the rage now is politics, electoral politics. My colleague Mark Smith has been busy the past few days addressing Wayne Grudem’s qualified support of Donald Trump for president. I am not going there for now. I wanted to say something about the bigger picture of how and why we got to where we are […]
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240 years ago, more or less on July 4 (the actual date of the signing of the Declaration is debated), the members of the Continental Congress signed a document that severed the bonds of the American colonies from their British rulers. For many Americans, this day is still cause for celebration for that reason, as […]
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Religious liberty is seemingly coming under greater attack, either culturally or legally. As of now, a good many of the instances of this attack are represented in opposition to Christian attempts to claim what we may call “conscience rights.” What is conscience, that which someone called “that little voice in our heads”? What legitimate role […]
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What is Our Life?
12 May 2016
I was reading a book the other day and happened across mention of part of a poem by William Butler Yeats, written in 1938, entitled “Politics.” I thought it was interesting in the context in which it was cited, which was a discussion of the term and concept, “politics.” One might think a poem with […]
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Trumpeting toward Irrationality
03 May 2016
During my graduate studies at George Mason University, I was blessed with outstanding faculty, especially in the field of Public Choice economics (the study of the public sector using economic methodology). Nobel Laureate James Buchanan led the intellectual tradition, but there were many other fine minds, including a brash young economist from Princeton, Bryan Caplan. I […]
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Forrest McDonald (1927-2016)
04 Mar 2016
Just as I was thinking about one of my favorite author-scholars today, I discovered he had very recently died. Forrest McDonald, one of the truly great scholars of early American political thought, and long-time professor of history at the University of Alabama, passed away at the age of 89. The first lesson I should learn […]
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“The Immense and Tutelary Power”
22 Feb 2016
I think I quoted this passage from Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, last year, but have enlarged the context. Is this a description of the centralized command and control bureaucratic government that we [sic] have been creating over the past 100 years or so? And is Tocqueville on to something? Feel free to comment. […]
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Taxation and Ethics: Further Reflection
16 Feb 2016
I have continued to read the comments on Jeff Haymond’s blog about progressive taxation, and my own complementary blog, and have decided I should make another foray into this subject to address in more depth the ethical theory of policies such as taxes (but, indirectly, others as well). The question to begin is: Is progressive […]
Bert Wheeler
Jeff Haymond
Marc Clauson
Mark Caleb Smith
Tom Mach