A Thinking Reed

  • Thought for the Day

    “There is no good trying to be more spiritual than God. God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. That is why He uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not: He invented eating. He likes…

  • Thinking Outside the Box

    I like people who defy easy stereotypes and flout established categories. For instance, here’s the website of John McColgan, a Democrat running for a congressional seat in Oregon. Here’s his platform: 1. Defend the Constitution, the UN Declaration of Human Rights, and the rules of the Geneva Convention; 2. Restore American credibility abroad by respecting…

  • Tom Regan on Contractarianism

    In this essay, Tom Regan, the philosopher best known for his writings on animal rights, argues against “contractarianism” in a fashion similar to that of my argument below. Here’s Regan: Here, very crudely, is the root idea [of contractarianism]: morality consists of a set of rules that individuals voluntarily agree to abide by, as we…

  • Part IV: The Road to Serfdom?

    (for earlier posts in this series see here, here, and here) I realize that the foregoing will have put me well beyond the pale in the eyes of most libertarians, but for what it’s worth, I remain convinced that the present day State is far larger and more intrusive than is necessary. Libertarian critics are…

  • Part III: Beyond the Minimal State

    (see here for Part I and here for Part II) Suppose that the foregoing argument is right, and that anyone committed to the minimal protection of basic libertarian rights should prefer a minimal state to an anarcho-capitalist world of competing defense agencies. Are there further considerations that drive us beyond affirming the minimalist night-watchman state…

  • Part II: Do We Even Need Government?

    (see here for Part I) Radical libertarians, so-called anarcho-capitalists, argue that government, defined as an agency or institution with a coercive monopoly on deciding when force is legitimate in a given territorial area, is not necessary to protect human rights. As a subset of libertarians, an-caps consider human rights to include life, liberty, and the…

  • Why I Am Not a Libertarian (Anymore) Part I

    As hinted in earlier posts, for quite a while I thought of myself as a libertarian as far as political philosophy went. Libertarianism, I think, often appeals to people who value abstract, systematic theorizing and like the idea that you can deduce a blueprint for an ideal political arrangement from a few simple axioms. Over…

  • Maybe "Humane Slaughter" Is an Oxymoron

    Keith Burgess-Jackson directs our attention to this article in the Washington Post on the conditions in modern slaughterhouses. Despite the passage of the (somewhat Orwellian-sounding) Humane Slaughter Act, the level of enforcement appears to vary greatly: For example, the government took no action against a Texas beef company that was cited 22 times in 1998…

  • Thought For the Day

    “There are many things wrong with the internationalist idea to Make the World Safe for Democracy, one of them being that it is not that different from the nationalist idea that What Is Good for America Is Good for the World.” – John Lukacs, Confessions of an Original Sinner

  • Just Don’t Shred the Constitution, That’s All I Ask

    A friend writes: “I’m beginning to think our only hope of choosing a national leader is to hold him/her to the standard of not f**king s**t up. Is that libertarian?” [edited for content – hey, this is a family-friendly blog!] I love this! That’s exactly where I am right now. I carry no water (Hold…