All Posts Tagged With: "justice"
Lysander Spooner: American Anarchist
It was in the early 1970s that I first learned of Lysander Spooner’s ideas. The six volumes of his Collected Works, which were published in 1971 and which I purchased soon thereafter, played an important part in my intellectual development as a voluntaryist. I was the person who in 1976 unearthed Spooner’s essay “Vices Are [...]
24Aug2011 | Carl Watner | 7 comments | ContinuedJury Nullification: Right, Remedy, or Danger?
Last December a “mutiny” occurred in a Montana courtroom. At least that’s what a stunned county deputy attorney called it. One of 27 members of a jury pool spoke up to ask why taxpayer money was being wasted to prosecute a man accused of possessing 1/16th of an ounce of marijuana. When polled, a large [...]
25May2011 | Wendy McElroy | 8 comments | ContinuedChina: Wealth but Not Freedom
When Chinese President Hu Jintao visited Washington earlier this year he received the gracious welcome and state dinner he did not get on his first visit in 2006. He also had some tough discussions on trade, foreign exchange, national security, and human rights. China can be proud of the rapid economic progress it has made [...]
21Apr2011 | James A. Dorn | 2 comments | ContinuedOf Fallible Umpires and Rogue Judges
There is a striking similarity between blown calls by umpires in baseball and blown calls by judges in our legal system. We now know, unambiguously, that umpires make mistakes—sometimes excruciatingly costly ones. According to baseball purists, those mistakes “are part of the game.” Yet there is a rising chorus of calls for Major League Baseball to [...]
22Oct2010 | David N. Laband | 1 comment | ContinuedCapital Letters
Don’t Let the Court Off the Hook To the Editor: As a former wartime draftee — the Korean War — I’m of two minds re Aeon J. Skoble’s “Neither Slavery Nor Involuntary Servitude” piece in your September issue (“It Just Ain’t So!). No question, he did a very good job of picking apart the operational [...]
6Jul2010 | FEE Admin | 1 comment | ContinuedFrom Good Samaritan to Robin Hood
The clamor from interventionists against inequality morphs into a clamor for a larger and larger state. This path leads to the loss of liberty and a distortion of both democracy and justice. It distorts democracy because, by attempting to solve inequality, it removes limits to power and expands the field of state action. It distorts justice because the only way to solve inequality politically is for the state to have the power to treat individuals unequally. Thus the struggle to eliminate inequality ends up destroying the most important form of equality for an open society: equality before the law.
10Jun2009 | Carlos Rodríguez Braun | 2 comments | ContinuedJudges, Empathy, and Bastiat
In case someone hasn’t seen John Hasnas’s important Wall Street Journal op-ed on why an “empathetic” judge or justice is likely to commit Bastiat’s fallacy of overlooking the “what is not seen,” it is here. “The ‘Unseen’ Deserve Empathy, Too” is well worth reading!
1Jun2009 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedCapital Letters
What Do We Do About the Subsidy of History? I concurred on one point with “The Subsidy of History” by Kevin Carson (June 2008). It is not sound to view the historical development of capitalism as though it evolved strictly by fairness, without including the vices of mankind. Surely history is better stated by Burton [...]
1Nov2008 | FEE Admin | 1 comment | ContinuedBook Reviews – November 2007
- Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe
by Robert Gellately Reviewed by Richard M. Ebeling
- Depression, War, and Cold War
by Robert Higgs Reviewed by Burton Folsom, Jr.
- Great Philanthropic Mistakes
by Timothy Sandefur Reviewed by George C. Leef - Elements of Justice
by David Schmidtz Reviewed by Aeon J. Skoble
Liberalism Beyond Justice
The first several chapters of John Tomasi’s Liberalism Beyond Justice are devoted to his pledging eager and cloying allegiance to the world of Rawlsian liberalism that dominates political theory and philosophy, especially in the corridor of academic power that stretches from the University of Pennsylvania through Princeton, Columbia, Brown, and Harvard. In his last two [...]
1Oct2002 | Eric Mack | 0 comments | ContinuedWe’re All Rawlsians Now!
In the 1970s Richard Nixon famously remarked, “We’re all Keynesians now.” Fortunately, the president overestimated the long-run influence of John Maynard Keynes’s ideas among economists. For modern philosophers, it might be appropriate to rephrase Nixon’s line and say, “We’re all Rawlsians now.” John Rawls, the Harvard University philosophy professor, truly has had as much influence [...]
1Jun2002 | Robert A. Lawson | 1 comment | ContinuedThe Rule of Law and Freedom in Emerging Democracies: A Madisonian Perspective
James Dorn is vice president for academic affairs at the Cato Institute. The collapse of communism in 1989 in Eastern and Central Europe, and the fall of the Soviet Union two years later, have increased the number of democracies in the world to a total of 120. Of those, however, only 85 are classified as [...]
1Aug2001 | James A. Dorn | 0 comments | ContinuedFrederic Bastiat: The Primacy of Property
James Dorn is vice president for academic affairs at the Cato Institute and a professor of economics at Towson University in Maryland. This is adapted from a longer article that will appear in the September 2001 Journal des Économistes. Reprinted by permission. Frédéric Bastiat, although best known as an economic journalist, was also a pioneer [...]
1Jun2001 | James A. Dorn | 2 comments | ContinuedThe Quest for Cosmic Justice
The Quest for Cosmic Justice offers no big surprises to anyone familiar with Sowell’s work. Its theme of arrogant elites’ tyrannizing ordinary folk has sounded prominently in Sowell’s writings since at least the late 1970s. But the book percolates throughout with ingenious smaller-scale insights that make it well worth reading. By “cosmic justice” Sowell means [...]
1Jul2000 | Donald J. Boudreaux | 0 comments | ContinuedPunishing the Many
Russell Madden teaches at Mt. Mercy College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Anyone who has observed children will recognize that, ironically, they often demonstrate a more stringent and uncompromising sense of justice than the adults around them. A small child who must divide a piece of cake, for example, will be excruciatingly precise in cutting it [...]
1Jun2000 | Russell Madden | 0 comments | ContinuedIndividualist Feminism: The Lost Tradition
Women are, and should be treated as, the equals of men. For many, that sentiment forms the core of feminist theory and policy. But historically, there has been substantial disagreement within the feminist movement over the meaning of the term equality. Does it mean: equality under existing laws; equality under laws more just than existing [...]
1Aug1998 | Wendy McElroy | 1 comment | ContinuedDrawing Life: Surviving the Unabomber
John Attarian is a freelance writer in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and an adjunct scholar with the Midland, Michigan-based Mackinac Center for Public Policy. David Gelernter was a busy associate professor of computer science at Yale University, an artistic man who had entered software research because he wanted a trade. Then, going through his mail on [...]
1Jul1998 | John Attarian | 0 comments | Continued-
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