A Second Hand Conjecture

photo: Isuru Senevi | site

And so ends Mauritania’s brief experiment with constitutional democracy. The AFP has a source in the new ruling junta who says there will be new elections in two months. We shall see.

(more…)

1 Comment »

Peg pointed me this way, and I really enjoyed nodding in agreement. Of course, I have long nodded in agreement with Megan. Especially on these:

2) Gay marriage. I’m basically pro, but I take the Burkean arguments seriously.

3) Immigration. Again, I’m pro–but while I think the anti-immigration side makes often ridiculously ahistorical arguments about how current immigration differs from past waves, I think that more-open-borders folks like me don’t give enough respect to the real cultural frictions that immigration causes.

[…}

5) Taxes. I don’t have any very well thought out position on the optimal level of taxation in society. I take seriously both the justice arguments of the libertarian absolutists, and the notion that anyone living in a wealthy society owes their prosperity at least as much to the wealthy society as they do to their own skill and hard work–and if you doubt this is true, I suggest you go try to deploy your rugged individualist talents in Zimbabwe. I think society has a duty to care for those who genuinely can’t care for themselves, but I am against an ever-expanding notion of what constitutes “can’t”.

6) Intergenerational equity. I don’t mean social security, which I think is largely a stupid program. I mean questions about how we should privilege the interests of people who exist now over those who will exist in the future. The environment is the most obvious, but not the only, area where these questions come up. To me, health care is another one; the core issue is that we can probably help some people by moving to a single payer system today, but only by destroying the innovation machine that will help many many more people down the road.

7) Humanitarian intervention. I am often tempted by the isolationist stance, the cool purity of its single-rule decision making. Then another Darfur rends my heart. I don’t mean to address the prudential, utilitarian calculus, but rather the question: if there’s a good chance that we could make things better, should we? And under what circumstances?

5 Comments »

David Axe writes on one of the world’s biggest ignored crises—right next door to the much more hip, much more visible crisis in Darfur. The Central African Republic has been spiraling into conflict, forcing over 60,000 people into refugee camps… which are in close proximity to the hundreds of thousands of refugees who fled Darfur. The refugees from Darfur, however, receive nearly 3 times as much aid per capita as the refugees from Chad—making the situation in the technically smaller Chadian camps far worse in terms of resourcing and resilience. Read it in full.

No Comments »