You and I may not be able to read minds, but it doesn’t matter. You can usually tell what someone is thinking by what they are doing— their inner thoughts and beliefs become outward acts.
Category: Blogs
The official Everything-Voluntary.com blog.
Two-and-a-Half Cheers for Elizabeth Warren’s Student Debt Plan
There’s a strong historical correlation between easy availability of student loans and soaring costs of a college or university education. It’s basic economics. By artificially lowering loan risk to direct money at a good or service, government increases debt and drives up the price of that good or service.
Elitism for Everybody
While not everyone is great, everyone can be. This may be my most American idea. As Gordon Wood argues in American Characters, we live in a populist country founded by elitists: a strange twist in history that has given to a mass population personal role models who had extraordinary (if flawed) personal character.
Defending the Castle
I was back in the bedroom and heard the front door open and someone come in. I glanced out the window but the car wasn’t there so it wasn’t my wife getting home early. I grabbed the .22 rifle sitting in the corner and walked to the living room and the front door.
It’s Not Just Trump Supporters: Politics is a Pile of Shared Psychoses
Dr. Bandy Lee, a psychiatrist affiliated with Yale University, posits a “‘shared psychosis’ among just about all of Donald Trump’s followers.” This particular version of the claim has a pretty thin basis, but it’s not incorrect. The big problem with it is that it’s too narrow. Donald Trump isn’t some lone Typhoid Mary of “shared psychosis,” nor are his supporters its only victims. Politics as we know it is made up almost entirely of shared psychoses.
“Human-Made Weapons”
I recently saw an anti-gun bigot on Quora make the desperate claim that there can be no right to human-made weapons because those weapons didn’t even exist until a few hundred years ago. He doesn’t believe anyone has the right to own and to carry a gun, and is apparently ignorant of human prehistory, as well.
The Fatal Weakness of the God of Cynicism
To tell the truth at risk to your own reputation? To celebrate virtue? To say what you think to someone’s face? No one expects this behavior anymore, and so it is unsettling and difficult to counter.
The Speech of Heroes
Almost everyone loves the idea of “speaking truth to power.” Standing tall, talking boldly, consequences be damned – how heroic! Yet on reflection, this Speech of Heroes takes two radically different forms.
Black America Before LBJ: How the Welfare State Inadvertently Helped Ruin Black Communities
The dust has settled and the evidence is in: The 1960s Great Society and War on Poverty programs of President Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) have been a colossal and giant failure. One might make the argument that social welfare programs are the moral path for a modern government. They cannot, however, make the argument that these are in any way effective at alleviating poverty.
Trump versus Iran: Power Doesn’t Just Corrupt, it Deludes
The claim of such absolute power has been the tacit US doctrine of foreign relations since at least as far back as the end of World War Two. America emerged from that war as the world’s sole nuclear power and, unlike other combatant countries, with its wealth virtually unscathed and its industrial capacity increased rather than demolished. Its rulers saw themselves as able, and entitled, to dictate terms to almost everyone, on almost everything.