The Bill of Rights turns 232 years old today. Adopted in 1791 as a consolation prize for the Anti-Federalists, it has been the most important part of American legal history since the 18th century.
Original Article: The Bill of Rights: The Only Good Part of the Constitution
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Bourne Again
2023-11-24
In his new book Only a Voice: Essays (Verso, 2023), the critic and essayist George Scialabba brings to our attention the wisdom of two authors who analyzed the dangers of war: Randolph Bourne and Dwight Macdonald. In this week’s column, I’d like to discuss what Scialabba says about them.
Bourne will be a familiar name to many readers owing to Murray Rothbard’s praise of him, but he was not a libertarian. Like John Dewey, he was a Progressive and a pragmatist who looked forward to “scientific management” as the way to solve America’s social problems. Scialabba describes Bourne’s view in this way:
In the experimental, antidogmatic, and—not least important—communal character of scientific practice, pragmatists beheld the image of a possible future. Dewey had shown, Bourne wrote, that the
Are Businesses Entitled to a Fair Profit?
2023-11-23
In my experience of public policy discussions, one of the most frequent weasel words used as an intended trump (not Trump) card has been “fair.”
Like another commonly played political trump card, “need,” fairness does not have a clear meaning. That provides a great deal of wiggle room for equivocation, almost always used to justify forcing some Americans to pay for what someone else wants.
Fairness has no universal meaning beyond “more for me or those I care about” or “I want, but I do not want to pay for.” I learned that decades ago from my children, who wielded the word almost exclusively to advance their narrow self-interests. For instance, when my daughter—who as the oldest had more responsibility and a bigger allowance—complained, it was because having more responsibility was “unfair”
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