My piece on LifeSharers and the organ allocation system is now up at Reason. It’s some straight-up libertarianism, to compensate for the heresy of that last piece…
Entries from June 2003
Brother, Can You Spare a Spleen?
June 26th, 2003 · Comments Off on Brother, Can You Spare a Spleen?
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Revisionist History
June 24th, 2003 · Comments Off on Revisionist History
So the retro-justification for the war du jour is that all the mass graves we’re finding show that Saddam was so very, very awful that he needed to be deposed, WMDs or no WMDs. Putting aside, just for a moment, the salient question of whether lying about the reason for a war is pretty awful, […]
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Still alive…
June 24th, 2003 · Comments Off on Still alive…
…and lest you think I’ve just been slacking while letting my blog languish, I actually have been doing some writing and blogging for my new masters at Reason. I’ve got a piece up today on the Michigan rulings, and somewhat to my own surprise, I end up concluding that they got it roughly right, even […]
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Brought to You by Pfizer
June 19th, 2003 · Comments Off on Brought to You by Pfizer
You’ve got to hand it to National Review for sheer balls. They’ve got a link on their front page to a “special symposium” on health care and pharmaceuticals—and from the front page, it looks just like any other article. Click through, though, and you’ll notice it’s basically one of those “special advertising sections,” with ad […]
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The Crucible
June 18th, 2003 · Comments Off on The Crucible
Calpundit observes that Stan Kurtz is about to get a reality check. When gay marriage becomes a reality in Canada, we’ll all get to see whether, in point of fact, Canadian society comes crashing down. I’ll smile a wicked little smile in 2030 when conservatives of the future are saying: “Of course, every reasonable person […]
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Markets R Us
June 16th, 2003 · Comments Off on Markets R Us
Folks who are skeptical of free-markets often talk about markets as though they’re some sort of alien force, a mysterious Other. (I suppose the term “invisible hand” hasn’t helped.) Market partisans typically counter, rightly enough, that this is a mistake: markets are just an framework, a set of rules for interaction given content by millions […]
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Bernard Williams
June 13th, 2003 · Comments Off on Bernard Williams
I’m not familiar with the author, but this Guardian obituary of Bernard Williams shows, somewhat to my surprise, a genuine feel for William’s ideas and style, and an appreciation of his idaes. He was one of the greats, and one of maybe four or five contemporary philosophers who had a profound influence on my own […]
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Standing Bleg
June 6th, 2003 · Comments Off on Standing Bleg
So, now that I’m supposedly a journalist of some sort, I figure I should start exploiting the fact that, for reasons unclear to me, a few thousand people apparently pop by here each week. If there are news items the world should know about, or potential stories someone ought to start investigating, shoot ’em to […]
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Now, This
June 6th, 2003 · Comments Off on Now, This
In his book Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman has a chapter entitled “Now, This…” in which he analyzes what he sees as the deleterious influence of the fragmented, soundbite-sized succession of stories that typify television news. The trend he described there has surely been exacerbated with the explosion of online news sources and 24-hour […]
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Tyranny of Choice
June 6th, 2003 · Comments Off on Tyranny of Choice
This post by Lambert, who’s temporarily standing in for Atrios over at Eschaton, serves as an unintentional reductio of a certain way of thinking about labor markets. Congress was considering a bill to let employees choose to have their overtime compensated either in the form of the standard time-and-a-half overtime pay, or instead take extra […]
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