anotherpanacea

Tag: Political Theory

  • Land Use, Density, and Local Control

    I’ve been looking for good articles on local governance, in part related to the Tufts Summer Institute, and in part related to my goal of transforming my ethics course so that it takes up the paired questions of the Good Life and the Good Citizen. One resource for this is Sharon Meagher’s textbook Philosophy and…

  • What can small groups do?

    I’ve just returned from two weeks at the Tufts Summer Institute of Civic Studies, which culminated in a conference attended by 117 researchers, practitioners, philanthropists, and public officials interested in expanding the role of citizens in our democracy. Peter Levine summed up the conference here: The Frontiers conference was modeled on No Better Time, a…

  • Meliorism versus Perfectionism

    Consider two courses of action: One has a low probability of success but promises to mildly increase welfare (however defined). Call this “meliorism.” Rawlsian liberals, Burkean and Oakshottean conservatives, and Hayekian libertarians frequently identify with this view. Another has an unknown probability of success, but promises to massively increase welfare (however defined). Call this “perfectionism.”…

  • The Money Illusion Manifesto

    Here’s the gist: I would like to argue that most of the really important public policy issues are not even part of the ongoing debate in the press.  Here are some examples: 1.  The huge rise in occupational licensing. 2.  The huge rise in people incarcerated in the war on drugs, and also the scandalous…

  • Cap and Dividend

    Scu pointed me to this discussion of a Cap and Trade dividend. One issue, which would also apply to a carbon tax + dividend: this would hit exports but miss imports. Contrast that with a plain-old VAT, which hits imports but is refunded on export. This would make our goods less competitive, while encouraging us to…

  • Using Basic Income to Sell a Carbon Tax

    Using Basic Income to Sell a Carbon Tax

    You know, I may have been looking at the Basic Income + VAT wrong. Instead of using a value-added tax to fund the basic income, perhaps we should use a basic income grant to sell a different policy… the carbon tax! Here’s what I have in mind: the US could adopt a revenue-neutral carbon tax.…

  • Does Basic Income + VAT “Solve” Immigration?

    One of my favorite liberal policies is the basic income proposal. The idea is that all citizens have a basic guaranteed income, below which no one may fall. As the argument goes, this supplies more flexibility than basic provision of essential services, and renders recipients much more autonomous than they currently are, since the government…

  • Why I am still hopeful for Egypt’s revolution

    It is said that revolution is what happens when a police officer is transformed from a legitimate authority into a man with a gun. If that’s true, then what we witnessed in Egypt yesterday is a classic counter-revolution: irregular hoodlums attacking peaceful protesters, whose only defense is the military standing by. To ask for the…

  • Is more illegal immigration the best we can do?

    Will Wilkinson on Bryan Caplan’s (false?) dilemma: Bryan Caplan lays down a challenge to liberaltarians: From what philosophic point of view is “maximizing growth + lots of redistribution + the immigration restrictions lots of domestic redistribution naturally encourage” better than “maximizing growth + no redistribution + free immigration”?  Whether you’re concern for the poor is Rawlsian,…

  • Dworkin on Sen

    Thomas Gregersen quotes Ronald Dworkin on Amartya Sen: It is not helpful, in the world of real politics, only to call for due consideration of a large variety of factors that everyone concedes relevant without also offering some overall scheme to suggest how these different factors should be weighted in a practical decision about a…