There’s a set of institutions that most western countries have that we collectively call “the welfare state” and, in the drive to shrink budget deficits, it has come under attack. But why do we have a welfare state in the first place? What is its function, and what are we putting at risk when we cut funding for it? That is today’s point of inquiry.
Author: Benjamin Studebaker
The State’s Role in Investment and Innovation
It is often said that the state spends money inefficiently–or at least, less efficiently than the private sector spends it. The old Hamiltonian argument, in favour of the state as an investor, an engine of growth, technological development, and innovation, often falls on deaf ears as the opposition points to Solyndra, the “crony capitalism” of investment centred states like France or Japan, and so on down the line. Today, I would like to challenge this dismissal for being much too flippant and much too anti-historical.
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Libertarian Party Platform
Some of the reaction to yesterday’s post, “Intellectual Hipsters: Libertarians” made the argument that yes, libertarianism has many defects in its theoretical intellectual foundation, but that perhaps real world libertarians are not deriving their policies strictly from that foundation, or that the policies of the Libertarian Party in America remain useful for other, non-libertarian reasons. I agree that this is a proposition worth considering, and so this post exists as a companion piece to yesterday’s–examining libertarian policy in practise to go along with yesterdays’ examination of libertarian political theory.
Intellectual Hipsters: Libertarians
There’s another upstart group of intellectual hipsters in addition to the sceptics and the lovers of Nietzsche–the libertarians. You’ve definitely met these hipsters before. They wax romantically about Ron Paul, some of them voted for Gary Johnson, they tend to like theorists like Nozick and Locke, and some of them are Ayn Rand-embracing objectivists. You know the type. Like all hipsters, their ideas are much less sophisticated and clever than they imagine, and their position is neither novel nor socially helpful. Of course, I cannot merely assert these things, I have to prove them. Let’s go.
A Reaction to Peter Hitchens: Democracy, Drugs, and Free Will
Yesterday evening the university was visited by Peter Hitchens, columnist for the Daily Mail, ardent conservative, and brother to the recently deceased Christopher Hitchens. You can read his blog here. Peter Hitchens exceeded my intellectual expectations and impressed me. He was thoughtful, clever, articulate, and even admitted to not always being thoroughly pleased with the content of the paper for which he writes. I even found myself agreeing with Hitchens in one quite notable, and though I disagree with many of his other positions, the nature of our disagreement was not quite what I expected either. Today I would like to discuss to views and opinions of Peter Hitchens, where I agree with him, where I disagree, and the reasoning behind each.
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Benjamin Studebaker 