Just a last minute reminder, for those in the area, of the Felician Institute’s Conference on Ethics and Public Affairs, to take place this Saturday, April 23 (9 am – 6 pm) at our Rutherford, New Jersey campus (223/227 Montross Ave, Rutherford NJ 07070). PoT bloggers David Potts and Michael Young will be there; plenary session by J.L.A. Garcia (Boston College); and don’t forget the 4 pm session on the ethics, economics, and politics of adjuncting. Here’s the nearly finalized program. Here’s a link to the Institute’s home page.

I’ll be scarce at PoT until after the conference. Seriously.

Am I the only person who finds it puzzling that people who insist that they believe in the legitimacy of government, but in five decades have not coherently been able to explain how they intend to fund it, insist on trashing the only mechanism that exists for funding it–while bitterly criticizing people who demand the unearned?

The title of the article in the second link is, “On Tax Day, What if Atlas Shrugged?” Here’s my question: On Tax Day, what if an article about taxation by The Atlas Society made minimal sense? How about any day (or any topic), come to that? Frankly, I’m not sure which event is more likely to take place.

Incidentally, I’d like to thank my accountant Vikrant K. Kapila, CPA for making Tax Day more bearable than it would be if I actually had to do my own taxes.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about the minimum wage, now that New York and California have increased it to $15 (over the next few years).

This is a literal, not a rhetorical or loaded question: what stands in the way of keeping the minimum wage where it is, but (where mathematically possible) decreasing payroll taxes on minimum wage workers by the equivalent of the proposed increase in the minimum wage? I encountered the proposal decades ago in an op-ed piece in The Washington Post by James Glassman, but have heard almost nothing about it since.

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Back in February, I threatened to go on a temporary vacation from blogging. Like so many of the threats and promises I make at PoT, I didn’t follow through–but with a new online course on my plate, and a  conference to organize, I’m thinking that a few weeks’ blogging hiatus would be the better part of valor.

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Some of you may have known Donald Heath from his days as Director of Operations for David Kelley’s Institute for Objectivist Studies (IOS). As you probably know by now, Donald passed away this past Friday of a heart attack; he was 56. I didn’t know Don very well, and hadn’t interacted with him since my last interactions with IOS in the mid 1990s, but he was one of my favorite people at IOS, and I have fond memories of him. This obituary by David Kelley gets it right.