Felician Institute Conference: Postscripts

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So the Felician Institute’s Tenth Annual Conference took place this past Saturday. PoT bloggers Michael Young and David Potts were in attendance, as I mentioned they would be; David gave a revised version of a post he did at PoT, and Michael chaired a session on hypocrisy and standing to blame. A great time was had by all.

Over the next few weeks, while I have the conference freshly in mind, I want to write a few very brief posts summarizing and commenting on some of the presentations I attended. My track record in living up to such resolutions is, of course, a pathetic farce, if only because I often think of them at the most inopportune times, and also because I’ve characteristically been (self)-defeated by the lethal combination of time constraints and the desire to be “thorough.” The obvious remedy occurs to me: ignore time constraints and be slipshod. (By the way, ignore the fact that I keep promising to go on blogcation and never do, and that I have a bunch of outstanding comments to respond to, but haven’t responded to them.)

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Political Philosophy Amidst the Ruins

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Well, spring term is winding down at Felician U., so I guess I’m (riot)-gearing up for summer term at Al Quds U. Let’s hear it for the beneficence of the Israeli “Civil Administration” (which is what the military occupation calls itself), its undying respect for “purity of arms,” and the pinpoint accuracy of its “civilian” strikes (against noncombatant civilian targets). Learning Objective 1: try not to get tear gassed, shot, or arrested.

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Tenth Annual Felician Institute Conference

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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.

Public Finance According to the Atlas Society

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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.

Philip Weiss’s “The World the Settlers Made”

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When I was in Palestine last summer, I mentioned that I was going to be spending some time visiting Jewish settlements in the West Bank. I ended up doing less of that than I had planned. And though I did some, I never got the chance to write about it here. Since then, I’ve just let the experience fester in some dark corner of my brain, watching the “third intifada” from afar with that experience in mind. Part of the reason for failing to write was, as usual, lack of time. But part of it was that I met people out there who knew more than me, had spent more time there than me, and were likely to do a better job than me at saying what needed to be said.

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Morals and the Free Society: 7. Frank

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Here is the seventh chunk of the argument. To return to the sixth chunk, click here. To advance to the eighth chunk, click here. The complete essay is posted here.

Robert Frank (1988) could hardly be accused of attempting to provide a moral vision for a free society, but he makes a case for one way of resolving the moral contradiction of the free society. He attempts to show how a seemingly selfless adherence to the moral principles that support the efficient operation of the free market might ultimately be justified in egoistic terms after all. The basic strategy is to reap the long term benefits of playing by free market rules by foregoing the short term gains that can be made by breaking them. Of course, this depends on finding other agents who also obey the free market rules—and enabling them to find you. Otherwise, as Frank shows, the strategy will be undercut and ultimately defeated by rule breakers.

How this strategy works can be illustrated by the case of honesty. Honest behavior is economically selfless on those occasions when one could gain by dishonesty (for example, perhaps by not paying the bill of a supplier who is about to go bankrupt or the bill of a small contractor who can’t afford to sue). Now, suppose you committed yourself to a policy of strict honesty. If others knew this, they would have reason to prefer doing business with you over others, to give you easier credit, etc. For, they could be confident that you would not rip them off; i.e., impose costs on them through dishonesty. In North’s terms, doing business with you would lower their transactions costs. Thus, by foregoing the occasional rip off, you reap the rewards of doing more business on better terms. And notice, by the way, that even if other people adopt the same honesty strategy, thereby undercutting your “market edge,” your terms of doing business will still be better. Transactions costs are still lowered, even if everybody becomes completely honest (indeed, they are lowered even more).

Of course, this works only if people know you are completely honest. Continue reading →

Bleg: Repression–Freudian and Otherwise

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I’m in the middle of a short paper (for class!) on Michael Billig’s Freudian Repression: Conversation Creating the Unconscious. Verdict on the book: essentially negative. But that’s a topic for another time. I’ve come neither to praise nor blame, but to bleg.

I’m looking for “off the cuff” answers to the four (or five) questions below the fold. The point is to get a (very unscientific) sense of how “people” think of psychological repression. Feel free to answer whether you’ve read Freud or not (Sigmund or Anna or both); whether you’re in psychology or psychiatry or not; and whether the conception of repression you have in mind is Freudian or not. If you have read Freud, and/or are professionally in psychology or psychiatry, please indicate that. And feel free to answer any or all (or I guess, none) of the questions.

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Minimum Wages and Payroll Taxes

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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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