Egalitarianism

April 1, 2014|affirmative action, Egalitarianism, Higher Education

Harvard to Go Egalitarian

Cambridge, MA, April 1, 2014

In a move designed to foster diversity and to create a university that “thinks like America,” Dr. Drew Gilpin Faust, the President of Harvard University announced yesterday that the school will embrace egalitarian admissions. The school will no longer give priority to students with good grades, high SAT scores, and impressive extra-curricular activities. Such policies have, Dr. Faust acknowledged, created an “elitist” and “inegalitarian” atmosphere at the college. “It is unacceptable in 2014 to be favoring the intelligent over the unlearned, and the energetic over the slothful,” she proclaimed.

March 27, 2014|Egalitarianism, Oxfam, Redistribution, Welfare State

Oxfam’s Flimflam

by Theodore Dalrymple|

A report of the British charity Oxfam recently drew attention to the fact that Britain’s five richest families had more assets than the lowest 20 per cent of the population put together. It called upon the government to consider instituting a wealth tax to reduce the gap, by how much it did not say. Would the poorest fifth be much the better off, or at least happier, if 20, say, or 50, rather than five families now had more wealth than they?

April 1, 2013|

Social Justice Theory: A Solution in Search of a Problem

by David C. Rose|

In response to: What is Social Justice?

Lamartine in front of the Town Hall of Paris rejects the red flag on 25 February 1848.

What is social justice? Sam Gregg’s essay answers this question by reviewing the origins and evolution of the concept. I find little to quibble with in Sam’s remarks and I am certainly in no position to make them a fortiori. My contribution will therefore be to offer an explanation for why social justice theory is both misguided and dangerous. It is misguided because it regards observed inequality as prima facie evidence of injustice because of insufficient understanding of how a free market economy actually works. It is dangerous because social justice advocates therefore attempt to solve a moral problem that doesn’t…

Social Justice is the State

by Eric Mack

Samuel Gregg’s essay, “What is Social Justice?” is an important reminder that many different moral traditions – including the Catholic natural law tradition – may lay claim to the vocabulary of “social justice” and to an associated notion of the “common good.” As articulated by Gregg, this natural law tradition can employ the language of…

February 19, 2013|Abraham Lincoln, Declaration of Independence, Egalitarianism, Equal Protection, Equality, Progressivism

The Equality of Self Government v. Egalitarianism

by Richard M. Reinsch II|

Thinking about President Obama’s second inaugural address and the ubiquity of egalitarian political rhetoric is enough to make you wonder if anything can be preserved from the reach of government. Even philanthropy itself, the unique American contribution to civil society, made by possible by the overflows from prior gains in trade, might now have to account to government for its independent work. So what does equality mean in the American republic? The inability to speak in a grounded manner about this principle seems to doom attempts to limit the size of government, protect commerce from undue interference, and uphold a robust civil society, among other worthy goals.

February 1, 2013|Administrative State, affirmative action, Egalitarianism, Federal Reserve, Ratifying the Constitution

Friday Roundup, February 1st

by Richard M. Reinsch II|

The next Liberty Law Talk is a conversation with John Vile about his new book, The Writing and Ratification of the U.S. Constitution. So if you're a stranger to this site, we post frequently on the administrative state. Some have referred to Greve's candid discourses on this topic as the case of a disgruntled admin law professor. I don't think "disgruntled" quite catches Greve on this matter. However, for a change of pace we went historical this week with Joseph Postell's insightful review of Jerry Mashaw's Creating the Administrative Constitution. Mashaw argues that what we think of as the administrative state…

January 29, 2013|Becoming Europe, Egalitarianism, Samuel Gregg, solidarity, Welfare State

America, Europe, and the Culture of Economic Freedom

by Theodore Dalrymple|

The only political prediction which I am proud to have made is that there would be demonstrations on the Boulevard St Germain if, in response to the riots in the banlieues of French towns and cities in 2005, the French government attempted the slightest liberalization of the French labor market. And so it proved: thousands of young people came out on to the streets to protest against what was really only a straw in the wind or a cloud on the horizon. They were protesting, in fact, against the potential withdrawal not of the privileges that they now enjoyed but that, as children of the prosperous and the fully-employed, they hoped to enjoy in the future.

It never occurred to them that the employment protections of some are the exclusion from the labor market of others. They were, in effect, like the white miners of the Witwatersrand in South Africa who went on strike in 1922 against the use of black miners as an economy measure by the mine owners. Their slogan, under the leadership of the South African communists, was ‘Workers of the world unite for a white South Africa.’

January 23, 2013|corporatist state, Egalitarianism, tobacco suits, trial lawyers

Up in Smoke: Freedom and Responsibility in the Corporatist State

by Theodore Dalrymple|

Humphrey Bogart

Smokers, I have found, are inclined to disbelieve just how unpleasant others find their habit. Since they themselves can’t or don’t detect the lingering smell of stale smoke in rooms, in corridors, on clothes, even in books (my second-hand copy of Father Coplestone’s study of Nietzsche is a smoke-filled room in itself), they think that non-smokers exaggerate when they complain of it. They don’t believe that the smoke that gets in your eyes stings, or that it rasps the throat, or that it destroys pleasure in food. The late Christopher Hitchens, an inveterate smoker, told a self-congratulatory anecdote about how he was bravely determined to strike a blow for freedom by breaking the law in New York. Determined to smoke a cigarette in a restaurant, he asked the people at the next table whether they minded if he lit up. It was characteristic of smokers’ egotism, and perhaps that of the author also, that he thought his question a neutral one, such that a reply to the effect that they did not mind meant that they really did not mind.

January 7, 2013|Constitutionalism, Egalitarianism, Hegel, Individualism, Liberalism, Orestes Brownson, Philosophy of Right, The American Republic

Liberal Constitutionalism and Us

by Richard M. Reinsch II|

Michael Greve’s April 2012 post “Constitutionalism, Hegel, and Us” had several significant points in his short essay masquerading as a blog post. Greve notes that liberal constitutionalism per Hegel’s argument in Philosophy of Right has a problem, a big one.

[P]olitical liberalism (Hobbes, Locke, Kant, and, with some qualifications, Rousseau) confuses civil society with the State. Again, that makes us nervous; but the distinction has a very large kernel of good sense. The principle of liberal constitutionalism, Hegel says, is “endless subjectivity,” or what we call “individualism.” A liberal constitution is a contract among individuals, who consent to limits on their autonomy insofar, and only insofar, as they are consistent with individualist principles. (Think Locke’s Second Treatise.) To state Hegel’s central objection at phenomenological level: you can’t run a free country on that basis.

So we need more than individuals. We need a society of persons constituted by familial, local, religious, and political attachments, recognizing that personhood contains aspirations and purposes that place it beyond the scope of state power. Society “possesses primacy over the state.” The state must serve the ends of the human person. On this basis we can relativize the state’s value.

A Mirror of the 20th-Century Congress

by Joseph Postell

Wright undermined the very basis of his local popularity—the decentralized nature of the House—by supporting reforms that gave power to the party leaders.

The Graces of Flannery O'Connor

by Henry T. Edmondson III

O'Connor's correspondence is a goldmine of piercing insight and startling reflections on everything from literature to philosophy to raising peacocks.

Harvard to Go Egalitarian

Cambridge, MA, April 1, 2014

Oxfam’s Flimflam

Social Justice Theory: A Solution in Search of a Problem

In response to: What is Social Justice?

More Responses

Social Justice is the State

The Equality of Self Government v. Egalitarianism

Friday Roundup, February 1st

America, Europe, and the Culture of Economic Freedom

Up in Smoke: Freedom and Responsibility in the Corporatist State

Liberal Constitutionalism and Us

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