José Azel 168 posts 0 comments

It was not supposed to be this way. The United States was not conceived as a gigantic, cumbersome, highly centralized state. The Founding Fathers envisioned an American polis weighted much more towards local and regional…
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By definition, an expanded government requires diminished liberty. Any function we ask of government requires us to surrender a measure of our freedom, and our treasure. And yet, large segments of the population favor an…
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American exceptionalism is the belief that the United States is unique among nations with respect to its democracy and individual freedoms. The idea of American exceptionalism stems from the American Revolution. In the…
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Philosopher Karl Popper (1902-1994), castigated obfuscating writers as those "who have nothing to say, and say it very badly." Popper, a forceful defender of liberal democracy, was particularly critical of highbrows…
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When I studied international economics in the 1960s, one of the explanations offered for the wealth of a nation was its endowment of natural resources. Then, countries were perceived to be rich or poor based on their natural…
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The Corruption Perceptions Index, published yearly by Transparency International, measures the perceived levels of public sector corruption in 180 countries. The 2018 report shows that, the vast majority of countries assessed…
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Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), who devised the essay as a literary genre, was one of the most erudite and sceptic humanist philosophers of the XVI century. He personified the French Renaissance’s spirit of freely embracing doubts.…
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In a now classic experiment, political scientist Philip E. Tetlock showed that the predictions made by political experts are only slightly better than a random guess, and worse than the predictions made by a statistical model. The…
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Social justice looks at how a society chooses to distribute the things that we value, among them income, wealth, powers, and more. Social justice asks: What is the right thing to do? Nearly 2,500 years ago, Plato got…
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Waging war is a very serious matter. Commendably, U. S. Presidents and Congress are very reluctant to authorize the use of the Armed Forces of the United States. And yet, the U.S. has enemies, and often the national interest requires the…
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As individuals, we know little about the world and its people. Yet, we hold strong opinions about what should be done to solve most problems. We "know" what should be done in Iraq, without being able to locate Iraq on a map. Also, many…
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Cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker has coined the term “Left Pole” to describe a mythical place where the political Left resides intellectually. Whereas, from the North Pole all directions are south, from the Left Pole, all opinion that…
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