Hobbes, Smith, and modern economoics.

 



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Chinese Dream

As the founder of the Kuomintang, Sun-Yat Sen put forth many of his visions in the party's enacted policies. One of the core elements of his ideology was the theory of the "Three Phases of the Fundamentals of National Reconstruction". This was the dominant theory at the time on how the KMT was to secure power and enact a modern state in China. The first phase was military rule/revolution, the second phase was political tutelage (党国）, and the third phase was constitutional government. The first and third phases are relatively easy to interpret. Military rule was necessary to ensure that the KMT was actually able to unite the country and defeat the disparate warlords, along with the imperial government. The third phase is also intuitive - Sun-Yat Sen envisioned a multi-party democratic state to be implemented in China. Indeed, it is the second phase that is the most controversial. Political tutelage is characterized by a period of one-party rule, by which economic and polit...
Read more

Who can the ghetto poor steal from?

  In this blog post, I want to consider the legitimacy of criminal actions perpetrated by residents of the dark ghettos in which the victims of the crimes are other residents of the dark ghettos.  Shelby argues that when society doesn't include adequate opportunities for individuals to avoid demeaning forms of labor, crime becomes reasonable (216). This is because, when individuals are not afforded that opportunity, they can reasonably claim they are not being treated as equal members in a cooperative society and that the requirement for reciprocity is not being met (217). When members of the ghetto poor are not treated in accordance with reciprocity, they are not bound by civic obligations (213). However, all people are bound by natural duties, including the obligation not to cause unnecessary suffering and the obligation to respect the personhood of others. In Shelby’s view, a category of crimes emerge as reasonable under this framework–crimes that would violate civic obliga...
Read more

The Aggregation Principle

Last time I wrote about Anderson, I discussed how her theory related to constitutional incorporation. This time, her analysis made me think about another constitutional concept: the aggregation principle.  The aggregation principle was established in a case I have talked about in a prior blog post, Wickard v Filburn (1942). The Commerce Clause states that the federal government has the power to “to regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes.” The federal government used this to establish wheat quotas. As a result, farmers could not produce more wheat than the quota allotted them. Filburn was a farmer who produced more wheat than the quota allowed him too. However, the amount of wheat he sold was less than the quota; he used the extra wheat to feed his livestock. The court ruled that this was illegal as it violated the quota and upheld the quota as constitutional. The Court established that Wickard’s excess wheat production would...
Read more