Author: Andrew Taggart

• January 21, 2012

  Against the fantasy of something for nothing

  (Beyond my bedroom window: the snow comes down, the pigeons sit askant, at odd angles, one here, another there as if playing with me.) — (The birds, unseen, are singing amid the gently falling snow. Pure sprightly delight.) — We have inherited a misguided public philosophy concerning the desirability of “free things.” The fantasy that,…
• January 20, 2012

  To be a modern woman: A social tragedy

  Were the fate of the modern woman to be written today, doubtless it would be cast in the genre of a social tragedy. Where once she was held in bondage, now she is free to choose: free to choose her own poison. The endings of many nineteenth and twentieth century novels bespeak a sense that the…
• January 19, 2012

  Stone Soup, mutual dependency, and a new economic order

  In “The Story of Stone Soup,” as Antonio Dias tells it, a wandering beggar comes upon a village. Hungry and tired, he goes to each door and is met with the same answer again and again. There is, he is told, not enough to go around, and the door, half-opened, is soon closed upon him.…
• January 18, 2012

  Being arrogant got me halfway…

  “To live an examined life is to make a self-portrait.” –Robert Nozick, The Examined Life Being arrogant got me halfway to where I am today. Becoming humble got me the rest of the way. Being humble put me onto a different way. But arrogance, strange to say, was a saving grace for a young boy…
• January 17, 2012

  Imagining 2 economic worlds: relative abundance and relative scarcity

  Let’s build a naturalistic account of a social order under the conditions, first, of abundance and, next, of scarcity. By a “naturalistic account,” I mean the most formal rendering conceivable of human activity based solely on the simplest principles of human life and on the most threadbare of “lived logics.” Below, points 1-4 are neutral…