Against Politics

Toward a depoliticized society

Important Voices interview with Anthony de Jasay

On March 15 2010 The Gary Johnson for President blog (!) featured a brief interview with Anthony de Jasay who “wishes to state, though, that he has no views on the candidacy of  Governor Gary Johnson for the Republican nomination.”  Asked why limited government is so hard to achieve, de Jasay answers: The main reason [...]

Karl Popper’s authoritarian social technologies

Karl Popper is known for his influential contributions to the philosophy of science and critical rationalism.  Unfortunately, his attempt to apply critical rationalism to political philosophy produced writings of a more impatient and dubious nature. For example, in 1960 Popper wrote: ..the empiricist’s questions ‘How do you know? What is the source of your assertion?’ [...]

Market fundamentalism

A recent trend in progressive thinking is to accuse opponents of “market fundamentalism.” That seems to be a smart rhetorical tactic because a) it rides on the wave of concerns about any kind of fundamentalism, and b) the phrase appeals to people’s reasonableness. After all, if two ways of “organizing society” are available, only a [...]

The bell curve of individual choice

What is the relationship between individual choice and collective choice? What should be the domain over which a democracy chooses? Prevailing answers to these questions are an important factor affecting the size of government. One argument why imperfect foresight should favor limited government, or no government at all, involves the difference between how individual and [...]

The calculus of voting

Is it rational to vote? For most people the question may seem absurd but quite a few economists and political scientists have made the claim that it is not. The reasoning is that in large elections the probability that your individual vote will decide the outcome is so small that voting is a futile exercise. [...]