Democracy? What Democracy?

We live in a free-market, democratic republic. We hold each of these descriptors very dear, and we believe that – through trial and error, not through philosophical debate – we have found this is the most stable, prosperous, fair society we can live in. On the other hand, we live in a world with huge enterprises larger (in financial terms) than most countries. Walmart, for instance, would be a country whose GDP (revenue) sits between that of Taiwan and Norway. Continue reading

When is Taxation Fair?

I had a long conversation with my brother while in Europe, and it sparked a lot of thinking inside me. We were talking about the Obama Administration’s concessions during last year’s budget negotiations and the resulting extension of tax cuts for the rich. From that instance we moved on to a more general topic: what is fair taxation? We noted at first that since the beginning of the idea, taxation was driven by ease of implementation more than by the idea of fairness. Continue reading

Chance, Ayn Rand, and the Triumph of Narcissism

[Long post, with a rambling story. It’s worth it, I promise.] When I was a wee lad in Italy, I had a horrendous Latin teacher. You must know that all high school kids in Italy need to learn Latin (at least back then), and in the higer grades of high schools Latin was taken very seriously. That meant that one of the two essays in the graduation exam had a good chance of being about Latin (the other was always about Italian literature). Continue reading