Richard Tarnas: The Passion of the Western Mind

When I was a child, I can remember wondering about all kinds of seemingly insoluble questions.  Why am I here?  Where was I before I was born?  How could I come from not existing at all to being a real person?  If my parents had not married, would I have existed in someone else’s body, [...]

What is a Rogue State?

A few days ago, I was flipping through the TV channels looking for something interesting to watch between football games.  Golf just doesn’t do it for me.  I zoomed past C-SPAN, which can be interesting at times, even if it’s also annoying.  I was on this channel long enough to hear some Republican congressman whipper-snapper [...]

The arts and the public sector

A while back, Aristotle introduced some discussion here about the relationship of the arts to the government–or you might say the relationship of the arts to the government’s money, which is another way of saying the relationship between the arts and the money that the government steals from your back pocket. I am a musician [...]

Of plumbers, philosophers, and would-be “DeFamers”

There has been some discussion on the Mises Yahoo! Group regarding an attack that a Brad DeLong — a man who does not register on my radar — directed towards a book written by Ludwig von Mises, the dean of the Austrian school of economics. The target of the attack was The Theory of Money [...]

Pete Seeger on public education

Seeger brings a poetic approach to the pernicious ideas which are taught in State schools in America. My heart goes out to the students that must return to their cell blocks sometime in the next few weeks. Would that we had a real education system which taught them how to think (you know….stuffy stuff like [...]

Everything you learned in public school (except for Math) is wrong.

I hated school from the moment I entered kindergarten. The whole routine of going to this maze of cinder block cells for five days a week always rubbed me the wrong way. I’m not sure I ever figured out why until many years after I graduated, and this is probably good: If I knew then [...]