This column was originally published in the Sept. 30 Harvard Independent. It responds directly to Max’s blog post from the previous week. Harvard’s position on the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, banning the group from campus until “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) is overturned, has always struck me the wrong way. It just doesn’t make sense to punish ROTC cadets for ... Read More
Sam Barr’s most recent post makes the rather shocking claim that Rand Paul, the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate seat in Kentucky being vacated by the retiring Jim Bunning, is a racist, or at least that he is not a non-racist. Sam deduces this from the fact that Mr. Paul is not a “consistent libertarian,” that he “picks and ... Read More
Peyton has posted a rejoinder to Max, trying to buttress his initial claim that it is “inappropriate for 73 percent of federal income taxes to be paid by 10 percent of the American population.” I am struck by a few things from Peyton’s post, and I want to pull them out and talk about them directly. First, Peyton argues that ... Read More
In his April 11 post, “Weighing In: The Great Tax Debate,” Max Novendstern rebuts my most recent argument that it is inappropriate for 73 percent of federal income taxes to be paid by 10 percent of the American population. Since our disagreement is to at least some extent based on our differing conceptions of fairness, I will offer only a ... Read More
In dueling editorials, two sets of Crimson editors opined today on the federal crack-down on unpaid internships. I’m with the pro-payment crowd, but I think that both the sides made the same conceptual error by assuming that this is a straightforward case of equality versus opportunity. The majority view was that, even though stricter regulation “might result in fewer internship ... Read More
We began The HPRgument with the goal of creating a new space on campus for lively discussion of the things that matter — political, cultural, or Harvardian Since we began three weeks ago, debate on this site has been spirited and engaged: we’ve taken on the racial politics of Avatar, praised Obama’s “shrewd” bank tax, discussed the “ Sociology of ... Read More
Urban America Volume 36, Number 2, Summer 2009. Letter from the Editor The Ten-Year Plan IAN MERRIFIELD Daring to end homelessness The Future of Urban Education Tiffany wen and jyoti jasrasaria The impact of new innovation on urban school systems Cities Without Limits Chris danello and ashley fabrizio How long-term factors drive municipal economies A New Approach to a Chronic ... Read More
For an allegedly “grotesque” (but, thankfully, “innocuous”) confusion, Sam Barr’s equation of liberty and equally is pretty well-founded empirically. Think about the history of America. Think about the struggle to integrate non-land-owners, Catholics, Jews, women, blacks and now gays. Surely, as Sam notes, all this expanded both liberty and equality at once. One way to understand the relationship between liberty ... Read More
