“Sarah Palin's Economic Philosophy - Associated Content” plus 2 more |
- Sarah Palin's Economic Philosophy - Associated Content
- Obituary: Kurt Baier / One of the founders of Pitt's philosophy department - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
- Scalia, Breyer Spar Over Capital Punishment, Judicial Philosophy - Huffingtonpost.com
| Sarah Palin's Economic Philosophy - Associated Content Posted: 14 Nov 2010 09:54 AM PST Reuters has published a story that opens up a preview of what the economic philosophy of a hypothetical Sarah Palin administration might be. The one sentence description is This is not exactly a contradiction. According to James Pethokoukis of Reuters: "In her 2009 book, 'Going Rogue,' Palin offered a remix of 1980s-style Reaganomics — low taxes, less government spending, strong dollar. That's all perfectly sync with her recent Fed-bashing. But she also attacked 'corporatism' in which government and business conspire against entrepreneurs and consumers. This view fuels Palin's critique of Obama's financial reform plan, which she portrays as a creation of Wall Street designed to perpetuate bank bailouts." As both an oil regulator and governor in Alaska, Palin more often than not clashed with big business interests which used connections with government to advance their interests. Palin had rebelled against a political culture in her beloved state that placed government and big business in arrangements that exchanged government favors for campaign contributions. The current fight between Senate candidate Joe Miller, a reformist small government politician in the Palin mode, and the current Senator Lisa Murkowski, who favors a more cooperative stance between government and business, should be seen against that backdrop. Palin has recently cautioned against the fed's policy of quantitative easing that injects printed money into the economy with the hope of spurring economic growth, but at the risk of sparking inflation. She has won some grudging praise from conservative economists. This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
| Obituary: Kurt Baier / One of the founders of Pitt's philosophy department - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Posted: 13 Nov 2010 09:22 PM PST Jan. 26, 1917 - Nov. 7, 2010 Exactly 50 years ago, when the region's political, academic and civic leaders were trying to transform the University of Pittsburgh from commuter school to first-class research and academic center, the school set out to put its philosophy department on the map. Kurt Baier, an Austrian native teaching philosophy in Australia, was brought to serve as chair by a brilliant young philosopher from Lehigh University hired by Pitt to find more brilliant philosophers. Adolf Grunbaum did just that, first -- as he freely admits -- by "raiding Yale's philosophy department. They called me the Pittsburgh Pirate in those days." Then he recruited Dr. Baier, who was not only exceedingly able "but personally an engaging human being," said Dr. Grunbaum, who, at 87, still serves on the faculty and chairs the university's Center for Philosophy of Science. Dr. Baier, who died last Sunday in Dunedin, New Zealand, at the age of 93, spent most of his career at Pitt before retiring to New Zealand in 1996, his wife's native country. Dr. Baier, along with Dr. Grunbaum and others, constituted the original group of scholars who established the department's international reputation -- but not without some difficult preliminary work. "He got a rid of a lot of dead wood in the most humane way and was able to build the department imaginatively so it became one of the best three in the country along with Harvard and Princeton," Dr. Grunbaum said. One of the most influential thinkers in the field of moral philosophy, Dr. Baier examined the reasons behind behavior, whether there are universal moral truths and how we can discover them, noted another former Pitt colleague, Jerome B. Schneewind. "A lot of people glibly say morality is subjective, and that's not accurate. What [Dr. Baier] tried to do was make explicit the rules we all follow when we talk about moral and ethical issues, and the rules governing the language of morality -- without which morality cannot be shared," said Dr. Schneewind, professor emeritus of philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. who also served as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Pitt for more than a decade. For example, he added, "if I promise I will call you in an hour, I give you the right to expect that I will do that, and the right to be cross with me if I don't. "If I repeatedly make that kind of promise, and break it, then you can say I am not to be trusted. That's something we all understand about promising, but it's very hard to explain what goes on when you do promise something." Dr. Baier tried to do that, by describing and justifying reasons for moral behavior -- perhaps spurred by a youth shaped by close encounters with moral failure. Born in Vienna in 1917, he grew up in a large extended family that shared what was commonly termed "healthy anti-Semitism" -- only to discover that his father was of Jewish descent. "Almost nothing, I believe," Dr. Baier wrote, "can make the concept of injustice clearer than involuntary membership in a group against which the law and public opinion practice strict discrimination." He served in the Austrian Army, then attended the University of Vienna, where from 1935 to 1938 he studied law. After the Anschluss in 1938 -- Austria's annexation into Germany -- he fled to Britain, where, according to a eulogy written by Alan Musgrave, a close friend and prominent New Zealand philosopher, he was "passed from one wealthy aristocratic home to another ... Kurt exuded Viennese charm and impressed the ladies, one of whom wanted to adopt him. She was the first in a long line of women who wanted to adopt Kurt, in one way or another." After a brief stint as a salesman of enamel saucepans imported from Vienna -- which ended after he broke a table demonstrating the strength of the saucepans -- he was interned as an enemy alien and was sent to Australia on the notorious ship Dunera, where, during a "nightmare" eight-week voyage, he was beaten and stripped of all his possessions, arriving in Sydney wearing nothing but an old sweater over a pair of pajamas. After the brutalities on the Dunera, Australia was a different world -- as he discovered when, after disembarking, he and the other passengers were lined up along the dock. Mr. Musgrave wrote: "Kurt was sure the soldiers were going to shoot them, until one of them walked over to him, handed him his rifle, and said, "Hold this, mate, while I take a leak." After studying at the University of Melbourne and Oxford University -- where his doctoral thesis was transformed into his first and most well-known book, "The Moral Point of View" -- Dr. Baier returned to Australia to teach, and married a fellow academic, Annette Stoop, before being appointed chair of the philosophy department at Pitt. He and his wife -- an expert in the history of philosophy -- were one of the few couples who achieved equal distinction in the field. Both received numerous awards, including membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Baier chaired Pitt's philosophy department until 1967, and was known, Dr. Schneewind said, as not only an astute administrator but a man of "ready intelligence, gentle wit, warmth and personal charm. His contributions to modern moral philosophy were great; his loss deprives us of far more than his philosophy." A funeral was held Thursday in Dunedin. There will be a memorial service at the University of Pittsburgh in the 2011 fall term. Mackenzie Carpenter: mcarpenter@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1949. First published on November 14, 2010 at 12:00 am This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
| Scalia, Breyer Spar Over Capital Punishment, Judicial Philosophy - Huffingtonpost.com Posted: 12 Nov 2010 08:41 PM PST LUBBOCK, Texas — One of the most conservative justices on the U.S. Supreme Court and one of the most liberal ones sparred Friday over capital punishment, the direct election of senators and various other constitutional questions during a rare public debate that highlighted their philosophical differences. Antonin Scalia, 74, the longest-serving current justice, appointed by Republican President Ronald Reagan, and Stephen Breyer, 72, appointed by Democrat Bill Clinton, shared the stage in front of a crowd of thousands during a West Texas event organized by Texas Tech University Law School. They particularly clashed on the question of capital punishment. Scalia argued that while there's room for debate about whether the death penalty is a "good idea or a bad idea," it is not cruel and unusual punishment. "There's not an ounceworth of room for debate as to whether it constitutes cruel and unusual punishment because, at the time the Eighth Amendment was adopted – the cruel and unusual punishments clause – it was the only punishment for a felony. It was the definition of a felony. It's why we have Western movies because horse thieving was a felony." Breyer said 200 years ago, people thought flogging at a whipping post was not cruel and unusual. "And indeed there were whipping posts where people were flogged virtually to death up until the middle of the 19th century," he said. "If we had a case like that today I'd like to see how you'd vote." The two bandied about other issues, including Brown vs. The Board of Education, the landmark high court decision in the 1950s that outlawed school segregation case, cable television rulings, and how they view cases that come before them. Later, Scalia returned to the issue of flogging, saying it's "stupid" but "not unconstitutional, which is stupid. There's a lot of stuff that stupid that's not constitutional." Scalia said he has no interest in what legislators intended when making a particular law. Breyer countered, saying judges need to go back and find out the purpose legislators had when crafting a bill. "I don't at all look to what I think the legislature thought," Scalia said. "I frankly don't care what the legislature thought." Breyer responded quickly, saying, "That's the problem," which brought thunderous laughter from the crowd. "You've got to go back to the purpose of the legislation, find out what's there," Breyer said. "That's the democratic way, cause you can then hold that legislature responsible, rather than us, who you can't control." At the end, the two were asked what they would change about the Constitution. "Not much," Breyer said. "It's a miracle and we see that through" our work. Scalia called the writing of the Constitution "providential," and the birth of political science. "There's very little that I would change," he said. "I would change it back to what they wrote, in some respects. The 17th Amendment has changed things enormously." That amendment allowed for U.S. Senators to be elected by the people, rather than by individual state legislatures. "We changed that in a burst of progressivism in 1913, and you can trace the decline of so-called states' rights throughout the rest of the 20th century. So, don't mess with the Constitution." Breyer countered that change has sometimes been needed. "There have been lots of ups and downs in the enforcement of this Constitution, and one of the things that's been quite ugly – didn't save us from the Civil War – is that there is a system of changing the Constitution through amendment. It's possible to do but not too easy." Get HuffPost Politics On Twitter and Facebook! Subscribe to the HuffPost Hill newsletter! Know something we don't? E-mail us at huffpolitics@huffingtonpost.comThis entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
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