Category: Philosophy

I have a piece in The Washington Post that argues for a Universal Basic Income. The piece is part of a general UBI forum with lots of participants. I was solicited to provide a left-of-center perspective, and so that’s what I did. The piece identifies two problems inherent in capitalist economic systems — employer coercion… Continue reading Capitalism is coercive and creates patterns of deprivation, as explained by libertarian blockquotes

Conservative website Breitbart accused racial justice activist Shaun King of misleading people into thinking he is black when he is actually white. This accusation pushed King to write a gut-wrenching piece unfolding his personal story and details of his childhood in order to explain that Breitbart was wrong and that he had a black father.… Continue reading The Problems of Identity Policing and Invisible Identities for Identitarian Deference

So I’ve been reading this paper from libertarian philosopher Matt Zwolinski about why a basic income is both consistent with, and even required by, libertarian precepts. What’s interesting about Zwolinski basic income advocacy is that the way it works is by first establishing that property is anti-libertarian, in the sense that it clearly relies upon… Continue reading Why Have Property At All?

When I am not reading economics-related material, one of the things I like to do is probe the strangest depths of Tumblr identity debates. Although I don’t write about it much (save one time before) and have no particular interest in their outcomes, I find these debates extremely fascinating on a purely argumentative level and… Continue reading Transrace and Transgender

At the risk of flattering Isaiah Berlin, who I believe to be a very overrated figure, it is important in debates about liberty to not muddle two different concepts. Liberty in the “negative” sense refers to essentially non-interference. Previously, I have spent a lot of time pointing out that this sense of liberty is incompatible… Continue reading Two Notions of Liberty