Unlawful Immigrants and Tax Cheats

People are residing in the United States unlawfully and people are cheating on their income tax returns. Relatively few in either category face enforcement action in any given year. Many conservatives, including one candidate for president, favor a dramatic increase in immigration enforcement and a dramatic decrease in tax enforcement. Can this be justified?

Rationality and the Belief in a Greatest Prime – with Side Trips to the Prisoner’s Dilemma and Kavka’s Poison

A puzzle current in some philosophical circles involves an eccentric billionaire who offers you a million dollars if you come to believe that there is a greatest prime number. This is, of course, a little challenging for you, knowing as you do Euclid’s proof that there are infinitely many primes.

Doctrinal Adam & Eve and Genetic Adam & Eve

Many of those who believe that the Book of Genesis is divinely inspired also believe in evolution, and, in particular, in the descent of humankind from earlier species going all the way back to the unicellular. “God behind evolution” and “guided evolution” are popular ways of expressing their view. Most of these believers take the Adam and Eve story to be a myth, albeit a myth bearing important spiritual truth. Some, however, take Adam and Eve to be actual, particular persons, even though they had biological parents. How well does this sit with the science of human pre-history?

Self-Ownership and Individual Rights

It has been said that all rights we have as human beings are rooted in individual self-ownership. If taken literally, and not as some sort of metaphor, this cannot be right.

Some talk suggesting self-ownership is the source of rights might be nothing more than rhetorical flourish, elaborating the observation that we have rights with respect, e.g., to our hands that are, in many respects, at least as strong as our rights with respect to our gloves. That I will not dispute. I here take issue only with those, perhaps few in number, who have been carried away and truly embrace the theory that the fundamental basis of individual rights is a property right of self-ownership

Of Voter Identification, Fraudulent Votes, and Closed-Out Voters

I hope you will all agree that increasing the stringency of voter identification requirements at the polls may prevent some unlawful votes, but will also result in some perfectly lawful votes not being cast, as voters, from various causes, do not get the right identification in their hands by election day.

What it seems, naively, should determine the policy for identification stringency is minimizing the sum of unlawful votes plus lawful votes that would otherwise have been cast but were not as result of the stringency. Naive or not, this is the voter identification policy test for which I will argue.

The 2nd Amendment Right to the Open Carry of Swords and Shoulder Launched Missiles

As everyone knows the Second Amendment is not about guns. The objects of the right it constitutionalizes are “Arms.” Swords, bayonets, and hatchets, as well as muskets, were the arms of the Revolutionary War. Current arms of individual use include body armor, hand grenades and shoulder rockets.

The fact that shoulder rockets are a tad dangerous and of little socially approved private use surely has some bearing on their constitutional status. A frank recognition of this fact will show the supporter of the open carry of large clip semi-automatics that his mode of constitutional interpretation is not so different from those who contend that the carry of said semiautomatic, and perhaps also of a Saturday night special, is outside constitutional protection.

Fear of Fascism and Fear of "Fascism"

I have both a fear of political and social trends reminiscent of fascism in the United States and Europe and a fear of overusing the word the word “fascism.” Much use at all, I think, would be overuse.