As a matter of fact, I don’t have much to add to Bill’s post or Felix’s response—except I will say that as an “elite” voter by the literature’s standards, I rarely find myself consulting the quotidian details of a candidate’s or congressman’s contributors. Maybe this is a flaw in the methodology of my politician assessment …
Monthly Archives: November 2009
Dissent: Inputs Predict Outputs
Bill overstates his point; how legislators spend our money may be more important than how they spend their time or how their campaigns are financed, but that does not mean that this additional information is irrelevant. Quite the contrary—transparency oftentimes uniquely illuminates an official’s political propensities.
Essay: The Trouble With Transparency
The “transparency movement” is, by all accounts, on fire. Obama campaigned on openness, launched his administration with nods to citizen participation, and has talked up a wonderful storm about credibility. The Sunlight Foundation [1. I should say, in advance, that I think the Sunshine Foundation is a fantastic organization with its heart in the right …
Previously: The Ethics of Begging
A dissensible debate on the morality of donatives to the destitute (or at least the fellows on the street presenting themselves as such).
Dissent: The Centrality of Judgment
I find A’s listing of propositions a bit robotic. For easy reference, I’ll list them again:
(1) it is morally required to give to beggars and immoral to refuse; (2) it is morally salutary to give to beggars, but it is not required; (3) it is morally neutral to give to beggars; or (4) it is …
Concur: What’s Wrong With the Bottle?
There seems to be a curious degree of certainty among the dissenters that the choice of the vagrant to purchase alcohol with his donatives is, in fact, a poor one. Bill Goodwin goes so far as to call it enabling self-abuse, which is an unambiguously pejorative description of a highly variable state.
In fact, drunkenness, like …