Dissense

Mr. McArthur is right to reframe the debt debate as a question of sovereignty, rather than one of constitutionality. All governments derive their legitimacy – their right to sovereign power – from The People. (Indeed, this has been a legal axiom in the West at least since the creation of Roman law.) It follows that …

If York’s proposal merited a “why,” McArthur’s response leads me to “why not?”
Rather than engage McArthur’s appeal to sovereignty directly, I’ll counter this oblique attack with a similar, but more devastating enfilading fire. To wit, in no particular order, McArthur’s mistakes.
First, McArthur assumes that the obliteration of a democracy by a dictator is necessarily ethically …

The philosophical framework presented by Mr. York, while a novel and interesting approach to the debt forgiveness conundrum, ultimately misses the mark. Most problematically, for an argument that is cast in purely philosophical terms, it is strangely lacking in any normative justification: why, we are left wondering, is extra-constitutional change – or the putative emergence …

Governments, just like persons, acquire debts. Although wealthy nations like the United States typically meet their financial obligations, not all nations are so fortunate or conscientious. Such countries, which chafing under the backbreaking debt of prior regimes, are often left with two options: devote massive portions of already impoverished national budgets to make interest payments (to say nothing of repaying the principal); or repudiate the debts as incurred by an illegitimate predecessor. I’m interested in a philosophical question: when, as an ethical matter, is a government liable for the debts of its predecessors? My answer is fairly simple: a government is liable for the debt of a previous government if and only if the present regime is the same state as that which incurred the debt.