Academic corruption at George Mason University ('Koch U')

Finally, the corrupting influence of the Charles Koch Foundation at George Mason University has been publicly acknowledged:

"Virginia’s largest public university granted the conservative Charles Koch Foundation a say in the hiring and firing of professors in exchange for millions of dollars in donations, according to newly released documents.
The release of donor agreements between George Mason University and the foundation follows years of denials by university administrators that Koch foundation donations inhibit academic freedom."

(From: "Documents show ties between university, conservative donors" [AP]. See also: "George Mason president: Some donations ‘fall short’ of academic standards" [WaPo].)

*Sigh*... As someone who has been following the growing pernicious influence of the 'Kochtopus' in American academia for many years now, this is thoroughly unsurprising. But I'm glad that a court compelled this public university to at least be honest about its past academic corruption.

(It is worth noting that the GMU Economics Department is where the libertarian misogynist Robin Hanson works. Small world...)

Members of Parliament for non-resident citizens

Parliamentary democracy is based on territorial representation: Members of Parliament are elected to represent citizens who reside within certain geographically-defined electoral districts (called ‘ridings’ in Canada).

One problem with this system concerns the representation of citizens who reside abroad. Insofar as such persons remain citizens of the country in question—the state remains the ultimate protector of such citizens’ rights and interests; it is the one place that they can go to if denied residency elsewhere—it would seem that they should have some kind of representation in their country’s legislature.

Many countries allow non-resident citizens to continue to vote within the electoral districts wherein they last resided, at least for a certain period of time (currently, Canadians can vote in federal elections so long as they have not resided abroad for more than five years). But a better form of representation, I think, would be to allocate a certain number of MPs to represent directly non-resident citizens.

Or so I have proposed in the past—viz., that there should be a number of MPs within the Canadian federal Parliament to represent Canadians abroad. (Such forms of representation, it should be noted, already exist for French and Italian citizens.) Interesting, a Briton residing in Spain recently has made a very similar proposal, and has started a petition to get the proposal debated within the UK Parliament. I wish him luck!

Libertarian misogyny

So ... a 'libertarian thinker’ tries to attack a straw man caricature of ‘distributive justice’ (some implausible version of ‘luck egalitarianism’, as far as I can tell), but instead reveals himself to be a grotesque misogynist.

(For the record, I think that the ‘argument’ fails miserably against any plausible version of luck egalitarianism. But even if I were wrong about that, I would be untroubled, as I belong to the ‘relational egalitarian’ camp—along with thinkers like Elizabeth Anderson, John Rawls, Samuel Scheffler, Joshua Cohen, among others—for reasons explained here.)

And as for libertarianism’s claim to be concerned with ‘liberty’, I found this recent post from Existential Comics rather amusing.

UPDATE: for a clearer explanation of this brouhaha, see "Own Troll" by John Holbo at the Crooked Timber blog.

UPDATE 2: Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo weighs in on the matter.

Justice and leisure time

In a recent piece in the Washington Post (25 April 2018), Elizabeth Bruenig helpfully explains the importance of free time: "America is obsessed with the virtue of work. What about the virtue of rest?"

Bruenig's article coheres nicely with my view, outlined in a couple of academic articles now, that leisure time should be regarded as a basic requirement of justice -- a 'primary good' in 'Rawls-speak'.

Specifically, Rawls acknowledges that leisure time could be treated as a primary good -- one interchangeable with income/wealth, and thus distributed via the different principle. (See Justice as Fairness, p.179.) My argument is that a certain amount of leisure time should be regarded as a 'basic right' -- to be included as part of the 'basic needs' principle (which has lexical priority over even the first principle of justice). (On the 'basic needs' principle, see Political Liberalism, p.7.) Above that threshold, though, it should be distributed via the difference principle. (So I partially agree with Rawls.)

For a longer explanation of my view, see section 4 of my article, "'The Kids are Alright': Political liberalism, Leisure Time, and Childhood."