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The Feminine in the Bible... Answering a question I received from yesterday’s post, I see the actual...
Cultural Epochs The issue of race, culture and theosophical-anthroposophical epochs is...
Susan Moller Okin and Emp... Okin makes a very interesting point when she criticizes John Rawls through...
Taxes vs Charity A common talking point on the right is that taxes can and should be lower...
More thoughts on OkinR... Another thing occurs to me as I consider Okin’s paper. Okin may be...
Why Republican Policies S... Republican voters are a minority in the US, yet their policy objectives are...
Rudolf Steiner on the rel... That Rudolf Steiner was did not desire to mix his work with politics is...
Eric P. Wijnants: serial ... Once upon a time I came across a site that annoyed me. It had a wealth of...

Short Term Vs Long Term Self Interest

At the depths of the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes had the insight that society can go badly wrong when people’s short-term interests lead them to oppose their long-term interests. He was referring to the tendency of businesses to cut workers and investments when their sales go down. Of course it makes perfect sense to do this, but if everyone does it at once you launch a spiral of unemployment that has no end....
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Hillary Clinton and the Question of Corruption

Hillary Clinton and the Question of Corruption

If you spend any amount of time around the right-wing media you will invariably hear throwaway phrases like, “Hillary Clinton – most corrupt politician ever”, or “Hillary Clinton’s extreme corruption”. But if you check her criminal record you will discover that she has never been indicted, much less charged or convicted, of any crime. What are we to make of this? Voices on the left will...
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Taxes vs Charity

A common talking point on the right is that taxes can and should be lower because the social needs of the impoverished should ideally be met by private charity. It is worth noting that this is a very old idea, going back at least to the start of the Industrial Revolution in the early 1800s. The concept was vividly illustrated by Charles Dickens in “A Christmas Carol” in the person of Scrooge, where it was also...
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Is the Estate Tax Double Taxation?

The general rule of money is that it is taxed when it moves. When you are paid a salary, some of that is taxed as income tax. When you use it to buy something, there is sales tax. People accept that both these taxes are valid, and you don’t hear a lot of argument that sales tax is “double taxation” because you already paid income tax on the funds. Likewise, when heirs get a windfall, the money is moving...
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GOP Tax Plan VII

Republicans seem determined to demonstrate that, no matter how bad their tax bill, they can always make it worse. In this case by tacking on a repeal of the individual mandate tax. Of course they love the symbolism of “repealing” Obamacare. But this really proves that, on policy, they party is really nothing more than a gang of pestilential plunder monkeys. Because repealing the individual mandate does nothing at...
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GOP Tax Plan VI: The Estate Tax

 “Even among high-income Americans, the plan seems designed to reward those who don’t work for a living — or more precisely, the less you actually do to earn your income, the bigger your tax break. Business owners would owe less in taxes than high-earning professionals; passive investors, who just sit there and collect dividends, would owe less than those who at least run their businesses. And wealthy heirs, who did...
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On the Evolution of Fairy Tales

The headline: In The Original Sleeping Beauty, The King Is A Sexual Harasser Who Forces Himself On The Princess My thoughts: I guess this brings up the question of what constitutes the “original” of a fairy tale. Most people would say the Brothers Grimm versions are the original, but the Grimms were editors (at times quite heavy-handed editors) of stories, some of which had been in circulation hundreds of year...
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How Obama and Hillary Clinton destroyed the Democr...

First off, some definitions. What is the Democratic Party? The Democratic a voluntary association of people who share political priorities. Because it exists in the US constitutional system, it serves as one of the two major parties in the US. The US constitutional system has a “first past the post” voting method which inevitably results in a political system with only two parties; such has it been since about...
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