Rockford University: Paranoid on the Periphery

A young library supervisor of student workers at Rockford University insisted that Christmas is only a private holiday because it is exclusively religious after I had said that I wanted to finish the book by Christmas. When I pointed out that in this country (the USA) Christmas is recognized as a national holiday, the library employee said that it is only a holiday for the federal government (not the rest of us) and demanded that I define "country." Then, presumably out of ideological spite, while I was taking an hour walk break outside, he intentionally took the book from its proper place on a bookshelf and demanded that each time I want to use the book, I had to ask him for it. It was neither a reference nor a rare book. Surely he had not spied on every patron, or taken books from the shelves so any patron wanting to use a book again would have to ask him at the front desk; and yet, his boss, the provost of the small college whose office was off to the side of the library's entry hallway, rebutted my complaint about his subordinate and instead angrily threatened me that I had to respect library policies, or of course I could go to another library. No wonder that college was in financial trouble and could not keep its CEO. 

The full essay is at "Rockford University"

On the Aristocracy of Wealth

The rule of a few—aristocracy. The rule of the wealthy—plutocracy. Where the few, being valued above the many, are determined principally on account of wealth, the two forms of government fuse into the aristocracy of the moneyed interest. The cardinal virtue is the fundamental desire for more—otherwise known as greed. Justice is limited to peerage, or amicitia (friendship) based on having wealth. This sort of justice, which can be derived from Cicero, is antithetical to justice as caritas seu benevolentia universalis (love, that is, universal benevolence), which comes from Plato, Augustine, and Leibniz.

The full essay is at "On the Aristocracy of Wealth."

The Electoral College: Beyond the Conventional Wisdom

The matter of how the U.S. President is to be selected was a tough nut for the delegates in the Constitutional Convention in 1787 to crack. Mason observed the following in convention, “In every Stage of the Question relative to the Executive, the difficulty of the subject and the diversity of the opinions concerning it have appeared.”[1] The alternative proposals centered around the Congress, State legislatures, the governors, the people, and electors designated for the specific purpose as the possible determiners. Although the delegates were men of considerable experience, their best judgments about how the alternatives would play out were subject to error as well as the confines of their times. In re-assessing the Electoral College, we could do worse than adjust those judgments and rid them of circumstances pertaining to them that no longer apply. For example, the Southern States no longer have slaves, so the question of whether those States would be disadvantaged by going with a popular vote no longer applies; the alternative of going with the popular vote nationwide no longer suffers from that once-intractable pickle. Yet lest we rush headlong into a popular vote without respect to the States, we are well advised not to dismiss the points made by the convention delegates, for we too are constrained by our times, and we may thus not be fully able to take into account points that have been forgotten.

The full essay is at "The Electoral College."

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1. James Madison, Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 Reported by James Madison (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966): 370.