Ingram
Все книги издательства IngramA Rat Is a Pig Is a Dog Is a Boy
Over the past thirty years, as Wesley J. Smith details in his latest book, the concept of animal rights has been seeping into the very bone marrow of Western culture. One reason for this development is that the term “animal rights” is so often used very loosely, to mean simply being nicer to animals. But although animal rights groups do sometimes focus their activism on promoting animal welfare, the larger movement they represent is actually advancing a radical belief system.For some activists, the animal rights ideology amounts to a quasi religion, one whose central doctrine declares a moral equivalency between the value of animal lives and the value of human lives. Animal rights ideologues embrace their beliefs with a fervor that is remarkably intense and sustained, to the point that many dedicate their entire lives to “speaking for those who cannot speak for themselves.” Some believe their cause to be so righteous that it entitles them to cross the line from legitimate advocacy to vandalism and harassment, or even terrorism against medical researchers, the fur and food industries, and others they accuse of abusing animals.All people who love animals and recognize their intrinsic worth can agree with Wesley J. Smith that human beings owe animals respect, kindness, and humane care. But Smith argues eloquently that our obligation to humanity matters more, and that granting “rights” to animals would inevitably diminish human dignity.In making this case with reason and passion, A Rat Is a Pig Is a Dog Is a Boy strikes a major blow against a radically antihuman dogma.
Why Progressive Institutions are Unsustainable
The painful performance of the American economy in the past decade is not a function of bad luck. It is the product of flawed institutional design. Right now we are reaping the harvest of efforts to reinvigorate the progressive programs of the New Deal that stress high progressive taxes, large transfer payments, strong labor laws, and major barriers to free trade.This combination of public finance and market regulation has proved a potent force for disaster.High marginal tax rates expose the political system to strong factional strife that stifles initiative, adds uncertainty and reduces overall revenues. To these multiple ailments, Epstein argues that the best recipe is a return to the flat tax of the classical liberal tradition. The government has committed itself to substituting state mandates for voluntary arrangements in labor and real estate markets, disabling both by retarding job formation and roiling real estate markets. To these multiple ailments, Epstein argues that the best recipe is a reinvigoration of free markets that do not upset voluntary arrangements on the supposed grounds that they are unfair, one-sided or exploitive.Just change these two levers, and we can find an effective classical liberal antidote to excesses of the modern progressive age.
Money in a Free Society
In the 15 years to mid-2007 the world economy enjoyed unparalleled stability (the so-called “Great Moderation”), with steady growth and low inflation. But the period since mid-2007 (“the Great Recession”) has seen the worst macroeconomic turmoil since the 1930s. A dramatic plunge in trade, output and employment in late 2008 and 2009 has been followed by an unconvincing recovery. How is the lurch from stability to instability to be explained? What are the intellectual origins of the policy mistakes that led to the Great Recession? What theories motivated policies in the USA and other leading nations? Which ideas about economic policy have proved right? And which have been wrong?Money in a Free Society contains 18 provocative essays on these questions from Tim Congdon, an influential economic adviser to the Thatcher government in the UK and one of the world’s leading monetary commentators. Congdon argues that academic economists and policy-makers have betrayed the intellectual legacy of both Keynes and Friedman.These two great economists believed – if in somewhat different ways – in the need for steady growth in the quantity of money. But Keynes has been misunderstood as advocating big rises in public spending and large budget deficits as the only way to defeat recession. That has led under President Obama to an unsustainable explosion in American public debt. Meanwhile the Fed has ignored extreme volatility in the rate of money growth, contrary to the central message of Friedman’s analytical work. In his 1923 Tract on Monetary Reform Keynes said, “The Individualistic Capitalism of today, precisely because it entrusts saving to the individual investor and production to the individual employer, presumes a stable measuring-rod of value, and cannot be efficient–perhaps cannot survive–without one.” In Money in a Free Society Congdon calls for a return to stable money growth and sound public finances, and argues that these remain the best answers to the problems facing modern capitalism.
Invisible Wealth
The discipline of economics is not what it used to be. Over the last few decades, economists have begun a revolutionary reorientation in how we look at the world, and this has major implications for politics, policy, and our everyday lives. For years, conventional economists told us an incomplete story that leaned on the comfortable precision of mathematical abstraction and ignored the complexity of the real world with all of its uncertainties, unknowns, and ongoing evolution.What economists left out of the story were the positive forces of creativity, innovation, and advancing technology that propel economies forward. Economists did not describe the dynamic process that leads to new pharmaceuticals, cell phones, Web-based information services—forces that fundamentally alter how we live our daily lives.Economists also left out the negative forces that can hold economies back: bad governance, counterproductive social practices, and patterns of taking wealth instead of creating it. They took for granted secure property rights, honest public servants, and the willingness of individuals to experiment and adapt to novelty.From Poverty to Prosperity is not Tipping Point or Freakonomics. Those books offer a smorgasbord of fascinating findings in economics and sociology, but the findings are only loosely related. From Poverty to Prosperity on the other hand, tells a big picture story about the huge differences in the standard of living across time and across borders. It is a story that draws on research from the world’s most important economists and eschews the conventional wisdom for a new, more inclusive, vision of the world and how it works.
Three Felonies A Day
The average professional in this country wakes up in the morning, goes to work, comes home, eats dinner, and then goes to sleep, unaware that he or she has likely committed several federal crimes that day. Why? The answer lies in the very nature of modern federal criminal laws, which have exploded in number but also become impossibly broad and vague. In Three Felonies a Day, Harvey A. Silverglate reveals how federal criminal laws have become dangerously disconnected from the English common law tradition and how prosecutors can pin arguable federal crimes on any one of us, for even the most seemingly innocuous behavior. The volume of federal crimes in recent decades has increased well beyond the statute books and into the morass of the Code of Federal Regulations, handing federal prosecutors an additional trove of vague and exceedingly complex and technical prohibitions to stick on their hapless targets. The dangers spelled out in Three Felonies a Day do not apply solely to “white collar criminals,” state and local politicians, and professionals. No social class or profession is safe from this troubling form of social control by the executive branch, and nothing less than the integrity of our constitutional democracy hangs in the balance.
How Obama Embraces Islam's Sharia Agenda
While Americans focus on terrorism, a more insidious Islamist threat to our way of life lurks. It is the agenda of sharia, Islam’s authoritarian legal and political system. The global Islamist movement aims, in the words of the international Muslim Brotherhood, to destroy the West by sabotaging it from within. Its principal strategy is not mass-murder but the exploitation of Western freedoms and the insinuation of sharia principles into Western legal systems. Because those principles are hostile to our core liberties – indeed, hostile even to the bedrock premise that people are free to govern themselves as they see fit – sharia’s advance gradually undermines our culture.The sharia agenda has found a friend in the Obama administration, which has embraced its vanguard, including the Brotherhood and the Organization of the Islamic Conference. President Obama is actively abetting the Islamist platform: promoting sharia in his foreign policy, easing enforcement of laws that stop Islamic “charities” from diverting funds to jihadist terror, and even sponsoring a United Nations resolution that – under the guise of insulating Islam from criticism – would stifle First Amendment rights.
Neither Beast Nor God
Appeals to “human dignity” are at the core of many of the most contentious social and political issues of our time. But these appeals suggest different and at times even contradictory ways of understanding the term. Is dignity something we all share equally, and therefore the reason we all ought to be treated as equals? Or is it what distinguishes some greater and more admirable human beings from the rest? What notion of human dignity should inform our private judgments and our public life?<BR><BR>In Neither Beast Nor God, Gilbert Meilaender elaborates the philosophical, social, theological, and political implications of the question of dignity, and suggests a path through the thicket. Meilaender, a noted theologian and a prominent voice in America’s bioethics debates, traces the ways in which notions of dignity shape societies, families, and individual lives, and incisively cuts through some common confusions that cloud our thinking on key moral and ethical questions. The dignity of humanity and the dignity of the person, he argues, are distinct but deeply connected—and only by grasping them both can we find our way to a meaningful understanding of the human condition.
Economics Does Not Lie
In the 20th century, privatization and market capitalism have reconstructed Eastern Europe and lifted 800 million people – in China, Brazil, and India – out of poverty. In Economics Does Not Lie, noted French journalist Guy Sorman reveals that behind this unprecedented growth is not only the collapse of state socialism but also a scientific revolution in economics – one that is as of yet dimly understood by the public but increasingly embraced by policymakers around the globe.
Life Liberty & the Defense of Dignity
At the onset of Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity, Leon Kass gives us a status report on where we stand today: “Human nature itself lies on the operating table, ready for alteration, for eugenic and psychic ‘enhancement,’ for wholesale redesign. In leading laboratories, academic and industrial, new creators are confidently amassing their powers and quietly honing their skills. For anyone who cares about preserving our humanity, the time has come for paying attention.” Trained as a medical doctor and biochemist, Dr. Kass has become one of our most provocative thinkers on bioethical issues. In Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity, he has written a book that grapples with the moral meaning of the new biomedical technologies now threatening to take us back to the future envisioned by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World. In a series of mediations on cloning, embryo research, the sale of organs, and the assault on mortality itself, Kass questions the wisdom of trying to break down the natural boundaries given us and to remake the human body into an instrument of our will. He also attempts to chart a course by which we might avoid the dehumanization of biotechnical “recreationism” without rejecting modern science or rejecting its genuine contributions to human welfare. Leon Kass writes profoundly about the limits of science and the limits of life, about what makes us human and gives us human dignity. Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity.
Honor
The importance of honor is present in the earliest records of civilization. Today, while it may still be an essential concept in Islamic cultures, in the West, honor has been disparaged and dismissed as obsolete. In this lively and authoritative book, James Bowman traces the curious and fascinating history of this ideal, from the Middle Ages through the Enlightenment and to the killing fields of World War I and the despair of Vietnam. Bowman reminds us that the fate of honor and the fate of morality and even manners are deeply interrelated. His book is an indispensable document in a time of growing concern about the erosion of values.