Economics & Empire 369
Without Borders, Ltd.
Kearneysville, WV. Question: what do these two books have in common? A Garfield the Cat book and My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One Night Stands. Or what about these:…
Who Owns Our Jobs?
Irving, TX. We have all been trained up to the belief that jobs are something in the gift of great corporations or government bureaucracies. True, there are still places in…
Tocqueville on the Shores of Titicaca
Amid Alexis de Tocqueville’s writings on revolution in France, there is a passage that rings true for those of us who have spent time in the countryside. He observed that…
Can Health Care Be Local?
[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] Wichita, KS Over the past couple of weeks, I've written a few things on the current debate over health care reform. A couple of smart…
Cocktails at the Dump
My father in-law, Ron, tells me a story of what life was like when he moved his young family (my wife not yet born) to the bucolic Southern California college…
Class Project
Recently, a friend who is conservative asked me: "What should be the next great project for conservatism?" I mulled this for a bit, and then the conversation quickly passed…
Characteristics of the Modest Republic
Erie, PA. Readers of the Front Porch Republic are likely looking for new ways to conceive of American politics and culture. They are in search of alternative categories to the…
Benedict on Business: What’s Love Got to Do With It?
Irving, Texas. Since its beginnings with Aristotle and Plato, the study of economics has always been regarded as a branch of philosophy, a colony of politics and ethics. But all…
“On the Grid”: When Electricity (and Other Things) Came to the Countryside
“Come in and look,” Quintín urged me, as he disappeared with a shuffle through the low doorway in his adobe house. I got up from the wooden bench on which…
The Red Tories and the Civic State
Phillip Blond Irving, TX. It has been sometime since I have called myself a “conservative.” It is not that any of my opinions have changed, but rather that conservatism forgot…
Buddhist Economics: The Eight-Fold Path
Cold Spring, N.Y. In order to get people thinking rightly about economists, Fritz Schumacher used to tell the story of an architect, a priest, and an economist talking about which…
On Feeling “Forgotten”: Agrarian Aspirations in the Andes
“The more things change, the more they remain the same.” The villagers of Pomatambo, Ayacucho, Peru, did not coin the phrase, though it has captured their lives with eerie precision…
“Servile World: How ‘The Big Business Government,’ ‘The Loathsome Thing Called Social Service,’ and Other Distrubutist Nightmares All Came True
In response to my posting on "'A Distributist View of the Global Economic Crisis': A Report," several people asked for more specifics regarding the popssible shape of a contemporary Distributist…
Cleanup in Pew 16
I have just returned from two weeks in England, were I was more or less out of touch with the internet. The occasion was a conference at the University of…
Lessons from a Motorcycle Mechanic
Wichita, KS [Cross-posted at In Medias Res] Let's pause a moment and be grateful that the job market for political theorists is so bad. Because if it wasn't, Matthew Crawford,…
The Whole Hog
Alexandria, VA They say you can’t judge a book by its cover, but you can sometimes tell how the book’s designers wanted the book to be judged at first glance.…
Working with Words
Our relationship was still in its early swoon when Nate came to pick me up from work one night. He was so obviously excited to see me that even my…
A Certified Deep Thinker
I don’t like machines. I find them dirty, confusing and, even worse, boring. I also don’t much enjoy working with my hands. I like reading books and telling people, in…
“A Distributist View of the Global Economic Crisis”: A Report
A conference with this title convened in St. Benet's Hall, Oxford, England, on Saturday, July 11. Organized by the G.K. Chesterton Institute, the great Chestertonian Father Ian Boyd offered greetings…
The Daily Yonder
Thanks to FPR reader and my fellow Hoosier Brandon Seitz for pointing us to The Daily Yonder, a webzine dedicated to writing about and analyzing what's going on in rural…
The Peasantry of the Future
Irving, TX. In answer to the question, “What do the poor want?” Simone Weil replied “They want you to look at them.” I take Simone's answer to mean we must…
Broken Connections
"We live on the far side of a broken connection" Wendell Berry has written. One of the greatest obstacles resulting from our current circumstance is our inability to make the…
Civilizing the Economy
Pope Benedict XVI's eagerly awaited third encyclical was released today: "Charity in Truth." I'll be reading it over the next few days, but here's a link to a quick synopsis.…
Aristotle and the Cult of the Immediate
In the current economic and political crisis, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is not likely to be one of the first places that Americans go looking for wisdom. It should be. Throughout…