Author: Garrett West (Garrett West)

What has six balls and screws the poor? The lottery. The crass joke suits the crassly unjust and embarrassingly ubiquitous aspect of public policy. A state-sponsored lottery is a tax—an insidious, regressive, inefficient, and disgraceful one. That these laws have lasted so long speaks to the hypocrisy of politicians, the apathy of citizens, and the...

Another election approaches, and soon hordes of “rationally ignorant” citizens (myself included) will shuffle to the ballots to vote. But we can’t really blame them (ourselves?) for their ignorance: Contemporary political discourse is boring, predictable, and all in all deplorable. Everyone appeals to some conception of justice, and these conceptions usually depend upon posited, universal...

I recently met a real-life Marxist. Though I had long been convinced that none really existed, I felt obligated to assent to the reality of this one, and we had a conversation — a good one. We spoke, mostly, about the relationship between politics and philosophy, and as it came to an end, I said,...