Welcome to Druthers! This is a collection of posts about liberty and how we might restore it. While there is a lot of rhetoric about “social justice,” these posts will aim at justice without an adjective.
Justice lies at the intersection of philosophy, politics, and economics. Philosophy because it includes ethics, or how we should behave. Politics because it ultimately involves the use of force against some who fail to follow the ethos. And economics because it includes resource allocation or trading off unlimited wants against limited resources.
Implementing justice requires organization, or leadership, management, and governance. Leadership is about doing the right thing. Management is about doing things right. And governance is needed because, in the spirit of power corrupts, no-one is to be trusted. It’s an organizational life, with government being an organization too.
Education is a necessary but, unfortunately, insufficient condition for leader, manager, and governor agents, since the most corrupt agents are also the best educated. Education is a function of setting, motivation, and potential. Formal education seeks to accelerate and shape the learning process. Motivation is essential to being a successful learner. Finally, potential sets the (very high) limits to the rate of learning.
Druthers will cover these topics with occasional digressions. My claim is that corruption broadly defined, or the agency problem as economists would call it, is the real number 1 problem facing the world. I will try to stay at a global level and above the news cycle. Since “writing is thinking,” I welcome feedback as I try to work through these issues towards solutions.