To start with, the rabbis notice a glaring logical contradiction in the biblical law. According to Exodus, an ox that kills a human being is to be stoned to death immediately; yet it is only after goring three times that the ox earns the designation “forewarned.” How, then, could any ox ever be forewarned, when it wouldn’t live long enough to kill three times?
The Captive Aliens Who Remain Our Shame
“Men like Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, and Washington,” Parkinson writes, “developed a myth about who was and was not a part of the Revolutionary movement; about who had an interest and who did not.” Other esteemed advocates of the Revolution, such as Thomas Paine and the Marquis de Lafayette, joined the effort. According to Parkinson, these men chose to prosecute the American war for independence in a way that put race at the heart of the matter. They used—actually helped foment—racial prejudice as the principal means of creating unity across the thirteen colonies in order to prepare Americans to do battle with Great Britain. The base sentiments they promoted for “political expediency” survived the fighting, and the “narrative” that dismissed blacks and Native peoples as alien to America—and conflated “white” and “citizen”—“lived at the heart of the republic it helped create for decades to come.”
Effective war stories were definitely required because despite the colonists’ complaints about tyranny and being reduced to—of all things—“slavery,” they were
- “the least taxed,
- most socially mobile,
- highest landowning,
- arguably most prosperous people in the western world.”
Writers usually know their faults far better than reviewers
Usually the writer knows far better than the reviewer what his faults are, and if he could get rid of them he would. Nabokov, for instance, used to be told that he was pedantic – a fact he knew, and still knows, very well.
How to save capitalism from itself
Yet, while capitalism at last stands electorally victorious and philosophically without serious rival, its performance has become manifestly unsatisfactory. Its core credential of steadily rising general living standards has been badly tarnished: a majority now expect their children’s lives to be worse than their own. It is time for “The Future of Capitalism”. Unfortunately, nobody has yet successfully written that book. In its absence, I will try to weave something from the strands of recent contributions to the field.