Politicians, researchers, and activists often trumpet the importance of lifting people above the poverty line. This is an admirable social policy objective, even if there are fundamental problems with how the poverty line is established. The idea that no individual should live below a certain standard of living, given the…

On my return flight home from Chicago, I was seated next to a lovely older Bulgarian woman who now resides in the United States. Eventually our conversation wound its way to the inescapable topic of politics. As someone born in 1993, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to ask her about…

The viability of socialism in the global North clearly suffers from the average voter not having a clear understanding of what it is — something certainly more true in the United States than Europe. …

Kulsoom Jafri contributed to this article. Grace Blakeley has recently ignited a firestorm on Twitter over her pronouncement that: Class is a social relationship rooted in production. Either you own resources critical for the production process, or you see your labour power to those who do. If the latter, you’re…

Richard Wolff has become something of a leading voice on the political left today — and for good reasons. Wolff, a retired professor, devoted much of his academic career to the study of Marxist economics. He has published several texts developing this heterodox approach, and explaining how it differs from…

A conversation between economist Russ Roberts and political philosopher David Schmidtz on the EconTalk Podcast revealed an important dilemma surrounding redistribution that those who identify as ‘progressive’ or ‘left-wing’ ought to carefully consider. But before we can get to that specific dilemma, some introductory comments on the social philosophy of…

The frequency with which means-testing is upheld as the responsible and moral policy position by the mainstream press is a depressing affair. Perhaps no more significant example is found than in the recent flurry of editorials denouncing a bill passed by the House of Representatives to send $2,000 stimulus checks…

Twitter’s censorship of The New York Post poses a problem classical liberalism can’t solve — Recently, Twitter, the social media platform of choice for journalists and the media world, got itself into trouble over its actions toward a major publication. I want to describe what happened in detail and evaluate it from the perspective of two different philosophical visions. Twitter’s Troubling Act of Censorship