Sublime

PayPal founder Peter Thiel’s Roth IRA is worth $5 billion. That money is completely tax free if the billionaire doesn’t withdraw it before he is fifty-nine and a half. This is just an obscenely exaggerated example of the kind of problem we should seek to rectify, a problem having to do with what used to be called “socialism for the rich and free en

Altruism, as an ethical principle, holds that a human being must make the welfare of others his or her primary moral concern, placing their interests above those of self; it holds that an individual has no right to exist for his or her own sake, that service to others is the moral justification of one’s existence, and that self-sacrifice is one’s f

ox,

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin and the Foundation of Inequality Among Mankind, which he wrote in 1754.

Whatever our race or religion, it is what we produce that entitles us to what we get, not our race or religion. Developing the economy, increasing productivity, increasing returns, these make sense only when fair play and fair shares make it worth everyone’s while to put in his share of effort for group survival and group prosperity.

Plato: the state should make possible the conditions under which everyone can provide for themselves and seek the Good. Aristotle: all communities aim at some good, and the state is the highest kind of community, aiming at the highest of goods. Locke: The state is legitimate if it enforces contracts and acts as the guarantor of private property.

Walker suggested that “we are crashing into the limits of what we can do with a nineteenth-century interpretation of philanthropy’s founding doctrine.” And he said Martin Luther King Jr. might offer a useful complement to Carnegie’s encrusted ideas, with his call to laud philanthropy while not ignoring “the circumstances of economic injustice which

The “veil of ignorance” encapsulates the intuitive idea that just because something is good for us individually doesn’t mean it is fair.