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Most of us are rather interested in being normal. We want to belong - and worry about ways in which we don’t quite. No matter how much we praise individualism and celebrate ourselves as unique, we are, in many areas, deeply concerned with fitting in.
It’s therefore unfortunate that our picture of what is normal is in fact – very often – way out of line with what is actually true and widespread. Many things that we might assume to be uniquely odd or disconcertingly strange about us are in reality completely average and ubiquitous, though simply rarely spoken of in the reserved and cautious public sphere.
The idea of the normal currently in circulation is not an accurate map of what is actually customary for a human being. We are - each one of us - far more compulsive, anxious, sexual, high-minded, mean, generous, playful, thoughtful, dazed and at sea than we are ever encouraged to admit.
Part of the reason for our misunderstanding of our normality comes down to a basic fact about our minds: that we know through immediate experience what is going on inside us, but can only know about other people from what they choose to tell us - which will almost always be a very edited version of the truth.
We know what we’ve done at 3am, but imagine others sleeping peacefully. We know our somewhat shocking desires from close up, we are left to guess about other people’s from what their faces tell us, which is not very much.
This asymmetry between self-knowledge and knowledge-of-others is what lies behind loneliness. We simply can’t trust that our deep selves can have counterparts in those we meet, and so we stay silent and melancholy. The asymmetry encourages shyness too, for we struggle to believe that the imposing, competent strangers we encounter can really have any of the vulnerabilities and idiocies we’re so intimately familiar with inside our own characters.
Ideally, the task of culture should be to compensate for the failings of our brains by assisting us to a more correct vision of what other people are normally like - by taking us, in a realistic but entertaining way, into the inner lives of strangers. This is what novels, films and songs should constantly be doing - defining and evoking states of mind we thought we were alone in experiencing - in order to alleviate our shyness and loneliness.
We are particularly bad at recognising how normal it is to suffer and to be unhappy. Around relationships, for example, we constantly operate with an image of the bliss of others which mocks and undermines our own efforts to keep going with many flawed but eminently ‘good enough’ unions. We find it hard to bear in mind that more or less everyone is, beneath a cheery surface, intermittently profoundly sad and rarely not anxious.
We become embarrassed too by our close-up knowledge of our own sexuality, which appears necessarily more perverse than that of anyone we know. It almost certainly isn’t. We simply haven’t been told the full story.
Ideally, art works would offer us a hugely consoling truth: that our hidden worries, the nagging anxieties we keep to our chests and our stranger thoughts and impulses don’t actually make us strange; on the contrary they are precisely what make us normal. One great goal of the love novel, for instance, should be to tell us what love and long-term relationships are really like; so that our own tribulations do not appear so readily as signs that everything is going wrong - but rather that our sufferings are very much in line with common human experience.
Our culture often tries to project an idea of an organised, poised and polished self, as the standard way most people are. We should discount this myth. Other people are always far more likely to be as we know we are - with all our quirks and surprising aspects - than they are to be like the cardboard cut-outs we meet in our social lives. Sursa alaindebotton

More Than Half the Dutch Manage to Work Just Part-Time

Citizens of the Netherlands are famously happy, almost as happy as Scandinavians, and it may be because they tend to favor working part-time jobs to full-time positions, at least when The Economist compared them to workers in other developed countries.

"On average, only a fifth of the working-age population in EU member states holds a part-time job (8.7 percent of men and 32.2 percent of women); in the Netherlands, 26.8 percent of men and 76.6 percent of women work less than 36 hours a week. Why?"

But surely there must be a catch. As a nation, America bemoans underemployment as though it's the new unemployment. Indeed, permanent part-time employment is a scourge we think we've inherited from the financial crisis and ensuing Great Depression. 

Thanks in part to the Dutch government's efforts that bring women into the workforce while still providing enough flexibility to help them raise children if they care to ... part-time positions enjoy "first-tier" status.

Beyond the gap in salary that results from working part-time as opposed to full time, part-time employees tend not to receive benefits like health insurance, paid vacation, parental leave, and so on. And there's the rub, says Ronald Dekker, a labor economist at Tilburg University. 

Thanks in part to the Dutch government's efforts that bring women into the workforce while still providing enough flexibility to help them raise children if they care to (rather than shipping them off to day care), Dekker says part-time positions enjoy "first-tier" status.

We've all heard horror stories of part-time employees purposefully kept just under the number of hours needed to acquire benefits like paid sick leave or health and dental insurance. Thankfully the Affordable Care Act is helping to remedy the situation for part-timers who can't get on their employers' insurance plans.

Promoting the legitimacy of part-time work has been the (full-time?) goal of Sara Horowitz, founder of the Freelancers Union that represents the needs and concerns of the growing independent workforce.

Money controls our lives. It's time to rethink our relationship with the almighty dollar

This year, 1 March marks the beginning of Lent in the Western church. For many, it will be a time to give up a personal vice – numerous people opt out of chocolate or alcohol, although fasting from social networks is becoming increasingly popular. It is a time to go without, and in doing so, draw closer to the one whom Christians follow, Jesus Christ. It is an opportunity to replace something that has some control over us with the liberating relationship we can have with Jesus.

Recently, I have been spending a lot of time thinking about the control that money has over our lives. In fact, for better or worse, I wrote a book about the relationship we have with money. It is called Dethroning Mammon and will be used by some churches this coming Lent as a study book that digs a little deeper into this relationship.

To me, it seems that the more interconnected the world becomes, the more power is held over individuals and nations by economics, money and flows of finance. In so many human crises, money plays a part – it is treated as both the problem and the solution. In the Gospels, the name Jesus gives to this force is Mammon.

Spending time at the World Economic Forum with people who lead countries, international organizations and corporations, is deeply enjoyable and educational. The theme of the 2017 Annual Meeting, Responsive and Responsible Leadership, offers an opportunity to reflect on how our personal and corporate attitudes to money and economics affect how we see the world and those with whom we share it.

The problem with materialism is not that it exists, but that it dominates. It shouts so loudly that it overrides our caring about other things. This is demonstrated particularly in how we measure things and ascribe value. If we can’t measure something, then there is a tendency not to value it as much as something that is easily measurable.

A book that is a particular favourite of mine is The Shield of Achilles by Philip Bobbitt. In it, amongst other things, he charts the evolution of the state. One of his most perceptive theses is that we no longer live in an age of the nation state, but rather of the market state. In the market state, the success or failure of the state and its government is measured entirely by the capacity to consume more or less. Economics is an end in and of itself, rather than a tool by which we pursue the common good.

As I have been thinking and writing about these matters, I have actively tried to avoid the typically negative attitude towards money that is often found in the church. Supply and demand, risk and reward, the gift of the free market to agreeably locate goods, the need for balance in the flows of money within the economy – all continue to be relevant. But they are not God.

Money itself isn’t negative or bad, but our attitude towards money can certainly have a deeply negative impact on our relationships and priorities.

The challenge, then, is to be increasingly aware of how money affects us as individuals, as well as at a systemic level. Very often, the more we have or are responsible for, the harder we have to work at maintaining this awareness and building habits into our lives that dethrone the emotional and ethical control that economics or money holds over us.

Sursa weforum.org

Let's Cut Out All These “Bullsh*t Jobs”, says Anthropologist David Graeber

Abundant, paid work might be an old-world way of measuring prosperity. After all, many manufacturing jobs are being taken over by bots, leaving those without computer science or relevant degrees in the dust, without work. Chris Twomey, policy director of the non-profit organizationWestern Australian Council of Social Service, argues we shouldn’t be trying to create more jobs; instead, we should be working less. 

Twomey's essay is one part of a series of essays put out by the Green Institute, all working together to create a larger conversation surrounding a Universal Basic Income (UBI), a plan that gives people unconditional, free money regardless of employment. The Green Institute remains agnostic on whether a UBI is what we need in order to fix many of the issues we face, including inequality and a shrinking job market. But they agree it’s a conversation worth having, if only to find a way to create a better, fairer society.

Technology is helping to make a future of less work possible, however, the noise of politics has created a distorted message. Our politicians are going around trying to bring back the jobs, says Twomey. Many in America’s heartland feel like President-elect Donald Trump will help bring the factories back from China. Here’s the problem, China is a scapegoat for the real issue. The factories have been coming back, and the jobs? Not quite as much. Because of the rise of automation, factories have been hiring only a fraction of the workers.

“Computers and automation are creating a world with fewer and fewer paid jobs, and more insecure work,” Twomey writes. “Education and training, supporting innovation, are important in this context. But they will not be sufficient. Working less, sharing jobs, and institutionally supporting people to do so, will be vital.”

The world is changing around us, which requires a shift in how we perceive work. Work is necessary, but do we really need 40 hours of it each week?

Here we arrive at the idea of fewer jobs, more shared work, and more meaningful work. “Technology has the capacity to free us from tedious and mundane work and enable us to pursue more meaningful and productive activities.”

Anthropologist David Graeber says our capitalist society has managed to create “bullshit jobs.” These are areas of industry that have little to no value other than to provide work for people to do – like a symptom of Soviet socialism. Middle managers who file inconsequential reports no-one will read. Unnecessary administrators who orchestrate meetings. Or take telemarketers. If all these were to go away, no one would miss them. This is what Graeber defines as a “bullshit job.”

“It seems to be this idea that work is a value in itself,” Graeber said in an interview.

What we need to realize is there’s also value in leisure from a health and environmental standpoint. Leisure is time to create, invent, educate, care for our family, and more.

Sursa Bigthink.com

Martin Heidegger: Philosopher of Nazism and Other Collectivist Cults

Martin Heidegger: Philosopher of Nazism and Other Collectivist Cults

Philosophy matters. We all “do philosophy” every time we ponder what we should do or whether a statement is true or false and how we know it. To do philosophy, one merely need devote time to thinking about those important questions and others that arise in the course of thinking about them. That makes one a philosopher. I say this consciously and not necessarily systematically, but, generally, people who style themselves philosophers go for being systematic in their thinking, for creating “philosophies” that express their ideas about life, truth, and action, and that serve as a means of legitimating their actions or those of their followers.

Many of the problems we face today are the creations of philosophers.Many of the problems we face today are the creations of philosophers. It turns out that one of the most dangerous things in the world is a philosopher with power. Thinking systematically about things and coming up with the wrong answers can lead to systematically bad ideas: communism, fascism, political Islamism, and many other ideologies have contributed greatly to human suffering, and because they are philosophies, they do so far more systematically than merely random acts of cruelty or stupidity.

All three of these philosophers wrote in German, although the last wrote many of his most important later books in English. The first two are important to me because I believe that we can discern their influence in all of the major organized intellectual and political challenges to libertarian values and principles around the world.

In modern political communitarianism, nationalism, populism, leftist politically correct assaults on freedom of speech, radical Islamism, and resurgent fascism and national socialism in Europe. I’ll talk through what may seem technical issues in philosophy, some in puzzling language, but there will be intrigue, war, and – as this is Planet Hollywood – nefarious Nazis, as well.

Martin Heidegger

The first philosopher is one of the most difficult to read and understand because he wrote in a style that is, in my opinion, deliberately opaque. His name was Martin Heidegger and he is widely considered one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. He made his big splash in philosophy in 1927 with the publication of his book Being and Time, a start on a longer work that was never finished.

In his book, he seemed to be following the program of the man widely believed to be his mentor, but whom we have since learned he despised and quickly dumped as soon as he had used him to secure a strong position as his successor at the university. That man was Edmund Husserl, considered the founder of the phenomenological movement in philosophy, that is, a scientific method whereby objective study of what would otherwise be considered subjective matters, such as consciousness and such conscious acts as perceiving, judging, comparing, and so on.

The Philosophy of Heidegger

Heidegger asks about the meaning of being, which is a term that has been considered either so general or so empty as to defy description. However, seeming to start with a phenomenological method, Heidegger looks into the kind of being that asks about being, which is us, which he terms – in German – Dasein. He claims boldly that we can see the meaning of being by examining our very asking about it.

In the process, he inaugurates what comes to be known as existentialism, for he argues that, whereas we use categorials to name the ways in which we can speak of a thing, such as substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, and so on. In contrast, Dasein is structured by existentials. He denies that Dasein has an essence, or a “what,” “because its essence lies rather in the fact that in each case it has its Being to be, and has it as its own.” Dasein, he wrote, “always understands itself in terms of its existence – in terms of a possibility of itself: to be itself or not itself.”

It's by building on that primordial relationship that we might come to understand things better as rooted in something more basic.That kind of talk seemed very exciting at the time and seemed to allow us to start with human beings as we really are in the world, before we come to study ourselves using scientific methods. Thus, we live in a world in which we are related, not to scientifically described objects, but to things as they are ready to hand for us to use. When I relate to a podium, I don’t relate to it as it might be described in either Newtonian or quantum physics, but as a useful thing on which to rest my arms. It’s by building on that primordial relationship, of being at home in the world, that we might come to understand better things such as the scientific understanding, as itself rooted in something more basic.

In contrast to Immanuel Kant, who started by asserting the truth of Euclidean mathematics and Newtonian physics and then attempted to reveal what must be true metaphysically for those sciences to be correct, Heidegger proposed to start with the structures of human existence, without presuppositions about things as understood scientifically, and then build up a philosophy of human existence.

So categories structure our perceptions of things, but existentials structure our own existence. What is remarkable, however, is how so many of the alleged existentials and their substructures are drawn from the literature that grew out of World War I and the experience of combat and death, such as authenticity, resoluteness, steadfastness, and being toward death. Heidegger offered a metaphysical dressing up of the cultural themes of violence, brutality, and domination that had emerged out of the war, especially as glorified by the novelist and essayist Ernst Jünger, who had a major influence on Heidegger.

Heidegger’s History

Heidegger famously publicly joined the National Socialist German Workers Party in 1933 after the takeover of power by Hitler. He organized and supervised militaristic organizations of students and faculty, insisted on public allegiance to the Leadership Principle, or the Führerprinzip, and much more. After the war, he denied that he was a Nazi, presented himself as a naïve and bewildered philosopher who grew disillusioned with the party after just one year, who retreated into a kind of private opposition, etc., etc. His ideas were not at all implicated in National Socialism and should be judged independently, and so on. It was all lies. All of it.

After the war, when his whole career was at stake, Heidegger denied that he had been a Nazi or even a sympathizer, saying that he had not read Mein Kampf, due to how repulsive he found the ideas in it, which was clearly a lie. As the Freiburg University historian Hugo Ott discovered when examining newspaper articles from the time, private diaries, party archives, personal correspondence, and much more, virtually everything Heidegger publicly said after the war was a lie. In fact, Heidegger was not merely a naïve professor who was tapped by the ministry of education to come in and take over the burden of administration after his predecessors were removed by the authorities. The party archives revealed that he was an active collaborator and agent of the National Socialist Party before he was named Rektor of the university, and had actively conspired with them to take over the university. A National Socialist professor reported on 9 April 1933 to his party handler in a written memo that:

To take the first point raised at our recent discussion, concerning the alliance of National Socialist university teachers, we have ascertained that Professor Heidegger has already entered into negotiations with the Prussian Ministry of Education. He enjoys our full confidence, and we would therefore ask you to regard him for the present as our spokesman here at the University of Freiburg. Professor Heidegger is not a Party member, and he thinks it would be more practical to remain so for the time being in order to preserve a freer hand vis-à-vis his other colleagues whose position is either unclear still or openly hostile. He is quite prepared, however, to join the Party when and if this should be deemed expedient on other grounds. But I would particularly welcome it if you were able to establish direct contact with Professor Heidegger, who is fully apprised of all the points that concern us. He is at your disposal in the coming days, but I should say that there is a meeting in Frankfurt on the 25th which he could usefully attend as the spokesman for our university. (Ott, p. 144)

The lies that Heidegger told to save his miserable life were promulgated by a large movement of anti-liberty intellectuals who rallied to rescue him in the final days of the war and for decades until and after his death in 1976. His defenders, notable among them the French deconstructionist Jacques Derrida, who staunchly defended Heidegger until his own death in 2004.

Martin Heidegger was one of the least understood of philosophers because he was, on the one hand, so efficient at concealing his ideas behind clouds of impenetrable prose, and, on the other, able to falsify his record during the Nazi era.¹ He was at the same time one of the most influential of all such philosophers; his anti-individualist ideas have infused and motivated the far right, the far left, radical and violent “Islamism,”² the radical environmental movement – which was given power by his influential essay “The Question Concerning Technology,” the “Social Justice Warriors” who censor and silence others in the name of “political correctness” – and other collectivist movements.

Decades of post-World War II readers who puzzled over his writings about “existence” (“Dasein” in German) thought that Heidegger was writing about what it means to “be” an individual human being or for you and me to exist as a human. In fact, as he made clearer during the period of National Socialism (Nazism), when he could speak more openly about his ideas, Dasein is something of which one can speak only in the collective “we,” and specifically, the Dasein of a particular people, the German Volk. As Heidegger declared in his lectures after the National Socialist seizure of power,

The German people is now passing through a moment of historical greatness: the youth of the academy knows this greatness. What is happening, then? The German people as a whole is coming to itself, that is, it is finding its leadership. In this leadership, the people that has come to itself is creating a state.³

That is to say, in “finding its leadership,” the leader (“der Führer”) will decide for all of the people. And, indeed, that collective Dasein, by finding its leadership, will be infused with power: “Only when we are what we are coming to be, from the greatness of the inception of the Dasein of our spirit and people, only then do we remain fit for the power of the goal toward which our history is striving.”⁴ Rene Descartes, famous for his “Cogito ergo sum” formulation (“I think, therefore I am”) was denounced by Heidegger because, for Descartes, “the I of the thinking human being thus moves into the center of what can truly be humanly known.”⁵ Heidegger wished to displace the “I” with the “We” of a collective.

As he stated in a very strange lecture course on logic delivered under the National Socialist regime, which had little to do with what is normally understood as logic and much to do with Heidegger’s enthusiastic racism and National Socialism, “we have … the advantage that the question of who we ourselves are is timely, as distinguished from the time of liberalism, the I-time. Now is the We-time.”⁶ The “We” was not merely this or that “nameless crowd” or “revolting mass,” but the Volk.

As for Marx, for Heidegger, Dasein was not the existence of an “isolated” and “self-forlorn” individual, nor of mere collections of them, but of a self-conscious collective. In Marx’s case this was the class and State, and in Heidegger’s case the Volk and State: “it becomes clear why the character of the self does not consist in the reflexivity of the I, of the subject; for it is precisely the blasting of I-ness and of subjectivity by temporality, which delivers Dasein, as it were, away from itself to being and thus compels it toward self-being.”⁷ The entire performance is mired in non sequiturs, opaque language, unjustified leaps of inference (often justified by whether words sound similar), and other moves, but Heidegger considered it one of his most important works, although not published until many years after his death, as his explicitly Nazi works started to emerge from the archives.

Founding Political Correctness

Heidegger set the stage for the rejection of individual freedom and responsibility in recent decades by insisting that the center stage should be occupied by the We, in his own case the We of the German People (Volk), which he considered a historical people with a historical mission. Heidegger’s elevation of the concept of “authenticity” as the test of true existence set the stage for a wide range of anti-individualist movements: nationalist, racist, socialist, ethnic, and even the recent surge of “politically correct” identities. Others have merely substituted for the German Volk other collectivities, consistently with Heidegger’s polylogism (the idea that there are different truths for different groups) and rejection of universal truths.⁸ In each case, it is an authentic existence that is asserted to be collective, as distinguished from the mere “I” in the company of other individuals that characterizes classical liberalism.

Heidegger set the stage for the rejection of individual freedom and responsibility.Metaphysical collectivism, the assertion that existence itself is inherently collective, was eagerly taken up by aggressive anti-individualist extremists of left and right, all of whom assert that their ideological submersion of the individual into the greater whole represents the embrace of “authentic” Dasein, and all of whom are united in their rejection of the idea of individual freedom and responsibility. Of course, such absorption of the individual into the “We” always means the subordination of some individuals, usually the majority, to other individuals, usually a small and well-organized clique of people who have seized power for themselves in the name of the collective.

I should add that, to put him in perspective in an American setting, the wave of political correctness also derives from one of Heidegger’s most famous students, the Marxist theoretician Herbert Marcuse, who saw in Heidegger the metaphysical foundations for Marxist collectivism. As he excitedly wrote in 1928 of Being and Time, “this book seems to represent a turning point in the history of philosophy: the point at which bourgeois philosophy unmakes itself from the inside and clears the way for a new and ‘concrete’ science.”

What excited Marcuse was the way in which formal rules would be dissolved in a concrete life, inevitably a collectivity, and thus the rule-of-law that characterizes liberalism could be swept away. As he noted in his 1928 gushing over Heidegger’s work,

Recognizing the historical thrownness of Dasein and its historical determinateness and rootedness in the ‘destiny’ of the community, Heidegger has driven his radical investigation to the most advanced point that bourgeois philosophy has yet achieved – and can achieve. He has found man’s theoretical modes of behavior to be ‘derivative,’ to be founded in practical ‘making provision, and has thereby shown praxis to be the field of decisions. He has determined the moment of decision – resoluteness – to be a historical situation and resoluteness itself to be a taking-up of historical fate. Against the bourgeois concepts of freedom and determination, he has posed a new definition of being free as the ability to choose necessity, as the genuine ability to grasp the possibilities that have been prescribed and pregiven; moreover, he has established history as the sole authority in relation to this ‘fidelity to one’s own existence.’

Later, in the US, he became a leader of the far left and argued that capitalism and liberalism had so infused all modes of life that the only way to be truly liberated from it, to achieve real freedom, was to abolish toleration. In his 1965 work on Repressive Tolerance, the deepest source of political correctness and the social justice warriors, he argued that to achieve liberation would require,

the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or which oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc. Moreover, the restoration of freedom of thought may necessitate new and rigid restrictions on teachings and practices in the educational institutions which, by their very methods and concepts, serve to enclose the mind within the established universe of discourse and behavior – thereby precluding a priori a rational evaluation of the alternatives. And to the degree to which freedom of thought involves the struggle against inhumanity, restoration of such freedom would also imply intolerance toward scientific research in the interest of deadly "deterrents," of abnormal human endurance under inhuman conditions, etc.

The idea of authenticity that Heidegger promoted is another key idea that has been deployed by anti-libertarian movements, in which an authentic collective self is allegedly liberated from the abstract rules-approach of liberalism. Every modern national fascist movement, every modern populist movement of modern times, has roots that are deeply embedded in the soil prepared by Heidegger, which found authentic existence in a historical collectivity, which may be taken to be a national-linguistic-racial collectivity, such as Germanness, or the Islamic Umma, or community of believers. Heidegger’s thinking is central to the neo-Nazi Jobbik and Golden Dawn movements in Hungary and Greece, the Neo-Eurasianist Nazi movement in Russia, and in the Islamic Republic of Iran and radical Islamism generally. The Islamic Republic is a most interesting case, because the intellectual leaders behind its establishment were very committed Heideggerians.

This is an excerpt from a speech delivered at the 2016 FreedomFest.
Parts 2 and 3 can be found here and here.

–––––

[1] See Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009) and Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life (New York: Basic Books, 1993).

[2] See for Heidegger’s influence on the founding of the Islamic Republic of Iran Ali Mirsepassi, “Religious Intellectuals and Western Critiques of Secular Modernity,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, Vol. 26, No. 3 (2006), pp. 416-433.

[3] Martin Heidegger, Being and Truth, trans. by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (Bloomington, In.: Indiana University Press, 2010), p. 3. The lectures in the book were delivered in 1933-34, after Heidegger’s Nazi Party had come to power in Germany.

[4] Ibid., p. 6. As he makes clear, “our western, German Dasein” refers to “our historical being-with-others in the membership of the people.” Whether “the derivative mock culture finally collapses into itself” “depends solely on whether we as a people still will ourselves, or whether we no longer will ourselves.” p. 11.

[5] Ibid., p. 33.

[6] Martin Heidegger, Logic as the Question Concerning the Essence of Language, Wanda Torres Gregory and Yvonne Unna, trans. (Albany: State University Press of New York, 2009), p. 45.

[7] Ibid., p. 139.

[8] Polylogism, in both its superficially distinct Marxist and Nazi versions, was subjected to withering criticism by Ludwig von Mises in such books as Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War (1944), Theory and History (1957), and Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (1966), all of which can be purchased or accessed online at http://oll.libertyfund.org/people/ludwig-von-mises.

Tom G. Palmer

Tom G. Palmer is executive vice president for international programs at the Atlas Network and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and director of the Institute's educational program, Cato University.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.