Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D.

If you want to watch Donald Trump's speech in Birch Run, Michigan, click here. I grew up in Vassar, which is only 18 miles from Birch Run.

There are 17 declared candidates for the Republican presidential nomination. For what it's worth, here is my ranking:

1. Ted Cruz
2. Ben Carson
3. Carly Fiorina
4. Marco Rubio
5. Scott Walker
6. Bobby Jindal
7. Rick Santorum
8. Donald Trump
9. Chris Christie
10. John Kasich
11. Jim Gilmore
12. Lindsey Graham
13. Mike Huckabee
14. Rick Perry
15. George Pataki
16. Jeb Bush
17. Rand Paul

Feel free to share your ranking.

Addendum: Let me explain how I arrived at this ranking. I asked myself the following question: "Which of these 17 candidates would I choose as my president, if it were up to me?" The answer was Ted Cruz. Then I subtracted Cruz and asked the same question. I kept going like this until I reached #17.

Addendum 2: I guess I'm not ethnocentrist, racist, or sexist, because my first choice is Hispanic, my second black, and my third female.

The answer to the question “Why not communitarian socialism?” was ironically provided by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the father of modern socialism. Although human nature has remained essentially the same, the circumstances of human life have changed.

The biggest change is obvious: we no longer live in small, independent family bands held together by mutual need and led by a family patriarch. Instead, we live in large multicultural and multiracial societies united only by a distant government. Practices that make sense for small, closely knit bands with a common ancestry and culture cannot be replicated in larger societies. Hence, the welfare-state utopia Rousseau envisaged in The Social Contract ([1761] 1997) would remain resolutely small and intimate; everybody in it would know everybody else.

Rousseau’s followers unfortunately have not listened to his sage warning. In the century just passed, ill-considered attempts to impose “brotherly love” socialism on vast polities of unrelated peoples produced holocausts of a scale never before imagined—150 million dead and counting—and even now too horrible to contemplate with equanimity. Furthermore, we know why they did so. Although we human beings are not naturally selfish psychopaths capable of loving only ourselves, we are also not natural Christians filled with indiscriminate charity for all our fellow human beings. We have a capacity for altruism, but it is extremely limited. So forcing us to contribute to the welfare of people we do not know or love goes against the grain.

It is politically incorrect to say so, but the plain fact of the matter is that we human beings are tribal animals whose spontaneous altruism is normally limited to kith and kin. We cannot readily be made to share limited and insecure resources with those we do not know and may not love. Try to make it our duty to do so, and some of us will shirk that duty, and others will exploit it, thereby subverting it. Try to prevent the corruption of personal character and social order that dependency on state largesse creates, and you will merely foster resentment while promoting increasingly oppressive and corrupt government. The once putatively benevolent and providential state either will eventually become insolvent as rapidly growing entitlement costs exceed diminishing assets or will turn into an intolerable tyranny helpless to prevent the dissolution of society and the moral degradation of its members.

Does this problem have a solution? Yes, but as the tragic failure of attempts to turn unwilling and resentful subjects of coerced redistribution into willing altruists has made painfully obvious, socialism is not up to the job. Communitarian socialism might be made to work, given a radical change in the human genome sufficient to make humans into self-sacrificial drones or given a return to a division of mankind into small, closely knit clans. Although collective welfarism worked very well in the extended families that roamed some parts of the earth as recently as a few hundred years ago, we may safely say, given the evidence, that it cannot be made to work in the societies that now contain the bulk of our species.

What can be made to work in these societies are Lockean negative rights. These rights work where welfare states cannot because they impose on their citizenry only minimal duties that are acceptable to all alike and so create less resistance. To live in Lockean regimes is to be left alone as far as is practicable to pursue your life as you see fit, assured that you will not be wantonly killed, enslaved, robbed, or cheated. Because these assurances benefit all, they are also welcome to all. In contrast, positive duties to share one’s substance with unloved and often unworthy strangers benefit only some at the expense of others. These duties are welcome to their beneficiaries, but not usually to those who must bear their costs.

Because negative Lockean rights benefit all, protection of them requires only a minimal state employing minimal coercion; so this state promotes liberty and the many good things that go with it, including general prosperity and individual responsibility. In such a state, people still have positive duties to provide welfare assistance to family, friends, and neighbors, but because such duties already accord with natural human dispositions, they need no enforcement by an incompetent but oppressive state. Charity, which begins at home, can stay there. It can remain a matter for local group morality rooted in the bonds of consanguinity.

(Max Hocutt, "Rights: Rhetoric Versus Reality," The Independent Review 17 [summer 2012]: 51-64, at 61-2 [italics in original; footnotes and parenthetical references omitted])

Some of you will recall that I'm reading the 10-volume Encyclopedia of Philosophy (second edition) at the rate of two pages per day. I've been at it since 24 April 2007. Today I finished the letter "R." Among the entries I've read are:

I read the two pages first thing in the morning. It takes about 15 minutes.

To the Editor:

Re “A Word Too Far? ‘Blood’ Remark Tests the G.O.P.” (front page, Aug. 9):

The problem is not that Donald Trump’s latest comments about the Fox News debate moderator Megyn Kelly violate political correctness (as he claims); it is that they are extraordinarily impolite and vulgar.

They would have always been considered extraordinarily impolite and vulgar, long, long before there was the concept of political correctness.

JOHN SCHRECKER

Waltham, Mass.

To the Editor:

Donald Trump characterizes as political correctness criticism of his deliberately inflammatory rhetoric. This is a bully complaining when people object to his bullying.

The First Amendment protects Mr. Trump’s right to say things that are offensive, unfair and untrue. But it doesn’t obligate anyone to invite him to a political event or a TV show to say those things.

On the contrary, are we to believe that candidates who don’t have the courage or integrity to challenge Mr. Trump will have the fortitude and judgment to lead the country and the world?

GINA HAUSKNECHT

Iowa City

Note from KBJ: The thing people like about Donald Trump is that he doesn't allow journalists or politicians to intimidate or bully him. Pounding a bully is not bullying. Megyn Kelly asked Trump scurrilous questions that allowed only a one-minute reply. He responded in kind.

Yesterday, when I returned to my house from my 35.4-mile bike ride, the temperature in my zip code, according to the Weather Channel app on my iPad, was 103º Fahrenheit, but the heat index was only 98º or 100º (I forget which). How can this be?, I wondered. Doesn't the heat index have to be at least as high as the temperature? The answer is no, as this page explains. You learn something every day.

Addendum: If the heat index can be lower than the temperature, as it was yesterday, can the wind chill be higher than the temperature? I suspect not, but I may be wrong.

Addendum 2: The official high temperature yesterday at DFW Airport was 106º. That's the highest temperature in three years on a day in which I rode my bike.

Rock N Roll Animal (1974). Best. Intro. Ever.

Here.

Here.

The best guarantee that low standards in business will be recognized as low, is for men to practise higher standards outside business.

(Leonard J. Russell, "Ideals and Practice (II)," Philosophy 17 [July 1942]: 195-209, at 206)