Even though it’s election season– and it’s a mid-term election that may well have dramatic consequences– and even though there have been several recent incidents of gun violence– the gun control debate seems to have completely disappeared. It’s another illustration of the sheer brutalizing stupidity of our current political culture. If we are not trying to stop the violence in our culture, what are we thinking as we prepare to vote?

There’s an apparently viable candidate for the Senate in Delaware who doesn’t “believe” in evolution, as if scientific fact were simply a mater of individual belief; a gunman shows up at my old university, swings an AK-40 around and then shoots himself; the most recent research indicates…

The list of libertarian market ideology ruins is long: health care, the banking system, public schools, airlines, the public universities, energy. You don’t have to be a nostalgic dreamer to realize that we would be much better off if we had gotten a national health care system as a part of the New Deal, or that we would not be facing the death of a thousand fees each time we take a trip back home if we had rational airline regulations, or that democratic education would be better served by a system of tenured professors and school teachers. The irrationality of private markets needs a public counterweight.

Yet the religion of the market marches on unabated, now perhaps exemplified in…