David Lay Williams, Author at Public Seminar

North America

Elon Musk’s Cruel Moral Sentiments

What the world’s richest man has yet to learn from his study of the Bible

April 3, 2025 • by David Lay Williams

Elon Musk may or may not be “the world’s richest man” these days, depending on the wildly fluctuating value of his Tesla car company, a target for those protesting Musk’s “move fast, break stuff” approach to downsizing the federal bureaucracy through the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Musk’s savage cuts ...

Economy

Why We Should Worry about Inequality

And why we should take seriously Plato and John Stuart Mill

January 11, 2023 • by David Lay Williams

Plato and Mill respectively propose a variety of measures to achieve their desired degree of economic equality (not precise equality in either case), though both agree (1) that inheritance taxes should play a significant role, and (2) that this equality should be achieved incrementally, rather than all at once, to ...

Economy

The Wall Street Journal Resurrects Mandeville

Do poor Americans have too much?

September 27, 2022 • by David Lay Williams

According to a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed by Phil Gramm and John Early, the problem is not that the wealthiest Americans have seen their fortunes dramatically explode. It is rather that the poorest Americans have too much! ...

The Wall Street Journal Resurrects Mandeville

Democracy

What Hobbes Can Teach Us About Trump’s Lawless Reign

Or, how the rich are really different from the rest of us

December 1, 2020 • by David Lay Williams

As the losing Trump campaign team extends this election season beyond its typical limits, by continuing to claim that the president has, in fact, won the 2020 election, one cannot help but notice how his conduct in office has threatened long-established and respected democratic norms. Perhaps the most prominent recent account ...

What Hobbes Can Teach Us About Trump’s Lawless Reign

Philosophy

Lao-tzu, Plato, and Parasite

What’s up with that Scholar’s Stone?

February 28, 2020 • by David Lay Williams

Parasite depicts the struggling Kim family, living in a semi-basement apartment in Seoul, desperately seeking sources of income to afford the very basics to sustain their humble lives. In a portentous scene early in the film, the older child of the family, Ki-Woo, is visited by his wealthy college friend, Min, ...

Economy

David Brooks & Economic Inequality

Consulting the “Great Books”

January 23, 2020 • by David Lay Williams

Yet in his column published in the New York Times on January 16, entitled “The Bernie Sanders Fallacy,” echoing similar pieces in the past, I had hoped that he would have consulted them for wisdom again. In it he argues that despite the rapid growth of economic inequality in the United States, ...

North America

Impeachment and Rousseau’s General Will

Insight from the Past on the Politics of the Present

January 15, 2020 • by David Lay Williams

The article encapsulates many of the debates leading up to the president’s impeachment -- that it is grossly inappropriate for presidents (but presumably any government officials) to prioritize their own personal or private interests above the national interest. In impeaching Trump on this count the House emphasizes that while a ...