A burden on future generations? How we learned to hate deficits and blame the baby boomers

The idea that public borrowing places an intolerable burden on posterity is as old as the institution of public debt itself. But the debate over deficit-spending assumed an entirely new scope and import with the rise of the fiscal state in the early twentieth century, as governments assumed greater responsibilities with regard to public welfare and found themselves subject to a new kind of conflict concerning the uses and distribution of public income. In this context, the intergenerational argument against social welfare spending became an important tool in the fight against class redistribution. With a focus on American debates, this article provides a historical sociology of the idea that deficits constitute a burden on future generations, identifying the key historical turning points when this idea acquired new political resonance. In particular, the article investigates how we learned to blame baby boomers for the alleged ills of government deficit-spending and how this now ubiquitous motif of public discourse was reintroduced by the Virginia school public choice theorist James M. Buchanan and later refined by the chief proponent of generational accounting, Laurence Kotlikoff.

Character, Choice and Criminal Responsibility

This paper examines the issue of criminal responsibility and the role of legal excuses from two theoretical viewpoints : the character theory and the choice theory of responsibility. The character theory claims that the moral assessment of an offender's character is a necessary prerequisite of criminal liability and punishment. Legal excuses preclude the attribution of moral and legal blame because, by negating voluntariness, they block the inference from a wrongful act to a flawed character. The choice theory, on the other hand, claims that criminal responsibility pertains to the voluntary violation of the law rather than to the doing of an immoral act as such. For the choice theorist criminal responsibility is concerned with choices rather than with character traits. From this point of view, excuses are taken to preclude criminal liability because, when these conditions are present, the actor does not have sufficient capacity or a fair opportunity to choose to act according to law. The paper concludes that the character theory, by placing the emphasis on those character traits that motivate a person's choices offers a better basis for understanding the moral significance of human actions and for explaining and justifying the attribution of criminal responsibility and punishment.