An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment? (Kant 1784)

In this essay, Immanuel Kant defines Enlightenment as "man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity" and states the motto of Enlightenment as: "Have courage to use your own understanding!"  Kant believed that the problem confronting the modern age was that individuals lacked the courage to think independently and called for the inclination for free thinking.

Several questions arise from reviewing this essay:

(1) What are the Enlightenment values?

(2) Why is it so difficult for men to overcome intellectual immaturity?

(3) Is Kant's optimisim about the age of enlightenment justified?

(4) Should there be a difference between private and public use of reasoning?
(5) Do postmodernism and modernism share the same deep impulse to libertate the human spirit from intellectual and cultural constraints? Is it possible to achieve this goal?

(6) Can the use of socratic practice in the learning experience help the Enlightenment values to flourish?

To read the text, see:

http://www.sapere-aude.at/What%20is%20Enlightenment.pdf

Public debt, cost theory, and the fiscal illusion (Buchanan 1964)

In this essay from Public Debt and Future Generations, Buchanan explains how public debts probably generate fiscal illusions of both the Vickrey and the Puviani sort.  Individuals probably do undervalue the future tax liabilities that an issue of debt embodies, and, even if they do not, they should probably still prefer debt to the current tax alternative.

Some questions arising from the essay are the following:

(1) What is a public debt illusion?
(2) To what extent does the presence or absence of a public debt illusion affect the temporal location of debt burden?
(3) What is an individual's share in the liability that an issue of interest-bearing public debt represents?
(4) What determines the individual's undervaluation of future tax liabilities in the presence of  a public debt illusion?
(5) Why when facing a pure Ricardian choice between the levy of an annual tax in perpetuity and an extraordinary tax, the individual will prefer the debt-annual tax alternative?
(6) Is the fiscal illusion a part of the explanation for the debt accumulation in the U.S. and Europe?

James Buchanan's text The Fiscal Illusion can be found in the following link:

http://www.econlib.org/library/Buchanan/buchCv4c10.html