Upon hearing an argument for capitalism, many respond, “That is good in theory, but it would never work in real life.” Such a statement is wrong in both theory and in practice. (And it is actually an example of a fundamental philosophical error–the mind/body...
In 1887, Congress created the first federal regulatory agency by enacting the Interstate Commerce Act. As has often been the case since that time, the act was a response to the problems created by previous government interventions. Under the Pacific Railway Act,...
“I was born in a house my father built.” So said Richard Nixon (1913-1994) about his birthplace in Orange County, California. A recent visit to the home, located on the grounds of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, and museum (which opened in 1990 with...
In 1839, John O’Sullivan, editor of The United States Magazine and Democratic Review, wrote a piece titled “The Great Nation of Futurity” in which he argued that the United States had a divine destiny to occupy the American continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific....
How “austerity” measures lead the United States’ rapid recovery from the deep recession into which it sank in the last half of 1920.
Seeing Reginald Denny being assaulted and mutilated for the color of his skin on live television provided an unforgettable lesson in the politics of race-baiting: that jumping to conclusions may impair government from protecting the public and instead incur looting and …
We are often told that government must provide certain vital services, such as education, roads, and mail delivery. History provides a very different lesson.
As this fall’s presidential election takes shape as a contest between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, the rhetoric out of both camps is becoming sharper and more ideological. Looking to exploit Governor Romney’s increasingly close association with Wisconsin...
In 1887, Congress created the first federal regulatory agency by enacting the Interstate Commerce Act. As has often been the case since that time, the act was a response to the problems created by previous government interventions. Under the Pacific Railway Act,...
“I’d rather my children red than dead,” President Kennedy told a young White House virgin whom he had summoned for sex, during the so-called Cuban missile crisis, according to the New York Post ‘s account of a new book, Once Upon a Secret: My Affair with President...
Abraham Lincoln is not, and nor was his Administration, any model for what today seems so objectionable in the modern welfare state.
By the end of the Italian Renaissance the battle remained horrifically one-sided. Collectivism is the political expression of altruism, i.e., that each man should live for others. Altruism is a known and widely accepted moral code. It has been the foundation of the...
Individualism began as a doctrine implicit in the Ancient Greek view of man, best captured in their art and in Aristotelian philosophy. That view consisted essentially of reality being knowable and the base of all knowledge, and of man as a heroic being. Such a view...
With the rise of the ancient cultures of Mesopotamia and Egypt (between c. 5000 and 4000 BCE), men’s social groupings expanded. Previously, the social groupings of prehistoric man had slowly developed from family to clan to tribe. The advent of the Neolithic...
How Che ruined the Cuban economy.
John Lewis’s Solon the Thinker contains a careful reading of the poetic fragments of Solon – not as poetry, but as political thought.
Riots that began on the outskirts of Paris have spread into the center of the French capital and to other communities in other parts of the country. Thousands of cars have been set on fire and the police and even medical personnel have been shot at. Like many other...
What John Stuart Mill rejected in attempting to redesign society according to this shaky premise of “social utility” was the older tradition upon which the great achievements of winning liberty was based in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the traditio…
Ayn Rand called this movie pro-Soviet propaganda, a deliberate whitewash of the terrible reality of life under communism.
On Columbus Day, in sum, we celebrate Western civilization with the utter certainty that it is good according to an objective standard: man’s life. America therefore deserves to prevail against the religious totalitarians who would destroy industrial civilization and re…
“Reflecting Absence,” the winning WTC memorial design, offers a list of randomly scattered names, a pool, and some trees, which elicit in most viewers nothing but bemused boredom. For those of us who loved the sight of the Towers and still grieve over the...
Most Columbus Days are marked by rabid condemnations of the explorer as a genocidal maniac bent on destroying the peaceful and innocent native peoples who populated the Caribbean islands which Columbus discovered. These condemnations are not only unwarranted but...
Soviet President Brezhnev, one of the last of the Soviet Communist dictators, hated the Catholic Church, according to conversations reported in The Wall Street Journal. Back during the Cold War Brezhnev is quoted as saying, “Sooner or later [the Church] would...
Flight 93 should be remembered for many reasons. Foremost is that it was the first victory in the War on Terrorism, though it came at a high price. The terrorists’ plan depended on the passenger’s common assumption that their temporary cooperation with...
On this, our great national holiday, let us rededicate “our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor” to the greatness of America.
Ronald Reagan was one of our most successful Presidents in part because he fervently believed in, and acted on, a small number of important principles. To be sure, he knew how to compromise to advance his legislative agenda. But in the process he always kept sight of hi…
The unchosen physical characteristics that make us automatic members of one race or another must always come secondary to those characteristics that we do choose.
An excerpt from the afterword of the second edition of The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists Are Murdering Our Past.
For many of the politically correct today, it is enough to dismiss George Washington because he was a dead white male.
What should we remember on Martin Luther King Day? In his “I Have a Dream” speech Dr. King said: “I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
The 2000 Olympics opened last Friday (15.Sept.00) in a “splendidly diverse and inclusive” (New York Times, editorial, 17.Sept.00) portrayal of Australia. The symbol of the aboriginal athlete Cathy Freeman carrying the Olympic flame in its final stage...
For the Founding Fathers, economic liberty was inseparable from the case for political freedom.
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