Having spent a few weeks teaching here in Iceland, a few things are becoming clear. First, Icelanders are a friendly people who have managed to maintain a society with very little crime or violence, in which children are very safe and in which there is an extremely strong sense of community. Second, it is a [...]
I am spending much of the summer teaching in Iceland. It is an interesting country for many reasons, not least the fact that it has the oldest still-active legislature in the world. A group of us took a tour that included a visit to the site of the original Althing and the probable site of [...]
Motivational speakers, from what little exposure I have been forced to have with them, seem fond of telling people that they should “do the impossible.” This may well be simply part of the meaningless verbiage intended to get employees to pay attention to the context of the facts they face. To “think outside the box” [...]
There is a story, which if not true should be, that a student once regaled Russell Kirk with a listing of the different kinds of conservatism—libertarian, neo, paleo, and so on—then asked “which kind are you?” to which Kirk replied “I am a conservative.” I was reminded of this story when reading in these pages [...]
Diversity pervades American public life. It is a policy, an ideology, and a regime. That is, diversity is a full governing system its proponents want to spread throughout society, with its own rules, goods, rights, and duties. The goal is revolutionary—establishment of a new way of life in which chosen “differences” are affirmed and valued [...]
Diversity has come a long way in the United States. Originally presented as a policy aimed at improving learning experiences and the ability of citizens to work, trade, and lead in an increasingly multicultural society, diversity has come to dominate American public and private life. Part of the power of this doctrine no doubt stems [...]
Critics of liberalism, whether from the conservative right or the collectivist left, long have bemoaned its tendency to atomize society in the name of individual autonomy. The collectivist critique long has been recognized as somewhat ironic, of course. The utopian visions of ideologues like Karl Marx, who promised his New Socialist Man a life in [...]
One does not hear much about the “flat tax” any longer. The idea lost its steam when people pointed out that, in order for it to significantly lower most people’s effective tax rate, it would have to include (that is, eliminate) some very well-entrenched tax breaks we all love. Most prominent among these is the [...]
I am reasonably certain that Robert Downey, Jr., is not a conservative—at least not in any serious sense. What with the drugs, the girlfriends and wives, and the successful movie career, it is highly doubtful that the man behind Iron Man is harboring a library filled with the works of Edmund Burke or even William [...]
We are all secretaries now, in the most demeaning sense of that term. Most people who work in offices now are responsible for their own clerical tasks. This is mostly the result of technology’s spread. April 22 is Secretaries’ Day. Actually, the official title has been changed to the more politically correct “Administrative Professionals’ Day.” [...]
Poor Mr. Obama. To hear Colbert King tell the story, the President is being put in the impossible position of one of his great predecessors, Abraham Lincoln. In a piece in the Washington Post provocatively titled “A Rising Insurrection Against Obama,” Mr. King paints a picture of looming disaster for America akin to the Civil [...]
The good intentions of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights took place in stages. Drafted in large measure as a response to the horrors of World War II and in the face of the continuing horrors of communism, the 1948 Declaration sought to “transcend” political, religious, and ethnic differences in the name of an [...]
A surprising number of people who know about the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948 and a focus of rights discussions around the world ever since, are unaware that its primary author was Jacques Maritain, a prominent Catholic philosopher. Much of the document’s language and reasoning might seem more in keeping [...]
For more than a century now there has been a slow drift toward Presidential government in the United States, motivated by the desire to “get America moving,” to have “progress” through “efficient” government that is not saddled with the constitutional limits on which our entire way of life was based. It would appear that, at [...]