About John Barnes

John Barnes writes sporadically from his home in the Rocky Mountains.

Statesmanship: Echoes of the Past

By |2017-06-28T16:32:05-05:00April 8th, 2011|Categories: John Barnes, Politics|

Fellow Hillsdale alum Devin Foley, now President of the informative and amusing Intellectual Takeout, posted a picture on the interwebs with the apt caption “Rome is burning.” The photo and Devin’s comment brought to mind a selection from Russell Kirk’s essay “Civilization without Religion.” “It was at York that the dying Septimius Severus, after his [...]

Friday Reading: Growing the Business of Government, and Fast Times at Big State University

By |2017-06-28T15:54:22-05:00April 1st, 2011|Categories: John Barnes|

John Barnes The Wall Street Journal’s Stephen Moore has a great piece today on how public sector employment now dwarfs private sector employment. If you want to understand better why so many states—from New York to Wisconsin to California—are teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, consider this depressing statistic: Today in America there [...]

Whittaker Chambers and “the Strenuously Sterile World of Atlas Shrugged”

By |2017-06-28T15:22:49-05:00March 30th, 2011|Categories: Ayn Rand, Books, Film, John Barnes|Tags: |

Working in the free-market policy world, I’m forced to endure a certain adulation of Ayn Rand and her epic Atlas Shrugged. With only a couple weeks until the much-awaited film version debuts, the email listerves normally teeming with white papers and legislative analysis are now spitting out adverts telling me to get my tickets now [...]

A Dose of Reality in a World Run by “Experts”

By |2017-06-27T16:55:56-05:00March 28th, 2011|Categories: John Barnes, Politics|

Alan Simpson Work around government long enough and you develop a healthy skepticism when a president or governor forms a special task force or commission to tackle a major public policy issue. It’s almost always done purely for political and theatrical reasons. Ultimately, behind the talk about bi-partisanship and cooperation sits an army [...]

Pondering the Humility of God

By |2017-06-26T11:49:58-05:00December 24th, 2010|Categories: Catholicism, Christianity, Culture, John Barnes|

The mystery chose to enter the history of man through a life story identical to that of any other man. Thus, it made its entrance imperceptibly. No one was there to record it. At a certain point, the mystery presented itself. And this event marked the greatest moment in the lives of those who encountered [...]

Sacrifice and the Destiny of Man

By |2017-06-20T14:55:54-05:00November 21st, 2010|Categories: Politics, Virtue, Western Civilization|

After a long week filled with many joys and frustrations, in the quiet hours of Friday’s eventide I sat in the candle-lit nave of my parish here in an obscure corner of Washington state. Weary and eager to close my eyes for sleep, I thumbed through the Roman breviary and came across a selection from [...]

The Walls Have Ears (and Hands, Too)

By |2017-06-20T14:43:48-05:00November 19th, 2010|Categories: John Barnes, TSA|

Like most people in the U.S., when President George W. Bush created the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), I didn’t see many problems with it. We had just watched in horror as terrorists flew planes into three buildings and killed thousands of people. They came from within and turned fully-fueled commercial [...]

Social Unrest and the Coming Reset

By |2017-06-20T14:17:50-05:00November 13th, 2010|Categories: Bradley J. Birzer, Conservatism, Government, John Barnes|Tags: |

I remember sitting in the lobby of my college dormitory stupefied, watching the World Trade Organization riots tearing apart downtown Seattle in 1999. Twenty-five hundred miles away, the view was surreal. My hometown had become a war zone. Familiar streets and shops, normally bustling with lively but peaceful activity, formed the backdrop for chanting crowds, [...]

Government Debt: All the Government We Can Borrow

By |2017-06-19T13:03:41-05:00October 19th, 2010|Categories: Bradley J. Birzer, Economics, John Barnes, Political Economy|

“We should be grateful we don’t get all the government we pay for” someone remarked to me at a local Republican strategy conference earlier this year. The hard coastal rain combined with the flat tire on my rental car awaiting me in the parking lot had dampened my spirits, so I didn’t have the energy [...]

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