Joseph Pearce, whose work we appreciate, has issued a critical response in The Imaginative Conservative to our new book from Ignatius Press about J.R.R. Tolkien’s political and economic vision. Or rather, he has issued a critical response to a short answer one of us gave in an interview about the book. Mr. Pearce begins: “In [...]
In their impossibly good book Money, Markets, and Sovereignty (2009), Benn Steil and Manuel Hinds make the point that over the last four thousand years, the only period in which humanity has not consistently based its currency in metal, specifically gold, is the last forty. That’s right. Ever since President Richard M. Nixon announced forty [...]
In a very interesting interview in Catholic World Report, Jay W. Richards, co-author of The Hobbit Party, a new book examining the political thought of J. R. R. Tolkien, sought to distance Tolkien from the political views of G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. Whilst paying lip service to the romantic aspirations of distributism, the political [...]
The German economist Wilhelm Röpke, commenting on the expansion of European welfare states in 1958, wrote, “To let someone else foot the bill is, in fact, the general characteristic of the welfare state and, on closer inspection, its very essence.” While he did not argue that, therefore, such state assistance should in all cases be [...]
“Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains.” Jefferson’s brutal verdict comes to mind in the fierce debate over inversions, those decisions by U.S. companies to buy foreign firms to move their headquarters abroad and renounce their U.S. [...]
According to Kimberly Strassel (and this is the general line of the Wall Street Journal), conservatives are those who believe that government should do as little as possible to inhibit to the operation of the free market and as much as possible to maximize the free choice of individuals. Everyone will be better off as a result. Any deviation [...]
With the stock market cruising at all-time highs and the unemployment rate sitting at quaint levels, a fashionable new argument is making the rounds. Barack Obama is better at economic recovery than Ronald Reagan ever was. The numbers make the case. Dow Jones Industrial Average the day President Obama was inaugurated in January 2009 was [...]
A friend of mine in the financial services industry called me the other day to vent about the poor quality of the public discourse concerning the freedom of the marketplace and the obsession with the Almighty Dollar. “Does it make sense,” he asked, “that the pursuit of self-interest is the essence of all human motivation [...]
The greatest editorialist of our age, Joseph Rago of the Wall Street Journal, is at it again. Mr. Rago profiled two investors in Philadelphia who are resisting government pressure to admit that they did something wrong when trading in the electricity marketplace. The investors’ case is that everything they did was transparently legal. The feds don’t care—if they [...]
Houston, Texas sure is entering a golden era. It seems that everyone is moving to the town (the nation’s fourth biggest) these days. The largest construction project in the nation is just north of the city, a campus for Exxon Mobil. Houses are getting thrown up like suburbanization is some new fad. Maserati cars (remember [...]
Neither the panics or busts of fiscal America can be attributed to the gold standard. Any currency that is on the gold standard can have its manager ruin the monetary system if so disposed. One of the main reasons that detractors of the gold standard contend it is a “barbarous relic” (in John Maynard Keynes’s [...]
“Supply-side economics needs a 21st-century update,” went a post at the American Enterprise Institute’s blog the other day, challenging the assurance from the Cato Institute’s Dan Mitchell that no, it doesn’t. The point of contention in the rising, intra-Republican squabble over economic policy is whether it is best to solve the problem of the tax [...]
Introduction Contributing to the multi-faceted crisis Americans now face is the loss of those values and principles that are essential to a healthy economy. We could mention the incestuous relationships between business and politics, the avarice of large banking institutions, misguided Federal Reserve policy, the irrationality of Wall Street investors, and the Gordon Gekko motto [...]
Decentralists of the ’30s had a clear-eyed focus on the grip of the giant corporations over our political economy, whose antagonism to our sense of individual and community freedom and fair access to justice is so palpable today. There was a time in the Depression of the 1930s when conservative thought sprang from the dire [...]