As any old newspaperman can tell you, crafting headlines is a rare skill quite distinct from ordinary good writing. A New York Post example, “Headless Body in Topless Bar,” is a work of art. Or when rural American audiences felt insulted by hillbilly comedy films, and Variety proclaimed: “Stix Nix Hix Flix.” Or a long-forgotten [...]
No one really disagrees with Distributism, do they? No one would really prefer Wal*Mart to a family-owned general goods store, or McDonalds to the little pub down the street. We are just pulling the wool over our eyes if we think Distributism could actually happen, the anti-Distributist says. Well, look at it this way. Do [...]
Knut Hamsun The modern market economy has never lacked for its literary expositors. From the time the industrial revolution (a term coined in the 1820s in France) first gained notice as a major and permanent development, litterateurs have given it the treatment. From Balzac’s dissection of the new class system of 19th-century Paris [...]
Distributism is the name given to a socio-economic and political creed originally associated with G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. Chesterton bowed to Belloc’s preeminence as a disseminator of the ideas of distributism, declaring Belloc the master in relation to whom he was merely a disciple. “You were the founder and father of this mission,’”Chesterton [...]
Sen. Carl Levin was aghast. Before his committee sat, unapologetic and uncontrite, Apple CEO Tim Cook, whose company had paid no U.S. corporate income taxes on the $74 billion it had earned abroad in recent years. “Apple has sought the Holy Grail of tax avoidance,” said Levin. “Apple has exploited an absurdity.” […]
Libertarian futurists such as Tyler Cowen and Brink Lindsey sometimes write as if the point of all our remarkable techno-progress—the victory of capitalism in the form of the creative power of “human capital”—is some combination of the emancipatory hippie spirit of the 1960s with the liberty in the service of individual productivity of Reagan’s 1980s. [...]
That a French socialist economist is trashing the American economy for fomenting inequality should hardly be news. But Thomas Piketty is enjoying some moments in the popular press, before returning to the usual comfortable sinecure for the left—academia. Why? Well, we are told, economic inequality is on the march again, and must be stopped. Stopped [...]
Ross Douthat has written on the revival of Marxism as a seductive theory in the wake of burgeoning economic inequality and the withering away of the middle class. He might have said that the futurist most attuned to both those trends is the savvy libertarian economist Tyler Cowen in his Average Is Over. Cowen says, [...]
Does God underwrite our freedom, or undermine it? There are thousands of self-styled “libertarians” who would argue the latter. They actively oppose the religious commitments of most social conservatives, many of them convinced that materialism is the best metaphysical home for what we might call “libertarian values”—individual rights, freedom and personal responsibility, reason, and moral [...]
Most Americans today, as has been the case for the past 150 years or so, are neither economically nor politically free. They are, instead, servile, prime subjects for abuse and manipulation, because most depend on a wage or a salary. Americans have long mistrusted great power, which they regard as the enemy of freedom. They [...]
The fear, anxiety, and rancor that dominate contemporary politics would be inconceivable without reference to the New Deal, for the 1930s and early 1940s marked the last time Americans engaged in substantive deliberations about the nature and future of their country. When Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, he promised to undo as much [...]
Bill Gates is largely a conventional thinker, but he’s still willing to challenge the conventional wisdom from time to time. In his annual letter, released in January, Bill challenges what he calls “three myths that block progress for the poor.” The third myth he takes on is this: “Helping the Poor Leads to Overpopulation.” As [...]
President Obama has been a strong supporter of programs designed to help families pay for a college education, most notably through the Pell Grant and the Opportunity Tax Credit. However, in the summer of 2013, President Obama announced a new “Plan to Make College More Affordable.” In his speech announcing the plan, the president affirmed that “a [...]
Corporate scandals over the last two decades, followed by the crash of the economy in 2008, have brought about widespread skepticism toward America’s corporate leaders. Almost daily there are calls for new legal and regulatory reforms directed at businesses, especially banks and investment firms. Some corporations have even begun to reassess their own business practices. [...]