As one who has adopted South Carolina as my home, I am still haunted by the recent events in Charleston and more than a little alarmed by its dark and disturbing aftermath. I cannot help feeling that a culture that advocates the banning or burning of flags is on the slippery slope to becoming a [...]
To the size of states there is a limit as there is to other things, plants, animals, implements; for none of these retain their natural power when they are too large or too small, but they either wholly lose their nature or are spoilt. – Aristotle The great Aristotle is always worthy of our deference and [...]
I have had a lot of response to my column on Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s book Democracy — The God That Failed, most of them enthusiastic. A surprising number of citizens of this democracy have lost faith in the state, democratic or otherwise. It is amazing how seldom we ask the most basic questions: What is a state, [...]
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 [...]
National Gazette, January 23, 1792 In every political society, parties are unavoidable. A difference of interests, real or supposed, is the most natural and fruitful source of them. The great object should be to combat the evil: 1. By establishing a political equality among all. 2. By withholding unnecessary opportunities from a few, to increase [...]
It’s campaign season again. Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Hillary Clinton, and Marco Rubio have already announced their bid to become president. More politicians are expected to follow suit. These candidates will, we can be sure, equivocate, pontificate, prevaricate, and grandstand about any number of issues in the coming months, but the one that should be [...]
“Pat, sometimes it seems like our friends want me to go over the cliff with flags flying,” President Reagan once told me. Today, it is “Bibi” Netanyahu and the neocons howling “kill the deal” and “bomb Iran” who are shoving the Republican Party toward the cliff. The question, which may decide 2016, may be framed [...]
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 [...]
Pope Francis, recently referring to horrific slaughter of Armenians a century ago, set off a diplomatic incident with Turkey when he used the word genocide.* Considering that the Vatican lobbies the Turkish Government for better treatment of its small Christian minority, this is a brave and perhaps costly decision. The controversy holds an unexpected lesson [...]
Abraham Lincoln, then a newly-minted young lawyer, delivered the following speech to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois. January 27, 1838 As a subject for the remarks of the evening, the perpetuation of our political institutions, is selected. In the great journal of things happening under the sun, we, the American People, find our [...]
In November 1956, President Eisenhower, enraged he had not been forewarned of their invasion of Egypt, ordered the British, French and Israelis to get out of Suez and Sinai. They did as told. How far we have fallen from the America of Ike and John Foster Dulles has been on painful display this March. An [...]
My recent article on the relative merits of monarchy and democracy brought an array of comments from both ends of the political spectrum. At one extreme I was berated for suggesting that the absolutist view of monarchy, rooted in the political theory of the divine right of kings, was wrong. The person who made this [...]
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 [...]
With Hillary Clinton scrambling to explain her missing emails, much of America is wailing, “Please don’t make us watch this movie again!” Why, then, would the Republican Party, with a chance to sweep it all in 2016, want to return us to the nightmare days of George W., which caused America to rise up and [...]