“Second Term Begins With a Sweeping Agenda for Equality,” ran the eight-column banner in which The Washington Post captured the essence of President Obama’s second inaugural. There he declared: “What binds this nation together … what makes us–what makes us American–is our allegiance to an idea, articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries [...]
President Obama buttered up the American taxeaters with his syrupy State of the Union address on Fat Tuesday night by tabling a massive stack of new spending proposals that are selling like hotcakes with folks who will never have to pick up the tab. If enacted, these proposals will pancake employers, batter investors, and will [...]
According to the Washington Post, Washington DC’s public school district is planning to close 15 under-enrolled traditional schools: “If we don’t become very serious about marketing and competing with charter schools," [DC Councilman David] Catania said, “traditional public schools, as we know them, will become a thing of the past.” Charter schools have grown quickly [...]
Wealth, Poverty & Human Destiny edited by Doug Bandow and David Schindler For religious believers, the complicated issue of reconciling the free market with traditional morality is one of increasing importance as the ideology of capitalism gains unprecedented public support and globalization becomes unavoidable. The prospect of material triumph appears omnipresent, and the justifications for [...]
On both sides of the Atlantic, we are witnessing a concerted attack on Christianity and on the institution that the Church deems the fundamental cell of society, namely the family founded on the marriage of a man and a woman. In the US, Archbishop Chaput and other bishops have reacted strongly to the “contraception mandate”–the plans of the [...]
Phil Michelson Don’t quite recall what happened in 1913? The Philadelphia Athletics’ World Series win that year didn’t make its mark? How about this, as I wrote in my book Econoclasts: For all one hears about, say, 1914, 1929, 1945, 1968, 1989, and 2001, 1913 may well be the most important year in [...]
The president is bent on raising taxes big time. The rationale? The deficit is getting out of control. Indeed it is. Since January 2009, when President Obama took office, the United States has run cumulative budget deficits of $5 trillion. Before that time, debt held by the public was $6.3 trillion. Now it’s $11.4 trillion, an [...]
What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us.—Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue MacIntyre’s brilliant critique of modernity and its many failings was published almost thirty years ago. Its many [...]
Berry’s economic program, what he calls the “little economy,” is a smaller wheel in the larger motion of the “Great Economy.” To understand the former, it is vital to grasp the latter. In the following, then, Berry’s vision of the broader drama of human action is set forth, followed by a presentation of his narrower [...]
In Aristotle's view, “true wealth” was finite, restricted to those articles “useful to the association of the polis or the household,” and thus necessary to sustain “the good life.” The exchange of commodities for money with the aim of making a profit was an artificial, and potentially destructive, enterprise. Trade, Aristotle declared, should be mutually beneficial, [...]
F.A .Hayek Following the Second World War, Hayek tried in vain to warn Western capitalists that they had set themselves on the “road to serfdom” at the very moment when the West stood on the threshold of unprecedented economic affluence, which would have been impossible without the intervention of government. At the turn [...]
Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius, by Sylvia Nasar, Simon & Schuster, 558 pages In December 1974, in the midst of the first energy crisis, Friedrich Hayek received the Nobel Prize in Sweden and confessed, “we have little cause for pride: as a profession we have made a mess of things.” He admitted that [...]
“There’ll never be another Camelot,” said Mrs. John F. Kennedy forty-nine years ago this week, in the wake of her husband’s assassination in late autumn, 1963. “Camelot,” of Knights of the Round Table fame, was a Broadway hit at the time, and Jackie saw in all the genius advisors surrounding Kennedy another mythical fraternity the [...]
It has now been several weeks since we imaginative conservatives woke up to the nightmare that President Obama had been reelected. It is time we wake from our delusional daydream for a future conservative order. It’s time we realize it’s morning in America again and that we have been blind to the glaring truth that [...]