In an age of Twitter mobs and cancel culture, it’s becoming clearer every day that no cultural artifact or icon, no matter how old, banal, celebrated, or grandiose, is safe. One of the latest targets is the smash Broadway hit musical Hamilton. The tragicomedy of targeting a phenomenon like Hamilton is manifest in the reality that the musical…
In my introductory essay, “American Workers Do Not Need Unions,” I took dead aim at the system of labor relations embodied in the National Labor Relations Act. Its regime of exclusive representation, given to a union that secures a majority vote within a given bargaining unit, creates a rigid system of cartel rule that frustrates the adaptability of labor…
On June 17, the Washington Post ran a story about a 2018 Halloween party at the home of cartoonist Tom Toles. A woman named Sue Schafer attended in blackface, with a nice business suit and a name tag that read, “Hello, my name is Megyn Kelly.” That October, Kelly had made this remark on the air: “When I was…
There are many sources of our recent decades of discontent, but one is low economic growth rates. When an economy is booming, people feel better about their lives and a larger pie becomes available to fund legitimate public projects, such as care for the sick and needy. Peter Thiel’s lament that “we wanted flying cars, but instead we got 140…
The dream of a society so perfect that no one will have to be good (as T.S. Eliot put it) is a beguiling one for intellectuals, perhaps because they think that they will be in charge of it, as a recent article in the Journal of the American Medical Association titled “The Moral Determinants of Health” well illustrates. In…
William Wordsworth enthralled me when I was a scrawny, brooding boy. Later, during college, on a study abroad program, I visited the Lake District as well as Welsh locales associated with Wordsworth, pausing a few miles above Tintern Abbey—where I imagined the poet himself had composed his moving lines about that sylvan spot—to scribble a note on the inside cover…
The religious right that arose in the United States since the 1970s did so in almost studied neglect of the religiously based governing parties in Europe, the Christian Democrats. Part of this neglect reflects the mixed legacy of Christian Democracy by the 1970s and after; part reflects the nature of Evangelicalism in the United States. In the current issue of…
If there is any moment which marks modern conservatism’s beginning, it is the publication of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Central to Burke’s critique of the events occurring across the Channel was his insistence that France’s revolutionaries were seeking to construct a new world based on abstractions deeply at variance with the hard-won wisdom of…
The Liberty Fund Board of Directors announced today that it has selected Sean Shelby as the next President & CEO of Liberty Fund. Shelby will assume his new role on August 31, 2020 and will succeed Emilio Pacheco who led Liberty Fund since 2016. For more information, please read the full press release.
Many of us now feel old, detached even, before our time. The beliefs, attitudes, mores that our parents, clergy, coaches, teachers, and other authority figures, almost unconsciously imparted to us, seem increasingly like museum pieces. Should we consign individualism, competitive striving, personal accountability, to say nothing of a belief that we live and act under God and the moral law,…