The non-profit National Rifle Association, founded in 1871, describes itself as “America’s longest-standing civil rights organization.” With nearly five million members, the NRA is also one of the nation’s largest and most influential organizations, promoting the safe ownership and use of firearms. Through its affiliated foundation (a tax-exempt entity formed in 1990), political advocacy arm (the Institute for Legislative…
Hello, and welcome to Liberty Law Talk. I’m Richard Reinsch. Today we’re talking with David Goldman about his new book, You Will Be Assimilated: China’s Plan to Sino-form the World. David Goldman is the author of the widely read Spengler column for the Asia Times. He’s an award-winning Wall Street strategist. He’s worked for Credit Suisse. He was the…
No book has been revisited more in recent months by the general public, serious readers, and public intellectuals than Albert Camus’ The Plague. Set in Oran in North Africa during the 1940s, it documents the struggles of a city in the grip of an outbreak of plague that lasts for months, forcing the authorities to quarantine the town, preventing anyone…
In Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, Ludwig von Mises lays out the case against socialism and its varying forms. In focusing on human persons and their wide-ranging motives, Mises’ methodology set him apart in 1922. Nearly a century later, the majority of mainstream economists still fail to appreciate the degree to which their discipline ought to rest on a…
The Reuters news agency recently offered up a headline that is typical of our current moment but also very curious: “Chevron diversity ratio to improve as layoffs progress.” With corporate America long ago joining the “diversity” bandwagon, this story hardly rates as news at all, though a moment’s reflection should raise some alarm bells—and maybe even some serious legal…
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…