As we approach the 42nd Earth Day, environmental data accumulates and wisdom grows, however unevenly. Most measures of America’s environmental quality show major improvement, notably air and water pollution. The increasing plenty of natural resources is also something to celebrate. Environmentalism has become many people’s preferred religion. It’s unseemly to criticize people’s faith but this […]
Read MoreFREE Insights and Innovations This FREE Insights introduces two innovations. First is the addition of a day-long excursion during our July and August seminars. The July program, “Faith, Political Economy, and Social Justice: Lessons from Butte, America” includes a day in Butte with experts on its history, decline, and renewal. The August seminar is “Faith, […]
Read MoreCharles Murray’s latest book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, is an extraordinarily important study of the process implied by his title. Charles has a penchant for writing books that challenge, and sometimes change, America’s policy environment. Murray’s Losing Ground was published in 1984 and fundamentally transformed America’s thinking on the causes of […]
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This week’s FREE Insight is by University of Illinois political scientist, Robert Weissberg. Essentially, Bob argues that due to humans’ biological hard wiring, conflict will emerge when an energetic, intrusive state engages in social engineering threatening the values and behaviors that fostered survival of genetic lines. I had read a far longer version of this argument […]
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The most idiotic reason that single mothers give for not marrying is: “I’m too poor to get married!” Evidently these women believe they’re not too poor to educate, house, feed, clothe, and provide a stable home and an enriching moral and cultural environment for a child on their own. The “I’m too poor” defense, documented […]
Read MoreWhen is the last time you heard a liberal describe himself as a “liberal”? It’s probably been a long time. These days, those on the left are more likely to call themselves “progressives.” Writing in The New York Times, Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs said there have been two progressive eras — one in the […]
Read MoreAt Thanksgiving, the poor pay for dumb regulation.
Read MoreTonight I will show that no government can successfully turn on its owncitizens when they own guns. No government in history turned on its ownpeople as malevolently or on as large a scale as Hitler’s Third Reich. Itkilled seven million of its own citizens, six million of them Jews — andthe Nazis could not have […]
Read MoreThere’s no more full-throated a defender of property rights than a member of the anticapitalist Left asserting the right to colonize someone else’s property. “Whose park? Our park!” chanted members of the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Zuccotti Park as the New York Police Department belatedly broke up the illegal occupation yesterday morning. “This is […]
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The month between Thanksgiving and Christmas is an excellent time to reflect on and give thanks for one’s blessings. We were doing so with friends when conversation turned to the adoption of neglected children. We implicitly agreed that one important measure of a society is the care it provides for needy children. This reminded me […]
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