On Broken Friendships

One warm, early-1980s weekday afternoon, I was walking east on Delancey Street in New York City’s Lower East Side. At that time, as were many areas of the city, Delancey was kind of rundown. I don’t remember what brought me …

Is Serfdom Humanity’s Default?

In the mid-20th century, the economist Friedrich von Hayek warned that the rise of centrally-planned economies—whether in the form of socialism/communism or fascism, which he argued have common roots—was leading us all (back) down “the road to serfdom.”

The term …

The First Champion of Free Speech

Most accounts of the history of free speech political doctrines—after a nod to the Magna Carta (which lays some groundwork but does not specifically mention free speech)—begin with poet and scholar John Milton’s famous, Areopagitica: A Speech For The Liberty Of Unlicensed …