Kind hosts in Vienna asked me to speak on Adam Smith, this year being 300 years since his birth in 1723. The lecture was arranged by The Hayek Institute and the Austrian Economics Center, in Vienna, delivered June 26, 2023. …
No One Apologizes for the Theft of Time
In the ending comments box of the latest small business survey I received through email from the Census Bureau, I wrote, “One of the ongoing irritations from government is the uncaring and unrepentant theft of time. These surveys are a …
Feminism and Its Betrayal
I’m a feminist. I have no problem with this “F” word and never have.
There have always been women who rejected the label. When I was a college student in the late 80s-early 90s, some women rejected the word and …
Emulating Odysseus Today
The epic poem known as the Odyssey, or Homer’s story of Odysseus, the ancient Greek king of Ithaca, who was cursed by the god of the sea, Poseidon, to wander for 10 years before returning home after the fall of …
How Young Adult Literature Became the Playground, and Battleground, for Adults
On a warm spring day roughly ten years ago, back when we still did such things, I caught a city bus to my office in downtown Minneapolis. It was a pleasant early morning ride, windows open, the people unusually quiet. …
“The people” will not save us | Chris Waldburger
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Chris Waldburger discuss why ‘voting harder’ will not prevent another Covid event and why liberal democracy cannot stave off the bio-security state. What, then, is to be done?
Chris attempted to criticize a modern …
The Dignity of Labor Requires Freedom and Truth
As I celebrated Mass for our parish on the morning of Labor Day, I was struck by the Gospel which coincidentally was given to be read for Monday of the 22nd Week in Ordinary time: Luke 4:16-30. Here we see …
Beware the new leviathans
Are men and women naturally good? The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau thought so, though he admits that we began in a state of “savagery” in which moral terms such as good and bad simply didn’t apply. From there, however, the human …
The four thinkers who took on the mob
What is the formative connection between the private self and other people? Or, as the architect of libertarianism Ayn Rand once put it, how should we order “the two principles fighting within human consciousness — the individual and the collective, …
In defence of critical theory
If you’ve been watching the latest pitched battles in America’s culture wars, you’ve doubtless heard of the much-ballyhooed and much-denounced field of critical race theory. One thing you may not have gleaned from all the media furore, though, is that …
Why did Jacqueline Rose erase women?
What is a woman? Hoping he might be able to answer this vexatious question, the New Statesman turned to Richard Dawkins. In the resulting piece, the biologist expresses sympathy with those with gender dysphoria, but is unequivocal that a woman …
‘The People’ Will Not Save Us – Perhaps We Need Machiavelli’s Lions
Are ‘the people’ sovereign in a democracy?
Constitutions that safeguard individual rights are meant to be expressions of the sovereignty of ‘We the People’ (as the Americans put it), yet any cursory glance at the history behind the promulgation of …
What’s wrong with cannibalism?
“I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti,” whispers Hannibal Lecter, before making that scary teeth-sucking noise. But what makes Lecter our favourite moral monster is not that he eats people; it’s that he gruesomely murders …
Transhumanism and the Philosophy of the Elites
In 2004, when Foreign Policy asked eminent scholar Francis Fukuyama to write an article answering the question, What is the world’s most dangerous idea?, he responded with a piece titled Transhumanism. Fukuyama argued that the transhumanist project will use biotechnology …
One hundred years of platitudes
The worst sort of books make you feel clever without actually making you more so. They flatter your intelligence, encouraging you to nod along in smug agreement at some faux deep observation, giving you a sense of achievement without having …