from Declination: Do You Want to be Right, or True? Something changed over time. Call it maturity, or wisdom, or understanding of self. Or call it, as I do, a certain intellectual exhaustion. Whatever it is, I just stopped caring about
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from the Wall Street Journal, Daniel Johnson’s review of the book, Public Intellectuals in the Public Arena. On a personal note: In the introduction to this book my father, Paul Johnson, is quoted warning in 1988, “One of the principal
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from an interview with Penn Jillete in the January Reason Magazine When I talk about the death penalty to people, there are a zillion pragmatic arguments to make that the death penalty is more expensive, that you could make mistakes
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from the Wall Street Journal Look Who’s Getting That Bank Settlement Cash –Tens of millions of dollars disguised as ‘consumer relief’ are going to liberal political groups. by Andy Koenig The most recent came in April when the Justice Department announced a
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Progressivism can be viewed as socialism lite, paying homage to the great progress of capitalism while acknowledging some of the limitations of a free market. Social and economic theories develop, mature and evolve as they face the hard tests of
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Mark Perry posts at Carpe Diem at AEI a wonderful collection of quotes from Thomas Sowell and Frederic Bastiat, who share the same birthday and economic insights. Happy 86th birthday to economist Thomas Sowell, one of the greatest living economists
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These are some of the best articles that stood out to me so far this year- and a few of mine . America Doesn’t Have a Gun Problem; It Has a Democrat Problem from Sultan Knish Chicago’s murder rate of 15.09
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Don Boudreaux in his excellent Cafe Hayek quotes from Matt Ridley’s The Evolution of Everything. I consider this the best new book of the year followed by Yuval Levin’s The Fractured Republic. Ridley compares the spontaneous order of evolution with
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Demonization of your opponent is an intellectually lazy way of avoiding the defense of your position. A more subtle way of such demonetization, rather just calling your opposition stupid, racist or anti-science is to call them ideological. This infers that
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It is not the act of being ideological that disturbs the left, it is the ideology. Faith in an idea or principle makes you ideological; faith in their own ideas and principles makes them pragmatic. Pragmatism with a capital ‘P’
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Kevin Williamson is probably one of the most excerpted writers on Rebel Yid. I was fortunate to meet him lat year at Freedom Fest in Las Vegas. He has a creative and unconventional way of viewing the great debates. He
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Why has the left become so intolerant of dissent? The quality and the rationality of any position can be discerned by its tolerance for dissent. In a world of absolute truth there is no safe space, in a world of
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We have observed how one can use irrefutable facts to reach the precisely wrong conclusion. It happens when we assume away real personal biases, emotionally attach to models and narratives, or are blinded by a delusional sense of moral superiority.
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From The Sultan Knish, The Traditionalist Rebel The traditionalist rebel is slow to anger. Unlike the social justice warrior and the crybully, he does not derive his sense of self from manufactured conflicts only meant to reinforce a collective identity, but
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From Joel Kotkin at newgeography.com AMERICA’S NEW OLIGARCHS—FWD.US AND SILICON VALLEY’S SHADY 1 PERCENTERS this is an excerpt from a reader’s comment on the article above: The Valley’s failure to fulfill its promise seems to be due precisely to this: it
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From The Sultan Knish, The Traditionalist Rebel The traditionalist rebel does not believe that collectivist institutions can make us moral. He relies instead on individual institutions of character and honor, empathy and morality. He trusts people individually to do the right
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from my article in yesterday’s American Thinker, Donald Trump ushering in the third wave of Progressivism We are witnessing the third and final phase of American Progressivism, where the administrative state has stifled the economy, destroyed opportunities, and lost control of
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From The Sultan Knish, The Traditionalist Rebel The traditionalist rebel is the snake in the liberal Eden because he does not have faith in the noble motives of the bureaucratic activists who claim to be the gods of this Eden. He
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from Don Boudreaux’s Cafe Hayek’s Quotation of the Day 2/20/16 … is from pages 292-293 of Richard Vedder’s and Lowell Gallaway’s still-relevant and resonant 1993 book, Out of Work: One of the clichés that has emerged from the Keynesian episode is
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from The Progressive Itch to Regulate Speech by George Will in The National Review Sanders and Clinton detest the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, which they say their court nominees will promise to reverse. It held that unions and corporations
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