Brad Pearce | The Libertarian Institute

Syria Proves Tolstoy Right

by Brad Pearce | Dec 17, 2024 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

The sudden collapse of the Syrian Arab Republic is one of the most inexplicable political events of the modern era. Though the regime was structurally unsound from over a decade of war and severe sanctions, by all accounts Bashar al'Assad's government had more or less won the war five years prior; they just weren’t able to take back some peripheral areas because they had foreign protection, most notably terrorist-controlled Idlib governate. Then, despite having survived so long in much worse circumstances, the Syrian Arab Army gave up when jihadists broke out of Idlib. An army that...

I’m Thankful We Defeated the Scolds

by Brad Pearce | Nov 28, 2024 | Featured Articles, Politics

It's become something of a Thanksgiving tradition that each year we are treated to the same tired op-eds about how the story of the first Thanksgiving is fake and we should feel guilty about making this continent our home and what a difficult day this is for Native Americans. One suspects that this year that tradition may be nearly dead. There are plenty of things wrong with Donald Trump as a political leader, but his 2024 victory is undeniably a victory over a class of scolds who have taken the view that the problem with America is that our public is uniquely morally bad and the only way to...

Ukraine’s 1,000 Days of War

by Brad Pearce | Nov 20, 2024 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

Tuesday, November 19 marked 1,000 days since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, though Ukraine’s civil war has been ongoing for over ten years. President-elect Donald Trump has a clear mandate to try and end the war, but with staffing picks like Marco Rubio as secretary of State, it is not clear that he wants to. Meanwhile, the outgoing Joe Biden administration has agreed to let Ukraine strike into Russia with U.S.-supplied long-range missiles, something which almost everyone seems to agree is a deliberate attempt to sabotage future peace talks. The Biden administration is also trying to run...

Our Endless Elections

by Brad Pearce | Oct 31, 2024 | Featured Articles, Politics

Democrats have been breathlessly insisting that if Donald Trump is elected again that this could be our last election. That is obvious nonsense, but as the journalist Walter Kirn recently pointed out, “with their wanton rhetoric, they've also made many of us never want another one.” While many Americans, myself included, are addicted to following electoral politics, these idiotic contests are clearly bad for society and caring about them is bad for us an individuals. Further, constant electioneering prevents our government from functioning, as there is no time to govern well and be rewarded...

Are the Global Elites Over Population Control?

by Brad Pearce | Oct 21, 2024 | Economics, Featured Articles, Politics

It is widely believed among libertarians, and really everyone of anti-globalist sentiment, that there is a high-level global depopulation conspiracy. This belief is perhaps best summed up with the pithy phrase, “You are the carbon they want to reduce.” Bill Clinton recently acknowledged that he believes immigration is necessary for economic growth because our country has below-replacement fertility levels. While the global elites have given us many reasons to believe that they want depopulation, this is largely the residue of a panic about population growth from the 1960’s through 1980’s...

Israel’s Pager Terrorism

by Brad Pearce | Sep 19, 2024 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

On Tuesday, September 17, Lebanon experienced one of the most widespread terrorist attacks in history. All at once, pagers across the south of the country indicated they had received a message and then exploded. As of Tuesday night it was said fourteen people were killed, including an eight-year old girl. Almost 3,000 were wounded, a testament to the indiscriminate nature of the attacks. As the people who possessed the pagers were primarily associated with Hezbollah, responsibility was quickly attributed to Israel, both by Hezbollah and by Israel’s ghoulish supporters, who are excited by...

Fighting the ‘Middle State’

by Brad Pearce | Sep 10, 2024 | Featured Articles, Politics

From around the middle of the twentieth century, federal agencies tasked with law enforcement, intelligence gathering, and various types of “defense” have accrued overwhelming power in the United States. Democrats, who now worship such agencies, may wail at the term “Deep State” and the idea that they are nefarious. But regardless, the FBI, CIA, and myriad other “three letter agencies” are immensely powerful and reside outside of the political process which the public participates in. Perhaps the John F. Kennedy assassination was a coup, perhaps it wasn’t. But there is little doubt that in...

North vs. South: Korea’s Population Crisis

by Brad Pearce | Aug 27, 2024 | Featured Articles

Birthrates have been falling throughout the developed world for years. While it’s true that the global population can’t and shouldn’t grow forever, and that a gradual decline could be desirable, the current OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) average birth rate of 1.6 presents serious, but manageable, challenges to maintaining economies and societies. In South Korea the situation is much more dire, and this number has dropped to an abysmal lifetime fertility rate of .72 children per woman, or just over a third of the replacement rate. Without drastic action, this...