Brad Pearce | The Libertarian Institute

Immigration Solutions Don’t Need to Be All or Nothing

by Brad Pearce | Jan 30, 2025 | Featured Articles

The border crisis and illegal immigration were one of the primary political issues which brought victory to the Republicans in the 2024 elections. While many opponents of immigration control are ideological and think having a border is somehow “fascist,” other objections are made on more practical grounds, reflecting a belief that modern America cannot achieve basic tasks of governance. Perhaps this is accurate due to partisanship and political dysfunction, but such worries seem to have become a pathology which leads to the feeling that it is pointless to try and implement good public...

Biden Family Corruption Laid Bare

by Brad Pearce | Jan 23, 2025 | Criminal Justice, Featured Articles, Politics

For many years, Joe Biden’s corruption has been as well known as his dementia to anyone remotely out of the Democrat Party and MSNBC messaging zone. Throughout his half-century career as an unimpressive politician, his family has accumulated enormous wealth through influence peddling. This, of course, came to the fore with his son Hunter’s laptop whose authenticity was denied by “51 former intelligence agents,” claiming it was a Russian operation. The truth is Hunter Biden’s corruption is fairly routine. It's just that other family members of politicians aren’t whoremongering crackheads and...

The Year History Bit Back

by Brad Pearce | Dec 31, 2024 | Featured Articles

2024 marked the 35th anniversary of the publication of Francis Fukuyama’s famous essay, “The End of History?” in The National Interest. Suffice to say, its thesis looks more wrong than ever. It must be acknowledged that Fukuyama’s arguments were somewhat more complex and less optimistic than is commonly imagined, but regardless, the premise was that the ideological evolution of human governance is in the process of finding a resting point at liberal, internationalist democracy. But in reality, we are seeing that system fail all around us as ideological veneers are pulled down and resource...

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...