institute newspaper logo sized
If Joker Met Jordan Peterson: What separates a monster from a hero?

If Joker Met Jordan Peterson: What separates a monster from a hero?

by | Oct 20, 2019 |

What does it take to turn an ordinary person into a monster? To create a mass shooter, a terrorist, a Joker? According to Joker himself, “One bad day.” That’s how he tells his own story in Batman: The Killing Joke, a 1988 graphic novel by Alan Moore and Brian Bolland. This classic origin story heavily influenced the controversial new Joker film. Once, Joker was an ordinary man. He was trying to be a good husband, preparing to be a father, and striving to make it as a stand-up comic. But his jokes were bombing and his family was trapped in poverty. He felt like a failure. He was overwhelmed...

read more

The Federal Reserve’s Shell Game

by | Jun 8, 2018 | ,

The Federal Reserve is a key component of the US government's wealth redistribution apparatus. Under the guise of “macroeconomic management,” it redistributes vast amounts of wealth on an ongoing basis through inflation. The victims of these transfers are ordinary Americans. The beneficiaries are the government and its elite cronies. The Fed masks the nature of this surreptitious taxation and corporate welfare by performing a simple shell game that is just complicated enough to confound the general public. First, let’s imagine the government performing this kind of inflationary transfer...

read more
Trade Is What Makes Us Human

Trade Is What Makes Us Human

by | Aug 30, 2017 |

In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith famously wrote of humanity’s “propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.” Smith noted that trade is a characteristic mark that distinguishes humankind from all other creatures: “It is common to all men, and to be found in no other race of animals, which seem to know neither this nor any other species of contracts. (…) Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog. Nobody ever saw one animal by its gestures and natural cries signify to another, this is mine, that yours; I am willing...

read more

The Sweet Sociability of Self-Interest

by | Jun 27, 2017 | , ,

undreds of liberty-loving students, professionals, and entrepreneurs recently gathered in Atlanta for the first-ever FEEcon, an event celebrating the ideas of freedom and free enterprise. Judging from attendee feedback, it was a smashing success. But it raises an interesting question. A skeptic might ask, “Isn’t a gathering of individualists a contradiction in terms?” Such a critic might have been even more flabbergasted had he attended. The conference was successful, not only because of meticulous planning (perhaps another shocking word in this context), but because of the communal spirit...

read more

Is ‘Wonder Woman’ War Propaganda?

by | Jun 9, 2017 | ,

Why did human beings slaughter each other by the thousands during World War I, a conflict of unprecedented mass savagery in which an entire generation of young men decimated itself and inflicted atrocities on civilian populations full of women, children, and the elderly? In the movie Wonder Woman, the heroic Amazon princess Diana believes that an evil god is to blame. Ares, god of war, is the son of Zeus, king of the gods and creator of the human race. Ares loathes his father’s creatures and throughout history has striven to eradicate them by pitting humankind against itself in ceaseless,...

read more

Trump’s Ego Is Actually Too Small

by | May 10, 2017 | ,

Long before Donald Trump became a controversial political figure, he was a household name famous for his phenomenal ego. He first rose to fame as a larger-than-life real estate tycoon. By cultivating the media, Trump became the poster boy for the gilded, go-go 80s: a brash, ostentatious capitalist antihero who plastered his name on skyscrapers, plazas, hotels, casinos, and resorts. At one point he even sought to rename the Empire State Building after himself, calling it the Trump Empire State Building Tower Apartments. And in the 2000s, with his hit reality show The Apprentice, he became the...

read more

Trump Surrenders to the Iron Law of Oligarchy

by | May 2, 2017 | ,

Did the Deep State deep-six Trump’s populist revolution? Many observers, especially among his fans, suspect that the seemingly untamable Trump has already been housebroken by the Washington, “globalist” establishment. If true, the downfall of Trump’s National Security Adviser Michael Flynn less than a month into the new presidency may have been a warning sign. And the turning point would have been the removal of Steven K. Bannon from the National Security Council on April 5. Until then, the presidency’s early policies had a recognizably populist-nationalist orientation. During his...

read more

Today’s Civil Strife Is Rooted in Economic Frustration and Fallacy

by | Apr 28, 2017 | ,

Why is America today so politically charged and polarized, to the point that people are regularly clashing in the streets? As James Carville used to say, “It’s the economy, stupid.” Americans still haven’t got their economic mojo back since the financial/housing crisis and Great Recession of 2007-2009. And today’s public agitation is largely an extension of the protest movements that emerged in the wake of that downturn. On the right, the Tea Party movement arose in 2009 largely out of disgust that big banks and big business had been bailed out by big government with newly printed money,...

read more


Podcasts

scotthortonshow logosq

coi banner sq2@0.5x

liberty weekly thumbnail

Don't Tread on Anyone Logo

313x0w (1)

Shop Our Books

Pin It on Pinterest