TGIF: The Nonsense of Statist Political Economy
In the video "How Capitalism Makes You Less Free," self-described Marxist Grace Blakeley, author of Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts and the Death of Freedom, boldly asserts that all societies must have some kind of economic planning. That's hardly news in 2024. Free-market liberals, or libertarians, have long taught that the issue is not planning versus no planning but who plans: free profit-motivated, consumer-oriented individuals independent of the state and other coercion or force-wielding centralized bureaucrats and their cronies, with or without democratic...
The Logic of It All
This is how some people think: Business has long used the government to gain benefits it could not get in the marketplace. I have the cure for that: Abolish the market and expand the government to encompass all of society.
What Is Easy and What Is Not Easy
It is easy to oppose Israel's massacre in the Gaza Strip. Just watch a few horrifying videos. What is not easy is understanding the price system, its prerequisites -- private property and free exchange -- and its benefits for mankind, including civil peace.
Can’t We All Get Along?
Pre-Zionism and pre-Israel, Arab-Muslims, Arab-Christians, and Arab-Jews (yes!) got along in many places as neighbors and friends. Compare that to Europe. Arab and Jewish nationalism messed it up. See Avi Shlaims's Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew.
TGIF: What Is Self-Determination?
People go on quite a bit about self-determination these days. Some decry the denial of self-determination to "the Palestinians." Others insist that only "the Jewish people" can have the right to self-determination between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Israel passed a law declaring that principle in 2018. Unfortunately, I see too little thought behind the term self-determination. What is it? What self are we talking about? What is determination? This and the related issue of nationalism are big topics with an unsurprisingly big literature. I will resist talking about nations and...
Lying Politicians Gonna Lyingly Politick
House Speaker Mike Johnson speaking on Holocaust Remembrance Day: We remember what happened then [in Nazi Germany], and today, we are witnessing American universities quickly become hostile places for Jewish students and faculty. The very campuses which were once the envy of the international academy have succumbed to an antisemitic virus. Students who were known for producing academic papers, are now known for stabbing Jewish peers in the eyes with Palestinian flags. Faculty who once produced cutting-edge research are linking arms with pro-Hamas protestors calling for a “global intifada.”...
The Purpose of the Antisemitism Awareness Act
The point of the House-passed (and misnamed) Antisemitism Awareness Act is not to empower the Education Department to sue and defund colleges under civil rights law. It is to make lawsuits unnecessary by chilling expression.
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