Politics & Rights

If we want to understand and protect the values on which human life and liberty depend, we need clear understandings of the terms we use in thinking about them. Toward this end, it is helpful to understand the fallacy that Rand called “package-dealing” and the nature of what she called “anti-concepts.”

Adam Smith and Ayn Rand are widely considered to offer merely different flavors of pro-capitalist thought. But their differences are greater—and far more consequential—than their similarities.

If freedom-loving Brits are serious about the moral principles on which liberty depends, they must oppose the monarchy and advance a vision of a free British republic.

Not only do many educators and parents fail to encourage and help children learn how to think and become efficacious, they also paint the whole of mankind as incompetent, or worse, self-destructive.

The Case for Nukes is a refreshingly rational overview, not just of the merits of nuclear power, but of the potentially wonderful future of the human race and the ideas we must embrace and reject if we want to create a better future for ourselves and our descendants.

First and foremost a magnificent novel, George Orwell’s 1984 is also a terrifyingly prescient political commentary. Written by an Englishman in 1949, it substantially mirrors the trajectory of American politics today.

Isabel Paterson’s The God of the Machine, Rose Wilder Lane’s The Discovery of Freedom, and Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, all published in 1943, launched the modern American liberty movement. Freedom’s Furies by Timothy Sandefur is the first book-length exploration of these women's relationships and context.

Contra those who think it’s not possible to ethically accumulate so much wealth, Taylor Swift has done so by trading value for value—never resorting to force or fraud. She created that wealth, and fans upset about this “need to calm down” and acknowledge this fact.

What many of Lincoln's contemporaries—and many today—mistook for paradoxes or even contradictions more often reflected the prudence of a leader facing the horrendous task of guiding the United States toward a philosophic principle when unprecedented bloodshed made it sometimes seem safer to disregard that principle.

Dr. Andrew Bernstein, author of Why Johnny Still Can’t Read or Write or Understand Math: And What We Can Do About It, recently joined me to discuss the problems with American schools today, along with some inspiring solutions.