Politics & Rights

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.

Recently, a growing chorus of voices has become increasingly hostile to free speech. Certain speech, we are told, must be suppressed in order to combat “hate speech,” stop misinformation, and “protect democracy.” But, as Jacob Mchangama explains in his book, Free Speech: A Global History from Socrates to Social Media, these arguments are not new.

If Jacinda Ardern were as empathetic, compassionate, and insightful as most reactions to her departure suggest, she would have respected the rights of New Zealanders, including their liberty to travel and to speak their minds freely. She didn’t, and that is how she should be remembered.

Americanism isn’t a matter of where you live or which government rules over you. It’s a matter of the principles that recognize individuals as individuals with their own minds and lives, and thus enable them to live by the judgment of their own minds.

The stalemate over house speaker brings to mind a question: Isn’t it strange that in a nation of such ambition and inventiveness, our options for political candidates basically range from bad to worse, from senile morons with no understanding of basic economics to ditzy Marxists and outright frauds and crooks?

Responses to the Twitter Files display a fundamental misunderstanding of what censorship is—and point us toward “solutions” far more dangerous than the problem.

Incitement to violence and the spread of “disinformation” are common rationalizations for expanding government powers to restrict speech, but how does such censorship actually pan out?