Politics & Rights

“The key to remaining an optimist,” says Norberg, “is to ignore politics, at least a little. . . . Read a science magazine to look at the interesting research and the innovations that are taking place. You’ll realize that even under the worst of circumstances, the worst politics and the nastiest tempers, people continue to improve the world.”

As a philosopher and energy expert, Epstein evaluates the methods employed by today’s opponents of fossil fuels, identifies their unstated assumptions, and penetrates to the core of this vital issue.

Robert Pierce Forbes’s painstaking research into the writing and revision of Notes on the State of Virginia is impressive and valuable. But his conjectures about Thomas Jefferson’s goals in writing those portions of the book that still stain the great man’s reputation only perpetuate the mysteries.

Racism is premised on the false and immoral idea that people’s minds are functions of their ancestry and, consequently, that a person’s accomplishments are less morally relevant than the color of his skin. But George Mason University law professor David E. Bernstein shows in Classified that racism contains still another layer of incoherence.

People are asking the wrong questions about abortion. To determine whether a fetus has rights, the questions we must answer are not “When does life begin?” or “Is a fetus a human being?” Rather, the questions are: What are rights? Where do they come from? How do we know it? To whom do rights apply?

Russia has firmly and unquestionably established itself as a threat to Britain and the civilized world. Western governments should recognize the Russian regime for what it is: A despotic dictatorship bent on conquest with no regard for the lives or rights of individuals.

What is happening now in Ukraine is a kind of barbarism many in the West thought was consigned to history. The only antidote to it is a principled defense of the very ideas Putin opposes: individualism and individual rights.

The Russian government of Vladimir Putin has issued a mandate effectively seizing the planes of European companies. Western companies should learn from this experience and pull out of all rights-violating nations.

The theory of white privilege is demonstrably false and racially divisive. It’s an anti-concept, based on a collectivist, nonobjective conception of privilege. It subverts individualism, treating all people as interchangeable cogs within their racial groups.

To condemn Jeff Bezos as the next King Louis or Marie Antoinette is utterly nonsensical. Their productivity and the standard of living they make possible for millions of people should be celebrated, not condemned.