The recent meltdown of the mortgage bubble illustrates a basic insight of Austrian Economics:  cheap money leads to distortion and malinvestment, which can only be resolved through mass liquidation.  Liquidation is an anodyne term, but in real life it means lost jobs, declining wages, “upside down” bank notes, bankrupt businesses, and stagnant housing values.  The Federal Reserve’s decision after the September … [Read More]

Conservatism is sometimes criticized as unprincipled, relativistic, or contradictory.  This criticism stems from the very nature of conservatism; it is a philosophy rooted primarily in attitudes about change, so its starting point is always a given society, as it is found in all of its contradictions.  Conservatism recognizes how the various goals of civilized, social life are often at odds with … [Read More]

Though not conservatives, libertarians nonetheless rely on selective portrayals of the past to support their fantasies about drug legalization.  They are particularly fond of painting a scary picture of the drug war replete with thuggish cops, draconian sentences, and a scary authoritarian picture of the new America.  They contrast this picture with the recent past, a time without SWAT teams and … [Read More]

One of the most distracting phenomena of modern times is a kind of “hyper skepticism.” For example, well known truths—that minorities commit more crime, that men are stronger than women, that many criminals can’t be rehabilitated—are met with demands for statistics, studies, and the like. If a study can’t be found, this often grinds a debate to a halt. Recall the … [Read More]

Our view of what kind of nation we are is related to the question of “nationalism.” Are we a normal nation?  A “creedal” nation?  An “exceptional” nation?  For many on the left and the neoconservative right, America is only authentic and just when it uses its immense power in a selfless ideological struggle on behalf of the powerless. This view of … [Read More]