The Great Education Bubble

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, ...

The Relativist Roots of Libertarianism

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 ...

The War on Drugs Has Its Advantages

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 ...

Fads, Tradition, and Real Knowledge

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, ...

“€œNever Again”€ Nation

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 ...