Articles
Teach the Republic: Why Every Civics Crisis Traces Back to Teacher Preparation
By Samuel J. Abrams – If our aim is to sustain a functioning, self-governing republic, then it is not only appropriate but essential that deep constitutional study be centered in ordinary institutions. We cannot confine this work to boutique seminars for the well-connected and already powerful. The work must also happen where most Americans – especially future teachers – actually train: regional public universities, teaching-focused colleges, and continuing education programs that are accessible and affordable.
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Pentagon Has Two Years to Prevent World War III
By Mike Gallagher – Pete Hegseth, Mr. Trump’s nominee, will have to confront the collapse of deterrence in Europe and the Middle East, resource constraints on Capitol Hill, recruitment challenges, and a deteriorating balance of power in the Indo-Pacific. The only way to promote peace is to go to war on day one—not with China, Russia or Iran but with the Pentagon bureaucracy.
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America’s Crucial First Line of Defense in the Pacific
By John Bolton – China is trying to break the First Island Chain, and its strategy is to divide and conquer.
The elephant in the room is Taiwan. Without it, there is little chance other concerned countries can effectively thwart China’s destabilizing efforts. This time it isn’t Taipei asking for help, but other regional capitals that need help as much as Taipei. Losing effective control over what Douglas MacArthur labeled an “unsinkable aircraft carrier”—much less actual Chinese annexation—would fatally breach the First Island Chain.
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China Is Ready to Blockade Taiwan. Here’s How. A
By Joyu Wang and Austin Ramzy – “I think there’s general agreement both in the United States and Taiwan that if China wanted, it could quarantine or blockade Taiwan today,” said Bonny Lin, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
The U.S. president’s stance on Taiwan likely plays the most crucial role in Beijing’s calculation about whether to take action, said Huang Chung-ting, a Taipei-based defense analyst at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research, a think tank backed by the Taiwanese military.
The prospect of a U.S. military response remains a wild card. Trump’s commitment to defending the island is uncertain, and his recent suspension of U.S. support for Ukraine caused a rupture with Europe, diminishing the threat of unity on sanctions.
“Our worst nightmare scenario involving a blockade actually comes from American isolationism—where the U.S. decides to completely step away from Taiwan Strait issues,” said Huang.
Continue Reading China Is Ready to Blockade Taiwan. Here’s How. A
Capitalism Needs Champions A
By Matthew Hennessey – In this twilight struggle the truth has an advantage: Socialism is incompatible with human nature. People are driven to build, to invest, to strive and be productive, to pursue their own families’ well-being above all. Socialism subverts these impulses. It requires coercion to achieve anything resembling success. It’s an intellectual lab leak. Misery follows wherever it’s tried.
Yet each generation somehow produces naïfs who are certain that collectivism is the true longing of the human heart. …The young voters who supported Mr. Mamdani were primed by their expensive educations to buy his line that capitalism is rigged in favor of the rich. All they’ve ever been told—by teachers, professors, TV and TikTok—is that markets are inhumane.
This is a failure of education, yes. Basic economics is rarely taught in high school or required in college. But it’s equally a failure of public relations.
Javier Milei’s Gift for Pope Leo A
By Andy Kessler – Anything that interferes with markets and price discovery is dangerous. Unions distort prices. Student loans—and the policy of forgiving them—distort prices. So do quotas, subsidies, green policies and ethanol requirements. Even lockdowns and stimulus checks. Taxes, especially capital-gains taxes, distort the cost of capital. Redistribution is the ultimate market manipulation. And tariffs, which are taxes, distort prices, jobs and currencies.
Make America Solvent Again A
By William A. Galston – The consequences of a debt-induced financial crisis would be dire, and government officials would be wise to reduce the risk of such a crisis occurring. Stabilizing the burden of federal debt on the economy is a feasible, responsible target, and lawmakers should move toward it as fast as possible.
The stakes are enormous. Foreign governments and investors already are diversifying their portfolios away from the U.S. dollar and stocks.
Got Debt? Try Some Fiscal Federalism AA
By John F. Cogan – Following World War II, and especially during the peak years of the Great Society (1965-74), the federal government greatly expanded its spending on activities that were traditionally regarded as state and local affairs. … New expenditures on traditionally state and local activities as a share of GDP accounted for more than the growth in total federal spending during this period. … In other words, the entire increase in national debt is traceable to the federal government’s spending on state and local activities.
The abandonment of fiscal federalism has … begun to undermine our security. National defense should be the federal government’s highest priority. Yet since the 1950s spending on traditionally state and local affairs has taken its place. Funding these projects has come at the expense of the defense budget, which as a share of the federal total has fallen from around 60% in the mid-1950s to some 13% today. That level is wholly inadequate to meet rising global threats.
The federal government needs to reverse its priorities, prizing national defense and returning state and local affairs to their proper place.
Trump’s Tariffs Are as Bad as Bidenomics A
Phil Gramm and Donald J. Boudreaux – The state-directed capitalism of President Biden’s subsidies and Mr. Trump’s tariffs might attract some investments and create hothouse jobs that require perpetual subsidies and protection, but they misallocate productive resources and make the nation poorer. Protectionism also raises consumer prices, dampens competition, and slows innovation and growth.
As Elon Musk has wisely suggested, Mr. Trump can still save us from this bleak future with real reciprocal trade agreements in which we and our trading partners mutually lower our trade barriers. The president’s advisers and Republicans in Congress would serve him better by remembering Thomas Sowell’s advice: “When you want to help people, you tell them the truth.”
The World War II Lesson for DOGE A
By Arthur Herman – A Trump revolution is poised to unleash the innovative and productive power of the private sector, transforming the federal government. If it happens, Americans will witness the most significant change in the operation and philosophy of governance in 120 years. Fortunately, the precedent for this kind of transformation occurred more than 70 years ago, when American private industry mobilized to win World War II.
Biden Leaves His Successor a World of Disorder A
By The Editorial Board – It is a far more dangerous world than Mr. Biden inherited, and far less congenial for U.S. interests, human freedom and democracy.
Mr. Biden’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan was his single most damaging decision, and it has led to cascading trouble.
More damaging is the message his withdrawal sent to adversaries about American will and retreat. The credibility of U.S. deterrence collapsed.
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Zohran Mamdani Is Like a Bad Therapist
By Jonathan Alpert – In therapy, false relief traps patients in their problems. In politics, it traps cities in decline. Our cities are being run like bad therapy sessions—all processing, no progress.
Therapy works when it builds resilience, agency and accountability. Yet modern therapy too often prizes validating patients’ feelings over pushing them to grow. When that victim mindset drives policy, cities treat solvable problems as existential crises and avoid the hard work of fixing them.
Both Parties Can Agree on America’s Nuclear Peril A
By John Bolton – Nuclear-force resilience is more crucial when facing threats from two adversaries, not one. To help fashion the structure and size of the future nuclear force, the report identifies strategic principles from which to derive military requirements. That includes maintaining an assured second-strike capability and directing nuclear strategy at what Moscow and Beijing prize most: their leaders and the security institutions keeping them in power.
Continue Reading Both Parties Can Agree on America’s Nuclear Peril A
The Pentagon Can’t Wait to Innovate A
By Leon E. Panetta and Mike Gallagher – The Defense Department must make the rapid adoption of new technologies a priority, particularly in the commercial sector. This will require Pentagon bureaucrats to overcome the aversion to risk that permeates their agency and to leverage the expertise of academia and the private sector. The goal will be to build a defense innovation ecosystem in which the brightest minds in technology, strategy and defense can collaborate without constraint.
America’s Space Force Is Preparing for the Risk of War B
By Warren P. Strobel and Brett Forrest – The Pentagon relies on space systems for almost everything it does: collecting and disseminating intelligence to assist with troop and ship movements, communicating, and finding adversary battle formations and targeting them. Being blinded in space, if only partially or momentarily, could have catastrophic consequences for U.S. military and intelligence operations.
U.S. adversaries, especially China, have seized on these vulnerabilities. According to Space Force officials, China now has nearly 500 intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance satellites operating in space, which can detect aircraft carriers, air wings and ground forces. Nearly half of China’s intelligence satellites were deployed just last year.
With these spacecraft, “China is able now to detect, track, target and kill U.S. forces,” said Jay Raymond, a retired general who served as Space Force’s first chief.
Continue Reading America’s Space Force Is Preparing for the Risk of War B
The Case for Space Defense B
By J.D. Crouch II – To be effective, the Golden Dome must cover multiple domains: space, air, land and sea. The architecture to build it is already within reach—modeled decades ago, proven technically sound, and now economically and operationally viable. We don’t have to wait for a breakthrough. We already have the skills and tools to build a strong missile-defense system. We need only the political will to turn it into reality.
The Case for Exporting American AI B
By Aaron Ginn – Generative artificial intelligence isn’t a trend; it’s the backbone of the next industrial era. Countries are racing to build the full AI stack: data centers, chips, power and platforms. On his recent trip to the Middle East, President Trump signed deals to export AI chips to Persian Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, in exchange for more than $1 trillion in investments in the U.S. economy, largely in AI infrastructure.
The deals signify a shift from the Biden administration’s AI Diffusion Rule, which sought to regulate the export of American-made AI chips and handed China an opening to dominate the market. By rescinding the rule … Mr. Trump cleared the path for America to lead. Now, American allies can build AI using U.S. infrastructure, values and standards.
How Humanitarian Aid Feeds War Machines B
By Netta Barak-Corren – Somalia shows how thoroughly diversion can be built into routine. Three clan cartels win most World Food Program transport contracts, skim 30% to 50% of the cargo, and then split the spoils with those who transport the food and those who control the displacement camps. Based on U.N. reports and monitors, my coauthor and I estimate in our study that barely one-eighth of donated food reaches intended households.
The Old Missile-Defense Debate Is New Again B
By Amb. Henry Cooper – The Union of Concerned Scientists backed the congressional opposition that sharply curtailed SDI efforts, limiting development of U.S. homeland defense to the most costly, least effective defenses: ground-based interceptors. This also canceled development of the most cost-effective defenses, those based in space, while claiming that such defenses would be excessively expensive, contrary to exhaustive technical and cost studies.
Continue Reading The Old Missile-Defense Debate Is New Again B
Can AI and Drones Replace Soldiers and Jets?
By Aaron Kaplowitz – Weeks later, Israel’s strike on Iranian nuclear facilities offered a sharper, more enduring lesson: The future of warfare isn’t about drones replacing jets—it’s about integration. While Ukraine revealed how smart, agile tactics can disrupt an adversary, Israel put on a masterclass in modern warfare by blending conventional and new battlefield technologies.
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Christian Brose on the Coming Revolution in Military Tech
By Kate B. Odell – Is America prepared for the new way of war? “At every level, I think, our conception of military power, and the industrial base that we’ve been optimizing to build it, is just systemically wrong,” says Christian Brose, …
Anduril’s inexpensive cruise missiles, unmanned wingmen for fighter jets, and other technology could be crucial to U.S. victory in a future conflict…
America needs military power that is “mass-producible, that is adaptable, that is scalable and that is fundamentally replaceable…
The real U.S. defense challenge is injecting into the defense base “more of the American capitalist system at its best—more competition, more disruption, more innovation.”
…“We created an entire category of technology that didn’t even exist, dozens and dozens of companies that are funded with billions of dollars of private capital . . . trying to build military systems and defense capability.”
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The U.S. Is Losing the Ability to Deter War With China
By Seth G. Jones – America is rapidly losing the ability to deter China in the Taiwan Strait and elsewhere due to a weak defense industrial base. The Trump administration can revitalize this base by increasing procurement funds, making defense systems critical for warfighting and deterrence in Asia a priority, and cutting excessive contracting regulations.
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The Scholar Who Saw Zohran Mamdani Coming in 2003
Mr. Kors lamented that socialism had yet to be held accountable for the scale of its crimes: “No cause, ever, in the history of all mankind, has produced more cold-blooded tyrants, more slaughtered innocents and more orphans than socialism with power.” The failure to acknowledge and come to terms with this reality in the West,…
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Critical Race Theory Is an Inversion of History
By John Ellis – The Biden administration had quietly implemented policies throughout the federal government based on this theory, and it is being taught in colleges and schools throughout the country. It has overrun much of the corporate world, and it has even secured a place in the training of many professions. The accusations made in closed training sessions are astonishingly venomous: Arrogant white supremacy is ubiquitous; white rage results when that supremacy is challenged; whites hold money and power because they stole it from other races; systemic racism and capitalism keep the injustices going.
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Ron DeSantis: Good Riddance to the U.S. Education Department
By Ron DeSantis – Mr. Trump can empower states to manage education policy by removing the cumbersome bureaucracy that has become the hallmark of the U.S. Department of Education. Abolishing the department and reinvigorating state control of education would enable states like Florida to serve better the needs of students, parents and teachers.
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The Census Defines the Poverty Rate Up
By Phil Gramm and John Early – Spending on Medicaid, Internal Revenue Service cash welfare payments (refundable tax credits) and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps) has grown in inflation-adjusted dollars by 671%, 1,463% and 289% respectively since 1990. By contrast, total real Medicare, Social Security and defense expenditures have grown by 383%, 186% and 38% respectively. Medicaid absorbs seven times as much general revenue as Social Security—more than Social Security and Medicare combined.
The Public Needs Campus Viewpoint Diversity
By John Ellis – … shutting down woke programs goes only so far; it limits what bad actors in academia can do, but it leaves those bad actors in place.
Without broader staffing reforms, radical left-wing professors will still control higher education. Several states are trying to dictate what professors should and shouldn’t teach, but these efforts similarly don’t reach the core of academia’s sickness—the political monopoly that guarantees its continued malignancy.
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Decline and Fall of America? Not Yet
By David Mamet – The mythic hero is aided by the Word of God, contemporary Westerners by heroic example. Winston Churchill inspired in his country’s populace an awareness of their own greatness. So does Mr. Trump.
Yet half of America not only abides but fervently supports a codependent decline to poverty, crime and a nascent police state. Why? The leftist politicians and their media courtiers and designated beneficiaries profited from the perks of power. But why did the everyday American endorse them and their fear mongering? The actual threat wasn’t global warming, Islamophobia, the Supreme Court, the police, Immigration and Customs Enforcement or Mr. Trump. It was exclusion from the herd.
The Trade Secret of Intellectual Trumpism
By Joseph C. Sternberg – The truth is much more complex, and politically challenging: While some other economies suppress domestic consumption and subsidize export production, Americans choose to do almost exactly the opposite. Through political choices such as suppressing energy production and distribution, or permitting red tape and the like, or any number of other policy foibles, we make it much harder than it otherwise would be to produce things in the U.S. Meanwhile, you can’t take a step in America without tripping over a consumption subsidy.
Most glaring, though, are our entitlements. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, not to mention a raft of other benefit programs, funnel vast quantities of money into consumption. The trick here is that we’re able to finance these via chronic fiscal deficits funded by foreign investors, meaning at the margin Americans borrow from the rest of the world at ultralow interest rates and funnel the cash into consumption at home.
One Nuclear War Can Ruin the Whole Climate
By Ted Nordhaus and Mark Lynas – Nuclear winter, by contrast, would destroy civilization beyond repair within months or years. Yet unlike climate change, which has preoccupied activists for decades, it is largely ignored.
Conflicts between nuclear-armed adversaries remind us that no other risk to human societies remotely rivals nuclear warfare.
Henry Kissinger, Statesman and Friend
By Eric Schmidt – Henry had a simple model of geopolitical progress: You try to figure out what the other side wants, understand its motivations and pain points, and then find something that is possible and that it will see as an improvement. He was a fearsome negotiator with an impressive grasp of other countries’ history and an ability to assess their leaders realistically and to think three moves ahead. He viewed American culture as not strategic in this way: We tend to approach adversaries with a list of demands when we should have a conversation about a stable long-term outcome.
Grand strategy in his mind was exactly that. The exploitation of the Sino-Soviet split was a natural outgrowth of this approach.
The Economics of Slavery
By Roland Fryer – Probing the incentives and institutions that kept slavery alive can help us value what freedom means.
Reflections on Lincoln 160 Years After His Murder
By Paul Wolfowitz – April 14, 2025 – America’s greatest president had moral vision, strategic genius, and astounding eloquence.
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Netanyahu Flips the Script
By Walter Russell Meade – A coalition in revolt, prosecutors on his heels, powerful rivals looking to unseat him, chilly relations with Mr. Trump, growing opposition from Europe, skeptical military and intelligence chiefs and a hostile press—few leaders anywhere have faced this kind of pressure.
By Walter Russell Meade – By week’s end, Bibi had flipped the script. A series of military blows exposed the weakness of Iran’s sulphurously belligerent regime and demonstrated Israel’s military and intelligence supremacy in the Middle East. The government crisis subsided. Mr. Trump praised Israel’s audacious attack. As in the months after Oct. 7, 2023, a determined prime minister harnessed the Israeli military machine to orchestrate a dazzling series of victories that stunned the world even if they did not win it over.
Four Steps to Creating a National Defense Strategy Built on Strength A
By John G. Ferrari | Elaine McCusker | Todd Harrison – The new Pentagon leadership has set itself up to potentially oversee fundamental changes that could dramatically improve military warfighting capabilities for decades to come. In addition to realigning the defense budget, organizational structures, and acquisition policies to support warfighters, key decisions are still pending on how and where America will defend its security and prosperity.
Continue Reading Four Steps to Creating a National Defense Strategy Built on Strength A
Trump’s Big Opportunity in Japan A
By Mike Gallager – Japan undergirds U.S. power in the Pacific. It has one of the world’s largest economies …It’s time to take a lesson from Mr. Ohtani and swing for the fences, moving beyond a narrow focus on sectoral trade deficits. America must build new institutions designed to defend both countries from the Chinese Communist Party’s economic aggression, the way our alliance already defends us from Chinese military aggression.
Economic aggression has generated China’s trillion-dollar—and growing—trade surplus, backed by suppressed domestic demand, subsidies for strategic industries and intellectual-property theft on a staggering scale. Joining forces with Japan against this aggression would move trade talks … to the more productive question of how to regain or preserve dominance in shipbuilding, semiconductors and software.
The Politics of Medicaid Reform B
By Paul Winfree and Brian Blase – Congress has an opportunity to reform Medicaid, the nation’s third-largest, and most flawed, entitlement program. Done right, reform could protect the vulnerable, promote private coverage and save hundreds of billions of dollars. Done wrong, it won’t reduce federal spending and will hurt Republicans at the ballot box by making more voters dependent on government welfare.
Medicaid’s financing is fundamentally broken. Because of ObamaCare, the federal government pays $9 for every $1 of state spending on able-bodied working-age adults, compared with roughly $1.33 for pregnant women and disabled children. That incentive pushes states to favor healthy adults over the vulnerable in enrollment and access to providers and better services.
The Battle of Civilization B
By Benhamin Netanyahu – This is a turning point for leaders and nations. It is a time for all of us to decide if we are willing to fight for a future of hope and promise or surrender to tyranny and terror…The barbarians are willing to fight us, and their goal is clear: Shatter that promising future, destroy all that we cherish, and usher in a world of fear and darkness…This is a turning point for leaders and nations. It is a time for all of us to decide if we are willing to fight for a future of hope and promise or surrender to tyranny and terror.
Trump’s Tariffs Are as Bad as Bidenomics AA
By Phil Gramm and Donald Boudreaux – Not since Herbert Hoover signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff has a president chosen to disregard a larger body of informed opinion than President Trump did when he instituted his protectionist trade policy. Based on a series of verifiably false grievances—wages haven’t grown in 50 years, manufacturing has been hollowed out by imports, countries with trade surpluses are “ripping us off”—Mr. Trump used constitutionally questionable powers to abrogate congressionally approved trade agreements and undermine the world’s trading system. Markets convulsed in anticipation of the massive wealth annihilation that would accompany the shredding of global supply chains and a transition to a more protectionist world.
Continue Reading Trump’s Tariffs Are as Bad as Bidenomics AA
Jimmy Carter, Champion of Deregulation AA
By Phil Gramm – Jimmy Carter, who turns 100 on Oct. 1, doesn’t get enough credit for the quarter-century economic boom from 1983 to 2008 and the underlying resilience of the economy since. Without Mr. Carter’s deregulation of airlines, trucking, railroads, energy and communications, America might not have had the ability to diversify its economy and lead the world in high-tech development when our postwar domination of manufacturing ended in the late 1970s. The Carter deregulation helped fuel the Reagan economic renaissance and continues to make possible the powerful innovations that remake our world.
Welfare Is What’s Eating the Budget AA
By Phil Gramm and Jodey Arrington – Means-tested social-welfare spending totaled $1.6 trillion in 2023. Welfare spending now absorbs an astonishing 72.6% of unobligated general revenue (total revenue net of Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes and premiums and mandatory interest on the public debt) and is larger than the claims against unobligated general revenue by Social Security (4.1%), Medicare (23.5%) and defense (37.2%) combined.
Mitch McConnell: Liberal Bureaucrats Threaten Democracy
By Mitch McConnell – The Constitution vests each branch of the federal government with an exclusive power, responsive to the people in elections. In each branch, liberals seek to remove that power from democratic accountability and vest it in unelected bureaucrats.
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The Rise of the Climate Right
By Kimberly Strassel – We still don’t know the extent to which human activity plays a role in warming, given natural variability, data limitations, uncertain models and fluctuations in solar activity. Models predicting what is to come remain all over the map. U.S. historical data doesn’t support claims of increased frequency or intensity of extreme weather. Climate change is likely to have little effect on economic growth. U.S. climate policies, even drastic ones, will have negligible effect on global temperatures.
The U.S. Military’s Growing Weakness B
WSJ Editorial Board – A new Heritage Foundation report warns about declining U.S. naval and air power. …The truth is that U.S. hard power isn’t what it used to be. That’s the message of the Heritage Foundation’s 2023 Index of U.S. Military Strength, ….Heritage rates the U.S. military as “weak” and “at growing risk of not being able to meet the demands of defending America’s vital national interests.” The weak rating, down from “marginal” a year earlier, is the first in the index’s nine-year history.
The Counter-Revolt Finally Begins B
A list of the phenomena laying us low includes: wokeness, DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion), defund the police (a depressing subset of wokeness), conspiracy theories, head-in-the-sand isolationism and a self-centered political polarization typified—from left to right—by Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Cori Bush, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert….
In all these places, the reversals by elected officials are driven by the prospect of voters’ turning them out of office. That is the U.S. political system trying to right itself.
When the Only Problem Was Climate Change B
By Bjorn Lomborg – Time hasn’t been kind to the idea that climate change was humanity’s last problem or that the planet would unite to solve it. A rapid global transition from fossil fuels is, and always has been, impossible. There are several reasons that make it so. Many developing nations never shared the Western elite’s obsession with reducing emissions. Life for most people on earth is still a battle against poverty, hunger and disease. Corruption, lack of jobs and poor education hamper their futures. Tackling global temperatures a century out has never ranked high among the priorities of developing countries’ voters—and without their cooperation, the project is doomed. Geopolitical changes since the 1990s have also limited climate ambitions. Russia, Iran and North Korea have emerged as a destructive and destabilizing axis opposed to global security. Despite their occasional claims to the contrary, none of these nations will support global climate-change-mitigation efforts.
America’s Space War Vulnerability A
The Editorial Board – Feb. 15, 2024… the military threat in space is real and growing. Russia and China are working hard to develop space weapons. A Pentagon official told Congress last year that “Russia has fielded several ground-based lasers that can blind satellite sensors and has a wide range of ground-based electronic warfare systems that can counter the Global Positioning System,” satellite communications, radars, and space-enabled weapons guidance. China “has already fielded ground-based counterspace weapons, including electronic warfare systems, directed energy weapons, and direct-ascent (DA) anti-satellite (ASAT) missiles designed to disrupt, damage, and destroy U.S. satellites,” the same Pentagon official told Congress last year.
Drone Swarms Are About to Change the Balance of Military Power
By Elliot Ackerman and James Stavridis – Much like the nuclear arms race of the last century, the AI arms race will define this current one. Whoever wins will possess a profound military advantage. Make no mistake, if placed in authoritarian hands, AI dominance will become a tool of conquest
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Ed Feulner Built Institutions in Support of American Values
By Mike Pence – As the founder of the Heritage Foundation, Ed was a leading voice of conservatism for more than 50 years. Under his leadership, Heritage became both a center for scholarship and a powerhouse of strategic influence.
What concerned him, as always, was the long-term health of the American Republic, and the strength of the institutions that would defend it for generations to come.
Ed didn’t just build up institutions; he cultivated a movement that brought ivory tower ideas into the public square and never lost sight of the moral and spiritual foundations of liberty.
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The Federal Reserve Deserves a Pat on the Back B
John H. Cochrane – Over the past 15 years the Fed has engineered a fundamental advance in monetary policy by paying interest on reserves and supplying “ample” reserves…Banks holding lots of reserves don’t lend less. If the Fed buys Treasury bonds to create reserves, banks hold more in reserves and less in Treasurys. Money available for lending is the same…More deeply, we learned that the Fed can fully control the short-term interest rate by simply varying the rate it pays on reserves without having to ration money.
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The Enemies of Freedom Are Deadlier Than Ever A
By Gerard Baker – But the power of our example would never have been enough without the example of our power. In the absence of sustained military commitments, strategic engagement and repeated sacrifice, there was nothing guaranteed about the victory of our ideas. We need to remember that truth as we survey the world today. Not since the worst days of the Cold War, perhaps not since the 1930s, have we faced such a combination of threats to our freedom and prosperity, to our very existence. A touching faith in the supposed universality of our ideals and the inevitable rightness of our cause won’t save us. A modern de facto alliance of tyrannies—we might call it an axis of evil opportunism—advances across the globe. China, Russia, Iran—
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Henry Kissinger on Power and Morality AA
By Walter Russell Meade – Kissinger understood something that too many Americans, on the left and right, find difficult to grasp: Power and morality aren’t opposites. Rather, power is the platform that makes moral action possible for a state. And morality isn’t a set of rules and laws that states are expected to obey. Rather, in international relations, morality involves creating an order that prevents the anarchy and slaughter of great-power warfare. Such an order gains legitimacy not by its perfect adherence to a religious or secular moral code, but by its ability to preserve values and conditions that allow civilizations, and the human beings who inhabit them, to flourish.
Higher Ed Has Become a Threat to America AA
By John Ellis – Our corrupt, radical universities feed every scourge from censorship and crime to antisemitism. America faces a formidable range of calamities: crime out of control, borders in chaos by design, children poorly educated while sexualized and politicized against parental opposition, unconstitutional censorship, a press that does government PR rather than oversight, our institutions and corporations debased in the name of “diversity, equity and inclusion”—and more. To these has been added an outbreak of virulent antisemitism. Every one of these degradations can be traced wholly or in large part to a single source: the corruption of higher education by radical political activists.
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Isolationism Makes a Perilous Moment More So A
By Paul A. Gigot – The relevant questions are: How did we get here? And what to do about it? The answer to the first question is that we forgot the lesson of history. One of my military mentors was Andy Marshall, the legendary Pentagon strategist, who liked to say that peace is best understood as an interlude between wars. Robert Gates issued a similar warning as he retired as defense secretary in 2011 when he said that, when wars end, the U.S. always makes the mistake of drawing down defenses and leaving ourselves vulnerable. We ignored him. So what do we do about it? The obvious initial answer is to spend more on defense, and soon. But that is the easy part; we know the policy solution. The harder issue is finding the political will to do it, while persuading adversaries that we are credible enough to restore American deterrence. As we have learned in Ukraine and now in the Middle East, U.S. deterrence has faded. And the world’s rogues are on the march.
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Dostoevsky Knew: It Can Happen Here AA
By Gary Saul Morson – Cruelty often thrives among the sophisticated. Dostoevsky recalls the French terror, when people were humiliated and murdered in the name of the highest principle…. during the Stalinist terrors millions were routinely tortured … and that during the collectivization of agriculture, millions more were deliberately starved to death, with young Bolshevik idealists brought in to enforce the famine…. In the West, intellectuals justified such behavior because it was done in the name of socialism …Dostoevsky adds that there is no need to resort to examples from the past because the same dynamic can occur in any place at any time that allows the dark side of human nature to show itself, clad in the language of whatever passes for progressive and enlightened. “Believe me, the most complete aberration of human hearts and minds is always possible.”
How China Could Turn Crisis to Catastrophe A
By Walter Russell Mead – A war over Taiwan would devastate the economies of both Asia and the globe….the most important international development on President Biden’s watch has been the erosion of America’s deterrence. The war in Ukraine and the escalating chaos and bloodshed across the Middle East demonstrate the human and economic costs when American power and policy no longer hold revisionist powers in check. Washington’s attention is understandably fixed on the threat of a wider Middle East war…. But if the erosion of America’s deterrent power leads China and North Korea to launch wars in the Far East, it would be a greater catastrophe by orders of magnitude.
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A World Without American Deterrence A
By Walter Russell Mead – Why are so many actors challenging American power in so many parts of the world? Because the U.S. is losing its power to deter….the erosion of deterrence usually begins gradually and ends suddenly. Emboldened by American failures to respond effectively (as when Mr. Putin invaded Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014, when President Obama failed to enforce his “red line” in Syria, or when China built and militarized artificial islands in the South China Sea), our adversaries gradually lost their inhibitions and dared to challenge us more directly in more damaging ways.
The Democrats’ Refounding of America AA
By Christopher Caldwell – …In this view, the civil rights movement wasn’t just a reform but a refounding….The real political legacy of the 1960s comes from the Civil Rights Act of 1964….…The new law cut constitutional corners, constraining freedom of association, … drawing the federal government into the running of local elections. It opened the door to new kinds of lawsuits: The U.S. attorney general, for instance, could now file discrimination suits against local school districts. It imposed a degree of federal management on all institutions that received federal money. And it created a vast investigative infrastructure through the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission…
Is Lincoln Speaking to us? AA
By John Walters – By and large, we do not believe that there are individuals with great ruling talent who “thirst and burn” to shatter the existing order for the sake of dominating others … a fundamentally different type of human being: animals of prey, a profoundly different human type from the rest of us. …Is Lincoln’s warning grounded in a timeless truth?… We need only think of Stalin, Mao, and, of course, Hitler. Can we learn from this terrible history?…Specifically, are Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping just such individuals?….they now largely control the levers of power and use that power in a brutal and unified manner. …they seek to shatter the existing order and bring the world around them under their domination.
100 Years of Communism—and 100 Million Dead AA
By David Satter – The Bolshevik coup had two consequences. In countries where communism came to hold sway, it hollowed out society’s moral core, degrading the individual and turning him into a cog in the machinery of the state. Communists committed murder on such a scale as to all but eliminate the value of life and to destroy the individual conscience in survivors….The Bolshevik plague that began in Russia was the greatest catastrophe in human history… it …would kill millions and inflict a near-fatal wound on Western civilization… In the West, communism inverted society’s understanding of the source of its values, creating political confusion that persists to this day…
Continue Reading 100 Years of Communism—and 100 Million Dead AA
The Scary Math Behind the World’s Safest Assets B
By Spencer Jakab – Say you added just 1 percentage point to the average interest rate in the CBO’s forecast …That would result in an additional $3.5 trillion in federal debt by 2033. The government’s annual interest bill alone would then be about $2 trillion. For perspective, individual income taxes are set to bring in only $2.5 trillion this year.
Compound interest has a way of quickly making a bad situation worse—the sort of vicious spiral that has caused investors to flee countries…
Continue Reading The Scary Math Behind the World’s Safest Assets B
Florida’s Education Triumph A
By Scott Yenor and Anna Miller – Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s antiwoke education agenda has drawn national attention, but equally important and far less noticed is how Mr. DeSantis advanced new educational standards. A pedagogical revolution is afoot in the Sunshine State, which could serve as a blueprint for states across the country.
Florida’s education reformers understand that antiwoke rhetoric alone is insufficient. A vision for education excellence must displace underperforming K-12 institutions. Florida has passed universal education savings accounts, which give families access to public per pupil funds for tuition to private or classical schools, school supplies and home-schooling aid.
So far, Florida has introduced new standards in English, language arts, math, social studies, civics and health education. The English standards, for instance, are knowledge-based, rather than skills-based. They center on the great books of Western civilization
‘The Gulag Archipelago’: An Epic of True Evil AA
By Gary Saul Morson – How was such evil possible? … but those who commit the greatest harm think of themselves as good. Before interrogators could torture prisoners they knew were innocent, they had to discover a justification for their actions. Shakespeare’s villains …had no ideology,” nothing to compare with Marxism-Leninism’s “scientific” and infallible explanations of life and ethics. “Ideology—that is what . . . gives the evil-doer the necessary steadfastness and determination . . . the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good . . . in his own and others’ eyes.”
Continue Reading ‘The Gulag Archipelago’: An Epic of True Evil AA
Higher Ed and the Fragmentation of America A
By Orrin Hatch – …Somewhere between the rise of cable news and social media, our shared sense of reality splintered. We live in an era of endless political narratives, in which the phrase “my truth” is supposed to be taken seriously. .. Americans today cannot agree on the existence of facts, let alone what the facts are….
This article is included to draw attention to the grave problem of the left’s domination of higher education and its profound influence on our culture, our politics, and our society in ways that threaten our future…
Continue Reading Higher Ed and the Fragmentation of America A
Opening Our Borders Would Overwhelm America A
By Dave Seminara – Rolling surveys conducted by Gallup … estimated that 640 million people wanted to emigrate, with the U.S. being the desired destination for 150 million. …If the U.S. loosened visa restrictions… we’d see the largest mass movement in human history. It would be an epic economic and environmental catastrophe.
Continue Reading Opening Our Borders Would Overwhelm America A
For Saner Politics Try Strong Parties AA
By Gerald F. Seib – Today, the movement to weaken the national party structures that began in 1968 has reached its logical result: The power of the two national party organizations has declined so dramatically that they sometimes appear to be bystanders to a political system in which they were once central actors. This trend… is now contributing to the polarization and dysfunction of America’s political system. The decline of party organizations has opened the way for the rise of more extreme voices and, crucially, turned much of the financing of campaigns over to less-accountable players. The extremes of left and right have been strengthened …
Be Afraid of Nuclear War, Not Climate Change A
By Bjorn Lomborg – … the global elite has an unhealthy obsession with climate change…. First, it has distracted the Western world from real geopolitical threats. …the United Nations…whose main purpose is ensuring world peace—was focused instead on “climate catastrophe,” … This at a time when nuclear weapons are posing the biggest risk of literal mutually assured destruction in half a century….Second, the narrow focus on immediate climate objectives undermines future prosperity…the best economic estimates … all show that the total impact of unmitigated climate change—would be … less than a 4% hit to global GDP by the end of the century.
Continue Reading Be Afraid of Nuclear War, Not Climate Change A
A New American Grand Strategy to Counter Russia and China A
By John Bolton – First, Washington and its allies must immediately increase defense budgets to Reagan-era levels relative to gross domestic product and sustain such spending for the foreseeable future. Federal budgets need substantial reductions to eliminate deficits and shrink the national debt, so higher military spending necessitates even greater reductions domestically. So be it. Neither the obese welfare state nor massive income-redistribution schemes protect us from foreign adversaries. Higher levels of economic growth, freed from crushing tax and regulatory burdens, will underlie the necessary military buildup.
Continue Reading A New American Grand Strategy to Counter Russia and China A
Government Policies, Not Low Rates, Are Driving Inflation A
By David Malpass – The Fed’s bond purchases make matters worse by enabling Washington’s fiscal irresponsibility.
The Federal Reserve’s monetary policy is broken. Normalization of interest rates has been needed for years to allow markets, not regulators, to allocate capital. But with interest rates at 5.5% and the dollar strong, the inflation battle must shift to the problem of government spending and regulation. The Fed’s silence on the fiscal and regulatory roots of this inflation crisis, and its insistence on using an antiquated inflation model that blames growth and jobs for price hikes, risks an even weaker U.S. economy.
Continue Reading Government Policies, Not Low Rates, Are Driving Inflation A
DEI at Law Schools Could Bring Down America A
By Tunku Varadarajan and Ilya Shipiro – … The threat to ‘dismantle existing structures’ is an idle one in English class. But in legal education it targets individual rights and equal treatment under the Constitution.… If you read critical legal studies, of which critical race theory is a subset, you’ll read about the need to ‘fundamentally dismantle existing structures,’ to ‘change the way social hierarchies operate.’ . . . The goal is to fundamentally change the way that American society operates”….
Continue Reading DEI at Law Schools Could Bring Down America A
Can Politics Get Better When Higher Education Keeps Getting Worse? A
By John Ellis – Only a few years ago, several well-established features of the current political landscape were too absurd to be taken seriously. Defunding the police was a ridiculous idea; critical race theory would be a giant step backward in in race relations; leftist radicalism was a fringe element of the Democratic Party. Suddenly all have gone mainstream….Only a short while ago most Americans would have been appalled to find that almost half of voters were foolish enough to want a lawless society, accept the teaching of racial hatred to children, and embrace radical leftist ideology.
Continue Reading Can Politics Get Better When Higher Education Keeps Getting Worse? A
The FDIC Has a Proven Way to Avoid Moral Hazard A
By William M. Isaac – Instead, the FDIC should have turned to its 1982 innovation: the modified deposit payoff. This would ameliorate the damage a bank failure inflicts on the economy without creating the moral hazard accompanying a 100% guarantee. Uninsured money that would otherwise sit idle for years at the failed bank receivership would be returned promptly to the local marketplace to support economic growth.
Continue Reading The FDIC Has a Proven Way to Avoid Moral Hazard A
America’s Got Talent, but Not Nearly Enough B
By Edward Conard – If innovation is the primary driver of growth, and the most productive workers are the primary drivers of innovation, doubling the number of workers who currently represent the top 5% of America’s talent could double the U.S. growth rate. America has 125 million full-time workers, so the top 5% is just over six million. The U.S. currently issues a million green cards a year. By targeting the most talented would-be immigrants, the U.S. could double its high-productivity pool in short order.
Continue Reading America’s Got Talent, but Not Nearly Enough B
Identity Politics Could Kill America’s Scientific Edge A
By Sadanand Dhume – China leads the U.S. in research on 37 of 44 critical technologies, ,,.Given this challenge, you might imagine that America would re-emphasize the principles of objectivity and merit that made it the world’s leading scientific innovator. You would be mistaken. …. Ironically, scientists in communist China need to care less about ideology than their American counterparts. In the U.S., the National Institutes of Health requires some prospective researchers to demonstrate “a strong commitment to promoting diversity and inclusive excellence” in order to receive funding”.
Continue Reading Identity Politics Could Kill America’s Scientific Edge A
The New Moral Order Is Already Crumbling B
By Gerard Baker – The new moral order our secularist elites have been busy constructing since the end of the Cold War is collapsing around them. Over the past 30 years, the values of Judeo-Christian belief that had inspired and sustained Western civilization and culture for centuries have been steadily replaced in a moral, cultural and political revolution of the postmodern ascendancy. But the contradictions and implausibilities inherent in this successor creed have been increasingly exposed, …. This new edifice has been built around three principal pillars: First, the ethical primacy of global obligation over national self-interest, in economic and geopolitical terms, but most consequentially in a rejection of the morality of national borders and an embrace of something like open-door immigration. Second, a quasi-biblical belief in climate catastrophism, in which man’s essential energy-consuming sinfulness can be expiated only by massive sacrifice of economic progress. Third, a wholesale cultural self-cancellation in which the virtues, values and historic achievements of traditional civilization are rejected…
Biden’s Plan for an Entitlement Society B
By John F. Cogan and Daniel L. Heil – The federal government’s system of entitlements is the largest money-shuffling machine in human history, and President Biden intends to make it a lot bigger. His American Families Plan—which he recently attempted to tie to a bipartisan infrastructure deal—proposes to extend the reach of federal entitlements to 21 million additional Americans, the largest expansion since Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society.
For the first time in U.S. history…more than half of working-age households would be on the entitlement rolls if the plan were enacted in its current form. Contrary to Mr. Biden’s assertion that his plan “doesn’t add a single penny to our deficits,” his plan would add more than $1 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.
It’s the Entitlements, Stupid A
By The Editorial Board – The Wall Street Journal – Sen. Joe Manchin’s public support Sunday for at least $2 trillion in new spending in a partisan budget bill is a huge win for the political left. This means a giant tax-and-spend bill this year is likely, and the biggest expansion of the entitlement state since the 1960s is now possible.
The entitlements are by far the biggest long-term economic threat from the Biden agenda. Tax increases can be repealed by a future Congress. Spending on infrastructure will slow as funding falls. The courts may block his racial preferences. But entitlements that spend automatically based on eligibility are nearly impossible to repeal, or even reform, and they represent a huge tax-and-spend wedge far into the future.
The media won’t talk about this, and Republicans are so far missing in action. But Americans need to understand the stakes.
Entitlements Always Grow and Grow A
By John F. Cogan – The seven-decade-long growth of entitlements and the pandemic response are the product of expansionary forces that operate on Congress regardless of who is in charge. Throughout history, the most potent force has been the equally worthy claim. The claim originates from a well-meaning impulse to treat all similarly situated persons equally under the law. Here’s how it works. When first enacted, entitlement benefits are usually confined to a narrow group of worthy individuals. As time passes, groups of excluded individuals claim that they are no less deserving of aid. Pressure is brought by, or on behalf of, these excluded groups to expand eligibility rules. Eventually, Congress acquiesces. But the broadening of eligibility rules only brings another group of claimants closer to the eligibility boundary lines, and the pressure to relax qualifying rules begins again. The process of liberalization repeats itself until the entitlement program’s original limited goals are no longer recognizable.
Income Equality, Not Inequality, Is the Problem A
By Phil Gramm and John Early – Real government transfer payments to the bottom 20% of household earners surged by 269% between 1967 and 2017, while middle-income households saw their real earnings after taxes rise by only 154% during the same period. That has largely equalized the income of the bottom 60% of Americans. This government-created equality has caused the labor-force participation rate to collapse among working-age people in low-income households and unleashed a populist realignment that is unraveling the coalition that has dominated American politics since the 1930s.
Continue Reading Income Equality, Not Inequality, Is the Problem A
Incredible Shrinking Income Inequality A
By Phil Gramm and John Early – The refrain is all too familiar: Widening income inequality is a fatal flaw in capitalism and an “existential” threat to democracy. From 1967 to 2017, income inequality in the U.S. spiked 21.4%, and everyone from U.S. senators to the pope says it’s an urgent problem. Yet the data upon which claims about income inequality are based are profoundly flawed.
We have shown on these pages that Census Bureau income data fail to count two-thirds of all government transfer payments—including Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and some 100 other government transfer payments—as income to the recipients. Furthermore, census data fail to count taxes paid as income lost to the taxpayer. When official government data are used to correct these deficiencies—when income is defined the way people actually define it—“income inequality” is reduced dramatically.
Biden’s Cradle-to-Grave Government B
By The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal – The progressive hits keep coming from the Biden Administration, and the latest is the $1.8 trillion American Families Plan introduced in broad strokes on Wednesday. It’s more accurate to call this the plan to make the middle class dependent on government from cradle to grave. The government will tell you sometime later, after you’re hooked to the state, how it will force you to pay for it.
Rising Crime Rates Are a Policy Choice B
By William P. Barr – Progressives can’t solve the problem because they won’t abandon the practices that cause it. The violent crime surge was preventable. It was caused by progressive politicians reverting to the same reckless revolving-door policies that during the 1960s and ’70s produced the greatest tsunami of violent crime in American history. We reversed that earlier crime wave with the tough anticrime measures adopted during the Reagan-Bush era. We can stop this one as well. Studies have repeatedly shown that most predatory crime is committed by a small, hard-core group of habitual offenders. They are a tiny fraction of the population…
What the Child Poverty Rate Is Missing AA
By Phil Gramm and John Early – The Census Bureau fails to count two-thirds of all government transfer payments to households in the income numbers it uses to calculate not only poverty levels but also income inequality and income growth. In addition to not counting refundable tax credits, which are paid by checks from the U.S. Treasury, the official Census Bureau measure doesn’t count food stamps, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, rent subsidies, energy subsidies and health-insurance subsidies under the Affordable Care Act. In total, benefits provided in more than 100 other federal, state and local transfer payments aren’t counted by the Census Bureau as income to the recipients. If the Census Bureau had included the missing $1.9 trillion in transfer payments, child poverty would have been only 3.2% in 2017, compared with the official rate of 17.5%. Government transfer payments that were distributed in 2017 had already cut child poverty by 82%.
Containment Can Work Against China, Too A
By Hal Brands – To succeed against a rising China, the U.S. must relearn the lessons of containment. Containment yielded an epochal U.S. victory because it was well-suited to long-term rivalry—the very quality that makes it relevant today.
Outdated Nuclear Treaties Heighten the Risk of Nuclear War B
By Franklin C. Miller – U.S. policy makers have lost sight of the crucial link between arms control and deterrence. U.S. nuclear deterrence policy and U.S. nuclear arms-control policy have become dangerously disconnected.
Longstanding deterrence policy requires that the U.S. have sufficient capacity to target what potential enemy leaders value most. Arms control is supposed to augment deterrence by limiting, and if possible reducing, the threats while allowing the U.S. to deploy a force that deters an attack on America or our allies. The policies were tightly linked throughout the closing decades of the Cold War, providing the U.S. and its allies with a credible deterrent …
Continue Reading Outdated Nuclear Treaties Heighten the Risk of Nuclear War B
Ex-Liberal Fred Siegel Saw New York Fall and Rise – Steven Malanga A
By Steven Malanga – As a New Yorker, Siegel had witnessed the city’s rapid deterioration under … a vast expansion of crime and social disorder. Siegel and other conservative intellectuals at the Manhattan Institute argued that the sharp rise in urban chaos wasn’t inevitable or irreversible…In fact, disorder was a choice. By cutting police and sanitation budgets to boost welfare spending, …The worse things got, the more the city invested in addressing the supposed underlying causes of crime rather than re-establishing order. Siegel … called this “rewarding failure.”…The “riot ideology” that Fred Siegel described in his 1997 book, “The Future Once Happened Here,” played a significant role in the decline of America’s cities in the 1970s and ’80s. Siegel, who died Sunday at 78, wrote that the riot ideology rested on the assumption that “the sins of racism” justified violence and criminality—and that only federal spending could solve those problems.
Continue Reading Ex-Liberal Fred Siegel Saw New York Fall and Rise – Steven Malanga A
The Future of War Has Come in Ukraine: Drone Swarms B
By Eric Schmidt – The innovations that have led to Kyiv’s remarkable successes against Russia will change combat dramatically. My most recent trip to Ukraine revealed a burgeoning military reality: The future of war will be dictated and waged by drones.
Continue Reading The Future of War Has Come in Ukraine: Drone Swarms B
The Economic and Human Costs of Protecting Criminals B
By Jason L. Riley – A 2021 paper published by the University of Chicago’s Journal of Law and Economics put annual spending on policing and corrections at about $250 billion. Meanwhile, a study released the same year by the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation “conservatively estimated” that the yearly cost of personal and property crimes in the U.S. is $2.6 trillion. By that comparison, it’s hard to conclude that we spend too much money on law enforcement. What’s even harder is putting a price on the psychic burden of crime—the constant fear that you or a loved one will become a victim
Continue Reading The Economic and Human Costs of Protecting Criminals B
Why China Is Winning the War for High Tech B
By Arthur Herman – The story told how China’s Zuchongzhi programmable quantum computer had surpassed Google’s best quantum computer in solving the kind of complex problem that would stump even the fastest supercomputers, such as factorizing large numbers. The announcement is one more indication that China is on track to achieve what every cybersecurity expert fears, and every politician outside Beijing should fear: the creation of a large-scale quantum computer that is able to break into every public encryption system currently in existence.
Continue Reading Why China Is Winning the War for High Tech B
The Coming War Over Taiwan B
By Hal Brands and Michael Beckley – The U.S. is running out of time to prevent a cataclysmic war in the Western Pacific. While the world has been focused on Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Ukraine, Xi Jinping appears to be preparing for an even more consequential onslaught against Taiwan. Mr. Xi’s China is fueled by a dangerous mix of strength and weakness: Faced with profound economic, demographic and strategic problems, it will be tempted to use its burgeoning military power to transform the existing order while it still has the opportunity.
On Marriage, an Economist Bravely States the Obvious B
By Jason L. Riley – George Gilder wrote about the importance of the nuclear family in “Sexual Suicide” (1973) and “Men and Marriage” (1986). Charles Murray, who had touched on it in his landmark study, “Losing Ground” (1984), made similar arguments in “Coming Apart” (2012). In 1994 David Blankenhorn published “Fatherless America,” and 1996 brought David Popenoe’s “Life Without Father: Compelling New Evidence That Fatherhood and Marriage Are Indispensable for the Good of Children and Society.”
Other books that cover the same ground as Ms. Kearney include Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher’s “The Case for Marriage: Why Married People Are Happier, Healthier and Better Off Financially”; James Q. Wilson’s “The Marriage Problem: How Our Culture Has Weakened Families”; Kay Hymowitz’s “Marriage and Caste in America: Separate and Unequal Families in a Post-Marital Age”; and Ralph Richard Banks’s “Is Marriage for White People? How the African American Marriage Decline Affects Everyone.”
Continue Reading On Marriage, an Economist Bravely States the Obvious B
Defend America’s History—and Retake Its Institutions A
By Gerard Baker – Jul 6, 2020- At the end of the 20th century, the U.S. had won World War II and the Cold War, liberated half the planet from history’s most dehumanizing ideologies, advanced a free-market capitalism that had led more humans out of poverty than any economic system ever devised, and given the world the richest bounty of… This article warns of how the effort to distort our history and the domination of the left in higher education….
Continue Reading Defend America’s History—and Retake Its Institutions A
America’s ‘Window of Maximum Danger’ B
By Kate Bachelder Odell – Russia has invaded Ukraine and threatens nuclear war, China is eyeing Taiwan, Iran holds regular military exercises with China and Russia, and North Korea just launched a missile over Japan. If that doesn’t sound ominous enough, Mike Gallagher has worse news: The U.S. is increasingly vulnerable to losing a war, “either by sitting the conflict out or through defeat in combat.”
Taiwan is a particular preoccupation. What interest do Americans have in protecting this distant island? If the Chinese subdued it, it would heighten their threat to Japan and the Philippines, which the U.S. is bound by treaty to defend. America’s friends would hedge their bets by cozying up to Beijing. More important, by seizing Taiwan’s semiconductor-manufacturing capability, Xi Jinping would “hold the rest of the world economically hostage,” Mr. Gallagher says. “All this stuff that drives people in the Midwest crazy, when Hollywood or Wall Street bows down” to the Chinese Communist Party, “you can 10-X that if Xi takes Taiwan.”
Four Nuclear States Can Ruin Your Whole Strategy A
By Matthew Kroenig – Instead of pursuing 1990s-era fantasies about reducing the role of nuclear weapons, Washington needs to understand that, for the first time since the Cold War, it is entering a long-term strategic-arms competition. This time will be even more dangerous because the U.S. now faces multiple nuclear-armed rivals. America needs to strengthen its strategic forces to provide an adequate deterrent for itself and the more than 30 formal treaty allies that rely on U.S. nuclear weapons for their security. America won the last Cold War in part because it outcompeted the Soviet Union in strategic forces. Washington should remember that lesson if it doesn’t want to lose this one.
Continue Reading Four Nuclear States Can Ruin Your Whole Strategy A
A Homeric Age of Statesmanship A
By Robert D. Kaplan – Standing in contrast to these misdeeds are the records of three great Republican secretaries of state who shepherded American diplomacy during the middle and late phases of the Cold War: Henry Kissinger, George Shultz and James Baker III. Their successes were inextricable from their understanding of America as a nation-state, a worldview that put the needs of the U.S. above all else.
Handing Putin the Nuclear Advantage B
By The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal – The latest Pentagon budget request nixes the sea-launched nuclear cruise missile, or SLCM-N. This missile is considered a “tactical” nuclear weapon that has a lower yield than “strategic” options and might be used on battlefield targets. The missile could be launched from submarines or destroyers. This weapon is aimed at deterring a known risk: Russia’s up to 2,000 tactical nukes, including weapons “employable by ships, planes, and ground forces,” as the Pentagon’s 2018 Nuclear Posture Review noted. The Russian nuclear inventory includes “air-to-surface missiles, short range ballistic missiles, gravity bombs, and depth charges for medium-range bombers, tactical bombers, and naval aviation, as well as anti-ship, anti-submarine, and anti-aircraft missiles and torpedoes for surface ships and submarines,” and more.
Pivot to the Pacific? That Misses the Point B
By Andrew A. Michta – Meantime, over the past 30 years the U.S. defense industry has consolidated from 51 to five aerospace and prime defense contractors. This mismatch has led to multiyear delays for weapons and munitions deliveries to our forces and allies. As a result, our military isn’t positioned to fight simultaneous and potentially uncontrollable conflicts on the horizon—a problem that no amount of strategic finessing, rebalancing between theaters, or technological sophistication can resolve. There’s a way forward, but it will require that we invest in expanding the military and the defense industrial base.
Continue Reading Pivot to the Pacific? That Misses the Point B
Restore Reagan’s Military ‘Margin of Safety’ B
By Roger Zakheim – Today’s challenges are no doubt more complex, in part because China poses economic and security risks. Still, the solutions Reagan offered should be no less compelling. Yet 42 years later, leaders in both parties seem eager to make common cause with the detente-pushing realists, assuming that an aggressive Russia and a rising China are merely the facts of life in the 21st century. Even with a bipartisan consensus that China is America’s pre-eminent security challenge and that Russia is a dangerous adversary, many in both parties wonder whether the U.S. has the economic and political strength to prevail against China while sustaining its security leadership in Europe and the Middle East.
Continue Reading Restore Reagan’s Military ‘Margin of Safety’ B
Ukraine Is No Distraction From Asia B
By John P. Walters – Ukraine and Taiwan are on the front lines of the global struggle between freedom and tyranny. Both face larger, wealthier opponents with huge militaries that threaten to extinguish their freedom. Both also depend on America for security. As Mr. Kishida’s and Ms. Tsai’s words suggest, the outcome of the war in Ukraine will shape how the U.S. is perceived far beyond the shores of Europe. Just as America’s feckless withdrawal from Afghanistan reinforced Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine, so, too, the U.S. performance in Ukraine will affect Beijing’s calculations in the South Pacific.
China’s Alarming Nuclear Breakout A
By William Schneider Jr. – Beijing is adding warheads, missiles and subs at an alarming rate. The goal is global dominance. The military threat from Beijing is accelerating at a pace few anticipated. Recently released satellite imagery shows that China is rapidly constructing nearly 300 hardened underground silos in its western desert to house intercontinental ballistic missiles. This indicates that the Chinese have dramatically increased their operationally deployed strategic nuclear warheads beyond even what was forecast by the Defense Department a year ago.
Book Summaries
Suicide of the West
By Jonah Goldberg – …Humans have an innate moral sense. How we use it depends on the environment we grow up in and how we define morality. The desire for unity and distrust of strangers are universal human tendencies. Of all systems ever created that actually increases trust and cooperation among strangers none has been as successful as the market. The market lowers the level of distrust by letting very different peoples and cultures find common interest. …ideology flows from human nature… and refining the definition of evil is the very essence of what civilizations do
Why Nations Fail
By Daron Acemoglu and James Ronbinson – “The authors convincingly show that countries escape poverty only when they have appropriate economic institutions, especially private property and competition….countries are more likely to develop the right institutions when they have an open pluralistic political system with competition for political office, a widespread electorate, and openness to new political leaders. This intimate connection between political and economic institutions is the heart of their major contribution…” – Gary Becker
Balance
Notes on BALANCE by Glenn Hubbard & Tim Kane – The book is a review of the experience of great powers in world history and the political and economic lessons to be learned from studying them. Two thousand years ago, Rome was a stable and prosperous civilization. After 3 centuries of decline from the relentless…
The Breakdown of Higher Education
By John M. Ellis – The preface cites Bloom’s, The Closing Of The American Mind, Kimball’s, Tenured Radicals, D’Souza’s, Illiberal Education, and Ellis’s, Against Deconstruction, all warning about the dangers of a radicalized campus being created by increasingly radical professors. “This book is of a different kind, since now the campus is already radicalized. …its purpose is to explain exactly what happened and what made it possible; to describe the damage done to all levels of education, ..and to our society; …and to suggest what can be done about this educational and societal catastrophe.”
The Plot To Change America
By Mike Gonzalez – Introduction – The political purpose of identity politics is to divide the country into groups as a strategy to change America completely. Identity politics sees people’s beliefs and interests as determined by their membership in specific groups, particularly sex, race, sexual orientation, and disability status. It is an enemy of reason…
American Marxism
By Mark Levin – American Marxists call themselves progressives, democratic socialists, social activists, community activists, etc….They claim to promote economic justice, environmental justice, racial equity, gender equity…They claim the dominant culture and capitalist system are unjust, inequitable, racist and sexist…The aim is to undermine the citizenry’s confidence in the nation’s institutions and traditions, weakening the nation from within, and destroying American republicanism and capitalism.
They occupy our colleges and universities, newsrooms and social media, entertainment and boardrooms, and their ideas are increasingly influential within the Democratic Party. Their influence pervades teacher training and classroom curriculum throughout America’s public school system. They use propaganda and indoctrination, and demand conformity through cancel culture, etc. to destroy reputations and careers. They censor and ban patriotic and contrary viewpoints on social media. They attack academic freedom and intellectual diversity in higher education.
Unintended Consequences
By Edward Conard – The world of economics is deeply divided and inherently political. Advocates for stronger incentives for risk taking and those for income redistribution each work backward from their conclusions to find a set of indisputable beliefs on which to build their arguments. The economy is so complex that it is impossible to definitively isolate the effect of any one factor. This book attempts to explain how the economy works, why the U.S. has outperformed its high wage rivals, what caused the financial crisis, and what improvements might better protect our economy without damaging its growth
The Smart Society
By Peter Salins – America’s success is heavily dependent on its bedrock of political, social, and economic institutions – a free market democracy with secure personal freedoms and property rights. The real secret to its extraordinary success is human capital. …Given the indispensable role of government in generating human capital it matters a great deal how, specifically, government executes that role. Education, productivity, and immigration are a country’s human capital tripod and government has a key role to play in each. Government support of education and basic research generates enormous benefits
Why Government Fails So Often
By Peter H. Schuck – Among liberal democracies, Americans are by far the most patriotic people and America has the most robust and creative civil society. …A majority now believes that big government is the biggest future threat to the country. In the 1950’s, the vast majority of Americans trusted the federal government to do the right thing in most instances, today only a tiny minority do. Today the public views the federal government as a chronically clumsy, ineffectual and bloated giant that can’t be counted on to the do the right thing much less do it well
I Citizen
By Tony Woodlief – Two phenomena corroding self-governance and liberty are the unchecked and metastasizing agencies of the executive branch, and the shameful abdication of responsibility by our elected representatives.
The only alternative to Imperial rule from DC is self-governance within the Federalist system.
Restore the Future
By Donald H. Young – Laws are fundamental to the concept of society, and the principal differences among all societies are in the laws by which they function. By the 18th century, concepts of individual rights and laws to protect them were being developed. David Hume wrote A Treatise Of Human Nature in 1739, and John Locke in his Second Treatise On Government said that all men are endowed by a supreme being with natural rights which include life, liberty, and property and that governments are instituted for the purpose of protecting and advancing those rights
Books
Reading the Right Books
Books contain the ideas, make the arguments, and preserve the history necessary for the maintenance and perpetuation of liberty. Reading the Right Books is a practical list of thoughtful and accessible books — not the “classics” but solidly good books — recommended to provide a general framework around which the reader can build a firmer…
Conservative Colleges and Universities
Hillsdale College
Hillsdale College has highly competent scholars teaching all the main academic subjects with particular emphasis on giving its students an honest understanding of American history and its founding principles and how they have influenced its development. Hillsdale has several initiatives in addition to providing an outstanding well-rounded undergraduate college education. They include very comprehensive selection…
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Foreign Affairs