Articles
America Needs the Filibuster AA
By Ben Sasse July 19, 2026 – The filibuster prevents the dramatic pendulum swings that are the natural result of simple-majority lawmaking. Every election and every vote becomes an existential crisis in a system that no longer plods through checks and balances but instead rushes to European-style referenda…. It’s a partisan’s dream: Court packing, new states, federal takeover of state elections…Sweeping changes to nearly every aspect of national and local life….The reality is that once the dam breaks, the stakes will climb endlessly higher.
Thomas Sowell: My Experience With Artificial Intelligence
By Thomas Sowell Jan. 15, 2026 -Tragically, the AI impersonation fraud is part of a much larger and much longer lasting undermining of the very concept of truth…. If there are no serious consequences for either individuals or institutions that create frauds—whether by AI or by silencing other viewpoints—we will have no basis for settling our inevitable differences other than violence.,,,And once violence takes over, it may not matter what issues set it off, as violence and counter-violence take on a life of their own. At that point, the issue is no longer which vision will win, but whether we shall survive as a free society, or survive at all.
Continue Reading Thomas Sowell: My Experience With Artificial Intelligence
Black America Needs a Moral Rejuvenation
By Robert L. Woodson Sr. Jan. 15, 2026 – I remember growing up in the 1940s and ’50s, when black communities were sanctuaries from white violence, not danger zones for our own children. Moral discipline, faith and strong families were our first line of defense….Then came the transformation. The civil-rights movement dismantled segregation and expanded opportunity—an extraordinary achievement. But over time, leadership shifted from moral suasion to political patronage. Welfare replaced mutual aid. Bureaucrats replaced neighbors. Racial grievance replaced dignity.
A Hypersonic Missile on a Beer Budget
By Kate B. Odell June 12, 2026 – Few challenges are more consequential than the race for a cheap hypersonic missile. …The U.S. is “very far ahead, I’d say, in the high-end technology. We are woefully far behind on the speed to develop, the capacity, and the cost,” Mr. Hargis says. “Almost all wars end up in an economic exchange ratio that determines the winner”—that is, the side whose weapons are cheaper, as many Americans have now noticed in Ukraine and Iran.
Florida Leads Again on Public Unions
By The Editorial Board March 22, 2026 – The bill, SB1296, would require many unions that represent government workers in the state to get at least 50% of members to participate in any vote for recertification, then win with a majority of votes cast
A British Psychiatrist Debunks an American Racial Myth
By Jason L. Riley July 21, 2026 – The racism-explains-everything line of argument ignores or plays down cultural factors that are far more likely to be driving social inequality, as evidenced by the fact that nonblack populations in the U.S. and abroad with no history of slavery or segregation exhibit many of the same characteristics of the black underclass in America.
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Big Government Inevitably Invites Corruption AA
By Marian L. Tupy July 20, 2026 – But what makes such conduct possible in the first place? Democrats rightly blame the man….But there is another culprit. The power of the federal government, which commands the fate of every major enterprise in America. A tariff waiver can mean billions for one company and bankruptcy for its rival. An antitrust filing can erase a decade of shareholder value in an afternoon. A procurement decision can build a company, and a regulatory finding can bury one. When the government holds that much influence, officials need not even demand tribute. Tribute arrives on its own…. When government can make or break a business, businesses will invest in making friends with government, and the return on a lobbyist will exceed the return on an engineer. Corruption and discretionary power go hand in hand.
Continue Reading Big Government Inevitably Invites Corruption AA
AI Is Bound to Subvert Communism
By Cameron Berg April 13, 2026 – China seeks to control it, but the idea of freedom is baked into its training on all human knowledge. (Irrespective of how AI will affect China, it should undermine the reigning orthodoxy in American education.)
India’s Affirmative-Action Lesson for America
By Sadanand Dhume July 15, 2026 – Quotas hold the country back, even as China’s meritocracy fuels its economic advancement….“The biggest challenge for 21st-century India is how to go forward with democracy and merit,” Mr. Das said. He pointed out that India could learn from China’s “remarkable success” in recent decades at dramatically reducing poverty and becoming “a middle-class nation.” Mr. Das argued that China’s embrace of the principle of merit—in both education and leadership selection—played a large role in the country’s transformation.
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Gen Ed Is a Joke at Most Schools
By Mark Bauerlein July 14, 2026 – Getting courses included in college general-education requirements is how fringe academic departments with few majors justify their existence.
To justify its roster of professors, the department needs enrollments, which it gets by mounting “Introduction to Queer Theory,” “Fashion, Gender, and Identity,” and 62 other courses that satisfy general education requirements. Without that benefit, few students would sign up and the department would fold….Some states are beginning to do something about this problem. Utah and Iowa have sought to return gen ed to its traditional mission.
Trump Can Restore Standards to Federal Hiring
Charles Murray June 19, 2026 – Bring back an updated version of the Federal Service Entrance Examination and apply the Rule of Three for all new hires. (the “Rule of Three”…limited the hiring official to a choice among the three highest-scoring candidates—the only truly effective way to limit the role of personal preferences in hiring decisions). It won’t transform the civil service immediately, but it would dramatically improve the competence of new hires and the fairness of their selection.
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Bankruptcy and Higher Education
Todd Zywicki June 21, 2026 – The takeover of Auburn University is analogous to receivership for a struggling business.
‘The Origins of Efficiency’ Review: Rise of the Machines
By Mark Mills Oct 21 2025 – AI, similarly, has been available for decades (for specialists and in supercomputers). But now the AI ecosystem, thanks to a similar pattern of ingenious gains, is exhibiting precisely the same efficiency and scaling trajectory as the automobile more than a century ago…….all efficiency gains emerge from changes in five basic features: the inputs, the design of the process or product, the pursuit of reliably repeatable processes, the nature of how people or machines do things, and the role of volume (scale). How these features combine to improve efficiency depends on human ingenuity, imagination, tenacity and that elusive thing called “tacit knowledge” that comes from experience.
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America’s Success Against Iran May Prove a Distraction
By David H. Petraeus April 15, 2026 – War is increasingly defined by unmanned systems, artificial intelligence and mass precision. The Gulf offers useful insights, but Ukraine is the more demanding laboratory. There, the true challenges of unmanned systems at scale and the rapid emergence of autonomous capabilities are already on display….The Ukraine war involves remotely piloted systems, electronic warfare, layered air defenses and relentless adaptation. …This is industrial-scale warfare, in which success depends less on exquisite platforms than on mass, resilience and constant innovation.
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Justice Thomas: Progressives vs. the Declaration AA
By Justice Clarence Thomas- Progressivism was the first mainstream American political movement—…—to openly oppose the principles of the Declaration. Progressives strove to undo the Declaration’s commitment to equality and natural rights, both of which they denied were self-evident….But we were fortunate not to trade our Lockean bounds for the supposedly enlightened world of Hegel, Marx and their followers. Fascism—which, after all, was a national socialism—triggered wars in Europe and Asia that killed tens of millions. The socialism of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China proceeded to kill more tens of millions of their own people. This is what happens when natural rights give way to the higher good of notions of history, progress, or, as Thomas Sowell has written, the “vision of the anointed.”
Continue Reading Justice Thomas: Progressives vs. the Declaration AA
There’s a New Way of War, but Is It Evolution or Revolution? AA
By Yaroslav Trofimov July 7, 2026 – The key feature of the war between Russia and Ukraine, and likely of other major conflicts to come, is that what used to be cutting-edge weapons and technologies becomes outdated within months. “If you have an adaptive adversary, it’s the speed of iteration and the rate of learning that matter, rather than the technology per se,” Mosley added….One example of adaptability is Ukraine’s new procurement system for drones, which account for over 90% of enemy losses, electronic warfare systems and some other key weapons. It is fundamentally different from how Western militaries, with their centralized defense budgets, operate.
Continue Reading There’s a New Way of War, but Is It Evolution or Revolution? AA
Can the Left Do ‘Abundance’?
By Andy Kessler March 30, 2025 – Mr. Gilder noted, “The scarcest resource is time, which always becomes scarce as other things become abundant. It is human genius that transcends the scarcity of time.” That’s economic productivity in a nutshell….. He’s a big fan of time prices, “the one impeachable standard to compare abundance from one era to another era. How many hours does it take a typical worker to earn a set of goods and services?”…“all goods and services from the private sector are radically cheaper in time prices, while government services are the one function that has actually increased in cost in most cases.” Why am I not surprised?
Jeff Bezos Earned His Fortune
By Marian L. Tupy – May 26, 2026 – The Amazon founder’s innovations save customers 22 hours a year on average, giving them the gift of time. …But Amazon didn’t become valuable by force. It became valuable because hundreds of millions of people chose to use it. …That is capitalism: People get rich by creating something others value enough to buy.
What the Founders Didn’t Trust
By Barton Swaim – July 1, 2026 – The doctrine of original sin—and its implication that humans tend toward rank self-interest and degeneracy—animated every part of the constitutional structure the Founders erected. … Even the skeptics and deists among them, of whom there were few, happily adopted Christianity’s moral outlook. …But Hamilton, Jay and Madison aimed chiefly to convince the public that the proposed Constitution, by balancing powers against each other, mitigated man’s propensity for mischief, violence and corruption.
Scott Bessent: Hamilton Inspires Trump’s Economic Statecraft
By Scott Bessent – June 23, 2026 – Economic security begins with the capacity to build, invent, finance and scale the industries that will define the next century, among them semiconductors, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, advanced manufacturing, shipbuilding, critical minerals and pharmaceuticals. More than economic sectors, these are sources of national power. The U.S. must lead in all of them.
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Gordon S. Wood, a Historian Who Loved America
By Jack Butler – June 8, 2026 – Our revolution “did not just eliminate monarchy and create republics; it actually reconstituted what Americans meant by public or state power and brought about an entirely new kind of popular politics and a new kind of democratic officeholder.”
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Even-Handed History at the National Archives
By Michael Auslin – Jan. 5, 2026 – Now, after an eight-year, $40 million redesign of its exhibition spaces, the National Archives building is poised to become the capital’s leading venue for civics education… No other museum in Washington has comparable technology, but it is the content of the exhibits that has the potential to revitalize civics education. The museum presents different sides to important national issues, which itself is a civics lesson.
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Habits for Humanity in the Age of AI
By Ben Sasse – May 8, 2026 – America’s experiment in self-government has always depended on wisdom and self-control. These aren’t virtues that politicians or bureaucrats could ever impart. They aren’t fostered by technology’s illusion of endless consumption, infinite options and cost-free disembodiment. No, the virtues for a life well-lived are taught, modeled and practiced in the daily life of society’s smallest but most important platoons—chief among them the family.
America Needs AI That Can Do Math
By Jack D. Hidary – Feb. 16, 2026 – China will release its next five-year plan next month. These plans are important because China pours billions of dollars into, and otherwise gives favorable treatment to, the sectors targeted in these programs. The U.S. will need to use a whole new class of artificial-intelligence models—built for the world of science and math, not language and images—to stay competitive with China as it puts the pedal to the metal in critical sectors.
Government Won’t Help the AI Job Transition
By Phil Gramm and Michael Solon – Feb. 5, 2026 – Societal gains from technological change come from what the economist Joseph Schumpeter called “the wave of creative destruction.” The lost jobs and investments rendered unprofitable by new technology free up labor and capital that can be redeployed to produce new and higher-valued goods and services. The more seamlessly the transition from the old to the new, the greater the gain from the new technology. “American exceptionalism,” our ability to generate and sustain higher living standards, has come in part from developing new technology and benefiting from being the first to implement it, and in part from our ability to move labor and capital dislocated by the wave of creative destruction efficiently into higher and better uses.
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America Reclaims Its Dominance in Space
By Arthur Herman – Feb. 8, 2026 – Just two years ago, America’s longstanding dominance in space seemed under threat. China had been surging ahead for more than a decade and planned to become the world’s leading space power. …Most troubling: Beijing continues to test and develop antisatellite weapons that could cripple the GPS and other space-based systems on which the U.S. would rely in time of war. …In the past year, however, the energy and vision in the U.S. government has shifted, thanks to the Trump administration and NASA’s new administrator, Jared Isaacman. Meanwhile, Beijing is struggling to keep its space ambitions on track.
Black America Needs a Moral Rejuvenation
By Robert L. Woodson Sr. Jan. 15, 2026 – Here is the truth we must confront: Poverty doesn’t produce moral decay. Deprivation doesn’t produce depravity. It never has. We once endured conditions far worse than today without losing our moral compass. During Jim Crow—when racism was written into law—black neighborhoods were safer than today. Elders were respected. Children could walk the streets without fear. Families were intact, churches were full, and black marriage rates during the Great Depression were higher than for any other group in America. We had less money but more order. Less power, but more integrity.
Trump’s Big Opportunity in Japan
By Mike Gallagher – June 11, 2025 – During Mr. Trump’s first 100 days, the administration upgraded the status of U.S. forces in Japan, approved equipment sales for a Japanese hypersonic-missile program and explored joint production of dual-use ships…. Trade and investment, however, have become a sore spot. …A big swing on trade and technology with Japan would reward an ally that is investing aggressively in its own defense and has as much to offer the U.S. as we can offer it. It could also set the gold standard for trade deals with other countries, allowing the Trump administration to transform tactical disagreements with allies over tariffs into a strategic coalition to counter Chinese economic warfare.
See How a Chinese Attack on Taiwan Would Be Japan’s Problem
By Niharika Mandhana and Daniel Kiss – Dec. 28, 2025“The balance of power in Asia would be tipped quite decisively in favor of China should Taiwan fall into China’s hands,” said Robert Ward, Japan chair at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. …In a conflict, Taiwan’s fate would become quickly intertwined with the U.S.-Japan security alliance. To repel a full-scale attack, Taipei would need America—its main defense partner—to join the fight. To fight effectively, American forces would need Japan.
Continue Reading See How a Chinese Attack on Taiwan Would Be Japan’s Problem
The Biggest Fraud in Welfare AA
By Phil Gramm and John Early – Dec. 17, 2025 – Yet even as our economy has experienced broad-based growth, real federal welfare spending has soared by 765%, more than twice as fast as total federal spending, and now costs $1.4 trillion annually. Were that money simply doled out evenly to the 19.8 million families the government defines as poor, each household would receive more than $70,000 a year. The source of this dramatic mismatch is a fraud built into how various programs determine welfare eligibility: The government doesn’t count any refundable tax credits or benefits that aren’t paid in cash as income to the recipients.
Higher Ed Needs Receivership, Not Reform
By John Ellis – Nov. 10, 2025 – The discrepancy between what we fund the campuses for and what they are doing is enormous. Promotion of knowledge and understanding has given way to inculcation of a poisonous fringe ideology. Students are encouraged to despise their society and kept ignorant of anything that might make them think otherwise. The only viable solution is to place schools in “receivership,” a well-established procedure to reform ailing college departments. A new chairman is imposed on a department with a free hand to make whatever appointments he thinks necessary to restore the department to health. By action of lawmakers or trustees, a new president can be imposed on a campus with a mandate to return the school to its proper mission by appointing subordinate administrators, especially deans, committed to reform.
America Is the Sole Superpower Again
Arthur Herman – Jan. 14, 2026 – It happened after World War II and after the Cold War—and it is happening now. President Trump has thrust the U.S. into another “unipolar moment,” a time when a single great power dominates the globe and crafts a new world order. The strike against Iran’s nuclear sites, the cease-fire in Gaza, and the capture of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro together show that the U.S. controls the tempo and direction of world events. Which may also come to include regime change in Iran.
Jewish History Is the Antidote to Antisemitism AA
By Eric Cohen – Sept. 23, 2025 – Attacks on Jewish college students provoked a larger national debate about the radicalization of the humanities and anti-American animus that have corrupted so many universities. The confrontation between Israel and its enemies has forced the democratic nations of the world to reckon with—or self-righteously deny—the true costs of defending civilization against barbarism. …The Jews are a thermometer for the moral condition of the Western world and the health of our civic institutions.
Continue Reading Jewish History Is the Antidote to Antisemitism AA
Rediscovering Order in an Age of Populism AA – lengthy article
By Mike Pence & Ed Feulner – Summer 2025 – An existential identity crisis now grips the American right. A political movement once united by a commitment to limited government, moral order, and a robust defense of American ideals now appears fractured, its purpose clouded by populist grievances and ideological drift. The urgency of this moment demands a return to first principles, along with a reexamination of what conservatism means and what it seeks to achieve in an age marked by cultural upheaval and political polarization.
Continue Reading Rediscovering Order in an Age of Populism AA – lengthy article
America’s Exorbitant Privilege AA
By Paola Sapienza – 10 27 2025 – We can continue leveraging America’s exorbitant privilege in the global talent market, or we can retreat into protectionism that hands our competitive advantages to countries eager to welcome the talent we reject. If the United States wants to remain the world’s innovation leader, it must continue to welcome those willing to take the leap, cross oceans, and devote their lives to discovery. Our edge is selection from a larger global pool. Closing the door shrinks our innovative future. The choice is openness or stagnation. …In a globally competitive economy, the countries that win will be those that can assemble the best teams, regardless of where team members were born. The United States has spent decades building this capability. We abandon it at our peril—and we certainly shouldn’t abandon it in a way that strangles the startup ecosystem that made it possible in the first place.
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 …
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.”
The Census Defines the Poverty Rate Up AA
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.
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.
The U.S. Is Losing the Ability to Deter War With China AA
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.
Continue Reading The U.S. Is Losing the Ability to Deter War With China AA
The Pentagon Can’t Wait to Innovate AA
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.
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%.
The Trade Secret of Intellectual Trumpism AA
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.
Continue Reading The Trade Secret of Intellectual Trumpism AA
A Homeric Age of Statesmanship AA
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.
Can Politics Get Better When Higher Education Keeps Getting Worse? AA
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? AA
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.
Isolationism Makes a Perilous Moment More So AA
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.
Continue Reading Isolationism Makes a Perilous Moment More So AA
How Public Unions Took Taxpayers Hostage AA
By Fred Siegel – But there was another “rights” movement, largely overlooked, that has also had a profound effect on American life. The looming public-pension crisis that threatens to bankrupt city, county and state governments had its origins in those same years when public employees, already protected by civil-service rules, gained the right to bargain collectively.
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‘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
Irving Kristol’s Reality Principles AA
By Irving Kristol – WSJ – A great mind exposes ideological illusions, while thinking through better alternatives. The following are excerpts from essays that appeared in The Wall Street Journal by Irving Kristol, who died yesterday at age 89. An editorial on his legacy appears nearby.
Income Equality, Not Inequality, Is the Problem AA
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 AA
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…
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.
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
DEI Spells Death for the Idea of a University AA
By Matthew Spalding – Wherever this agenda is allowed to take root, free expression and academic integrity are doomed…The first object of government, Madison tells us,…is the protection of diversity in … different opinions, to be encouraged to preserve liberty. Equity is an ancient legal concept of justice …, developed over centuries of English common-law practice. …. Yet in true Orwellian fashion, they have been redefined.…Diversity is no longer a term to describe the breadth of our differences but a demand to grant privileges to purportedly oppressed identity groups. Equity assigns desirable positions based on race, sex and sexual orientation rather than character, competence and merit.
Continue Reading DEI Spells Death for the Idea of a University 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.
How to Stop Politicians From Cooking the Books AA
By John Steele Gordon – One justification for the Federal Reserve is to keep the power to print money out of the hands of politicians. A Federal Accounting Board would keep the power to cook the books out of their hands as well. Like the Fed, it would be run by a board of seven members, all professional accountants of long experience, serving 14-year terms. They could be removed only for cause. One member would be appointed chairman, serving a four-year term. The board would take over the duties of the Congressional Budget Office, and the White House Office of Management and Budget would be reduced to formulating the annual budget. The board would estimate future revenue and the costs of all legislation. It would also set the rules for how the federal books must be kept (no calling borrowed money “income”), and would determine if they are accurate and complete, as a CPA does for corporate books.
One justification for the Federal Reserve is to keep the power to print money out of the hands of politicians. A Federal Accounting Board would keep the power to cook the books out of their hands as well. Like the Fed, it would be run by a board of seven members, all professional accountants of long experience, serving 14-year terms. They could be removed only for cause. One member would be appointed chairman, serving a four-year term.
The board would take over the duties of the Congressional Budget Office, and the White House Office of Management and Budget would be reduced to formulating the annual budget. The board would estimate future revenue and the costs of all legislation. It would also set the rules for how the federal books must be kept (no calling borrowed money “income”), and would determine if they are accurate and complete, as a CPA does for corporate books.
Continue Reading How to Stop Politicians From Cooking the Books AA
The World War II Lesson for DOGE AA
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.
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.
Continue Reading Higher Ed Has Become a Threat to America AA
The Partisan Bureaucracy AA
By Kimberly A, Strassel – May 11, 2021- Would the IRS violate your privacy to further Democratic policy objectives?….The lesson is that Republicans must realize that Democrats are no longer their only political foe. They face an equally potent and dangerous federal bureaucracy—committed to destroying GOP officials and propelling a liberal agenda.
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.
A World Without American Deterrence AA
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.
Congress Once Constrained Government Debt AA
By Judy Shelton – Entitlement programs have accounted for all the growth in federal spending relative to gross domestic product in the past 60 years, causing the persistent budget deficits during that period. Entitlement expenditures are determined differently from so-called discretionary programs. Spending on the latter programs is set by fixed appropriations of money. Entitlement expenditures aren’t fixed in advance but determined by the program’s level of benefits, its eligibility rules and economic factors. Jurisdiction for entitlement legislation is dispersed among more than a dozen committees in each congressional chamber….In this system, no committee is accountable for total spending. Each committee has a reason to expand its programs and resist attempts to restrain them, but none have an incentive to keep overall spending down. It’s analogous to the classic tragedy of the commons.
Continue Reading Congress Once Constrained Government Debt AA
Teach the Republic: Why Every Civics Crisis Traces Back to Teacher Preparation AA
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.
Continue Reading Teach the Republic: Why Every Civics Crisis Traces Back to Teacher Preparation AA
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.
Continue Reading Pentagon Has Two Years to Prevent World War III
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.
Continue Reading America’s Crucial First Line of Defense in the Pacific
China Is Ready to Blockade Taiwan. Here’s How.
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.
Capitalism Needs Champions
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
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.
Send Harvard’s Chinese Students Home
By Mike Gallagher – Thousands of Chinese citizens are working and studying in such labs. The U.S. hosted 1.1 million international students last year. Of those, 25% came from China. In 2022 foreign nationals (many of them Chinese) accounted for almost 40% of science doctorates. In AI specifically, nearly 40% of top-tier researchers at U.S. institutions are of Chinese origin. Beijing is aggressively cultivating American-educated and American-employed researchers via the Thousand Talents program.
Make America Solvent Again
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.
Trump’s Tariffs Are as Bad as Bidenomics
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.”
Biden Leaves His Successor a World of Disorder
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.
Continue Reading Biden Leaves His Successor a World of Disorder
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.
Elon Musk Wants to Give You Money for Nothing
By Jason L. Riley – A single unrestricted cash-transfer system that replaces the welfare state bureaucracy, the thinking goes, would be more efficient. Unfortunately, the country’s thriving poverty industry, which includes powerful lobbyists and politicians who get elected to protect it, are unlikely to take that trade. The more probable outcome is that an income guarantee would be added to the hundreds of existing entitlement programs instead of replacing them.
Continue Reading Elon Musk Wants to Give You Money for Nothing
Both Parties Can Agree on America’s Nuclear Peril
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
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.
Continue Reading Can AI and Drones Replace Soldiers and Jets?
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.”
Continue Reading Christian Brose on the Coming Revolution in Military Tech
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,…
Continue Reading The Scholar Who Saw Zohran Mamdani Coming in 2003
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.
Continue Reading Critical Race Theory Is an Inversion of History
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.
Continue Reading Ron DeSantis: Good Riddance to the U.S. Education Department
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.
Continue Reading The Public Needs Campus Viewpoint Diversity
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.
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.
Continue Reading Reflections on Lincoln 160 Years After His Murder
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
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
Trump’s Big Opportunity in Japan
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
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.
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.
Continue Reading Mitch McConnell: Liberal Bureaucrats Threaten Democracy
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.
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