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Writers sometimes worry if a day will come when they have nothing more to say. As long as Paul Krugman is around, I will never have that worry. Boston University professor, Lawrence Kotlikoff has suggested that Krugman return his Nobel Prize. I hope he doesn’t. As long as someone with Krugman’s professional status gets his …
Oh, how the media love a good strike. Look at these fast-food workers and peasants standing up to the owners of capital! They aren’t going to take the oppression anymore. The suits in the boardrooms had better shape up and stop hoarding all that money. They need to give it up to the men and …
Whether you agree or not that the U.S. ought to strike Syria, there is one reason it will: Because it has to. (Indeed, the bombing may already have started by the time you read this.) Perpetual war is one of the pillars of the US economy. According to the Mercatus Center, the U.S. spends more …
Like all great historical ideas, the project of licensing journalists so that they may benefit from the First Amendment was born in a very modest place. In fact, it began in the most modest of all places: the brain of Dianne Feinstein, U.S. senator from California. The new law, which was just adopted by Congress …
The position that there need be a state is too often taken for granted. The main body of Sartwell’s book Against the State is dedicated to destroying the arguments for a state from the likes of Hobbes, Rousseau and Hegel. In fact, one thing that becomes crystal clear in reading Sartwell’s book is how bad …
Crispin Sartwell is someone you should know. He is doing important work in recovering forgotten greats in America’s anti-authoritarian tradition. Among other works, he’s put forward a lean and powerful book titled Against the State. In what follows, you’ll see why he’s my favorite living philosopher. Sartwell will take you on an intellectual tour de …
In the last several days, I’ve had three phone conversations with friends — completely normal people who have their wits about them — during which they have declined to say something for fear of government surveillance. They will be talking normally and suddenly catch themselves and divert the conversation. The topics we were discussing were …
From the moment Barack Obama, the president of the United States, arrived at this plush resort community for a family vacation after another year of hard labor for the American people, it was obvious that security was not a detail. Seventy hotel rooms had been booked for the president’s secret police (not counting those for …
Today, like most days, I fired up my computer. I read freely available information on the latest developments in technology that would, in the not too distant past, have required a drive to a library to flip through journals too numerous for me to afford. I read the latest national and global news without having …
Remember when President Obama promised back in 2009 that his health care reform plan would cut insurance premiums for the average family by $2,500? Four years later, those promised cuts have morphed into admissions of price hikes. Indeed, America’s health cost crisis shows no signs of stopping. And Obamacare will only make it worse by …