Latest Posts

February 12, 2019

Is only some insensitivity wrong?

Fox News and the Washington Post reported that actor Rob Lowe came under fire last week for making a joke on Twitter that poked fun at Senator Elizabeth Warren and her claims of Native American ancestry. Continue Reading...
February 11, 2019

The false promise of an ‘ultramillionaire’ tax

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is running for president in 2020, and she has gained attention for proposing an “ultramillionaire” tax: a 2 percent tax on households with a net worth over $50 million and an additional 1 percent on households worth over $1 billion. Continue Reading...
February 11, 2019

Peter Jackson’s World War I film is superb

In 1909, the British scholar and later Nobel Peace Prize winner, Sir Norman Angell, published a short pamphlet entitled Europe’s Optical Illusion. Subsequently republished a year later as The Great Illusion, Angell argued that the economic cost of a mass war in the industrial capitalist world would be so great, that, if it happened at all, it would be momentary. Continue Reading...
February 11, 2019

Socialism, by any other name

At the end of January I had the pleasure to speak with my friend of many years Ricardo Ball about the ongoing crisis in Venezuela.  The conversation was livestreamed from the Acton Institute allowing an international audience to listen in as we discussed recent developments from the streets of Caracas. Continue Reading...
February 11, 2019

A rule of thumb for the Green New Deal

I have a couple rules of thumb that I hope help me cut through some of the noise around various policy proposals and political debates. One has to do with budgetary reform (a topic I covered at some length last week): If the plan doesn’t engage with entitlements, then it isn’t really a serious proposal. Continue Reading...
February 08, 2019

The libertine road to serfdom

The Sexual State: How Elite Ideologies Are Destroying Lives and Why The Church Was Right All Along. Jennifer Roback Morse, Ph.D. TAN Books, 2018. 406 pages. Reviewed by Rev. Ben Johnson Keen-eyed analysts have probed every ideological trend threatening liberty – from socialism and fascism to the Alt-Right – with one glaring exception: the revolt against personal responsibility. Continue Reading...