Tag Archives | Democracy

Europe’s Last Dictator

Commentary by , August 16, 2020

World News Roundup America has been very fascinated for the past few years with looking into its own navel and ignoring the rest of the world. Some years ago, I described America’s foreign policy as “Etchasketchistan,” a state in which nobody could predict any more who would be the “hawks” and who would be the […]

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Who Resists the Resistance?

Commentary by , May 1, 2019

Five Things You Need to Read Today 1. Viva la Revolución “Democratic socialism” has finally achieved its usual end-state in Venezuela: mass shootings of innocent civilians by government goons. I’ll warn you that the reporting on this has been pretty awful, and in the link I just gave, even Jake Tapper—who ought to know better—refers […]

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How Politics Works

Commentary by , April 13, 2019

Five Things You Need to Read Today Editor’s Note: I was very pleased to see my recent article, “Why I Don’t ‘Believe’ in Science,” picked up by Judith Curry, a distinguished atmospheric scientist who is skeptical of global warming—exactly the sort of person to whom I want to offer this kind of intellectual ammunition. Her […]

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Gerrymandering the Electorate

Feature Article by , February 26, 2018

The events since the Parkland shooting have convinced me that we need to change the Constitution to eliminate an ill-considered Amendment that has done more harm than good. We need to repeal the 26th Amendment and raise the voting age back to 21. That’s the opposite of what a lot of people are advocating. Seeing […]

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Five Things You Need to Read Today

Commentary by , October 29, 2017

Here’s your weekly update, for subscribers only, drawing your attention to five stories that are worth catching. This week, the main theme is the re-emergence of totalitarian Marxism. 1. It Didn’t End with Robert E. Lee It didn’t end with Confederate monuments. Of course it didn’t. Now the new iconoclasts have come for George Washington. […]

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Democratized Aristocracy

Feature Article by , June 5, 2016

Voters in Switzerland just resoundingly defeated a referendum calling for a guaranteed minimum income, a check to be sent to every Swiss citizen every month for as much as 2,500 francs, or a little over $30,000 per year. That’s a solid lower-middle-class income—for doing nothing. There are two ways of looking at this news. We […]

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Undemocratic “Democracy”

Note by , October 29, 2013

A major theme of my work—which I will be focusing on much more in the future—is the basic incompatibility of economic controls and political freedom. In short, there is no such thing as “democratic” socialism, because government control of the economy always requires taking power from the governed and giving it to an entrenched elite. […]

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A Little Rebellion Now and Then

Feature Article by , July 9, 2013

The decision by Egypt’s military to intervene and force out the country’s Islamist president has produced a lot of hand-wringing about how this is an attack on Jeffersonian democracy. The irony is that this is “democracy” in the most literal, original sense, in a way that would have been easily recognized by the Ancient Greeks […]

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