One of the first lessons in an economics class is every action has a cost. That is in stark contrast to lessons in the political arena where politicians virtually ignore cost and talk about benefits and free stuff. If we look only at the benefits of an action, policy or program, then we will do...
“Why Is All COVID-19 News Bad News?” is a working paper by Bruce Sacerdote, Ranjan Sehgal, and Molly Cook recently published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). The authors found that media coverage of COVID-19 has been much more negative in the U.S. than in international media. They found, “Ninety one percent of...
Patient rights and bioethics are impossible without truly informed consent. This fundamental concept has vanished from public view faster than paper towels and toilet paper from your grocery shelves. Informed consent matters more than ever because we are entering the most coercive era of medical tyranny in human history. If the public...
The fate of Betsy Fresse, an evangelical Christian who refused to don a gay pride shirt in accordance with instructions from her manager in a Starbucks store in New Jersey is explained with remarkable concision in a recent Reuters article: A former Starbucks Corp barista in New Jersey sued the coffee chain on Thursday, claiming she...
The Biden-Harris administration will confront “a pandemic, an economic crisis, calls for racial justice and climate change. The team being assembled will meet these challenges on Day One.” So declares the transition team of Joe Biden, to echo what he’s defined as the lead items on his presidential agenda. And if this is his agenda,...
I’ve been watching The Mandalorian lately. It’s not my favorite Western and I am not a Star Wars fanboy, but I admit that it is entertaining. The best character is Baby Yoda, an infant of an alien species with big ears, which, I am told, has no name. The interesting factoid, for the purposes of MercatorNet, is that...
When the Civil War interrupts the Christmas plans of the March sisters in Louisa May Alcott’s novel Little Women, the four lament their reduced prospects for a happy holiday. “Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,” Jo says. Many of us likely feel similarly to Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy as we reach the end of...
My daughter’s friend—I’ll call her Amanda—never wears a mask anywhere. When the clerk standing outside our local grocery store distributing free masks and hand sanitizer asks if she’d like a mask, Amanda smiles and says “No, thank you.” If he asks, “Are you sure?” she nods and says, “I don’t have to wear a mask....
(This story was originally published by Chronicles on December 7, 2010.) Over 2,400 American sailors, soldiers and airmen were killed in Pearl Harbor 69 years ago today. Had we had an equivalent of WikiLeaks back in 1941, however, the course of history could have been very different. FDR would have found it much more difficult...
The Supreme Court granted injunctive relief to houses of worship previously closed under New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s restrictions on public gatherings. Justice Neil Gorsuch chided the governor for his “color-coded executive edicts that reopen liquor stores and bike shops but shutter churches, synagogues and mosques.” This is a tremendous step toward the restoration of order...
Many families took one look at their school district’s remote or hybrid learning offerings this fall and said “no, thank you.” That’s the message gleaned from national and state-specific data on the surging number of homeschooled students this academic year. Prior to the pandemic and related school closures last spring, there were just under two...
In early August 1990, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein invaded and occupied Kuwait and declared it to be his nation’s lost 19th province. Said George H. W. Bush, “This will not stand!” Translation: Get out of Kuwait, Saddam, or we will come over there and throw you out. Six months later, after a five-week air assault...
When the COVID-19 pandemic began in March, most people never imagined the government-imposed restrictions would be as harsh and arbitrary as they have been, nor that the entire affair would drag on into the new year. Yet glimpses of hope are arriving this week, small pieces of good news we can joyfully carry throughout Advent...
Though some students have found learning at home relieves them of school’s social stresses, many others miss their teachers, classmates, and the routine of the school day. Some of the little ones have become more defiant and have reverted to bed-wetting, while many older students suffer from depression. In “The Children of Quarantine: What does...
Former President Barack Obama took a bold step the other day when he suggested that calls to defund the police might alienate a number of voters. “You lost a big audience the minute you say it,” Obama noted in a Snapchat interview, “which makes it a lot less likely that you’re actually going to get the changes...
Walter Williams loved teaching. Unlike too many other teachers today, he made it a point never to impose his opinions on his students. Those who read his syndicated newspaper columns know that he expressed his opinions boldly and unequivocally there. But not in the classroom. Walter once said he hoped...
Convinced that President Donald Trump lost his bid for reelection, the media suddenly became less hysterical. Just like that, the media, at least to some degree, rediscovered concepts such as fairness and perspective, AWOL the last four years. Two weeks after the election, New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Nicholas Kristof haltingly, grudgingly, and reluctantly,...
With widened eyes, pursed lips, and a quick intake of breath the woman muttered in whispered tones through clenched teeth, “He is such a TYRANT!” Many of us have likely seen similar displays in recent weeks… or have performed them ourselves. The fact is there have been many actions by our leaders, both elected and...
The five-week offensive by Azerbaijan against the Armenian-inhabited enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh—the Azeris’ internationally recognized territory—has ended in a clear victory for the attacker. Tens of thousands of Armenians have fled their homes in the land they call Artsakh, which they had inhabited continuously for over two millennia. This is yet another defeat of embattled Christendom...
On February 18, the Oxford Mail published an article headlined “Scientists working on a coronavirus vaccine in Oxford.” The article explained that Sarah Gilbert, a British vaccinologist and professor at the University of Oxford, was leading a team of scientists at Oxford’s Jenner Institute in rapid development of a vaccine. The article was short (less than 200 words), featured...
America on Trial: A Defense of the Founding; by Robert R. Reilly; Ignatius Press; 384 pp., $27.95 Few observers of America today would doubt that the republic is in crisis. The crisis stems from a growing skepticism over the truth and validity of the principles of the American founding. For the political left to question...
“Teaching,” said the former nun in blue jeans, as if she were instructing a room full of halfwits about something very important, “is a political act.” It was early December 1991 at Providence College, the school where I taught for 27 years, the school that I grew to love deeply, though that love, it seems, was...
The American Way of Empire: How America Won A World—But Lost Her Way; by James Kurth; Washington Books; 464 pp., $30.00 “The most important feature of an empire,” James Kurth explains in his brilliant new book: …is how it seeks to order not just its own territories but an entire world, to set the standard for the way of...
Lying is the new normal as far as our governing elite are concerned. Of course, I’m talking about the news organizations, Big Tech, “woke” billionaires, and the celebrity class of illiterate know-nothings on social media. I smelled a rat way back in 2015 when I read the opening remarks of Hillary Clinton’s address to the Women...
For 124 years, the statue of John C. Calhoun, from high upon his perch in Marion Square, kept vigil over the city of Charleston. In life as in death Calhoun was indeed a monumental figure. Even in the flesh he seemed carved out of granite. He was, without question, the finest mind and the most dedicated...
Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody, by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay (Pitchstone Publishing; 352 pp., $27.95). To understand wokeness, I often ask students to explain why they add the word “social” to “justice.” They have yet to provide a satisfactory answer. My subsequent requests for clarification...
From Sen. Elizabeth Warren to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, some of the most prominent progressive politicians in the country are pushing hard for widespread student debt cancelation. So, it’s fascinating to see a new study show that forcing taxpayers to pay down the roughly $1.5 trillion in government-held student debt is not a “progressive” policy by any stretch....
That technology giants pull the strings in the 21st century is a fact that is becoming increasingly clear. It’s hard to imagine a world without social media and online shopping, and the billionaires made rich by these enterprises likely don’t want us to do so, either. Yet the consequences of this arrangement are becoming more visible....
Richard Holbrooke was the most shameless self-promoter in Washington D.C., a town that specialized in self-promotion, as George Packer writes in Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century. He was a social climber par excellence, a sycophant who embarrassed Barack Obama with his flattery to such an extent that he was banned from the...
If America’s contested election ends in Joe Biden’s inauguration, the world will be less safe. Biden is an instinctive interventionist who has supported bad policies for decades. He was an outspoken advocate of Bill Clinton’s military interventions in the Balkans in the 1990s, and in the early 2000s he supported both the War in Afghanistan and...
Nikole Hannah-Jones of The New York Times’ “1619 Project” has explained on Twitter—which apparently doesn’t mind communicating her racist views as long as they are left-wing—why the majority of Cuban-Americans in Florida voted for Trump. It seems, according to Hannah-Jones, that the term Latino is a “contrived ethnic category” that throws together white Spaniards from Cuba with...
Prominent figures on the intellectual and political right are increasingly questioning the superiority of markets over government. In the cultural realm, that argument has a long history, with traditionalists arguing that market forces undermine morality and cause an ever-increasing vulgarization of culture and society. Libertarians agree that this is true but celebrate the outcomes, or at...
The Devil All the Time Directed by Antonio Campos ◆ Written by Paulo Campos ◆ Produced by Nine Stories Productions and Bronx Moving Co. ◆ Distributed by Netflix 1BR Directed and written by David Marmor ◆ Produced by Malevolent Films ◆ Distributed by Dark Sky Films The Prowler (1951) Directed by Joseph Losey ◆...
Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class; by Charles Murray; Twelve Books; 528 pp., $35.00 When I was a graduate student in the 1990s, the following joke elicited knowing grins even from those sympathetic to the impenetrable French postmodernist theory that was then making the rounds: Q: Have you read the new Derrida? A: Read it? I...
In the 1976 film Network, a newscaster driven to the brink of insanity by his rage exhorts his viewers to throw open the windows of their apartments and homes, and shout “I’m mad as h—, and I’m not going to take it anymore.” Within minutes, thousands of people are roaring these words into the night. In...
Ours is an age of politicization. No matter the problem, real or imagined, proposed solutions are always couched in the language of politics. No subject can be discussed without constant reference to its political ramifications. Whatever position a political leader may adopt with respect to a current “issue,” it must be judged not by its relevance...
The past months have been strange for everyone, for New Yorkers most of all. What happens when the city that never sleeps locks down? When commuters stay home, subways are deserted, and shops, restaurants, theaters, museums, libraries, schools, playgrounds, public gardens, sports arenas, churches, and concert halls are all locked? Or for that matter, what happens...
In The Politics of Prudence, Russell Kirk dismissed the notion of conservatism grounding itself in a single foundational text. Since conservatism is “neither a religion nor an ideology,” Kirk concluded it “possesses no Holy Writ and no Das Kapital to provide dogmata.” Sure, Chronicles readers can recite the political dicta of Edmund Burke, Joseph de Maistre, and John Adams. We confront life’s complexity...
At first glance, Niccolò Machiavelli’s books The Prince and Discourses on Livy seem at odds. The former is chiefly a revolutionary guide to power, reveling in a ferocious spectacle of violence. The latter is a kind of manuscript on good governance that takes ancient Rome as its subject and model. Machiavelli’s aims in The Prince are at once revolutionary and conservative....
If Israel, as is universally believed and has not been denied, was behind the assassination of Iran’s leading nuclear scientist, questions arise: Why would the Israelis kill him? And why would they do it now? The scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, it is conceded, was a leader in Iran’s nuclear bomb program, but that program was disbanded...
My strongest impression from the United States’ 2020 general election is that the process by which we record and count votes is an unholy mess, wide open to fraud. Counting was suspended for hours without explanation; great tranches of mail-in votes appeared out of nowhere; vote monitors were denied access; and the counting process continued for...
If Donald Trump’s legion of enemies had the same grace they decry him for lacking, they would have had to admit that his re-election campaign was a bravura performance. Facing the combined opposition of the media, academy, entertainment industry, permanent bureaucracy, tech monopolists, and big money generally, Donald Trump crisscrossed the country in the final few...
I am sorry, but I have to raise an alarm, the more so as I have been a subscriber to Chronicles since 1985 and know full well what to expect and require from the magazine. Bluntly put, what the heck has made you publish an unbearably long piece on an obscure and mediocre person who had been commander-in-chief...
First published in 1936 as the nation was still reeling from the Great Depression, Who Owns America? A New Declaration of Independence remains a classic of American political thought and rhetoric. A collection of 21 essays, edited by the Fugitive-Agrarian Allen Tate and historian Herbert Agar, it was intended in part as a sequel to the better-known I’ll Take My...
Most of us wouldn’t list 2020 as our best year. But you know who would? Amazon, Wal-Mart, Google, Apple, and a whole host of other big corporations who’ve seen their sales and stock prices soar amidst the pandemic. Small businesses have been pummeled by excessive and insane governmental lockdowns of the economy. Experts warn that one third...
I recently wrote about one of my favorite movies – “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” – noting that its message seems more relevant to our times than when it was first released. After penning that article, I pulled the movie out for a re-watch and found that yes, “Mr. Smith” rings even more true for our time...
In the first two decades of the century, President-elect Joe Biden’s choice for secretary of state supported U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen. He was an ever-reliable liberal interventionist. This same Antony Blinken could spend the first years of a Biden presidency helping extricate our country from the misbegotten wars he championed....
Not everyone has a Hallmark Christmas. WebMD’s article “Holiday Depression and Stress” reminds readers that while for most people the holiday season is “a fun time of the year filled with parties, celebrations, and social gatherings with family and friends,” for others the holidays can bring “sadness, self-reflection, loneliness, and anxiety.” ...
Colorado officials last week announced that several counties had moved into the “red level”—the second-highest measurement on its COVID-19 dial—and would be forced to implement new regulations on restaurants, gyms, and other parts of the economy to combat the virus. Then something remarkable happened. Weld County, a county in the northern part of the state...