I have often observed that libertarian principles can corrupt the character even of good men.  Whether that is the reason or simply personal vanity, but Hans Hoppe’s account (on VDARE) of the departure of Libertarians from the John Randolph Club, while it is filled with many intelligent and useful insights, is founded on an historical...

Life as Property There are many ways of looking at human life; some emphasize the benevolence of the Creator; others our inheritance from and similarity  to other primates.  One approach  favored by some liberals/libertarians is to treat life as property.  But if the life of a child, born or unborn, is a property or possession,...

In June 1948, our wartime ally imposed a blockade on Berlin, cutting off and condemning to death or Stalinist domination 2 million Germans, most of whom, not long before, had cheered Adolf Hitler. Harry Truman responded with the Berlin airlift, in perhaps the most magnanimous act of the Cold War. For nine months, U.S. pilots...

“Never let a crisis go to waste”—a watchword of the present administration—finds its deepest, as it were, meaning in the offshore oil rig crisis. There, the idiocy of modern politics impatiently waits discovery. We’re sure to find it. The idiocy of modern politics is that politics has less to do with solving problems than with...

Questions of life and death—abortion, contraception, in vitro fertilization, stem cell research, euthanasia, and suicide—form a fissure in the American political geography, dividing (typically) left from right, but also moral from immoral, and—all too often—sane from insane. In this discussion there will have to a few rules.  Since the goal is to discover principles of...

When does a political deal become a bribe? At the 1952 Republican National Convention, California’s favorite son, Gov. Earl Warren, released his delegation reportedly in return for Ike’s promise that he would give Warren the first open seat on the Supreme Court. In September 1953, Chief Justice Fred Vinson dropped dead of a heart attack....

Rand Paul is the epitome of the Tea Party movement.  By all accounts he is a good man who believes what he is saying.  Unfortunately, he does not know what he is saying.  His knee-jerk repetition of libertarian platitudes, while it does not constitute anything like a coherent or principled political philosophy or ideology, will...

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” That was the slogan of the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s “1984,” where Winston Smith worked ceaselessly revising the past to conform to the latest party line of Big Brother. And so we come to the battle over history books...

The question Rand Paul forces us to look squarely in the face is a sensitive one: when, in human affairs, does pragmatism trump principle? Fairly often, is the answer. It is what we learn at a Certain Age. The world has its own ways of working; nor do all the consequent results interlock in satisfying...

If Barack Obama is sincere in his policy of “no nukes in Iran—no war with Iran,” he will halt this rude dismissal of the offer Tehran just made to ship half its stockpile of uranium to Turkey. Consider what President Ahmadinejad and the Ayatollah himself have just committed to do. Iran will deliver 1,200 kilograms,...

The Supreme Court’s power has become virtually unchecked: Amending the Constitution to reverse an erroneous Supreme Court decision is nearly impossible, and Congress has proved too timid to use the other weapons the Constitution provides to check the Court, including its power to restrict the jurisdiction of the federal courts. As a result, the Supreme...

On Sunday we were on our way to church, when I remembered that I had heard on the radio that the Illinois State Police were going to make a big push to arrest drivers who had committed the greatest crime against man and God known to the modern police, that is, they had failed to...

Modern Americans are going to live forever. We must believe that; otherwise we would not rise up in spontaneous outrage whenever a stuck accelerator causes a car to crash or a surgical procedure goes awry. Science and technology have made our world not only foolproof but death-proof, or at least they would have, were it...

“A chorus of black commentators and civic leaders has begun expressing frustration over (Elena) Kagan’s hiring record as Harvard dean. From 2003 to 2009, 29 faculty members were hired: 28 were white and one was Asian American.” CNN pundit Roland Martin slammed “Kagan’s record on diversity as one that a ‘white Republican U.S. president’ would...

The New York Times’ obituary for Michael Foot, who led the Labour Party in the general election that brought Margaret Thatcher to power in 1983 and who died in March at the age of 96, quotes the following passage from a campaign speech Mr. Foot delivered that year: We are not here in this world...

This booklog is the formal inauguration of the all-new and much-promised Rockford Institute website found again at rockfordinstitute.org.  Please check out the old features—earlier discussions of the classical tradition and teaching methods—as well as the booklist and additional columns and resources that will be added on a regular basis.  Between now and Christmas, I am...

Try as I might, I was not able to avoid entirely the media coverage surrounding the anniversary of the shootings at Kent State, coverage that was particularly intense here in nearby Cleveland. I am too young to remember the shootings, but I do remember the civil trial of the National Guardsmen who fired on the...

BP’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico continues to be a lead story.  Naturally it has engendered polemics over who is responsible and a broader discussion of whether offshore drilling should be continued or even increased.  On these great issues that agitate NPR listeners and FOX watchers, I have nothing to say.  I would,...

Faisal Shahzad sought to massacre scores of fellow Americans in Times Square with a bomb made of M-88 firecrackers, non-explosive fertilizer, gasoline and alarm clocks. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to blow up a U.S. airliner over Detroit with a firebomb concealed in his underpants. Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan shot dead 13 fellow soldiers at Fort...

She’s more likely than not to win confirmation to the Supreme Court. Thus, the really big question about Elena Kagan is blunter: How and when does the United States as a whole get out from under the sway of an alien enterprise such as her university, Harvard? That the Kagan nomination positions one more Harvard...

A sentence from a recent New York Times Magazine profile clings to the mind, like lint. The profile is of Scott Brown, whose sudden ascent to the U.S. Senate fascinated America a few months back. In 2001, the story relates, when a colleague of Brown’s, a lesbian state senator in Massachusetts, “announced that she and...

As I write, it’s already been three weeks since the Academy Awards broadcast on March 7, and I’m still surprised that the judges for Hollywood’s annual ceremony of self-love named The Hurt Locker Best Picture of 2009, awarding it six Oscars in all. The pooh-bahs of mediocrity voted for art rather than commerce, and so...

If you want to know why it isn’t a bright idea to permit homosexuals to serve openly in the military, consider the subject of “snorkeling.” That, according to The Atlantic, was one of Rep. Eric Massa’s occupation specialties as a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy. You might have heard of Mr. Massa. He quit...

How do you make $100 million per day? Goldman Sachs did it—and still does it. It even brags about it. Goldman’s net revenues for 2009 were over $45 billion. Most of this—$34.37 billion—came from trading. During the second and third quarters of 2009, Goldman made over $100 million per day on 82 out of 130...

The Little Picture—the picture of what’s happening right this minute—is what you get from the media, and that’s to be expected. But the Little Picture has to fit inside a bigger one for news consumers rightly to appraise all the stakes and angles. The news of the ominous oil slick from the offshore rig explosion...

Gordon Brown may have torpedoed his last chance to be prime minister in his own right when, in the privacy of his limo, he called 66-year-old Gillian Duffy that “bigoted woman.” What had widow Duffy done to deserve the slur? After taking the Labor Party leader to task for several minutes, Mrs. Duffy raised the...

In reaffirming the rule of law and giving local support to national sovereignty, Arizona has taken a bold, perhaps dangerous step.  How it will end, I do not know.  Much depends on the will of the electorate and the political class that is supposed to represent the people.  The predictable backlash from the Latino community...

(good for putting down right-wing bigots at cocktail parties or in the classroom) Taking off your shoes at the airport is patriotic and makes you safer. If college athletes fail academically it is obviously society’s fault. HIV is an unfortunate virus and not caused by human behaviour. Presidents are good and do what is best...

Scarce a week goes by without some scaremongering headline about climate change, premised on apocalyptic conclusions drawn from a computer-generated climate model. Modeling lies at the heart of the whole vast climate-change industry, an industry sparked by the big government-backed computer modeling centers in the U.S. and U.K. To understand the frail connection between these...

I hold with Washington and Jefferson—it is dangerous folly for our government to get involved in conflicts among different bunches of foreigners.  But that wisdom was long ago trashed by our rulers, who imagine themselves Masters of the Universe of Global Democracy, and their court intellectuals, who imagine themselves to be  prophets when they are...

Major demonstrations are to be held in 70 cities on May 1 to protest the new Arizona law to cope with an army of half a million illegal aliens now living there. Since Gov. Jan Brewer signed that law a week ago, Arizona has been subjected to savage attack as the modern embodiment of Jim...

Increasingly, I find it impossible to read a newspaper, listen to NPR, or even to check out what my favorite columnists are opining these days.  Part of my lack of interest stems from my cultural, moral, and spiritual detachment from life in these United States.  But this personal secession is only a part of my...

What this country needs is . . . an election! Didn’t we just have one? Yes. Can’t we see through the windshield a follow-up election just down the road? Yes. None of which obviates the present point: Never in recent memory has confusion over the course of public affairs been so dense, so impenetrable. A...

With the support of 70 percent of its citizens, Arizona has ordered sheriffs and police to secure the border and remove illegal aliens, half a million of whom now reside there. Arizona acted because the U.S. government has abdicated its constitutional duty to protect the states from invasion and refuses to enforce America’s immigration laws....

A review of The Edge of Darkness (produced by GK Films, Icon Productions, and BBC Films; directed by Martin Campbell; screenplay by William Monahan and Andrew Bovell from the original television script by Troy Kennedy Martin; distributed by Warner Brothers Pictures). In The Edge of Darkness, director Martin Campbell has tried to compress the six...

Watching the finals of the Austral­ian Open was a revelation. The worthy loser, Andy Murray, praised the winner, Roger Federer, by saying that he, Murray, could cry like Roger, but as yet could not play as well. He then broke down and wept in front of thousands. The crowd loved it and cheered Andy to...

In 1960, my father attended what was then Case Institute of Technology. Even though it was the most expensive school in Ohio, he was able to pay his tuition with his summer jobs. When he graduated, mechanical engineers were in demand; American manufacturing was booming, and the jobs being offered to good young engineers generally...

Reading up for a book on the fate of democracy since Tocqueville published Democracy in America in 1835, I recently came across an excellent study, Aristocratic Liberalism: The Social and Political Thought of Jacob Burckhardt, John Stuart Mill, and Alexis de Tocqueville, by Alan S. Kahan. Professor Kahan includes these men in a group of...

Nearly a century ago, G.K. Chesterton wrote of “the modern and morbid habit of always sacrificing the normal to the abnormal.” Today the very word normal is almost taboo. Perish the thought that there is anything abnormal—let alone sinful, vicious, perverted, abominable, sick, unhealthy, or just plain wrong—about sodomy. (Unsanitary? Let’s not go there.) As...

Which presidents of the United States have done a job of work? This little survey is limited to those born in the 20th century. Before that, everybody worked. Let’s start with our present leader. He has never lifted a shovel or driven a truck or had to make a payroll. He has never grown a...

Are you puzzled and irritated by the  viciousness and falsity  of most of what is being published these days about the South and Southern history?   The beginning of all wisdom on this subject is to know that in American public discourse  and so-called scholarship there is usually no effort to understand the South, like any...

A review of The White Ribbon (produced by Canal+ and Wega Film; written and directed by Michael Haneke; distributed by Sony Pictures Classics). German director Michael Haneke loves to sneer at his middle-class patrons. In Funny Games (1997, remade in the United States in 2007) and Caché (2005), his affluent characters are shown to be...

A congressional proponent of the nation’s first federal income tax law, enacted in 1894, was, to say the least, beside himself over the wonders he and his colleagues had wrought. “The passage of this bill,” burbled Congressman David Albaugh DeArmond, “will mark the dawn of a brighter day, with more of sunshine, more of the...

The Metropolitan Opera has a new production of Bizet’s Carmen, which premiered in New York City last New Year’s Eve. I read the review by Anthony Tommasini, the New York Times’ most competent music critic, who understands singing as well as he knows operatic literature. Mr. Tommasini raved over the production, the work of the...

A recent incident at West Point involving my wife and our little daughter has given us much to ponder. The initial responses, and later silences, of the military authorities were both surprising and perplexing. I became even more reflective and pensive, however, after my own well-informed and honest and very candid West Point classmates further...

On March 23, the Associated Press published a story dealing with sexual abuse within the Roman Catholic Church to little fanfare. It noted that allegations of sexual abuse involving the Catholic Church in the United States dropped in 2009, and that most of the alleged offenders “are dead, no longer in the priesthood, removed from...

“This was a recognition of American terrorists.” That is CNN’s Roland Martin’s summary judgment of the 258,000 men and boys who fell fighting for the Confederacy in a war that cost as many American lives as World Wars I and II, Korea, Vietnam and Iraq combined. Martin reflects the hysteria that seized Obamaville on hearing...

The first issue of The New Yorker (February 21, 1925) showed on its cover a dandy in top hat, high collar, and morning suit gazing through his monocle at a butterfly. The drawing is reproduced yearly, and butterflies became a cover motif. Whatever tastes, affectations, or snobbery the artist, Rea Irvin, wanted to suggest, it...

perspective Save the Childrenby Thomas Fleming views Adopting Indecencyby William Murchison For the Childrenby Scott P. Richert news How Do You Make $100 Million Per Day?by William J. Quirk reviews Soulcraft as Leechcraftby Derek Turner [A.N. Wilson, Our Times: The Age of Elizabeth II] Parallel Livesby John Lukacs [Nicholas Thompson, The Hawk and the Dove:...