[A discussion post.] President Trump’s now-serious proposal to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities has elicited the first round of responses ranging from Philistine! to It’s about time! Both agencies were created in 1965 by President Lyndon Johnson, who said at the time: “it is necessary and […]
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Olympe de Gouges’s first-wave feminism and her The Declaration of the Rights of Woman (1791). The first two items: “1. Woman is born free and remains equal to man in rights. Social distinctions may be based only on common utility. 2. The purpose of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible
Olympe de Gouges’s 1791 declaration of women’s rights Read More »
Alt-Right philosopher Jason Reza Jorjani is taken on by hard-left philosophers at Jacobin magazine. My commentary article begins this way: Is a seismic change rumbling through Left-wing circles? In the hard-Left Jacobin magazine, two young philosophers bemoan their discovery that postmodern strategies have now been captured by the hateful and hated Alt-Right — and so in
Alt-Right versus Hard Left — Forcing a Return to the Enlightenment? Read More »
What happens to education when it is politicized? Now that we have a new administration, led by Donald Trump, and a new secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, here is an updating of a Public Choice analysis of our mixed government-private education system came to be. The following is based in part by E. G. West’s
Public Choice and our semi-functional education system Read More »
When women got the vote fully at the national level: 1893 New Zealand 1902 Australia 1906 Finland 1913 Norway 1915 Denmark 1917 Canada 1918 Austria, Germany, Poland, Russia 1919 Netherlands 1920 United States 1921 Sweden 1928 Britain, Ireland All other countries: Granted later or not yet granted. Note: Six of the fifteen are British or former British colonies; the other nine are northern European. (Also worth
Where women first got the vote and when Read More »
Yet another reason to despise the Russian experiment in socialism. After the communist revolution, the great composer Sergei Rachmaninoff went into exile, losing his home and other property to the Soviets — along with his publisher and his status in Russia as leading musician of his generation. Starting over in the West was a challenge,
How Rachmaninoff’s composing was hurt by the Soviet Union Read More »
Defeating an enemy such as politicized Islam is a multi-front battle—police, military, diplomatic, cultural, and philosophical. Any fight is triggered by short-term, local disagreements. But long-term, generalized conflicts are always about abstract principles in collision. As with neo-Nazis, Communist revolutionaries, violent environmentalists, bomb-the-government anarchists, and others—our conflicts with them are intellectual in origin. Terrorism is
How to Tame Religious Terrorists [Good Life series] Read More »
Here is a list of the 30 most polluted cities on Earth. Per country, here’s where those cities are located: India: 14 China: 6 Saudi Arabia: 3 Pakistan: 2 Iran: 2 Bangladesh: 1 Cameroon: 1 Uganda: 1 All of them are clustered in the bottom half of rankings for economic freedom. Which reminds me of
Free markets versus pollution? Read More »