Forty years ago, I reviewed Leonard Peikoff’s Ominous Parallels very negatively, and with one exception, of which the less said, the better, this proved to be the most controversial review I have ever written. Perhaps it is time for a second look. In what follows, I’ll discuss some of the book’s main points and then offer a few critical remarks.
David French, maybe National Review ’s most reliably wrong scribe, issued this gem in response to the FBI raid on Donald Trump’s residence in Florida: Imagine thinking federal police agents and lawyers will be “held accountable,” or that presidents are not above the law! Is this an afterschool special? “Let’s wait and see, folks, before we judge
What We Owe the Future by William MacAskill Basic Books, 2022; 333 pp. William MacAskill, a philosophy professor at Oxford and a leading light of the effective altruism movement, has recently been in the news owing to the frenzied and fraudulent finance of his protégé Sam Bankman-Fried, who now awaits trial. The “effective altruists” took
Yuval Noah Harari, professor of history at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, is not only a best-selling author but also a top advisor to Klaus Schwab, founder and front man of the World Economic Forum (WEF). In 2018, Harari wrote : “Unfortunately, ‘free will’ isn’t a scientific reality. It is a myth inherited from Christian theology.” And, in a 2019
I have taught economics long enough that I have made use of a variety of “trick” questions in introductory courses. I have found them, used well, to be pedagogically helpful. But not everyone agrees. Whether a question is considered a trick depends on one’s viewpoint. From a professor’s point of view, such questions are often a way of revealing
In a decent society, real justice is specific and not general. In criminal matters especially, justice should be temporal and rooted in the facts of the instant case. Greater societal concerns, along with the identity of defendant and victims (sex, race, religion, notoriety, social or economic status, etc.), simply should not be considered. This
You will not be surprised to learn that my answer is no, but what I’d like to discuss in this week’s column is an argument by an eminent philosopher that we should. Robert Hanna is an authority on Kant (Objectivist readers will already see trouble ahead), and in an article published online this month, “ Gun Crazy: A Moral Argument for Gun
Nomocratic Pluralism: Plural Values, Negative Liberty, and the Rule of Law by Kenneth B. McIntyre Palgrave Macmillan, 2021; xii + 214 pp. Kenneth McIntyre, a political theorist and historian who teaches at Sam Houston State University, addresses one of the most difficult questions in political philosophy in his excellent book. It is a question
Left Is Not Woke by Susan Neiman Polity Press, 2023; 155 pp. There is much to dislike in this book. Susan Neiman, a former philosophy professor who now heads the “Einstein Discussion Group” in Potsdam, is a socialist who has good things to say about Communist East Germany and parrots every anticapitalist cliché in the book. I have blasted some of
On February 16, 2023, President Joe Biden issued his second executive order to strengthen equity within federal agencies. Among other things, it ordered them to install equity officers and implement action plans with the superficial aim of making it easier for “underserved communities” to access federal resources. Although there is plenty of
What is the Mises Institute?
The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.