Short answer: conspiratorial worldviews and attitudes are necessary to preserve the fiction that the United States has no ruling class. Who were and are the members of this ruling class? They are the ones who went to the well-funded secondary academies of the Northeast, such as Phillips Exeter Academy and all the many with less … [Read more…]
There is much talk and many words being spoken or written about elites, those who are destroying what was once good in the West and who have concentrated much wealth in their hands. These are the famous 1% or even 0.1% or still smaller groups of the ultra-wealthy and ultra-powerful. Some serious thinkers in academia … [Read more…]
Historical narratives will typically note that the Magna Carta was a result of struggles between an unpopular king and a group made up of secular lords and lords of the Catholic Church in England. It’s actually a pretty complicated story which played out over centuries and also had a long prologue, but the point is … [Read more…]
In March, Justin Raimondo wrote an essay, Rand Paul, Revisited, in which he quoted Garet Garrett: “There are those who have never ceased to say very earnestly, ‘Something is going to happen to the American form of government if we don’t watch out.’ These were the innocent disarmers. Their trust was in words. They had … [Read more…]
The issue of `deep states’ had drawn the attention of at least some mainstream journalists for an instant or so around February of 2014 because of a very interesting article by Mike Lofgren, a former Senate staffer; I’ll get to that article in a short while. The attention seems to have been a flash in … [Read more…]
A short while back Ralph Nader published an article, Who Owns America?, which begins: There was a time in the Depression of the 1930s when conservative thought sprang from the dire concrete reality of that terrible era, not from abstractions. They did not use the word “conservative” very often, preferring to call themselves “decentralists” or … [Read more…]
Is the invisible hand justly celebrated by Adam Smith really the hand of the pilgrim human community, of the Body of Christ forming—however imperfectly and incompletely—in this mortal realm? Yes, though the language is far from optimal and that language can lead to improper concepts regarding the Body of Christ and its relationships to human … [Read more…]
In this essay, I’ll sometimes write about the West as a whole and sometimes try to be more particular, especially in giving examples, by writing from the American viewpoint. In fact, it’s at least arguable that the current moral and social disorders of the West began in the United States. Henry James is said to … [Read more…]
Readers interested in our dysfunctional higher education system might be interested in an essay from one of the websites of Liberty Fund. I’m certainly not implying that the lower levels are functioning at even a minimal level of competence, but the issues are somewhat different though overlapping. In any case, I can’t add anything of … [Read more…]
The blog at The Independent Institute has been running short essays by John C. Goodman, the author of a recent book, Priceless: Curing the Healthcare Crisis. The latest essay is Can Entrepreneurship Be Copied? where we can read Dr. Goodman’s claim: In mathematics, Gödel’s Theorem says that no complex, axiomatic system can be both consistent … [Read more…]