Coming to terms with the importance of free speech means coming to terms with the reality that free speech will sometimes be used for abhorrent purposes. We protect bad speech on the grounds that the alternative—censorship—is even worse. But the rise of social media as both a powerful distribution framework and disseminator of content has […]

Markets do not naturally tend toward “equilibrium.”  They are wrecking balls if not properly harnessed. High levels of debt, which can be a source of strength (by enabling higher levels of investment than could be financed otherwise), can also be a source of vulnerability if the government fails to coordinate investment, curb excess capacity, and […]

Political trends in the U.S. and United Kingdom have mirrored each other for decades—and Britain’s recent local elections (and the Hartlepool by-election) are no exception. Predictably, there has been much discussion of the stunning collapse of working-class support in areas that have long been staunchly pro-Labour and the implications for the Democratic Party across the […]

Along with his proposals to raise the U.S. corporate tax rate to 28% (President Trump cut it to 21% from 35%), President Biden has offered something up to his global counterparts that has been around for a while, but which no U.S. president had heretofore seriously contemplated: a global minimum corporate tax rate of 21%, which […]

In a non-binding concurrence, Justice Clarence Thomas (joined by no other justices), argued that social media platforms could be labeled “common carriers,” and should therefore be treated like phone companies or similar utilities. Thomas’ commentary accompanied a Monday Supreme Court order instructing a New York district court to dismiss as moot a lawsuit against former […]

Americans have seen their wages shrivel as manufacturing has been repeatedly outsourced to low-cost jurisdictions such as China, Bangladesh and Vietnam.  Much of the prevailing conventional wisdom over the past few decades has been that manufacturing is not a necessary part of a wealthy nation, that we live in a “post-industrial” world, that is, one […]

Count Germany as the latest country to abandon the market fundamentalism that has characterized economic policymaking in the West for the past 40 years. A recent piece in the Frankfurter Allgemeine featured a public call from Deutsche Bank, urging sweeping state participation in efforts to reconstruct a new car industry fit for the 21st century, […]

The COVID-19 pandemic presents an existential conundrum to the structure and principle of employer-based health care and its various supporters and dependents. The loss of a job often cuts off access to health care, adding greater weight to the challenges of dealing with this public health crisis. And this is widely exacerbated by a longstanding […]

DAILY CALLER—Marshall Auerback discusses how a principled populism that addresses working-class interests could emerge in the GOP.

“Populism” is a term that since the modern era has been generally trotted out to mean a political attitude that reflects widespread anger and resentment against powerful elites, while among stenographers for the power class, populism has been reflexively trotted out to warn against the passions and wants of the mob. Who is using that […]

The likely configuration of the new Senate represents a potential obstacle toward some of the grander Democratic Party policy visions outlined in President-elect Biden’s program.  Almost certainly, we can forget about a Green New Deal (barring the possibility of a few wind turbines and solar panels being thrown into a broader policy that emphasizes public infrastructure). […]

As President-elect Joe Biden has been announcing members of his new team, he has been equally prone to pass on the message to the rest of the world that “America is back”.  While some degree of international re-engagement is a good thing, let us hope that the new administration understands that simply reconstructing the old […]