The Commons

My husband and I are proud to have two very intelligent and well-educated children. Yes, every parent thinks their kids are special, but they’ve always done well in school and our family paid a great deal of money to help cultivate their minds. We sent them both to college in hopes of them having the best […]

Buried within the Democrats’ multi-trillion-dollar reconciliation package is a provision to extend the recently expanded Child Tax Credit (CTC) to undocumented immigrants. This would be a grave mistake, and I say that as both a supporter of the CTC expansion and as a proponent of more liberal immigration.

In their adoption of “progressive” agendas, both unions and corporations have ignored entirely the preferences and interests of workers. (Whether an agenda that abandons workers can rightly be called progressive is a question for another day.) Not What They Bargained For, the American Compass survey of worker attitudes, highlights the ways that the labor movement’s […]

Some people believe the American Dream is dead and the game is rigged against them. That isn’t my mindset or attitude. In order to fulfill your dreams, you must aspire to be what you desire. That is the American Dream, to me. And I think some people don’t understand what fulfilling that American Dream can […]

How Antitrust Failed Workers, by Eric A. Posner (Oxford University Press, 224 pp., $29.95) In 1776, Adam Smith made perhaps the most famous statement linking monopoly power to labor. “Masters,” he wrote in The Wealth of Nations, “are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform, combination, not to raise the […]

The Biden administration is trying to launder widespread support for emergency COVID relief into irreversible changes to the nation’s economic policy. Upon signing the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan (ARP) in March, President Biden explained that “everything in this package is designed to relieve the suffering and to meet the most urgent needs of the […]

Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam, by Vivek Ramaswamy (Center Street, 320 pp., $15.99) Vivek Ramaswamy opens his book on the perils of woke capitalism by declaring himself a traitor to his class. He’s got the perfect elite resume: Harvard undergrad, partner at a hedge fund, Yale Law School, and founder of a […]

Opposition to globalization. Efforts to weaken intellectual property protections. Pushing for municipal broadband. Calls for the National Institutes of Health to develop drugs. What do these positions have in common? They are all examples of the recent turn toward anti-corporate progressivism. This shift is defined by a fierce determination to expand government provision of goods […]

The Long Crisis: New York City and the Path to Neoliberalism, by Benjamin Holtzman (Oxford University Press, 331 pp., $34.95) New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation, by Thomas Dyja (Simon & Schuster, 523 pp., $30) New York’s four-decade success story is showing its age. Even before COVID-19 bared […]

A college degree has long been the key that unlocks success in America—the good job, the high salary, the professional networks. But many individuals reflecting on their educational experiences today conclude that their preparation for college and career was disappointing. In short, there’s a disconnect between what young people expect from education and what they […]

As a father of young children, I have been shocked by the rapid growth and impact of gender ideology within our society, reaching human resource departments in practically every major corporation and recalibrating the relationship between parents, children, and public schools, both in the realm of curriculum and in policy.

Privacy is another major casualty of the COVID-19 pandemic. Governments instituted expansive surveillance programs to enable contact tracing and corral the disease. Many of these programs are here to stay, as citizens get used to them or welcome them to avoid future quarantine and lockdowns. More generally, the pandemic accelerated our growing dependence on digital […]