Enjoying the view from Limbo
Economic engagement with tyrants has long been proffered, by “conservatives” and “liberals” alike, as a way to moderate the tyrant’s aggression while serving your own national interests by opening up new markets. In the end, you will win short-term financial gains at the price of giving the tyrant an artificial economic, technological (aka military), and legitimacy boost he could never have achieved without...
The heirs of Frankfurt. — The American left’s intellectual strategists have long believed that the way to break the country’s resistance to progressivism was to forge ahead, with their vanguard fringes displayed in bright colors, in open defiance of the popular consensus, precisely because those fringes would be perceived by the “silent majority” as too much, too extreme, too immoderate and anti-American. The...
I see that Walter Williams, an influential and distinguished American proto-libertarian economist, professor, and political columnist, has died. A few thoughts, as they occur to me. To be an American black man and a classical liberal at the same time is to put a big X on one’s forehead and one’s life, in contemporary political and “cultural” terms. Williams followed this path, unwaveringly...
The other day, I listened to a recent Hoover Institution interview with Thomas Sowell, in which the interviewer, Peter Robinson, a milquetoast Republican type, asked Sowell to assess the presidency of Donald Trump. To be precise, he cited Sowell’s friend and fellow free market defender Walter Williams, who while criticizing Trump’s character nevertheless believes that he is “a good president,” offering as evidence...
by Daren Jonescu · Published October 16, 2018 · Last modified October 18, 2018
Recently, in reply to my post about the mainstream media’s coverage of hurricanes and other severe weather events, a great friend commented that the climate experts, with their diatribes about “unprecedented” and “historic” weather, are analogous to economists, who build their reputations on pretending to be able to explain the “unexpected” ebbs and flows of the market — as opposed to real experts...
Ideas and Reflections / What is Progressivism?
by Daren Jonescu · Published July 12, 2018 · Last modified July 9, 2018
One of my great bugaboos in conversing with my sometime allies in the American conservative movement is their all too frequent infatuation with, and deference toward, free market economic theory. Let me state this as clearly as possible. Economics in the modern form — the form into which it has evolved since, like its sisters among the “social sciences,” it detached itself from...
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