Enjoying the view from Limbo
Liberty's Labors Lost / Socialized Medicine / What is Progressivism?
by Daren Jonescu · Published July 26, 2017 · Last modified February 1, 2018
Charlie Gard’s parents, stonewalled by their government and the Euro-socialist high command for five months, their child effectively kidnapped by the State, have finally been forced to accept that it is now too late to hope that their baby might be saved. They have therefore withdrawn their application to take him to an American hospital for experimental treatment. He will soon die. There...
Socialized Medicine / What is Progressivism?
by Daren Jonescu · Published July 5, 2017 · Last modified February 1, 2018
Many important questions are raised by the case of ten-month-old Briton Charlie Gard, sentenced to death against the wishes of his parents who had raised money for a desperate last hope of life-saving treatment in America. For months, those parents fought a losing battle, all the way to the European Court of Human Rights, to invoke the human tradition of parental authority against...
Canada, the nation that brought socialized medicine to North America — i.e., that first crumbled one of freedom’s pillars, the right of self-ownership, in the modern, liberty-engendered New World — and spent the better part of sixteen years under the leadership of a Castro-loving, Maoist-sympathizing progressive pragmatist, Pierre Trudeau, is now governed nationally by a new generation of less pragmatic, more ideologically aggressive socialists. Its...
Once again, the American political center has been shifted leftward, as a Republican President and Congress have demonstrated their principled opposition to a progressive program by promising to keep half of it forever. The House has passed, and President Trump signed, what Right Scoop accurately calls an “Obamacare reform package.” Not the promised repeal, and not even a dubious “replacement,” but a mere reform...
Redshift is the astronomical phenomenon in which light-emitting objects moving away from us at speed appear red, because their receding motion lengthens the light waves reaching our eyes, which constitutes a “shift” toward the low frequency end of the color spectrum — the red end of the rainbow, if you will. For eight years, American conservatives struggled to understand why their warnings about the existential...
There are Chinese towns near the border with North Korea that send rice across the Yalu River in exchange for girls to marry. It makes sense. North Korea needs rice, because communist farming is a failure. China needs girls, after thirty years of sex-selective abortion and female infanticide. And this neat little arrangement in an obscure corner of the East holds an important...
Those who have been forcibly divested of their natural liberty by tyrants must be pitied. They have been coerced into accepting lies of security and state beneficence as paltry compensation for the loss of their birthright of a life worthy of human beings. And yet such wretchedness of external conditions, though destroying a man’s practical life, does not destroy the man. More wretched...
The primary reason it is so difficult to defend political liberty today is that freedom is a rational construct, and thus cannot be understood by the irrational. Children, or adults whose moral reasoning skills are stalled at childish levels, are unable to experience it—they literally don’t know what they are missing. This is why authoritarians of all stripes are hell-bent on producing...
President Obama says the Muslim call to prayer is “one of the prettiest sounds on earth at sunset.” Meanwhile, millions of Muslims are eager to kill, rape, or enslave you at sunset in the name of their faith. There is no contradiction here; in fact, the relationship may be causal. For we cannot understand the murderous extremism of modern Islam without considering the...
What is Progressivism? / What is The Establishment?
by Daren Jonescu · Published October 1, 2016 · Last modified October 9, 2016
Tyranny, being as endemic to the human condition as other similar privations of the human good such as ignorance, vice, or sickness, is as old as mankind. What may be new, however, is the uniquely intractable form of tyranny that is currently metastasizing throughout the world, namely the rule of an authoritarian plurality of societal parasites. Our next thousand years of darkness, if...
Follow: