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3 weeks ago | 
lawliberty.org | Richard Alan Ryerson |John Grove |John O. McGinnis |Jodi Bruhn
In front of Lexington, Massachusetts’s Town Hall is a large sign that announces, every day, the number of days until April 19, 2025, the 250th anniversary of the first battle between British Army soldiers and local militia units that began America’s War for Independence. Neither the original event’s location nor its date was entirely a surprise, either in Massachusetts or as far south as Virginia.
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3 weeks ago | 
lawliberty.org | Rachel Lu |John Grove |Jodi Bruhn |John Berlau
The Black Death marked an interesting turning point in European history. It was of course a monumental tragedy, killing as much as half of the entire population of fourteenth-century Europe, inflicting terror and suffering on an unimaginable scale. If you managed to survive it, your chances of thriving in the post-plague world were relatively good. With so much newly available land and resources, science and agriculture saw significant advances.
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3 weeks ago | 
lawliberty.org | Barry Lam |Richard Smith |Jodi Bruhn |John Berlau
It’s late winter as I write this review, and Elon Musk is on a rampage at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Stomping around like the proverbial bull in a china shop, he’s canceling contracts, firing government employees, and shutting down entire departments of the federal government. And why? Part of the reason is cost.
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4 weeks ago | 
lawliberty.org | John Grove |Jodi Bruhn |John Berlau |George Hawley
Of all the signs of spring, none is as exciting and as American as baseball’s Opening Day. Yet recently, each new season has come with fresh complaints about the sport. It’s definitely not dying as some argue. But neither is its popularity rising. Many commentators and casual fans are concerned that the sport is too “boring” for modern audiences. And while more devoted fans would probably contest that description, there is a sense that something is amiss with the way the game is currently played.
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4 weeks ago | 
lawliberty.org | Yuval Harari |John O. McGinnis |Jodi Bruhn |John Berlau
Since the Greek pre-Socratic philosopher Thales proclaimed that everything was water, ambitious theorists have sought a single element capable of explaining the physical or social world. For Karl Marx, history unfolded through the dynamics of class struggle.
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4 weeks ago | 
lawliberty.org | Michael Q. McShane |Jodi Bruhn |John Berlau |George Hawley
The passing of time has a funny way of playing with our memories. The coronavirus pandemic particularly distorted our perception, as days of monotonous isolation ran into each other, flattening weeks or months (or even years depending on where one lived). But even absent such a disorienting event, we humans tend to look back with rose-colored glasses and conflate what we know now with what we knew then.
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4 weeks ago | 
lawliberty.org | J. Bradford DeLong |James Rogers |Jodi Bruhn |John Berlau
University of California-Berkeley economic historian J. Bradford DeLong’s Slouching Toward Utopia tells the story of the breathtaking economic growth the world experienced between 1870 and 2010. While he sets his “grand narrative” against the twentieth century’s not-so-brilliant political (and military) history, it is the “forced marriage” of Friedrich Hayek’s free markets and Karl Polanyi’s social democracy that, for Delong, accounted for the progress of this century.
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1 month ago | 
lawliberty.org | Lewis Andrews |Jodi Bruhn |John Berlau |George Hawley
No matter how successfully Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) identify the waste in federal spending, their achievements will not be secure without a closer look at how Washington became so profligate in the first place.
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1 month ago | 
lawliberty.org | Thomas Savidge |Jodi Bruhn |John Berlau |George Hawley
March 25, 2025 Fights over federal spending should be a warning: state policymakers must prepare for inevitable cuts. On the afternoon of January 27, a memo from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) went out stating that there would be a temporary pause on grant, loan, and other financial assistance programs at the OMB effective 5 PM Eastern time the next day. As quickly as the memo went out, it was rescinded.
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1 month ago | 
lawliberty.org | Jodi Bruhn |John Berlau |George Hawley |Asheesh Agarwal
It’s early spring in Canada, four months after US President Donald J. Trump announced he would be imposing a 25 percent tariff on Canadian goods. A few days later, he offered to make Canada the 51st state. To say that many Canadians have not taken this well would be an understatement. A good portion of us appear to have lost our minds. Exhibit A: On February 20, a Member of Parliament introduced a petition to revoke the citizenship of tech billionaire Elon Musk, whose mother is from Saskatchewan.
