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Oct 15, 2024 | 
commentary.org | Michael Woronoff
In1947, in the wake of the Second World War, a cadre of intellectual heavyweights convened under the leadership of Friedrich Hayek in a small Swiss village near Montreux. The 39 attendees included many of the leading economic thinkers of the time, among them Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises, and George Stigler. The gathered were greatly troubled by the worldwide increase in government intervention and central planning that arose following the Great Depression.
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Sep 13, 2024 | 
commentary.org | Flagg Taylor |John Podhoretz |Christine Rosen |Michael Woronoff
Nobody who is interested in writing about liberty can avoid Abraham Lincoln’s famous line on the topic: “The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty.” But why should this be so? The difficulty may have to do with a related question: Is liberty one thing or many things?
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Aug 12, 2024 | 
commentary.org | Thomas Harvey |Adam White |Michael Woronoff
Thanks to the Supreme Court reform proposal he presented to the nation a week after he became the lamest of lame ducks, President Biden may finally have what he’s always wanted: grounds to compare himself credibly to Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
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Aug 12, 2024 | 
commentary.org | Adam White |Thomas Harvey |Michael Woronoff
Forty years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that judges should defer to regulators when they offer reasonable interpretations of ambiguously worded laws. As a matter of legal doctrine, the case in question—Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council—was important from the start. But for a long time, the importance of what came to be known as “Chevron deference” was limited to the world of regulatory litigators, agencies, judges, and administrative-law professors.
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Apr 12, 2024 | 
commentary.org | Brian Stewart |John Podhoretz |Christine Rosen |Michael Woronoff
Robert Frost was on to something when he advised against joining too many gangs. “Join the United Statesand join the family,” he counseled. “But not much in between unless a college.”But even so independent a spirit as Frost might have made an allowance for joining a magazine, especially one with a tradition of making valuable contributions to the battle of ideas. Martin Peretz certainly did.
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Apr 12, 2024 | 
commentary.org | Michael Rosen |John Podhoretz |Christine Rosen |Michael Woronoff
‘Lawless and mob-ocratic spirit” is how a prominent critic described the president’s aggressive populism. “It is spreading with rapid and fearful impetuosity, to the ultimate overthrow of every institution, or even moral principle.”Was this the #Resistance blasting both cannons at the former president? A card-carrying Never Trumper bemoaning the fundamental challenge to democracy presented by the MAGA movement?
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Mar 14, 2024 | 
commentary.org | Michael Woronoff |James B. Meigs
In 1848, a pair of authors published one of the most influential political pamphlets in history. They highlighted the transformative and dynamic nature of capitalism, which they noted had, in just a century, “created more massive and more colossal productive forces than ha[d] all preceding generations together.” They also emphasized the egalitarian power of free markets, observing that wherever capitalism took hold, it eliminated feudal arrangements and swept away entrenched prejudices.
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Dec 12, 2023 | 
commentary.org | Michael Woronoff |Robert Pondiscio |Naomi Riley
In1955, economics Nobel laureate Milton Friedman published his seminal essay “The Role of Government in Education,” presenting for the first time his proposal to replace the existing system of government-run schools with a voucher program. Friedman believed his school-choice plan represented a more efficient arrangement that would improve academic outcomes while providing families increased autonomy to decide where and how to educate their children.
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Oct 16, 2023 | 
commentary.org | Michael Woronoff |Brian Stewart |Noah Rothman |Christine Rosen
Thomas Sowell released his first book over a half century ago. He was 40. In September, at the age of 93, he released Social Justice Fallacies, his 48th. It is a short book, only 130 pages of text, but as is typical of Sowell, it is rigorously researched, meticulously documented, and filled with profound truths, simply stated. Sowell was born into a poor family in rural North Carolina at the beginning of the Depression. His father died before he was born.
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Oct 16, 2023 | 
commentary.org | Brian Stewart |Michael Woronoff |Noah Rothman |Christine Rosen
Atenacious debate in intellectual circles in recent years has centered on the question of whether the most pressing threat to liberal democracy comes from the illiberal right or the illiberal left. One of the more compelling exchanges on this front took place in the summer of 2020 between the liberal philosopher Yascha Mounk and the conservative historian Niall Ferguson on Mounk’s website, Persuasion.
