Are Markets Tyrannical? Where Christian Conservatives Are Mistaken

2023-09-05

Despite its origin in Marxist-syndicalist thought, “fascism” has long been used as a derogatory label for practically anyone on the right wing of the political spectrum. Sometimes the label is warranted, but other times it is used against those who have virtually nothing in common with fascists, such as libertarian capitalists. Progressives are quick to label any kind of economic deregulation and reduction in federal overreach as “fascist.”
Want to have a free market? Fascist. Want to get the federal government out of education? Fascist.
The history of projecting fascism’s crimes onto capitalism and capitalists is very long. The Communist International in 1935 declared fascism the result of monopoly capitalism. In the 1960s and ’70s, many Marxist intellectuals like Kurt Gossweiler and

2023-09-04

On we go, further and further into the era of post-journalism, where outlets survive not on the accuracy and honesty of their reporting but on the appeal of their narrative.
—Fred Skulthorp, The Critic
Nobody has missed that the West suffers from a credibility problem. Its institutions—by which we mean the media, government officials, academia, teachers’ unions and other joint societal “stuff” —hold less and less of our collective trust (business excepted, it seems). We don’t trust the media to convey or display the truth; we don’t trust our governments to tell the truth, to act honorably, or to steward the “commons” in good faith. Speaking of faith, the intellectual elites have broadly replaced God not with Mammon but with Gaia—many worship at the altar of St. Greta these days.
“Live Not

2023-06-07

Technocrats frequently pressure the US government to increase R and D as a strategy to upstage China. The assumption is that public R and D will lead to innovation and economic growth because research generates the science that spurs innovation. Yet the formula is mistaken, for history has shown that science often lags technology. Innovations prior to the advent of modern science in Europe occurred without crucial advancements in scientific knowledge.
But this does not discount the relevance of science since, according to economic historian Joel Mokyr, the industrial revolution in Europe did not phase out like earlier episodes of industrial progress because Europe had developed an epistemic base to fuel scientific and technical advancements. Technology can be developed without science;

2023-06-05

Here in the West, particularly in countries such as the United States and Canada, we have experienced radical political and cultural changes over the past several years, and the pace of these changes seems to have accelerated since 2020. In the minds of many, there is an almost palpable feeling that a switch has been thrown and that the relationship between citizens and the state has been permanently altered.
Perhaps the most salient revelation in the wake of these changes is a highly diminished pretense of state legitimacy in Western liberal “democracies.” In the Platonic ideal, this legitimacy flows from the citizens’ belief that their democratic government—ostensibly comprising peers and fellow citizens—effectively and uniformly administers justice and serves the needs of all citizens.