May 2, 2019
by Paul Kengor
I do my best to avoid The New York Times. Truly, I try not to read it. Doing so invariably ruins my day and wastes my time. It not only frustrates me but pains me. On countless thousands of occasions I’ve found myself reading a Times piece that leaves me barking at the page about [...]
July 6, 2016
by Stephen M. Krason
It is shaping up that one of the major issues this election year is going to be free trade and the international trade deals that the U.S. has negotiated over the past quarter-century. The major agreements that come to mind, which have generated so much controversy, are the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and [...]
December 1, 2009
by Mark P. Shea
For some reason, I still seem to mystify people in my views on the American political scene. Indeed, the most mysterious criticisms I get are the ones illustrated in the comments here, for instance, which say (in mixed tones of bafflement, rage, and disappointment), "How can you simultaneously be a Catholic writer who respects the [...]
September 4, 2009
by Joe Hargrave
Those of us who have argued for alternatives to individualistic capitalism and the bureaucratic welfare state are often told that we are good at pointing out problems but come up short on solutions -- it's a charge distributists hear often. Nevertheless, Pope Benedict XVI's latest encyclical, Caritas in Veritate,challenges us to overcome the "market-plus-State" model, [...]
August 31, 2009
by Ronald J. Rychlak
My family was in England for the summer while I taught a law course at Cambridge University, and one afternoon my son and I happened upon an interesting program on the radio. It was a radio "play" featuring a self-confident young woman and Kenneth Lay, the now-deceased president of Enron who masterminded the company's [...]
July 9, 2009
by Joe Hargrave
The prospects for conservatism as a political force in the United States are arguably grim. The GOP's electoral prospects may be on the verge of drying up due to demographic shifts, particularly the growth of the Hispanic vote -- the kind of shifts that, in the past, have driven major political parties into extinction. There [...]
May 18, 2009
by Joe Hargrave
Modern communitarian political thought began as an academic reaction to the publication of John Rawls's A Theory of Justice in 1971, which sought to establish liberal philosophical assumptions as universally valid. Since then communitarianism has developed as a more penetrating critique of liberalism, though it has in turn been criticized for failing to [...]
April 13, 2009
by Joe Hargrave
Pro-life Catholics fall into two camps on the issue of abortion: those who see it first and foremost as an individual moral failing, and those who consider it primarily a social moral failing. There is nothing mutually exclusive about the two positions, of course, but that isn't the problem. The real issue here [...]
March 16, 2009
by Joe Hargrave
It might surprise some to learn that the basic idea behind the "welfare state" did not originate with either Marxist revolutionaries or bleeding-heart liberals, but rather with a head of state usually identified with conservatism: Otto von Bismarck. Faced with a growing threat from the German socialist movement, in the 1880s Bismarck established four programs [...]
September 17, 2007
by Mark P. Shea
Two years ago, the mainstream media gathered in a special conclave in Rome to discuss the disastrous election to the papacy of Ratzinger the Enforcer, God's Rottweiler, the hardliner, inflexible, rigid, etc., blah blah. Some of us suggested to our television screens that the talking heads might want to wait more than a few seconds [...]