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Reckoning with Colonialism

As a moral framework for assessing regimes in an imperfect world, Nigel Biggar’s Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning has much to recommend it.
Key Founders believed that America’s future was to be a polity in which free and dynamic commerce would play a powerful role in defining society, as opposed to, say, the priorities of aristocratic or feudal societies. The “republic” side of this political economy equation is that this commercial society would operate within the context of institutions and sets of virtues that draw upon classical, religious, and moderate Enlightenment sources.
The second and final volume of a biography of Benedict XVI focuses on his place in addressing the crises shaking both the post–Vatican II Catholic Church and the West more generally.
Conservative critics of free markets are asking good questions, but their diagnosis of America’s economic challenges and proposed solutions leave much to be desired.
Today’s intra-conservative economic debates are about more than present-day economic policy. They also concern the Founding’s saliency for modern American conservatism.
The first of a projected two-volume biography of the theologian-pope underscores his thought’s consistency and how it was shaped by Germany’s twentieth-century traumas.
The leftward drift of many American business executives is driven by both dubious economic calculations and cultural and political pressures that will corrode business’s legitimate freedoms and damage the economy’s capacity to generate wealth.
We must insist on shareholder primacy if we want to hold publicly traded businesses accountable for their distinctive contribution to the common good.
The republication of Jacques Necker’s On Executive Power in Great States is an occasion to consider that eternal conundrum: how to empower but also limit the executive branch.
Sixty years after its publication in America, Wilhelm Röpke’s “A Humane Economy” remains a model for engaging classical liberal economics with conservative insights into reality.
There are good reasons to believe that industrial policy significantly undermines rather than bolsters the common good.
Carson Holloway and Bradford P. Wilson’s critique of my interpretation of Alexander Hamilton’s place vis-à-vis contemporary American nationalism makes legitimate points but also misreads important features of Hamilton’s thought and the new nationalism.
A new book systematically defends the American Founding against those who believe it was destined to end in nihilism.
Although Alexander Hamilton is regularly invoked by contemporary American nationalists to lend legitimacy to their positions, his nationalism differs significantly from theirs.
We must be clear-eyed about the long-term economic effects of expanding state intervention and temporarily freezing the economy as America battles COVID-19.
Like their forebears, those who favor market economies need to recalibrate their arguments to address new challenges—including those posed by China.
While the post-liberal right often asks good questions, many of its answers are flawed, grounded on mistaken premises, and deeply misleading.
Free markets and a limited state require a culture of liberty that says “yes” to responsibility and “no” to soft despotism.
A new book about the Great Society should give significant pause to today’s advocates for more government intervention in the economy.
The phenomenon of woke capitalism isn’t only about corporate America succumbing to progressive ideologies. It reflects deep confusion about the purpose of business and how commerce serves the common good.
Alexis de Tocqueville showed that socialism’s errors go far beyond bad economics. But his criticisms should remind today’s advocates of markets that they must promote stronger normative cases for capitalism.
Although many are dissatisfied with the Vatican’s efforts to mediate Venezuela’s political crisis, Venezuela’s Catholic Church is the one institution that has retained its integrity throughout two decades of a leftist-populist tyranny. What might this mean for a post-dictatorship Venezuela?
The choices underlying marketplace transactions are more complicated and less narrowly self-regarding than we often suppose. By returning to the full corpus of Adam Smith’s writings, we can escape economistic conceptions of human beings and enhance our understanding of how market economies actually work.
It’s an error for conservatives to see the American Founding’s emphasis on natural rights as necessarily fostering extreme individualism in contemporary America. Eighteenth-century Americans would have viewed the notion that rights could be exercised contrary to natural law as ridiculous.