Art and Culture
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Stop Tearing Down Statues. Use Them to Tell the Story of American Liberty.
“It is time that we confront our paradoxical history of personalities, beliefs, and institutions, telling a story of continued struggle to manifest a civic inheritance of individual liberty and human dignity. A struggle marked with failure, but which we hope will continue to bear fruit for the good of humankind.” ~ James L. Caton
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The Insidious Political Ends of Cancel Culture
“The problem comes when such behavior gets so pervasive that it makes any sort of desirable social fabric impossible. To those people who wish to engage in the heavy politicization, divisiveness, and domination inherent to cancel culture, I say: make sure we actually have a society left.” ~ Ethan Yang
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William Harold Hutt: A Birthday Appreciation
“Hutt was a complex thinker in a difficult time who worked to split the difference between the best world we can imagine and the best world that is feasible subject to the constraints we face in the world we actually inhabit. As Ludwig von Mises put it, “Professor Hutt’s rank among the outstanding economists of…
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The Washington Football Team Should Be Called The Candlemakers
“Bastiat laid bare the absurdity of so many arguments for protection, subsidy (for the stadium the Candlemakers would call home, for example), and regulation. The name would be a perfect homage to the never-ending stream of privilege-seeking supplicants filling the lobbies of Washington and looking for new ways to pick the pockets of their competitors,…
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The Bloodless Political Class and Its Lack of Empathy
“Power is dangerous even when not used, but deploying it brutally and pointlessly rots the soul. This is a good description of almost the entire ruling class around the world today, save a few civilized countries that never locked down.” ~ Jeffrey Tucker
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“Systemic Racism” Theory is the New Political Tribalism
“A freedom not based on race, nationality, language, or religion, but on an idea of the unique and valued individual who is at liberty to live his own life, peacefully in voluntary mutual association with others. A society that, more than any other, has done more to do away with the tribe and liberate the…
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Fear, Tyranny, and the Fairy Tale of Our Times
“Reflecting the national divisions that have only escalated since its release, it illustrates how false stories spread to infect hearts and minds as fatally as a virus. The solution is to reject these fictions and judge for ourselves. As Conall tells Maleficent, ‘I’ve made my choice. Now make yours.'” ~ Caroline Breashears
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Who Owns Leftover and Abandoned Bar Food?
“Figuring out the exact property rights isn’t worth the hassle: it’s too little and too rare to care about enforcing whatever legal right might be applicable in various jurisdictions. In practice, the ownership of leftover food is up to the social norms in the country you’re in, or even the attitude of the staff at…
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Do We Really Need More Movie Sequels? If the Market Says So, Then Yes We Do
“Studios make sequels because they expect them to be profitable. This is a good thing, though, because they are working to make Mickey and Minnie Moviegoer better off as Mickey and Minnie choose to define it according to their own preferences, values, goals, and opportunities.” ~ Art Carden
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The Lockdowns Are Killing the Arts
“Governments declared arts to be nonessential, dispensable, abolishable. It’s the biggest attack on art and beauty possibly since the iconoclasm of the 16th century, when mobs sacked churches, tore out paintings, and melted candlesticks in bonfires. Back then the motivation was to purify the world of sin. Now we think we are purifying the world…
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What the Data Say About Civil War Monuments
“The course in public memorialization of anti-slavery figures and events is at long last moving in a positive direction. It can and should be sustained, provided that the mob, now haphazardly targeting almost any form of public statuary, does not make those same monuments into additional casualties of iconoclasm.” ~ Phillip W. Magness
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The Inestimable Wisdom of Deirdre McCloskey
“Breaking down barriers not only institutionally but socially, allowing more and more people to strive for their potential is what started the engine of comprehensive economic growth. Economic and social freedom that rests not only in regulatory codes but in the hearts of men.” ~ Ethan Yang
