Free Republic

The most fundamental problem with libertarianism is very simple: freedom, though a good thing, is simply not the only good thing in life. Simple physical security, which even a prisoner can possess, is not freedom, but one cannot live without it. Prosperity is connected to freedom, in that it makes us free to consume, but it is not the same thing, in that one can be rich but as unfree as a Victorian tycoon’s wife. A family is in fact one of the least free things imaginable, as the emotional satisfactions of it derive from relations that we are either...

Sadly, most people choose their beliefs about how the world works the same way they choose most of their other actions: whatever makes them feel good. Nowhere is this more evident than in the assumptions of the Washington establishment about how to achieve peace between Israel and the Palestinians. The core premise of this establishment is that there is a 'peace process' and that if only this process could be gotten right, peace would result. Unfortunately, this is bald nonsense, and it is only believed because it enables that establishment to stage a pantomime in which it is both the...

ONE OF THE BIGGEST SHORTCOMINGS of the conservative mind is that conservatives generally have moderate intellectual temperaments and therefore don't really grasp the radicalism of the opposition. When the opposition says something that would be absurd if taken to its logical conclusion, we tend to assume that they won't take it there, simply because we wouldn't if we were in their position. Nowhere is this clearer than on the issue of sexual mores. I must caution the reader that the content of this article is shocking and absurd, (not to mention unsuitable for children) but I regrettably cannot say that...

I posted Robert Locke’s report last October indicating that the once seriously anti-Semitic British National Party has been in the process of reforming itself, and I quoted at length a column by BNP chairman Nick Griffin last December in which he criticized anti-Semitism at length. However, I also heard that Griffin socialized with David Duke and other Nazi types at the end of the recent American Renaissance conference. Some people tried to excuse this by saying, “How can he reform these people unless he talks with them?” The excuse didn’t work with me; were we really to believe that Griffin...

New York's famed Museum of Modern Art, the greatest such museum in the world, has just reopened after a 3-year hiatus in which it nearly doubled in size. It is immensely revealing. For a start, the mere fact of who was picked to design it tells a lot. The architect is the Japanese Yoshio Taniguchi, chosen over a field of prominent Western modernists and post-modernists. Japan has never been a hotbed of modern art, and the collection contains very little Japanese art. But Japan was, of course, a hotbed of architectural minimalism centuries before Mies Van Der Rohe and Le...