Free Republic

With just seven little words, the freakout began: “The government holds a monopoly on violence.” These were written by David Brat, a professor of economics at Virginia’s Randolph-Macon College and, now, the Republican party’s nominee for the state’s seventh congressional district. “Unusual” and “eye-opening” was the New York Daily News’s petty verdict. In the Wall Street Journal, Reid Epstein insinuated darkly that the claim cast Brat as a modern-day fascist. And, for his part, Politico’s Ben White suggested that the candidate’s remarks “on Neitzsche and the government monopoly on violence don’t make a whole lot of sense.” As is its...

More than 40 years ago, American biologist Paul Ehrlich sketched a doomsday scenario for planet Earth in his book The Population Bomb. Adding more people to the planet would inevitably lead to mass starvation and ecological disaster. Since the publication of the book, the global population has nearly doubled but most of its gloomy predictions have not come true. However, this has not stopped its author from campaigning against further population growth, this time in Australia. As he prepared for a series of lectures to the Environment Institute at the University of Adelaide, Ehrlich warned that Australia was full. As...

E-Notes Robert Kaplan onApplying the Wisdom of the Ages to the Twenty-First Century The Fifth Annual Robert Strausz-Hupé Lecture April 4, 2002 Summary by Trudy J. Kuehner Robert Kaplan delivered the Fifth Annual Strausz-Hupé Lecture on January 17, 2002, drawing on his new book, Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos (Random House, 2002). Author of such books as Balkan Ghosts and The Coming Anarchy, Kaplan is a contributing editor of The Atlantic, a fellow of the New America Foudation, and a former senior fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Warrior Politics is available to FPRI members at...