As Congress and the American people are finally waking up to Mr. Nobel Peace Prize’s illegal presidential war in Libya, a nation that never posed a threat to the United States—and as the Bush-Obama wars in Afghanistan and Iraq continue to fatigue the nation and, in many cases, bore a complacent media—we find ourselves...
Read More »

It’s always a treat to announce the publication of a new issue of our acclaimed quarterly journal, The Independent Review. If nothing else, it gives me an excuse to write up essay-type questions based on the new issue’s contents—and thereby bring to mind (to my mind, at least) those recurring Saturday Night Live skits,...
Read More »

Once in a great, great while, one or both houses of Congress do the right thing. Even more rarely is something good passed with strong bipartisan support. Majorities in both parties in the House of Representatives have voted to defund the illegal Libya war. It will be interesting to see what comes of this.

Florida’s new Governor Rick Scott promised to cut government and make Florida more business-friendly when he campaigned. In addition to overseeing a reduction in state spending, which I wrote about here, he also dialed back the state’s land use planning by cutting state oversight, and abolishing the agency that was the overseer. The bill...
Read More »

Critics of the market, from Marx and Karl Polanyi to Alasdair MacIntyre, John Gray, Robert Putnam, and some contemporary sociologists, decry the anonymity of commercial relations. Strong, local, community ties, they complain, are being displaced by long-distance, ad hoc, impersonal, weak ties. “Increasingly,” writes anthropologist Stephen Gudeman, “we commoditize things, leisure, body parts, reproductive capacities,...
Read More »