Governments Will Impose New Lockdowns If They Think They Can Get Away with It

This year’s stay-at-home orders and lockdowns imposed by governments on their populations represent a watershed moment in the history of the modern state.

Before March 2020, it is unlikely that many politicians—let alone many ordinary people—thought it would be feasible or likely for government officials to force hundreds of millions of human beings to “self-isolate.”

Carter vs. Reagan: The Last Semi-Intelligent Presidential Race

Presidential campaigns in the United States tend to be discouraging affairs, even if one is not a libertarian who has zero expectations that anything good can come from American elections. The old saw that insanity consists of doing the same thing repeatedly and somehow expecting different results applies to presidential campaigns as well as to anything else.

Willmoore Kendall on Mill and Free Speech

Willmoore Kendall was an editor of William F. Buckley’s National Review and played a leading role in Buckley’s effort to replace the noninterventionism of the Old Right with the global crusades of the Cold War. Like Buckley, he had a CIA connection. He was notorious for his fiery temperament, and he proved such a handful that Yale University bought out his tenure contract to get rid of him. He admired Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and in response to critics who claim that Rousseau’s general will suppresses freedom of opinion, he did not respond that it didn’t.