Thomas Hardy was a British poet of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Hardy, along with the great liberal philosopher Herbert Spencer, was one of the few members of the British aristocracy to oppose the Boer War. In 1902, he penned The Man He Killed in critique of this aggressive war, and it would become one of the most known anti-war poems of the century.

Whenever there is a gun massacre, statists inevitably respond that it’s time to repeal the Second Amendment. The idea is that if the Second Amendment is gone, so will be the right to own guns in the United States.

There is just one big problem with that position: It’s wrong. The Second Amendment, like the First Amendment, doesn’t give anyone any rights. Instead, it prohibits the federal government from infringing on rights that are natural and God-given and that preexist government.

The end of the era of cheap money highlights the risk of “Enron-style” bankruptcies in many sectors, including renewable energy. With the path of three rate hikes in the United States in 2018 confirmed by the Federal Reserve and a nervous equity market, the challenges are more evident than ever.

The past eight years of massive liquidity and low rates have not helped deleverage, and many companies have used this period to increase imbalances and create complex debt structures. In fact:

Dr. Sally Satel argues in an Op-ed for Politico that the narrative that medical doctors and pharmaceutical drug producers and distributors have caused the Opioid crisis is false. She finds that “contrary to popular belief, it is rarely the people for whom they are prescribed. Most lives do not come undone, let alone end in overdose, after analgesia for a broken leg or a trip to the dentist.”

Allen Mendenhall Interviews Paul Cantor About His New Book, Shakespeare’s Roman Trilogy: The Twilight of the Ancient World.

I write constantly (some would say incessantly and annoyingly) about entitlement spending.

Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto has devoted his life to alleviating poverty in the developing world. His research, well-received by those on the left as well as the right, documents the bureaucratic hurdles that prevent ordinary citizens in states like Egypt, Colombia, and Indonesia from obtaining business licenses. In many nations, it can take hundreds of days of waiting around in government offices to acquire permission to open a bakery or a laundromat. This prevents all but the rich and well-connected from accessing the ‘formal sector’ of legally sanctioned activity.

Fox News host Laura Ingraham certainly caused a firestorm with her recent comments regarding NBA superstars LeBron James and Kevin Durant. In case you haven’t heard, both James and Durant made disparaging remarks about President Donald Trump while being “interviewed” in the back of an SUV.

Over the past several weeks of Historical Controversies, I’ve discussed the role of American filibustering expeditions as they related to the antebellum conflicts preceding the American Civil War. Because the current series is exploring the conflicts that led to disunion, the focus of the recent episodes was on the two major filibusters of the 1850s and the relationship between their expeditions and the slavery controversy.