Foundation for Economic Education founder and cornerstone Leonard Read always had an ear out for widely accepted but misleading clichés that served to aggrandize government power and limit liberty. In his 1965 “A Cliché of Socialism: Under Public Ownership, We the People Own It!” He focused his attention on the large gap between public ownership of assets and the idea that “we the people” own them.

Imagine a hypothetical libertarian paradise (“Paradise”) that seeks only to live in peace and harmony with the rest of the world. Unfortunately, the rest of the world is not as pacifistic as Paradise; indeed, it has at least a few bad guys, countries controlled by people willing to use violence to get what they want. Worse yet, our Paradise is the only country with sufficient military might to resist the world’s bad guys effectively.

On 60 Minutes last Sunday, President Joe Biden declared “the pandemic is over,” but quickly added that “we still have a problem with COVID, we’re still doing a lot of work on it.”

Biden then reiterated: “But the pandemic is over” and his evidence was the fact “no one’s wearing masks. Everyone seems to be in pretty good shape. And so I think it’s changing, and I think this is a perfect example of it.”

[Originally published by Law&Liberty.]

New Jersey became one of the latest states in 2022 to ban single-use bags. In 2014, California became the first state to ban of use plastic bags. Since then, several states have followed including New York, Oregon, and Washington for a total of ten states. Advocates for the ban proclaim disposable bags to be bad for the environment and reusable bags to be good for the environment.

Melinda Cooper is professor of sociology at the Australian National University, and in her article “The Alt-Right: Neoliberalism, Libertarianism and the Fascist Temptation” published in the journal Theory, Culture and Society in 2021, she has some remarkable things to say about Murray Rothbard, remarkable, I fear, in that they are grievously in error.

Last week the Edmund Burke Foundation played host to the third annual National Conservative Conference in Miami, Florida, bringing together several of the preeminent political and intellectual leaders in the contemporary Right. Organized by Yoram Hazony, this year’s NatcCon brought together diverse segments of a conservative movement that has been transformed globally by a modern age of populist politics and the external threats posed by covid tyranny, the Great Reset, and the rising tide of militant cultural leftism.