In a free society, the waitress at the DMV does not face apathy and lethargy from her public servant. She is the sovereign. The clerk is her employee, paid by her taxes to provide durable, verified proof of identity: sex, age, name, and citizenship under the Constitution. The transaction is ordinary. The citizen should feel […]

Imagine seeing four doctors in three years and leaving every appointment with the same answer: your labs look “fine,” you’re probably just stressed, get more sleep. It wasn’t until she collapsed at work that anyone ordered the right test. She was 44. Her heart disease had been progressing for years, hiding in plain sight because […]

Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative demands that we act only on principles that could hold as universal law. Apply that test to free-riding, and the conclusion is immediate. If everyone refused to produce and simply claimed a share of what others created, there would be nothing left to claim. Therefore, the maxim “I may consume without […]

Dolly Parton was not, as I always think of her, an Aquarius. She was technically a Capricorn, as befits her indefatigable work ethic and prodigious output. She was born in the Great Smoky Mountains, into the utterly vanished world that predated universal electrification, on Jan. 19, 1946, one day before Aquarius season officially begins. Whenever […]

For over a decade, the U.S. government was a crypto whale. Thanks to dark-web busts and asset forfeitures, Washington quietly built a large digital war chest. The feds did not buy it on purpose. They just seized it, stored it, and auctioned it off for cash. But that era is over. The United States has […]

Watching Mayor Zohran Mamdani carry on in New York, I am reminded of Lord Percy of Newcastle’s ominous definition 75 years ago of “social democracy”: “The phrase,” he wrote, “does not imply that economic activity should not continue to be based on private property; it implies only that, as a matter of legal rights, such […]

The November of my senior year in high school, I stayed up until midnight watching the 2020 election. The campaign season and election were nerve-racking, especially amid the backdrop of the pandemic. When I finally fell asleep, the election remained a toss-up. Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Nevada were all leaning red, but that did not last, […]

President Donald Trump’s China summit arrives amid heated AI competition with Beijing and a related debate over America’s semiconductor supply chain, often framed as a choice between two unsatisfying alternatives. On one side is dependence on China: allowing critical technologies and components to flow through Chinese manufacturing networks because they are cheap, available, or convenient. […]