Category: Economics
four theses on immigration
The following are some core points about immigration that I hope can cut through the rhetoric that both sides of the issue tend to elide. The solutions I have on offer are not easy, nor do I expect they can...
The Right Thing Has a Real Cost: Abortion Politics and Social Welfare
This essay was originally published in 2015 at Canon and Culture, a project of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission under the title “The Right Thing Has a Real Cost”. I was unable to find it on Wayback Machine. I...
the liberal order and its haters
I’ve had several conversations in the past year in person and online in which I referenced “the liberal order” or “liberalism” as me and some of my buddies understand it, only to find that I have engendered confusion with this...
“You have got to feed the biology of the soil.”
I have long been interested in the work of the Land Institute and their perennial crops, so I appreciated this story about how people are trying to use them: “Mainstream agriculture, they just don’t get it,” says Jerry Doan, standing...
whither conservatism?
While there’s a lot more that could be said and a lot of things that could be said differently (as I hope to in a forthcoming essay for Mere-O), I appreciated this assessment from Timothy Shenk at Dissent of where things are...
$2.1 trillion in dirty money annually
I felt like this interview itself was a little short and didn’t quite get to the point, but I am very interested in the degree to which the international finance industry might be reformed to help make corruption and crime...
employee stock ownership plans
I really appreciated Rachel Cohen’s discussion of what an employee stock ownership plan is and why there’s enthusiasm for them: Unlike conservatives, who have defended employee ownership on the grounds that it’s most certainly not socialism — indeed, it turns laborers into capitalists —...
makes you wanna holler
This report from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (an organization doing more than any other, I think, to highlight where and how people can be working for the localism we like to talk about) highlights how dollar stores deliver low-quality goods...
Sabbath and soil
Years ago, when I first studied Isaiah 58, I found its call to honor the Sabbath mingled with the call to do away with violence and injustice odd. I suppose that I had grown up thinking of Sabbath-keeping as a...
“Uncontrolled liberalism, in other words, prepares the grounds for its own demise.”
There are some very sharp insights in this interview with Pankaj Mishra in the LA Review of Books: “Liberal modernity,” you’ve argued, “has prepared the ground for its destruction” by unleashing forces that are “uncontrollable.” Have these forces contributed to...