It’s not unusual for non-Americans, and many Americans of a center-left disposition, to portray the United States as a dog-eat-dog society: one in which the poor are left to fend for themselves and where a night-watchman state doesn’t intervene, save…
In case anyone missed it, the sick man of the global economy is getting much sicker. And it’s not just “peripheral” economies like Greece asunder in a sea of stagnation. Some of the European Union’s biggest players are in serious…
Envy, I’ve often thought, is the very worst human emotion. The epic Biblical narrative of Cain’s slaying of Abel reminds us that people have been jealous of others’ successes and well-being from time immemorial. When mixed, however, with the near-obsession…
William Shakespeare knew a thing or two about human psychology. But he also understood a great deal about the body-politic and how small signs can be indicative of deeper traumas. So when Marcellus tells Horatio at the beginning of Hamlet…
I always thought it would be difficult to imagine a period in which the West would be more adrift than the 1970s. Being a child at the time, I was spared consciousness of most of that miserable decade. Thus far,…
Whichever way the United States Supreme Court rules on Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, one fact has become abundantly clear. We are belatedly realizing that different forms of freedom are more dependent on each other than many have hitherto supposed….
Given Venezuela’s ongoing meltdown and the visible decline in the fortunes of Argentina’s President Cristina Kirchner, one thing has become clear. Latin America’s latest experiments with left-wing populism have reached their very predictable end-points. There is a price to be…
In the middle of 2013, a French journalist asked me who I thought was today’s outstanding center-right head of government. After a few moments’ thought, I responded: “She died in April. Requiescat in pace.” Looking around the world, the search…
If popes and presidents have anything to do with it, 2014 looks set to be the “Year of Inequality.” Already the rehashing of old, old arguments has begun in earnest. Economists, for instance, are re-disputing the inequality statistics. Others are…
Given the decidedly strange response of the Obama Administration and much of the Western commentariat to the violence sweeping the Islamic world, one temptation is to view their reaction as simple incomprehension in the face of the severe unreason that…