Mises Search

I bought Crunchy Cons by Rod Dreher (Crown Forum, 2006) with one question in mind. After all the publicity this book has received, I wanted to know how much his cultural agenda requires of the state. How much liberty must we give up in order to achieve this author’s vision of what is right and true? This is, after all, the critical question to ask

Have you noticed how the text of the “fortunes” in fortune cookies seem to be improving? In contrast to the old days when the fortune was a mere throw away, these days, the language is clearer. The thoughts are more profound. Some of them are real keepers. Is this a consequence of China’s having become more capitalistic? While I can’t comment on

Sometimes, for your own mental well being, it is a meritorious act to remove yourself from the hustle-bustle of daily life, with its mind-boggling busyness, technological frenzy, ever-changing professional demands, and relentless pressure to be drawn into ephemeral fripperies, and instead reflect on what T.S. Elliot called the Permanent Things

For those who follow the zeitgeist — and the Nobel Prize committee seems always in the position of following rather than leading — the 2007 Peace Prize was no surprise. It went to one of the least-criticized men on the planet: Professor Muhammed Yunus and his Grameen Bank of Bangladesh. Everyone left, right, and center appear to love him. His

It begins with a runny nose, always in early December when the weather gets colder and nature emits strange particles. I’m speaking of the eternal menace of the winter cold, which, experience suggests, can be prevented from turning to flu or other yucky infections by keeping symptoms at bay. Thus should the company that invented pseudoephedrine —

Not being a television watcher, I was amazed to discover, from watching an hour or two of commercials this weekend, that there is a little pill you can take that will turn your body from portly and weak to thin and strong in a matter of months, if not weeks. And how much better will be the eventual results if you acquire this thing called The Bean

The upshot was that it was a bat, which, despite the prevalence of bat revisionism, is a spooky, nasty, disease-carrying, malicious threat to peace and contentment, made all the worse by its elusive, nocturnal habits. But this wasn’t at all obvious at first. It began as little more than a peculiar sound, noted by a visitor to our home. It sounded

An unexpected pleasure of watching any Spider-Man movie, and the new release of the third is no exception, is that it allows the viewer to be a voyeur of a largely abandoned ideology, the perspective of the old, old Left. The film, and the ideological structure of Spiderman’s world, not only shows us how wrong the left was way back then; it

The skinny on Spiderman 2 is that this is a movie that even movie snobs can love, and there’s certain truth in this view. Its characters are more introspective and thoughtful than other superhero fare, and its social-critical undercurrent isn’t overtly political enough to become annoying. In fact, its leftist core is barely discernable to most

We’ve all suspected that the market economy has a civilizing effect on people, but I’ve rarely seen such a poignant example. Here I was returning a rental car to the dealer, and some confusion set in about the keys. The attendant asked for them back, and I handed them over even as I was pulling bags and things out of the car. The attendant hopped