This article of mine, motivating the study of philosophy, appeared last Friday in Quillette: The Indispensable Study of Inescapable Matters For those who do not know Quillette, here is Jordan Peterson interviewing Quillette founder Claire Lehmann: Here is an article about Lehmann and Quillette: Australia’s Mistress of the Intellectual Dark Web Here is a New York […]
The Recreation, Arts, and Parks Tax—the RAP Tax—is a one-tenth-of-one-percent sales tax levied by Cedar City, Utah on all purchases within the city. One third of the tax money is spent on what the government considers good art. This tax forces individuals to pay for specific works of art against their will. The RAP Tax […]
The screenplay version of my story, The Merchant of Mars, is now available for sale. The screenplay was represented by a prestigious Hollywood literary agency years ago, but was shelved. The heroes are patriotic American capitalists who want to exploit Mars as private property; the villains are environmentalists, aided by the Communist Chinese government, who […]
I recommend this short article by Charlotte Cushman, and I am grateful to her for quoting me. Monogamy is Moral, Promiscuity is Not
As is my custom, I celebrate the birthday of Ayn Rand by opening one of her novels to a random page and reading. Here is something I read today, from The Fountainhead, Part Two, Chapter 5: His great voice was soft and persuasive. It filled the room, but it made his listeners realize that it […]
Amid the problems and rancor regarding our federal government, it is essential to establish and maintain good local government. The phrase “all politics is local” refers to the idea that political contests, no matter how broad geographically, are won or lost at the local level of cities, towns, and even neighborhoods. Having relocated from blue […]
Suppose there are three sick people: my wife, a stranger, and a person I despise. Under socialism, the state will force me to care for all three equally. Under capitalism, the state will defend my right to care exclusively for my wife, or to allocate my time however I choose. Capitalism is good. Socialism is […]
Religious Liberty Cannot Stand Without Liberty In the first two parts of this essay, I identified two important ways in which Ryan T. Anderson, in his book Truth Overruled: The Future of Marriage and Religious Freedom, makes fundamental concessions to the postmodern Left in his defense of marriage. Here I identify yet another such fundamental […]
Romantic Love As Integration of Reason and Emotion Even more important than the legal reason I explained in Part 1 of this essay, there is a cognitive and romantic reason why the concept of marriage must refer only to a union of man and woman. And there is a way in which Ryan T. Anderson, […]
In his book, Truth Overruled: The Future of Marriage and Religious Freedom, Ryan T. Anderson argues that, for the concept of ‘marriage’ properly understood, sex matters. That is, Anderson argues that marriage can be only between one man and one woman. In praising this book on its back cover, Princeton’s Robert P. George calls Anderson […]