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Court could help clean up homelessness chaos in this city, and yours

I have an article this morning on Fox News’ website about the recent court ruling that declares Phoenix’s homeless “Zone” an illegal public nuisance. Excerpt:

Phoenix leaders had claimed their hands were tied by a 2019 Ninth Circuit ruling that held that the city of Boise, Idaho, violated the U.S. Constitution’s "cruel and unusual punishment" clause by arresting people for sleeping on sidewalks. "Human beings are biologically compelled to rest," that court reasoned, so punishing them for "involuntarily sitting, lying, and sleeping in public" was cruel — akin to punishing them for "an illness or disease." If a city lacks sufficient bed space in its shelters to accommodate the homeless, the Ninth Circuit said, it’s unconstitutional to arrest them for sleeping on the streets.

But whatever one thinks about that case, it hardly applies to Phoenix’s situation, which doesn’t involve people "involuntarily" sleeping on sidewalks for lack of shelter space. The Zone’s residents are living there indefinitely, not because they’re biologically compelled to, but because they choose not to seek other arrangements.

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Talking about the Arizona "Zone" lawsuit with Armstrong & Getty

I talked this morning with my friends Armstrong and Getty about the ruling in the Phoenix homeless "Zone" lawsuit, as well as about other pressing matters of the day. You can listen here:

The life and ideas of Isabel Paterson

The Objective Standard Institute has posted the video of my talk about the life and ideas of Isabel Paterson, from last year's TOS-Con. You can watch it here:

The dark side of historical preservation

I have an article in Discourse Magazine about the downsides to “historic preservation” laws, which often impose Byzantine bureaucratic rules on people who just want to live in their homes, and which sometimes impose crushing—and unconstitutional—takings of private property without compensation. Excerpt:

Preserving the past is a worthy goal. But like all worthy goals, it also represents a tradeoff, with costs and benefits that must be weighed in the balance. Ignoring property rights, the role of incentives and the principles of due process—which forbid vague laws—blinds both politicians and voters to the cost side of the equation. That tends to benefit the politically powerful at the expense of less influential property owners—and of consumers who would benefit from new and more innovative construction. Without legal checks and balances, historic preservation cannot only stifle new building and improvement, but even obstruct the goal of preservation itself.

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Talking about the ladies who founded libertarianism

I spoke a few weeks ago with Juliette Slegren for her Great Antidote podcast, about the lives and ideas of Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand. You can listen here.

Subversive as all hell

I have an article in Symposium today about the way in which Rose Wilder Lane, Isabel Paterson, and Ayn Rand can be considered "counter culture" figures. It tells one of the classic stories of Lane's life--the time the FBI went after her for writing a postcard to a radio talk show host in which she expressed opposition to the Social Security program. You can read those fun details by clicking here.

The Importance of Paterson, Wilder, and Lane

I talked the other day with Jon Hersey about my book Freedom's Furies: How Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand Found Liberty in an Age of Darkness, for the podcast Philosophy for Flourishing. Jon had some unusual and interesting questions for me about the book and about the lives and ideas of these remarkable women. You can watch it here:

New review of Freedom's Furies

At Discourse, Robert Tracinski reviews my new book Freedom's Furies. Excerpt:

What is perhaps more remarkable from today’s perspective is that these women came up through the world of art and literature. Similarly, H.L. Mencken and Henry Hazlitt—the latter was a leading free-marketer of the time and a friend of the trio; he and Mencken would be fused into the crusading pro-liberty columnist Austen Heller in The Fountainhead—were both editors of the American Mercury. This was one of the prominent right-wing publications of the early 20th century but also one of its leading literary journals. Paterson was a key figure covering the book publishing scene in New York City, while Ayn Rand started out as a scriptwriter in Hollywood and later hobnobbed with studio executives and movie stars. These people were what you might call “coastal elites”—yet they argued for laissez-faire economics, promoted individualism and fought against the left.;

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The Stasi Poetry Circle

In my latest book review for The Objective Standard, I examine Philip Oltermann's book on the curious episode in which the East German secret police established a creative writing workshop--the "Writing Circle of Chekists." Why did they do it? Excerpt:

Alongside their propaganda and surveillance missions, they had another goal: to understand poetry. Genuine collectivists, who view privacy as anathema, can never really understand poetry—at least, not lyric poetry—because it is such a direct expression of the evanescent and ineffable creative spark within the human mind, something collectivism can never truly reach. One of the best anti-communist poets, E.E. Cummings, expressed that point in his own quirky way in his classic “Jehovah buried,Satan dead,” which bitterly satirized communist states where “Souls are outlawed” and “dreamless knaves on Shadows [feed].” The result of communist regimentation, he wrote, is that

Boobs are holy,poets mad,
illustrious punks of Progress shriek;
when Souls are outlawed,Hearts are sick,
Hearts being sick,Minds nothing can:

That last phrase—“Minds nothing can”—was not only Cummings’s way of saying that a country that outlaws individual aspiration will also obliterate creativity, but also his way of expressing the essential crudity of communism, which views man as a mechanism to be manipulated, categorized, and put to labor, rather than as a unique creature of infinite potential. East Germany’s rulers, who never lifted their eyes from the dingy concrete of the police state, could hardly comprehend such potential. And that made it impossible for them to grasp, let alone counteract, the attractions of the free world’s culture.

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Abraham Lincoln's intransigence

In my latest book review for The Objective Standard, I take a look at Jon Meacham’s new biography of Abraham Lincoln, entitled And There Was Light. Excerpt:

[Lincoln’s] intransigence proved crucial in the immediate aftermath of his election to the presidency, and Meacham’s description of this episode is the best part of his book. In the months between November 1860 and the inauguration in March 1861—the so-called Secession Winter, during which South Carolina and six other states left the union—slave owners and their northern collaborators proposed myriad compromises to avoid bloodshed. The most popular was offered by Kentucky Senator John Crittenden; it would have drawn a line across North America to the Pacific Coast, guaranteeing the legality of slavery below that line by amending the Constitution. Lincoln opposed the idea, not only because of his antislavery convictions but because the slave states had repeatedly bullied the federal government since at least the 1830s, with the latter almost always conceding to southern demands under the threat of violence. To appease them yet again would only have rewarded their intimidation, effectively guaranteeing another round of extortion.

Lincoln could not actually do anything before his inauguration to block the Crittenden Compromise, except to rally members of Congress to oppose it. That he did, under pressures to which many men in his place would have bent—and Meacham rightly highlights the importance of his inflexibility at this crucial moment: “Lincoln courageously resisted compromising on slavery in an hour when such compromise was within the realm of acceptable opinion,” he writes. “In these cold and complex months, Abraham Lincoln was both statesman and moral being, choosing the difficult over the easy, the catastrophic over the convenient, the right over the wrong.”

In underscoring this, Meacham outclasses David Herbert Donald, whose 1995 book Lincoln until now had been the best one-volume biography of the sixteenth president. Donald was a superb historian but far more interested in the pragmatic, day-to-day machinations of party politics than in leaders who elevated principle above mere scheming. In his version of the story, “the chances for compromise in 1860–1861 were never great,” and Lincoln’s refusal to endorse it, while admirable, was motivated more by awareness that to do so “would disrupt the party that elected him” than by the courage of his convictions.

Yet as Meacham shows, the Crittenden proposal was a real threat—and Lincoln’s moral courage was not just right but also, and for that reason, the only truly practical plan. That’s because by 1860, slavery’s opponents were so accustomed to cowardice on the part of their leaders that Lincoln’s refusal to surrender gave them the morale boost they needed. A cynical Henry Adams, watching Crittenden’s allies negotiating the compromise proposal with Republican lobbyists, predicted that Lincoln’s party would eventually embrace “some damned nonsense or other”—but Lincoln, knowing such concessions would make his party, in his words, “a mere sucked egg, all shell and no principle in it,” said no.

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A conversation about the "Furies" with Symposium

The other day, I joined Robert Tracinski on his podcast Symposium to talk about my new book and the fascinating lives of the three women who helped rescue liberty in an age of totalitarianism and world war. You can listen here.

Why Bronowski matters

This year marks the 50th anniversary of Jacob Bronowski's masterpiece documentary The Ascent of Man. I have an article in Discourse about why Bronowski's "personal view" remains relevant today. Here's an excerpt:

His intellectual interests were indeed so varied that one reporter called Bronowski “not one man, but a multitude.” Yet he saw the sciences and humanities as parts of a single effort to chart a modern, humanistic philosophy based in reason and discovery, instead of the superstition, poverty and violence that had so badly marred the 20th century. He thought of these last three as consequences of the “ascetic virtues” inherited from the medieval era—alongside nationalism, traditionalism, conformity and self-sacrifice. Such ideas produced only “societies constantly on the brink of famine, in which the greatest virtue of man was to achieve the heroics of an insect in a colony, and sacrifice himself for the hive.” Believing that mankind was “past those famine days, and should be past those famine virtues,” Bronowski offered instead a philosophy he called “human specificity” or “scientific existentialism,” which he first articulated in 1956, in a series of lectures at MIT entitled Science and Human Values. Casting aside the alleged dichotomy between “is” and “ought,” he argued that science provides the foundation for a universal, human ethics: “We ought to act in such a way that what is true can be verified to be so.” That commitment to discover the nature of reality led inexorably to values such as honesty, individualism, freedom of speech and respect for self and others. “The society of scientists must be a democracy,” too, because “it can keep alive and grow only by a constant tension between dissent and respect; between independence from the views of others, and tolerance for them.”

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Review of Freedom’s Furies in The Dispatch

This morning’s Dispatch has a very nice review of my new book, by my friend Jon Hersey:

A painstakingly constructed historical record that at times reads like a novel, with finely hewn characters and a plot driven by a central conflict of lasting importance: liberty versus tyranny. And in showing the travails of historic freedom fighters, its value—like that of all good history—goes far beyond the story itself…. Freedom’s Furies encapsulates the friendships and context that led to some of the most influential pro-liberty works of the 20th century. It serves as a microcosm of the movement’s sometimes fractious disputes. But it simultaneously shows the common ground these women staked out in defense of individualism—and spotlights the importance of that value for those who wish to carry on the fight for liberty.

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A nice review of my new book

The March issue of Reason has a nice review of my book Freedom's Furies. Excerpt:

The New Deal and World War II had a tremendous influence on the three thinkers. Sandefur describes the historical context well, with particular attention to the authoritarian side of President Franklin Roosevelt's administration. Indeed, professors looking for a book to assign classes studying American history from 1920 to 1950 should seriously consider Freedom's Furies. It masterfully details the causes of the Great Depression, the federal government's overreach during the New Deal, and the wartime attacks on political, economic, and civil liberties. Not only was individual freedom under assault, Sandefur notes, but it was "almost impossible to find any published material that made a strong, intellectual case for free markets." The furies realized they would have to produce their own.

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Upcoming speaking events

Feb. 1 -  5 p.m. Eastern / 2 p.m. Pacific - Freedom's Furies - with the Atlas Society - Online

Feb. 16 - 4 p.m. Arizona time - Freedom's Furies - at the Goldwater Institute - Phoenix, AZ

Feb. 23 - 6:30 p.m. Pacific - Freedom's Furies - America's Future Foundation - San Francisco, CA

Feb. 27 - 5:30 p.m. Arizona time - Freedom's Furies - America's Future Foundation, Phoenix, AZ 

Mar. 8 - 12 p.m. Eastern Time - Freedom's Furies - with the Institute for Liberal Studies - Online

Mar. 13 - 12 p.m. Arizona time - The Indian Child Welfare Act - Arizona State University Federalist Society - Phoenix, AZ

Mar. 15 - 5:15 p.m. Eastern Time - The Indian Child Welfare Act: separate and unequal? - University of Virginia Federalist Society - Online 

Mar. 30 - noon Eastern Time - Objectivity in the Law - Students for Liberty Prometheus Fellowship - Online

Apr. 6 - 5 p.m. - Freedom's Furies - Dartmouth College Libertarians - Dartmouth College, NH

Apr. 17 - noon Eastern Time - The Indian Child Welfare Act: separate and unequal? - University of Florida Federalist Society - Gainesville, FL

May 11 - TBD - Freedom's Furies - Hayek Group - Reno, NV

June 21-24 - TBA - TBA - Level Up Conference - Phoenix, AZ

June 28 - 3:30 - The Indian Child Welfare Act - Arizona Judicial Conference - Scottsdale, AZ

Remember, if you'd like to have me come out to your neck of the woods, drop me a line!

Phoenix leaders are failing everyone, homeless or not, in The Zone

I have an article, coauthored with my colleague Austen VanDerHeyden, in The Arizona Republic this morning about “The Zone”—the vast homeless shelter the city is operating on public streets in downtown Phoenix. Here’s an excerpt:

Shelters typically forbid people from drinking or using drugs, or engaging in other conduct on the premises that many of The Zone’s population would prefer to persist in. By letting people remain on the streets instead of moving to such a “high barrier” shelter, the city is effectively operating its own “low-barrier” shelter – that is, one where people can stay and ignore the law.

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What I read in 2022 and what I thought of it

Best book I read this year:

1. Midnight in Chernobyl by Adam Higginbotham*

An absolutely terrifying and amazing book. I found myself repeatedly having to reverse the audio and listen again because I could not quite believe the words that were coming out. Far, far better than the HBO miniseries--both because it is more horrific and because it is, in some ways, more hopeful? if that's the right word. An outstanding book. But it may cost you some sleepless nights.

Honorable Mentions:

What’s on The Menu in Hollywood?

Reviewers of the strange new horror movie The Menu seem to me to have missed the point—and to have done so in precisely the way the film’s creators wanted them to. And that very fact may make the film all the more delicious.

The Menu seems at first to be an “elevated horror” movie of the A24 variety. A group of strangers arrives at the dock for a trip to an island which is the site of a fantastically elegant restaurant called Hawthorne, presided over by Chef Slowik (Ralph Fiennes). The castaways of this three-hour tour include the unnamed Movie Star (John Leguizamo), the critic Lillian (Janet McTeer), three guys who are apparently ripping off the studio where the Movie Star works (Rob Yang, Mark St. Cyr, and Arturo Castro), and others. Our main character is Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy) who’s the date of restaurant enthusiast Tyler (Nicholas Hoult). We later learn that she’s actually a prostitute, but we discover right away that she’s a bit of a rebel, who thinks all this fancy Hawthorne stuff is rather ridiculous.

But very early in the movie we begin to see that this “elevated horror” movie is actually an allegory of some sort. One of the first courses is a “breadless bread plate,” which consists only of the sauces, without the bread. Chef Slowik explains that this is a kind of political commentary on the fact that the poor people of the world can’t afford bread. Critic Lillian is enchanted by the sophistication of Slowik’s radical chic, and Tyler is in awe of the Chef’s genius—which is a little jarring to the audience because it’s really not that clever. It’s the kind of tired cliché that we’re used to from Hollywood—and that realization dawns at just the moment when Margot speaks up in protest. The guests are being insulted, she points out, and she refuses to go along with it.

Errata in Freedom's Furies

I maintain errata pages for all my books, to list errors I discover after publication. If you notice a factual error in Freedom's Furies, please let me know and I'll include it here.

1. Page 345: My wording here implies that the quotation is from Averroes. It isn't; it's a quotation from Etienne Gilson, who was paraphrasing Averroes.

2. Page 250: in describing Almanzo’s trip to get the grain in The Long Winter, I say “Royal accompanies him.” Actually it’s his friend Cap Garland who does so.

3. Page 470 note 117 incorrectly states the date of the letter from Paterson to Rand (which contained the Averroes reference) as circa December 1943. This should say circa October. (It is correctly identified as October on page 345).

4. Page 269: Katharine Wright's name is misspelled Katherine.

California turned a constitutional shield into a government sword

I have an article in the Orange County Register about California's bizarre "Anti-SLAPP" law, or rather, the bizarre way in which the courts have interpreted that law. Excerpt:

California citizens who sue the government for violating their rights had better watch out: under a bizarre state law called “Anti-SLAPP,” they risk being sued by the government for doing so, on the theory that they’re violating the government’s own constitutional rights.

You read that right: California courts have ruled that government itself has a right to free speech, and therefore that anyone who goes to court to challenge the legality of something the government does risks being punished for trespassing on its expressive freedom.

At least, that’s the argument lawyers for the city of Rancho Mirage are making in an ongoing lawsuit in which property owners challenged the constitutionality of an ordinance barring them from renting out their houses. Viewing that ordinance as a violation of their constitutional right to private property, they filed a lawsuit—only to have the city respond by filing an “Anti-SLAPP” motion against them. The city argues that their true motive in the case was to censor the government’s free speech. If granted, such a motion would require the property owners to pay the city’s legal bills.

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