Freespace

Talking about administrative law...and war...with Armstrong and Getty

This morning, I joined Armstrong and Getty to talk about the Jarkesy and Loper Bright cases in the U.S. Supreme Court (and we also ended up talking about Sackett)...and then they had me stick around to talk about the wars in Ukraine and Israel. If you missed it, you can listen here.

Economic liberty and civil discourse

I spoke last night at ASU as part of their series of lectures on "Civics, Patriotism, and America's Prospects." The theme of my talk was the relationship between economic freedom and democracy--specifically, how private property rights and economic freedom are essential to preserving a healthy democratic society. And in part my remarks were a response to earlier presentations by Robert George, Richard Haass, and others, who I argue were largely wrong in the prescriptions for improving American civil society.

I'm told the video of the event will be made available soon on YouTube and broadcast on Arizona PBS, but if you don't want to wait, you can listen to my remarks here.

What about the environment?

In the latest installment of the Goldwater Institute's "Foundations of Freedom" video series, I take a look at the environment. It's often said that government has to regulate our behavior in order to protect the planet. But if that's so, why are the dirtiest places on the planet the places where the government has the most power? I explain:

My article on the life and art of Frank Lloyd Wright

The Objective Standard has published my article on the life and art of Frank Lloyd Wright. It elaborates on the talk I gave at LevelUp this summer, exploring the basic principles of Wright’s “Organic Architecture” and Wright’s effort to reconcile the natural and human with the age of the machine. Here’s an excerpt:

The international style plainly appealed to those who despised individualism and viewed decoration or a concern with beauty or the human spirit as decadent distractions from the task of mass-producing uniform "machines for living."

Nothing could have been more alien to Frank Lloyd Wright. He shared the Internationalists' rejection of obsolete artistic traditions and even praised Corbusier's book, agreeing that modern architecture should emphasize "the clean lines and surfaces of the aeroplane, the ocean greyhounds [ships], and...certain machinery." But he could not abide their ascetic functionalism. He believed that humanity and The Machine could coexist, but the kind of mechanization the Internationalists endorsed struck him as fundamentally antihuman. In fact, architecture critic Henry Russell Hitchcock—who began as one of Wright's harshest detractors but became an admirer—expressed the difference between the two camps precisely when he said the former had "bowed to the material side of the machine," whereas the later "rejoice[d] in its spirit." He meant that the Internationalists sought to make people into a kind of machine—and he did not mean this as a reproach. The Internationalists "are not humanists," Hitchcock observed. "They seek to express and to take part in the possible reintegration toward which after the decadence of the nineteenth century our life seems to be moving."

Nobody represented that "decadence" more than Frank Lloyd Wright. "Poetic tranquility instead of a more deadly 'efficiency,' should be the [goal] in the art of Building," he wrote. In his view, the Internationalists' hostility to beauty—or, in his words, their "sterility of ornaphobia"—had no stopping point. If followed to its logical conclusion, it would make every building a featureless cube, so anonymous and depersonalized that it might be plunked down anywhere in the world with no relationship to its surroundings and no sympathy for its inhabitants. One might as well "trim up the trees, too, shape them into boxes," he wrote, "cut them to cubes and triangles.... We are eventually going to have as citizens machine-made men, corollary to machines, if we don’t look out[.]" He thought it was right for modern architecture to aspire to dignified simplicity, but Internationalism embraced simplicity without the dignity, effacing architecture itself. That was why international style buildings “utterly fail to make [their] virtues honorably or humanly effective."

Read the rest…

Economic freedom and democratic participation

 I’ll be speaking at ASU on Nov. 28 as part of their “Civic Discourse Project”—which focuses on the need for civil deliberation, democratic participation, and civic education.

I’ll be disagreeing with some of the previous speakers and rattling a few cages…civilly, of course.

Registration is required--please join us!

Against the New Politics of Identity

In my latest book review for The Objective Standard, I examine Ronald Lindsay’s new book about identity politics. It’s probably the best such book that’s come out so far—written with a degree of patience and calm that I doubt I could manage if I were writing such a book. Here’s an excerpt from my review:

The irrationality of some parties in today’s political and cultural disputes—especially those involving race—is now so overwhelming that anyone trying to make sense of their arguments might feel paralyzed. In fact, the very idea of “making sense” is considered racist in certain circles: In 2020, the Smithsonian Institution published a document asserting that “objective, rational linear thinking” is a manifestation of “white supremacy” (21). And physicist Chand Prescod-Weinstein has condemned “white empiricism” as a form of “epistemic oppression.”

Many of America’s major institutions, from colleges to corporations to government agencies, have likewise embraced the premise that the United States is “systemically racist” and that all good people should direct their energies to “disrupting” the alleged “oppression” of “white society”—which, of course, means the remaining elements of capitalism in today’s mixed economy. To question this orthodoxy—or even, in some cases, to agree with it—is grounds for termination, humiliation, and “cancellation.”

Amid such intellectual gloom, it’s refreshing to find a clear light of reason in Ronald Lindsay’s Against the New Politics of Identity.

Read the rest…