There is a strange new sin spreading through universities, corporate boardrooms, and social media feeds. It is not violence. It is not hatred. It is not even rudeness. The sin is thinking clearly. Somewhere in the last two decades, logic became offensive. Not just unpopular or unfashionable, but genuinely threatening. To ask someone for evidence […]
Why Logic Is Now Considered a “Micro-Aggression” Read More »
Let us begin with a thought experiment. Imagine two countries. One is blessed with fertile soil, deep harbors, vast forests, and mineral deposits that glitter under every hillside. The other has rocks. Just rocks and some stubborn grass and a population with strong opinions about cheese. Common sense says the first country dominates trade. It
Why a Country With No Resources Can Still Win at Trade Read More »
Every revolution begins with a promise. The old guard will be swept away. The corrupt will be punished. Power will return to the people. And for a brief, intoxicating moment, it looks like it might actually happen. Then something familiar settles in. New faces appear at the top. They wear different clothes, use different slogans,
The Circulation of Elites: Why Revolutions Never Actually Change Anything Read More »
There is a certain kind of idea that makes people uncomfortable not because it is wrong, but because it might be right. Samuel Huntington’s claim that human rights discourse often functions as a vehicle for Western geopolitical interests is one of those ideas. It sits in the intellectual living room like an uninvited guest who
Why Human Rights Is Often Just Code for “Western Interests” Read More »
Most people think of economic progress as a straight line going up. More jobs, more wealth, more comfort. A rising tide that lifts all boats. It is a pleasant image. It is also completely wrong. Joseph Schumpeter knew this. The Austrian economist, writing in the middle of the twentieth century, looked at capitalism and saw
In 1996, Samuel Huntington published The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order and managed to irritate almost everyone. Liberals called him a fearmonger. Conservatives loved him until they realized he was not exactly cheerful about the West either. Academics dismissed the book as reductive. Then September 11 happened, and suddenly everyone was
There is a particular kind of discomfort that arrives when someone says profit is good. Not useful. Not necessary. Good. The word lands like a brick through a stained glass window. We have been trained, culturally and emotionally, to treat profit with suspicion. It is the thing corporations chase at the expense of rivers and
Why Profit Is the Only Honest Metric of Human Value Read More »
Thorstein Veblen died in 1929, broke and largely forgotten, in a cabin outside Palo Alto. He would have appreciated the irony. The man who spent his career dissecting how the wealthy perform their wealth could not have imagined that nearly a century later, teenagers on a Chinese social media app would prove his theories with
The Cult of the “Old Money” Aesthetic: A Veblenian Analysis of TikTok Trends Read More »
In 1803, a French economist named Jean-Baptiste Say made a claim that most people ignored for about two hundred years. He argued that the entrepreneur’s real job was not to own land or accumulate capital. It was to combine knowledge, judgment, and imagination into something the world did not yet know it needed. He called
The Intellectual Entrepreneur: Why Ideas Are the Raw Materials of the 21st Century Read More »
There is a comfortable story we tell ourselves about the Enlightenment. It goes something like this: brave thinkers stood up against kings and priests, championed the common people, and lit the fuse that would eventually explode into democracy. Voltaire sits near the center of this story, usually holding a quill and looking defiant. The problem
Against “The People”: Why Voltaire Feared the Mob More Than the Monarch Read More »