Brownstone Category

September 4, 2022

The Return of Carl Schmitt and His Scheme for Regime Longevity

The message and optics of Joe Biden’s address from September 1, 2022, were startling in our supposedly enlightened times. In…

September 2, 2022

Cold War Nostalgia Explained

The death of Mikhail Gorbachev this week unleashed a wave of nostalgia for simpler and better times. That’s odd, isn’t…

September 1, 2022

US Life Expectancy Down Three Years in Two Years

Jared Kushner had not yet read the news most likely. He was just telling an interviewer that he is working…

August 29, 2022

Social Distancing Was Supposed to Be Forever 

By April 2020, two months into the lockdowns, eminent Italian Philosopher Giorgio Agamben had put his finger on a point…

August 27, 2022

Moderna and Pfizer: Cat Fight! 

The legend is that patents are a just reward for new inventions. The reality is that they are government grants…

August 23, 2022

Jared Kushner and the Mystery of the First US Lockdown

The possibility of US lockdowns – never attempted on this scale in the history of pandemics – was already in…

August 22, 2022

How Could We Have Been So Naive about Big Tech?

The 1998 movie Enemy of the State starring Gene Hackman and Will Smith seemed like fiction at the time. Why…

August 19, 2022

How To Tame a Bureaucracy? Get Rid of It 

Any serious effort to end the crisis must deal with the problem of the administrative state and the bureaucratic power…

August 17, 2022

The CDC Failed, So Spin It Off and Make It More Powerful?

The failure of the CDC to manage Covid-19 was baked in from the first moments of its response. A government…

August 14, 2022

A Deeper Dive Into the CDC Reversal 

It was a good but bizarre day when the CDC finally reversed itself fundamentally on its messaging for two-and-a-half years.…

August 11, 2022

Did Lockdowns Turn Americans Into Lazy Bums?

It looks as if we can add another line to the long list of lockdown harms. Sloth.  This explains so…

August 9, 2022

Freedom Itself Is Gravely in Peril 

The FBI has raided Donald Trump’s home in Florida and opened a private safe, hanging around for hours looking for…

August 5, 2022

Just How Healthy Are These Labor Markets?

The news of the falling unemployment and the rise in total payrolls in July 2022 came as a welcome relief…

August 3, 2022

Besties: Twitter, Facebook, Google, CDC, NIH, WHO 

Many of us with a libertarian frame of mind presume as a matter of theory that the interests of business…

August 1, 2022

The Lockdowns Kicked Off this Depression 

If you were on vacation last week, good for you. You missed one of Congress’s greatest-ever scams. They just approved…

July 26, 2022

The Day Anthony Fauci Wrecked American Freedom

Fears of a virus from China had been rising for two months in the spring of 2020. The White House…

July 25, 2022

Dictatorship Chic 

In the trajectory laid out by F.A. Hayek in his 1944 book, The Road to Serfdom, dictatorship is the end…

July 22, 2022

Mozart, Mediocrity, and the Administrative State 

The 1984 movie Amadeus is a great achievement in its genre because it actually puts the creative process of the…

July 22, 2022

Articles of Inquiry: The Role of Media

The media, both traditional and social media, had an outsized role during the pandemic in pushing the US government’s Covid…

July 21, 2022

The US President Finally Gets Covid 

The political hierarchy of infectious disease has finally come full circle. Biden got Covid.  Covid pandemic policies have always been…

July 19, 2022

The 1968-69 “Hong Kong Flu” Pandemic Revisited

It was a very bad year for the flu. The pathogen came in two large waves. This is only obvious…

July 18, 2022

The Culpability of the New York Times: Then and Now

On February 27, 2020, weeks before full disease panic hit the US, the New York Times podcast started preparing the…

July 16, 2022

Dr. Birx Praises Herself While Revealing Ignorance, Treachery, and Deceit

The December 2020 resignation of Dr. Deborah Birx, White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator under Trump, revealed predictable hypocrisy. Like so…

July 13, 2022

Twelve Questions on Economic Issues for the Next Congress

We are now experiencing an economic crisis that could get worse. Financials are in bear markets. Inflation is roaring. The…

July 9, 2022

Musk Declines to Save Twitter from Itself 

The question is finally settled: Elon Musk has declined to buy Twitter. His initial offer of $44 billion was contingent…

July 7, 2022

The Crash and Burn of Credentialism 

The word credentials is derived from Latin for “believe” as in “Credo in unum deum” meaning “I believe in one…

July 1, 2022

The Mighty Gorsuch vs. the Administrative State: Quotes from West Virginia vs. EPA 

The power of the administrative state to destroy liberty and property – to blast through legislation, science, and judicial oversight…

June 29, 2022

Poke and Sniff: A Lesson from 1906

In 1906, Upton Sinclair came out with his book The Jungle, and it shocked the nation by documenting the horror…

June 28, 2022

What If People Actually Controlled the Government?

Imagine, if you will, the following system.  Government is managed by elected representatives who are in turn elected by the…

June 27, 2022

The Astonishing Implications of Schedule F 

Two weeks before the 2020 general election, on October 21, 2020, Donald Trump issued an executive order (E.O. 13957) on…