At the heart of debates around education freedom and school choice is the subtle but sinister sentiment that parents can’t be trusted. They are too busy, too poor, or too ignorant to make the right decisions for their kids, and others know better how to raise and educate children. Never mind that parents have successfully
READ MOREI’m a positive type of person. I like to smooth things over, to think the best of others. So it startled me to realize that, several months ago, I was doing the exact thing I prided myself on not doing: jumping to conclusions and thinking the worst of another person. Unfortunately, many fall into
READ MORE“Contraceptives are the greatest life-saving, poverty-ending, women-empowering innovation ever created.” That’s the message of Melinda Gates, wife of one of the world’s richest men, in her new book The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World. In The Moment of Lift, Melinda tells the story of her philanthropic work, particularly with the Bill
READ MOREHave you’ve seen a meme exhorting you not to use self-checkout because it impoverishes workers who are replaced by unfeeling scanners? There is no harm in making that choice. But if we remember our lessons from Frederic Bastiat, we can see why the rationale behind the campaign is absurd. Why should we stop with the
READ MOREThe immigration problem today demands a serious debate about how to remedy the situation for the good of the country and its citizens. What we get instead are misleading images and scandalous, politically-motivated allegations. Not surprisingly, the problems continue to worsen. The rhetoric boiled over recently when Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) visited a border detention
READ MOREOver 1.3 million people have RSVP’d as “Going” on Facebook to an event titled “Storm Area 51, They Can’t Stop All of Us.” An additional one million people are “interested.” The event details note that anyone who plans to participate and “see them aliens” should meet at the Area 51 Alien Center tourist attraction, a
READ MOREPeople often assume that government welfare programs provide the resources and safety net that local communities cannot. But in the early- and mid-20th century, systemic racism often meant that African American communities were excluded from government welfare programs. In the face of this injustice, we see numerous examples of communities stepping up to take care
READ MOREMinimum wage laws, I’ve noted, are popular with the public. This no doubt explains why House Democrats passed a bill Thursday that would raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. Yet the minimum wage’s apparent popularity might be political pyrite (fool’s gold). A newly published Business Insider survey found that support for the minimum wage wilts when Americans—both Republicans
READ MOREPractice frugality. Work hard. Save and invest your money. For Americans, these practices were the stepping-stones to a better life for the last three centuries But are they still applicable? Can they lead to financial security and even wealth? The recent death of my mother-in-law Dorothy brought those questions to mind. Dorothy and her husband
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