Nope, the answer isn’t smoking. Or fatty food. Or 16 oz. sodas. And it’s not alcohol, driving too fast, or standing between politicians and a TV camera. In the past 100 years or so, the biggest cause of premature death has been government. Back in 2011, while criticizing the Baltimore Symphony for using the Soviet hammer and sickle […]

Like all advocates of freedom, I normally despair about the future. Whether we’re measuring the ever-growing burden of government or the erosion of key forms of social capital such as self-reliance and the work ethic, it seems that the world is heading in the wrong direction. But, at least for today, I want to be […]

Citing polling data with poorly (or dishonestly) worded questions, anti-Second Amendment ideologues often argue that gun control is popular. The real test, though, is what happens on election day. That’s why it was such big news when two incumbent Democrats from Colorado’s State Senate were defeated in a recall election. They both represented districts that […]

I’m a big fan of school choice. If we bust up the government education monopoly and create a competitive education market, we’ll get a much better education system at much lower cost. This isn’t just idle theorizing. The evidence shows that competition produces better results. That will be especially good news for children from poor […]

Back in 2012, I reported on some academic research showing that Democrats lost about 25 seats in the 2010 mid-term elections because of support for Obamacare. But it’s not just big-government entitlement programs that are politically unpopular. Bill Clinton admitted that his ban on so-called assault weapons boomeranged against Democrats in the 1994 elections and […]

It sounds strange, but my two favorite columns on gun control were authored by self-identified leftists. But they didn’t let ideology trump common sense. Justin Cronin, for instance, explained that restrictions on gun ownership undermined his ability to protect his family. And Jeffrey Goldberg looked at the evidence and concluded that guns make people safer. […]

Fifty years from now (assuming we haven’t suffered a Greek-style fiscal collapse), will we still enjoy our constitutional freedom of private gun ownership? Sometimes I’m pessimistic about what will happen because politically correct educators are brainwashing our kids. We’ve even gotten to the point where a deaf kid can’t use sign language if his fingers […]

I’m not a big fan of the United Nations and I’m not a supporter of gun control, so you can imagine how agitated I get when two bad things are combined together. And that’s exactly what’s happening with a new anti-gun treaty being concocted by the United Nations. John Bolton, a former U.S. Ambassador to […]

bout a year ago, I spoke at a conference in Europe that attracted a lot of very rich people from all over the continent, as well as a lot of people who manage money for high-net-worth individuals. What made this conference remarkable was not the presentations, though they were generally quite interesting. The stunning part […]

I wrote earlier this year about the connection between a morally corrupt welfare state and the riots in the United Kingdom. But what’s happening now is not just some left-wing punks engaging in political street theater. Instead, the U.K. is dealing with a bigger problem of societal decay caused in part by a government’s failure […]