Libertarians are fond of saying, "Your right to swing your fist ends where my chin begins." The idea is that the only legitimate limits on freedom of action are those that forbid direct harm.

Liberals have a more subtle understanding of social relationships. Human beings exist in complex webs of...

I was sitting in a bar on Ludlow Street last Wednesday evening. The barmaid came over to ask: "Did you hear that Steve Jobs died?" She had tears in her eyes.

She couldn't have been older than 25. For someone of my generation, it is odd that the passing of...

Last year Feisal Abdel Rauf, the Imam of a small Tribeca mosque, and his wife Daisy Khan announced their intention to build a large Islamic community center, with events and sports facilities, a 9/11 memorial, and a mosque that could accommodate their growing congregation. Rauf and Khan were inspired by...

Right-wing libertarians, Tea Party activists, and the cynical corporate front organizations that love (and fund) them all like to talk about "individual freedoms." For them, human beings are born with an innate quality of liberty, and this liberty is degraded by the authority of government. The Constitution, therefore, recognizes only...

A few days ago, Bill O'Reilly announced on The View that the reason he opposed the so-called "Ground Zero mosque" is that "Muslims killed us on 9/11," prompting hosts Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar to walk off the show.

Goldberg's and Behar's outrage was very theatrical, suited...

On August 3, 2010, voters in Missouri voted overwhelmingly -- 71% -- in favor of a ballot measure that empowers the state to reject one of the fundamental measures of the health care reform legislation recently passed by Congress: the individual mandate that requires otherwise uninsured people to buy private...

I first saw Sxip ("Skip") Shirey when his band Luminescent Orchestrii opened for Dresden Dolls on the night that brought in 2008. It was an odd but oddly perfect pairing: the angry, exuberant cabaret punk of the Dolls - Amanda Palmer and Brian Viglione...

I must say that I'm surprised. I hadn't thought I'd be capable of greater revulsion for right-wing political tactics after the Kenyan birth rumors, after the stonewall on health care reform, after populist demagoguery on the bank bailout that was necessitated—and partially enacted—by a Republican administration. But the right-wingers have...

I was 26 years old in 1989, and I remember very vividly the excitement, the joy, the sense of a once-in-a-lifetime world transformation that came in that year when tyrannies were toppled all over Europe.

Those who didn't grow up with the Cold War will have a hard time...

Public education may be crumbling in many of our cities, but if American schoolchildren are still taught history at all, they probably do know that on this day, five hundred and seventeen years ago, Christopher Columbus (they will not know that this Hispanicized Genoese sailor, born Christoffa Corombo, knew himself...

First media check of the morning - my web browser opens to the NYT - and I thought it was a joke. "Has someone hacked the Times site?"

Nope. Obama really did win the Nobel Peace Prize, eight months after his inauguration.

Now I know a lot of people are...

A quick local note:

It's a banal enough observation that money often drags arrogance in its wake, and power even more so. Here in New York City, our Mayor, Michael Bloomberg, is a very very rich man who bought himself a powerful office. Perhaps he's been saved from a reputation...

Health care reform is the issue of the day, and President Obama is blowing it. He's trying to reform the health insurance system, not the healthcare system itself; and doing so on the backs of the rich and of small business owners. Mandates on employers will be disastrous for the...

A long time ago in a different life, when the Iranian Islamic Revolution was less than a decade old, I was a student at the small New England college where Mansour Farhang taught (and still teaches) political science. Farhang had been the Iranian ambassador to the UN in the early...

A few more words about the use of torture in pursuit of national security goals in the wake of former Vice President Dick Cheney's deeply sick speech at the American Enterprise Institute on May 21.

About that speech itself I will say very little, since so many others,...

May Third, 2009, was Pete Seeger's 90th birthday. WNYC in New York hosted a retrospective of his work, and an hour long program, "The Protest Singer: An Intimate Conversation with Pete Seeger." NPR aired an "appreciation." There was a big concert in his honor at Madison Square...

Other professional obligations have kept me from writing in this space for the last few months. During that time, my piece on the influence of Friedrich Hayek on modern political thinking made it from print to Dissent Magazine's online edition, so I can finally offer the...

A few brief items, and then to work.

The question before us is, Does The New York Times have any dignity at all? Since early January, The Times has employed William Kristol as a weekly columnist. Kristol is a right-winger so extreme that he teeters on the divide at...

I'd like to start by mentioning a piece that I wrote for Dissent magazine, on the influential economist Friedrich Hayek, a hero of the right. It's in the current edition, Winter 2008. I'd been wanting to write about Hayek for a while, and I was pleased with how it...

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of Atlas Shrugged, the cult classic by the cult leader Ayn Rand. Like her other works of fiction and nonfiction, the book manages to be both deeply sinister and deeply ridiculous, which isn't so easy to do.

Terry Teachout has a piece...