World History

Strange centennial somehow makes sense in the world of Leviathan.

President Obama has claimed that mass shootings do not occur in other countries. But, the data is clear that they do happen other places, and in places with stringent gun control laws. Worldwide, the state fails to keep its citizens safe.

The Paris attacks forced the world's attention away from causes such as the plight of "white privilege" on college campuses and back to the consequences of blowback to interventionist foreign policy. Unfortunately, the political response to these atrocities have been predictable.

EU members are closing their borders across Europe, effectively redrawing the map. But this doesn't mean an end to a unified Europe. We may be seeing the prelude to the emergence of a smaller and more militaristic European Union.

"Human rights" mean nothing to global elites when geopolitical advantages can be gained from joining forces with brutal regimes. Just as the West has embraced brutal dictators in Saudi Arabia and China, while ignoring the histories of the its Turkish and European Allies, the West may some day choose to do the same with ISIS.

When French President Francois Hollande declared this week that France is "at war," this could only possibly have been news to people who weren't paying attention. Of course, France is at war.

When the Soviet Union wanted to take away the rights of Catholics to worship, it confiscated their churches. The Soviets knew that the right to own property is intimately connected to a right of religious freedom. Pope Francis appears to not understand this.

No amount of fantasizing can make fundamental economic realities go away, no matter how much we put our faith in central banks, government regulation, or technologies of the future.

It wasn't long ago that the pundits were talking about Venezuela's "economic miracle" which had proved all the anti-socialist naysayers wrong. But with soaring unemployment, inflation, and deficits, the Venezuelan people are unfortunately having to pay for years of ignoring economic reality.

Robert Shiller, in a new screed against capitalism in The New York Times, asserts that government regulation makes countries rich. He then bolsters this argument by making stuff up.