Liberty Law Talk

Presidential power scholar Stephen Knott discusses in this latest edition of Liberty Law Talk his book Rush to Judgment: George W. Bush, the War on Terror, and His Critics, recently released in paperback form by University Press of Kansas. Knott has a point in this book. He argues convincingly that the vituperative critics of George W. Bush’s use of executive power, in many instances, were willfully ignorant of the historical use of these powers. Past presidents, ranging from George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Abraham Lincoln and certain presidents in the twentieth century, defended and exercised powers similar to those…Read More

Presidential power scholar Stephen Knott discusses in this latest edition of Liberty Law Talk his book Rush to Judgment: George W. Bush, the War on Terror, and His Critics, recently released in paperback form by University Press of Kansas. Knott has a point in this book. He argues convincingly that the vituperative critics of George W. Bush’s use of executive power, in many instances, were willfully ignorant of the historical use of these powers. Past presidents, ranging from George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Abraham Lincoln and certain presidents in the twentieth century, defended and exercised powers similar to those…Read More

The market for consumer credit has been subjected to an ever increasing amount of federal regulation since the 2008 crisis. The Dodd-Frank Act created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to intervene in consumer credit markets and protect us from the rapacious lenders who devour household income and place consumers in unmanageable levels of debt through stealth and manipulative business practices. The predictable results have been a marginal increase in the cost of credit and its decreasing availability to lower income consumers as the CFPB’s rules price them out of this market. Todd Zywicki, co-author of Consumer Credit and the American…Read More

The market for consumer credit has been subjected to an ever increasing amount of federal regulation since the 2008 crisis. The Dodd-Frank Act created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to intervene in consumer credit markets and protect us from the rapacious lenders who devour household income and place consumers in unmanageable levels of debt through stealth and manipulative business practices. The predictable results have been a marginal increase in the cost of credit and its decreasing availability to lower income consumers as the CFPB’s rules price them out of this market. Todd Zywicki, co-author of Consumer Credit and the American…Read More

The market for consumer credit has been subjected to an ever increasing amount of federal regulation since the 2008 crisis. The Dodd-Frank Act created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to intervene in consumer credit markets and protect us from the rapacious lenders who devour household income and place consumers in unmanageable levels of debt through stealth and manipulative business practices. The predictable results have been a marginal increase in the cost of credit and its decreasing availability to lower income consumers as the CFPB’s rules price them out of this market. Todd Zywicki, co-author of Consumer Credit and the American…Read More

This conversation with Roger Scruton engages his defense of the conservative disposition. Scruton’s just-released book, How to be a Conservative, might be said to take on the challenge Friedrich Hayek issued in his famous essay “Why I Am Not a Conservative.” There, you will recall, Hayek argued that conservatism does not offer a program, or any substantive content that would affirm a free society. It is always in prudential retreat. This conversation explores Scruton’s Burkean-informed notion that tradition and habit aren’t blind guides, but are teachers and modes of social knowledge by which the perennial problem of social coordination is…Read More

This conversation with Roger Scruton engages his defense of the conservative disposition. Scruton’s just-released book, How to be a Conservative, might be said to take on the challenge Friedrich Hayek issued in his famous essay “Why I Am Not a Conservative.” There, you will recall, Hayek argued that conservatism does not offer a program, or any substantive content that would affirm a free society. It is always in prudential retreat. This conversation explores Scruton’s Burkean-informed notion that tradition and habit aren’t blind guides, but are teachers and modes of social knowledge by which the perennial problem of social coordination is…Read More

This conversation with Roger Scruton engages his defense of the conservative disposition. Scruton’s just-released book, How to be a Conservative, might be said to take on the challenge Friedrich Hayek issued in his famous essay “Why I Am Not a Conservative.” There, you will recall, Hayek argued that conservatism does not offer a program, or any substantive content that would affirm a free society. It is always in prudential retreat. This conversation explores Scruton’s Burkean-informed notion that tradition and habit aren’t blind guides, but are teachers and modes of social knowledge by which the perennial problem of social coordination is…Read More

The attempt by the media and the political elites of the three major political parties in the United Kingdom to heap contempt on Euroskepticism no longer possesses the same power. With the victory of the United Kingdom Independence Party in local and European Parliamentary elections, the prospect of the UK leaving the European Union is a live one. Indeed, Prime Minister David Cameron has agreed to a public referendum on this question in 2017 should the Conservatives be returned to power in 2015. I recently discussed the case for a UK exit with David Conway, a frequent contributor to this…Read More

The attempt by the media and the political elites of the three major political parties in the United Kingdom to heap contempt on Euroskepticism no longer possesses the same power. With the victory of the United Kingdom Independence Party in local and European Parliamentary elections, the prospect of the UK leaving the European Union is a live one. Indeed, Prime Minister David Cameron has agreed to a public referendum on this question in 2017 should the Conservatives be returned to power in 2015. I recently discussed the case for a UK exit with David Conway, a frequent contributor to this…Read More

The attempt by the media and the political elites of the three major political parties in the United Kingdom to heap contempt on Euroskepticism no longer possesses the same power. With the victory of the United Kingdom Independence Party in local and European Parliamentary elections, the prospect of the UK leaving the European Union is a live one. Indeed, Prime Minister David Cameron has agreed to a public referendum on this question in 2017 should the Conservatives be returned to power in 2015. I recently discussed the case for a UK exit with David Conway, a frequent contributor to this…Read More

Comes now the great Daniel J. Mahoney, author of penetrating intellectual biographies of Bertrand de Jouvenel, Raymond Aron, and Charles de Gaulle, among other books, to discuss his latest work, The Other Solzhenitsyn. Mahoney, coeditor of The Solzhenitsyn Reader, offers in this discussion a tremendous introduction to the Russian dissident writer’s oeuvre and a rebuttal to his many critics. We might say that some Western writers who, from their position of faux outrage, frequently critique their governments, societies, and cultures have Solzhenitsyn envy, earnestly wishing their work had even a fraction of the impact of the Russian anticommunist’s corpus of writings. Not that they admire Solzhenitsyn’s political or moral philosophy, or his belief that freedom is ultimately born of spiritual commitment. They only yearn to have it said that their words put a “sliver in the throat of power.” Such was the praise given Solzhenitsyn in 1962 after the publication of One Day in the Live of Ivan Denisovich. If that short account of prison life was a sliver, The Gulag Archipelago represents the single most consequential writing delegitimizing Soviet communism. This “experiment in literary investigation” reports on Solzhenitsyn’s eight years in Soviet prison camps, recalling the sufferings of the zeks and the lies of the regime, knowingly accepted by its apparatchiks, lies required to keep the entire illegitimate enterprise afloat. Mahoney quotes the Swiss scholar Georges Nivat’s observation that in this work, Solzhenitsyn is “the Homer of the subterranean world inhabited by the zeks, a world of camps, repression and death, but also of spiritual renewal that he famously named ‘the gulag archipelago.’” Yet, Solzhenitsyn’s person and his work have been attacked and misrepresented. Are the accounts of Solzhenitsyn as anti-democratic, theocratic, and pro-Putin, to name a few, accurate? Do they reveal something his admirers have missed? Or is it the case that many Western writers fail to understand the nature of Solzhenitsyn’s critique of both communism and the materialism and unbounded freedom of late-modern Western democracies, to say nothing of their understanding of the Russian nation and culture, and the type of political freedom that Solzhenitsyn advocated after Soviet communism fell? Mahoney’s discussion of these questions and ideas is fascinating. Some might wonder why we need to listen to the words of Solzhenitsyn given that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is defunct. It is because we have been unable to deal with the monstrous legacy of communism. We have fallen short, as Solzhenitsyn himself said, and we need to explore why. His reasoning that communism was the fulfillment of philosophical modernity surely merits consideration in the matter of our diffidence in confronting communism’s record of death and destruction.

Comes now the great Daniel J. Mahoney, author of penetrating intellectual biographies of Bertrand de Jouvenel, Raymond Aron, and Charles de Gaulle, among other books, to discuss his latest work, The Other Solzhenitsyn. Mahoney, coeditor of The Solzhenitsyn Reader, offers in this discussion a tremendous introduction to the Russian dissident writer’s oeuvre and a rebuttal to his many critics. We might say that some Western writers who, from their position of faux outrage, frequently critique their governments, societies, and cultures have Solzhenitsyn envy, earnestly wishing their work had even a fraction of the impact of the Russian anticommunist’s corpus of writings. Not that they admire Solzhenitsyn’s political or moral philosophy, or his belief that freedom is ultimately born of spiritual commitment. They only yearn to have it said that their words put a “sliver in the throat of power.” Such was the praise given Solzhenitsyn in 1962 after the publication of One Day in the Live of Ivan Denisovich. If that short account of prison life was a sliver, The Gulag Archipelago represents the single most consequential writing delegitimizing Soviet communism. This “experiment in literary investigation” reports on Solzhenitsyn’s eight years in Soviet prison camps, recalling the sufferings of the zeks and the lies of the regime, knowingly accepted by its apparatchiks, lies required to keep the entire illegitimate enterprise afloat. Mahoney quotes the Swiss scholar Georges Nivat’s observation that in this work, Solzhenitsyn is “the Homer of the subterranean world inhabited by the zeks, a world of camps, repression and death, but also of spiritual renewal that he famously named ‘the gulag archipelago.’” Yet, Solzhenitsyn’s person and his work have been attacked and misrepresented. Are the accounts of Solzhenitsyn as anti-democratic, theocratic, and pro-Putin, to name a few, accurate? Do they reveal something his admirers have missed? Or is it the case that many Western writers fail to understand the nature of Solzhenitsyn’s critique of both communism and the materialism and unbounded freedom of late-modern Western democracies, to say nothing of their understanding of the Russian nation and culture, and the type of political freedom that Solzhenitsyn advocated after Soviet communism fell? Mahoney’s discussion of these questions and ideas is fascinating. Some might wonder why we need to listen to the words of Solzhenitsyn given that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is defunct. It is because we have been unable to deal with the monstrous legacy of communism. We have fallen short, as Solzhenitsyn himself said, and we need to explore why. His reasoning that communism was the fulfillment of philosophical modernity surely merits consideration in the matter of our diffidence in confronting communism’s record of death and destruction.

Comes now the great Daniel J. Mahoney, author of penetrating intellectual biographies of Bertrand de Jouvenel, Raymond Aron, and Charles de Gaulle, among other books, to discuss his latest work, The Other Solzhenitsyn. Mahoney, coeditor of The Solzhenitsyn Reader, offers in this discussion a tremendous introduction to the Russian dissident writer’s oeuvre and a rebuttal to his many critics. We might say that some Western writers who, from their position of faux outrage, frequently critique their governments, societies, and cultures have Solzhenitsyn envy, earnestly wishing their work had even a fraction of the impact of the Russian anticommunist’s corpus of writings. Not that they admire Solzhenitsyn’s political or moral philosophy, or his belief that freedom is ultimately born of spiritual commitment. They only yearn to have it said that their words put a “sliver in the throat of power.” Such was the praise given Solzhenitsyn in 1962 after the publication of One Day in the Live of Ivan Denisovich. If that short account of prison life was a sliver, The Gulag Archipelago represents the single most consequential writing delegitimizing Soviet communism. This “experiment in literary investigation” reports on Solzhenitsyn’s eight years in Soviet prison camps, recalling the sufferings of the zeks and the lies of the regime, knowingly accepted by its apparatchiks, lies required to keep the entire illegitimate enterprise afloat. Mahoney quotes the Swiss scholar Georges Nivat’s observation that in this work, Solzhenitsyn is “the Homer of the subterranean world inhabited by the zeks, a world of camps, repression and death, but also of spiritual renewal that he famously named ‘the gulag archipelago.’” Yet, Solzhenitsyn’s person and his work have been attacked and misrepresented. Are the accounts of Solzhenitsyn as anti-democratic, theocratic, and pro-Putin, to name a few, accurate? Do they reveal something his admirers have missed? Or is it the case that many Western writers fail to understand the nature of Solzhenitsyn’s critique of both communism and the materialism and unbounded freedom of late-modern Western democracies, to say nothing of their understanding of the Russian nation and culture, and the type of political freedom that Solzhenitsyn advocated after Soviet communism fell? Mahoney’s discussion of these questions and ideas is fascinating. Some might wonder why we need to listen to the words of Solzhenitsyn given that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is defunct. It is because we have been unable to deal with the monstrous legacy of communism. We have fallen short, as Solzhenitsyn himself said, and we need to explore why. His reasoning that communism was the fulfillment of philosophical modernity surely merits consideration in the matter of our diffidence in confronting communism’s record of death and destruction.

This latest podcast is with Joel Kotkin, America’s Demographer-in-Chief, on his recently released book, The New Class Conflict. Kotkin and I discuss his grave warning of an American future that no longer contains the promises of democratic capitalism. Two groups, in Kotkin’s telling, have converged and share a vision of America that is unconcerned with economic growth, shared prosperity, and the need to rein in state power. The book’s opening argues that this class of tech entrepreneurs and the "Clerisy" pose a fundamental challenge to America's self-understanding as a nation of economic mobility: In the coming decades, the greatest existential threat…Read More