The Boom & Bust Cycle: Simple as ABC(T)
By Jason Riddle In March of 2000, the tech-heavy NASDAQ peaked at over 5132 for a gain of nearly 500% in five years. Soon after, the dot-com bubble burst and erased millions in paper gains. To stave off the painful, but necessary, economic consequences of resource misallocation during the dot-com craze, the Federal Reserve dropped … Read more
Wallace Stevens and Imagination
It would seem at first blush that American modernism is incompatible with American conservatism. But this impression pivots on a too-narrow conception of both “modernism” and “conservatism.” The aesthetes who animated modern American poetry were many of them social and political conservatives. This fact has been lost on those intellectuals who do not admit or acknowledge … Read more
Lincoln’s Turmoil: The War for Principles
In any endeavor to measure the rectitude of some chosen course of action, one must first resolve to standardize and clearly define the component parts of the situation: the designated purpose of an individual or group, the forces acting against them, and the measure to which they or their opponent forces prevailed upon the other. … Read more
The Philosophy of Capitalism
In a recent attempt to refine and condense human history to its most crucial, most fundamental turning-points, equipped with an undergraduate-level sense of anthropology, I sifted through an endless myriad of names, places, and events- some proud, others shameful- searching pointedly for the very skeleton of the subject. I recalled the ancient Greeks, … Read more
Capitalism vs. The “Public Good”
The following essay by Slade Mendenhall, “Capitalism vs. The ‘Public Good’” was a Third Prize winner in the 2010 Atlas Shrugged Essay Contest hosted by the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, California. Of all that is to be derived from the teachings of Ayn Rand, no maxim may be as crucial, nor as rarely appreciated, as the … Read more
