José Azel 172 posts 0 comments

The United States is a republic, not a democracy. We owe this distinction to the ageless wisdom of the Founding Fathers. Think about it this way; suppose you live in a condominium building of ten apartment units. Nine of the units…
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Before a dear reader jumps the gun with a punishing email, let me make clear that,this is not an anti-immigration column. I have published, in these pages, several defenses of immigration; see for instance, “Migration as an Individual…
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In politics and economics, a Potemkin village means a hollow or false construct. Literally or figuratively, a construction created to deceive people into thinking that a situation is better than it really is. The term…
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Economist and historian Thomas Sowell tells an old Russian fable of two poor peasants – Boris, who had a goat, and Ivan, who didn’t. One day, a fairy comes along and offers Ivan a single wish. And, Ivan wishes for Boris’ goat to die.…
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It was not supposed to be this way. The United States was not conceived as a gigantic, cumbersome, highly centralized state. The Founding Fathers envisioned an American polis weighted much more towards local and regional…
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By definition, an expanded government requires diminished liberty. Any function we ask of government requires us to surrender a measure of our freedom, and our treasure. And yet, large segments of the population favor an…
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American exceptionalism is the belief that the United States is unique among nations with respect to its democracy and individual freedoms. The idea of American exceptionalism stems from the American Revolution. In the…
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Philosopher Karl Popper (1902-1994), castigated obfuscating writers as those "who have nothing to say, and say it very badly." Popper, a forceful defender of liberal democracy, was particularly critical of highbrows…
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When I studied international economics in the 1960s, one of the explanations offered for the wealth of a nation was its endowment of natural resources. Then, countries were perceived to be rich or poor based on their natural…
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The Corruption Perceptions Index, published yearly by Transparency International, measures the perceived levels of public sector corruption in 180 countries. The 2018 report shows that, the vast majority of countries assessed…
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Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), who devised the essay as a literary genre, was one of the most erudite and sceptic humanist philosophers of the XVI century. He personified the French Renaissance’s spirit of freely embracing doubts.…
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In a now classic experiment, political scientist Philip E. Tetlock showed that the predictions made by political experts are only slightly better than a random guess, and worse than the predictions made by a statistical model. The…
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