Paul Crider is a husband and father living in the San Francisco Bay Area. He daylights as a semiconductor engineer but otherwise likes to spend his time reading and writing.
Like many others, I discovered Ayn Rand in high school and converted to libertarianism with a true believer’s zeal. I remained a libertarian for over a decade. My exit from libertarianism was comparably much more gradual. By reading broadly and meeting a lot of sharp friends from other ideological
Relatively free and open markets have always accompanied liberal societies, and they have been most thoroughly suppressed by some of the most illiberal regimes. But the historical connection between liberal democracies and markets seems stronger than the theoretical connection, at least at first glance. Political liberalism builds in part upon
Slate writer Jamelle Bouie caused quite a kerfuffle by discussing the racist elements within the Enlightenment, first with a series of tweet threads and then with a more detailed article including, as they say, receipts. Bouie contends that the Enlightenment played an outsized role in creating our modern concept of
Kim Kelly has presented a pretty good explainer of capitalism for the uninitiated at Teen Vogue. I wouldn’t be writing this if I didn’t have issues with the piece, but I want to begin by affirming Kelly’s skepticism of capitalism as it is often portrayed and defended.
TaLynn Kel argues at The Establishment that Thor: Ragnarok is really a subversive takedown of white supremacy and colonialism. Spoilers follow. Hela, the film’s villain, tears off the mask of beautiful Asgard to reveal something wicked. As Hela points out in one particularly stunning scene, the spectacular gold of
In a talk given to the largely conservative audience of the Manhattan Institute, Jonathan Haidt discussed some of the reasons why Americans are becoming more polarized (transcript here). In doing so he uses a metaphor from physics, referring to centripetal social forces, those that pull people together, and centrifugal forces,
When a critical concentration of white men are present in early days of a movement or ideology, it sets in motion a vicious circle of attracting more white men and repelling others. This isn’t necessarily conscious. If a few white guys want to put something together, perhaps like a
Anarchism is surely underrated in the popular mindset, unjustly besmirched as it is by thesauruses juxtaposing anarchy with chaos and disorder, even nihilism. Anarchism has a place in the public discourse as a critical lens through which to analyze the state. But however unfairly anarchism is treated, as a substantive
The liberal tradition is centrally concerned with liberty. But the different currents within liberal thought naturally differ in their conceptions of freedom. (I take freedom and liberty to be synonyms and will use both interchangeably.) One of the most common distinctions drawn is between negative freedom and positive freedom. In
Recent political contests seem to have shifted from a left-right axis to an axis setting those in favor of the “open society” against the “closed society.” The political coalitions during the late 20th century across America and Western Europe split into the Left: heavy state regulation involvement in the economy,
If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. – James Madison, Federalist 51 Sam Hammond caught flak in certain social justice communities by daring to defend the controversial Kendall Jenner Pepsi ad on social
No modern defense of democracy needs to rely solely on first principles. Unlike our liberal forebears who struggled to constrain the arbitrary and expansive powers of kings and aristocrats, we know that representative, constitutional democracy works. The hockey-stick plot of per capita income over the centuries that the economic historian