Articles

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The Dirty Little Secret About Homelessness Is the Key to Ending It

The US Supreme Court recently heard oral arguments about what cities can and cannot do to end homelessness. What everyone agreed on was that homelessness is a difficult problem. I think most people listening to the Supreme Court would agree: it isn’t going to solve homelessness. That is a job for state legislators. So why haven’t they? Why has homelessness gotten worse? Read More ›
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The Biden Department of Education Seems to Hate Women and Girls

In a slap to the face to all American women and girls in schools and universities, the Department of Education dismantled many existing federal protections against actual sex discrimination promulgated under a civil rights law known as Title IX — which protects females against discrimination at public schools, colleges, and universities receiving federal funding — by unilaterally rewriting the law to apply to “gender,” which isn’t the same thing at all. Read More ›
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Homelessness in Colonial New England

Since starting this weekly column in June 2022 I’ve covered lots of topics, including homelessness in late medieval England — but I’ve shorted American history. Since today, April 19, is the anniversary of the battles in Lexington and Concord that started the Revolutionary War in 1775, it’s a good day on which to take a rapid ride through the New England countryside and summarize common responses to homelessness in the 17th and 18th centuries. Read More ›
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United States Supreme Court Building in Washington DC, USA.
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SCOTUS Will Hear Arguments in Controversial Homelessness Case that Will Impact Cities Nationwide

As homelessness hits all-time highs across the country, the United States Supreme Court will hear arguments next Monday about whether the enforcement of generally applicable laws regulating camping on public property are constitutional. The case will determine how cities nationwide are allowed to respond to the crisis of homelessness. Read More ›
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Man reading an e-book on the shore of a forest lake at sunset.
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Published Today: The Conservative Environmentalist

Published today is Benji Backer’s book on how government ties up sound conservation policy in red tape that immobilizes real reform. Benji is a University of Washington grad I was proud to have as a Chapman Fellow at Discovery Institute a few years back. Read More ›
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Elderly woman walking with walker
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Belgian Health-Fund President: Euthanize Old People to Save Money

Earlier this month, I noted that a U.K. columnist was pushing euthanasia for the elderly as a way of saving national resources. That call has now been echoed by a Belgian health-insurance official for one of the five mutual-fund companies that provide the country’s mandatory health- and disability-insurance policies. Read More ›
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A Market in Human Kidneys Is a Bad Idea

It is sometimes said that desperate circumstances require desperate measures. But desperation can also lead to the exploitation of the vulnerable. Such would be the case if we created a market in live-donation human kidneys. Read More ›
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Remaking the World, Past and Present

Andrew Wilson’s Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West (Crossway, 2023) has probably left dozens of historians groaning, Why didn’t I think of that? Wilson could have written one more bloviating account of how the WEIRD revolution — Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic — affected the world during the past 250 years. Instead, he concentrated on the one Read More ›

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Zimbabwe’s Central Bank Starts Africa’s Path to a Gold Standard

This month, the Central Bank of Zimbabwe launched a new gold-based currency, the first gold-based currency from a government since Richard Nixon effectively ended the world gold standard system in 1971. As long as the Central Bank of Zimbabwe adheres to some important principles, and doesn't play politics, it should be fine. Read More ›