When a government controls both the economic power of individuals and the coercive power of the state ... this violates a fundamental rule of happy living: Never let the people with all the money and the people with all the guns be the same people.

One of the things that makes me a conservative, or a libertarian, or whatever the heck it is that I am - a person who doesn't much like big government - is that I do not like the concentration of the power.

It is a law of governance that democracies have to spend themselves dizzy. Citizens of democracies can, after all, tell their government to give them things.

Positive rights are the right to shelter, the right to education, the right to health care, the right to a living wage. These things are - these are, I would call them, more properly, political rights rather than positive rights. And they are extremely tricky, because now we are dealing with things that are zero sum.

And, by the way, how come all the people who were so in favor of unilateral nuclear disarmament are so opposed to unilateral protection against nukes?

Detroits industrial ruins are picturesque, like crumbling Rome in an 18th-century etching.

There isn't much room for an outsider point of view in print any more.