“Lord, King of heaven and earth, we give you thanks for yourself. Of your own holy will you created all things spiritual and physical, made us in your own image and likeness, and gave us a place in paradise, through your only Son, in the Holy Spirit.”
–St. Francis of Assisi.
Today I provide commentaries on the proper role of government. Enjoy.
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Frederic Bastiat on the Purpose of Law
BY: Mark Lewis (September 6, 2026).
I don’t know who Krzysztof Szczawinski is, and couldn’t pronounce his name if my life depended upon it. I only know he seems to be a pretty smart Polish fellow who calls himself a “fan of reason, liberty, and Western Civilization.” He has recently written, on “X,” an excellent summary of Frédéric Bastiat’s views on “law,” and I’d like to share his summary here and put it into an American context. But Mr. Szczawinski deserves the credit for the good things here, not me. Any mistakes are mine. I want that clear.
For those who might need a little introduction, Frédéric Bastiat was an early 19th-century French economist and philosopher, a strong believer in free trade and limited government.
In other words, much in line with the thinking of Adam Smith, our Founding Fathers, the Austrian school of economics, Friedman, Sowell, Williams, and other champions of free market economics. His philosophy is highly regarded by those who prize free economic principles. If you’ve never heard of him, it’s because the Left hates his guts and doesn’t want you to know what he taught. And since the big government Left has dominated the American education system for generations now, Bastiat is not as well known as he should be. I think you will see why in the synopsis below.
Here is Mr. Szczawinski’s summary of Bastiat, with some (mostly unnecessary) comments from me afterwards.
“1. Every person has a natural right to defend their life, liberty, and property. Law is simply that individual right organized collectively – nothing more, nothing less.”
The whole purpose of law should be to protect people’s God-given rights to life, liberty, and property. As Bastiat (and our Founding Fathers) said, every human has an individual right to life, liberty, and property and to protect such. This is one reason for the 2nd Amendment.
“Government” and “society” are the collective ways individuals organize themselves to protect those rights. That is, as our Founders taught us (or tried to), the purpose of government.
“2. The moment law goes beyond that — taking from some to give to others — it has stopped being law and become legal plunder.”
This is, of course, where most governments go, and have gone, wrong. Law is for protecting virtuous citizens; it is not a club against them to be used by politicians to buy votes and forcefully redistribute resources.
“3. Legal plunder isn’t exceptional. It’s the normal operating mode of most governments most of the time: subsidies, redistribution, bailouts – each one a faction using state force to extract what it couldn’t get by voluntary agreement.”
Bastiat knew, as our Founders did, what governments in the past had done, i.e., used their citizen-given power to plunder those citizens for the benefit of the government. It was as evident to Bastiat in 1850 as it was to America’s Founders in 1776. Our Founders wrote a Constitution specifically designed to prevent this, but sadly, they failed.
“4. The test is simple: if the same act performed by a private individual would be called theft, it’s theft when the state does it, too. The badge doesn’t change the nature of the act.”
That is exactly the truth, and needs no comment from me.
“5. Two wrong responses to legal plunder: give everyone the right to plunder (socialism), or let the current plunderers keep going (cronyism). The only legitimate answer is to strip law back to its actual function.”
“Cronyism” has not been unknown in American history, and indeed, was what our government did for much of its history — give benefits to those whom the party in power favored. It often leads to civil war in history, and it led to one in America. The Democrats today, of course, are not only practicing cronyism, but also want to introduce socialism. That would give the government even more power, which is exactly what they want.
As Bastiat said, the only answer to this is to return law to its legitimate function; in America, to return to the Constitution the way it was written and intended. But that isn’t going to happen.
“6. Once people see law as a machine for taking rather than protecting, everyone floods politics to control it – because whoever runs the machine can point it at their enemies. This is why Bastiat defined the state as “that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.” Lobbying and corruption aren’t aberrations. They’re the logical conclusion of a law that plunders.”
Power corrupts, and government has power. Evil, selfish people want to control the government for their own benefit. The last statement about lobbying and corruption (waste and fraud) is especially perceptive.
“7. Bastiat isn’t describing what the law is. He’s describing what it’s supposed to be – and showing, relentlessly, how far the thing calling itself law has drifted from that. Real law protects, not takes. Everything else wearing the name “law” is organized force, plunder, and theft in disguise.”
Frédéric Bastiat was exactly right. Our Founding Fathers knew it before he did, and they told us the same thing, in various ways and writings. And again, they wrote a Constitution designed especially to prevent government from practicing “legal plunder.” Thomas Jefferson put it this way: “The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the Constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first.” This is exactly what Frédéric Bastiat was talking about.
All law, all of our rights, ultimately come from God, our “Creator.” They must do so, for only He is perfectly just and wise. If we look at legal systems created without His wisdom and guidance, we see the utter chaos such has produced. America has, for a generation now, left God out of our laws, and we are not better, or freer, because of it.
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Will We See Western Capitals Fall?
Governments that cause more problems than they fix do not deserve to survive.
BY: J.B. Shurk, The American Thinker (September 21, 2026).
Consider these recent news headlines: (1) “NYC Turns Back to Gas Buses After Finding Out the Hard Way That the Electric Versions Have Big Problems,” (2) “As a Former Head of MI6 it’s Clear That Britain’s Climate Policy is Leaving Us Dangerously Exposed to Our Enemies,” and (3) “Spain: 74% of sex-crime suspects are foreigners in Basque Country.”
They come from three different Western nations and involve three dissimilar subjects — public transportation, national security, and violent crime — yet each news story exposes the real-world consequences of government failure:
(1) In order to pursue “Net Zero” carbon goals, New York dumped a ton of money into electric buses that are too expensive and entirely unreliable for the city’s needs. (2) Britain’s former top spy is finally ready to admit publicly that his country’s delusional obsession with “climate change” has devastated the United Kingdom’s capacity for industrial and energy self-sufficiency, rendering the former superpower dependent on foreign adversaries for future survival. (3) Even though foreigners make up only 10% of the Basque region’s population, they account for 74% of rape arrests, 73% of homicide arrests, 95% of drunk-driving arrests, 80% of theft arrests, and 78% of violent robberies.
What’s so striking about these news stories is their “well, duh!” factor. An ordinary, rational person would have no problem predicting the failures of a citywide electric bus fleet, the offshoring of a nation’s critical industries, or open border policies that invite foreign invasion. Yet mayors, governors, and prime ministers have pursued these catastrophic programs anyway, while heads of espionage agencies and millions of government bureaucrats either support their harmful decisions or shamefully stay silent.
The middle article links to the transcript of a speech that Sir Richard Dearlove delivered to the Global Warming Policy Foundation in London last week. It was a good speech concerning an important subject, and Dearlove deserves some credit for articulating a point of view that goes against the powerful flow of “politically correct” Western orthodoxy. But he gave this speech from the comfortable perch of quasi-retirement with little to lose aside from a few honorary board positions. Where was his voice when he was in a position to actually do something about the U.K.’s suicidal energy policies?
In his speech, Dearlove explained how his Cold War experiences taught him “that the country’s war-fighting potential resided in its industry, that our most vulnerable link was the fuel chain…and that our industrial base could be rebuilt and repaired.” Now, however, there is “very little industry left to protect, and we cannot rebuild non-existent industries which lie in foreign jurisdictions beyond our reach.” Dearlove concluded that the U.K. must “rebuild the strategic industries we require to ensure that we can defend our island fortress and be a reliable ally to friendly democracies around the world.”
These are absolutely true statements. Blue-collar workers throughout the West have been making these arguments for fifty years. Had an ordinary Brit with few credentials been in charge of MI6, that person would have been screaming profanities and ringing alarm bells long before the U.K. closed its last coal mines and steel factories. Shouldn’t that embarrass Britain’s “ruling elites”? And if it doesn’t, shouldn’t “ruling elites” be considered a danger to the public’s prosperity and security?
Long-overdue, post-career wake-up calls bring to my mind President Eisenhower’s 1961 Farewell Address during which he warned Americans against the growing dangers from an emerging “military-industrial complex.” Although his turn of phrase continues to be used sixty-five years later, it would have been nice if the former Supreme Allied Commander and five-star general had used his two terms as president of the United States to tackle that problem before it got completely out of hand. Eisenhower certainly had the expertise to see its destructive potential more clearly than most, but he chose to outline the threat on his way out the door and leave it for others to solve. Some historians believe that parts of the MIC had a hand in President Kennedy’s assassination, and if that is true, then Eisenhower’s failure to promptly act had extraordinarily far-reaching consequences that included the death of his successor.
The generations of Americans who were born after Eisenhower’s tenure have given him much credit for recognizing that the symbiotic relationship between Big Government and Big Business was evolving into an unconstitutional and anti-American oligarchy that we know today as the “permanent bureaucracy,” the “ruling class,” or the “Deep State.” Perhaps if the American general-turned-president had neutralized the Deep State in the first decade after WWII, we would not have endured some of the worst chapters in recent American history, including the Vietnam War, the debasement of the U.S. dollar, the FBI’s soft coup d’état against President Nixon, fifty years of “global warming” con games, sixty years of mass immigration from third-world nations, NAFTA’s industry-killing bloodbath, China’s entry into the WTO, the 9/11 Islamic terror attacks, the Global War on Terrorism, Obamacare’s government takeover of medicine, the Russia Collusion Hoax, the COVID information war against the Bill of Rights, numerous rigged elections decided by unlawful voters and mail-in-ballot fraud, multiple assassination attempts on President Trump, the assassination of Charlie Kirk, leftist-inspired violence against conservatives, and the Democrats’ manufactured AI fearmongering going on today. Diagnosing problems without taking concrete steps to solve those problems produces a perverse phenomenon:
The worse unsolved problems become, the more prescient the person warning about them appears.
Toward the end of Dearlove’s speech, Britain’s former top spy argued that the government of which he was an integral part had monumentally failed: “The first responsibility of government is the safety of the nation. However, successive governments have forgotten this, and Britain is now caught in an energy trap of its own making. As with rebuilding our armed forces, it will take a significant national effort to extract us and bring us back to a position of safety. The task is urgent.”
This is certainly true. The question is why so many successive governments in the U.K. and across the West have betrayed their own citizens and made their nations much less safe. Because normal citizens would never have offshored their own industrial and manufacturing jobs to adversarial nations such as communist China. Normal citizens would not have conspired with transnational human trafficking gangs to import tens of millions of unassimilable illegal aliens. Normal citizens would not have imposed “green energy” regulations that make it harder for farmers to grow food and for businesses to pay their bills. Normal citizens would not mandate that unreliable electric vehicles replace internal combustion engines while power grids crash due to insufficient supplies of wind and solar energies. These kinds of policies are so obviously foolish and suicidal that only our credentialed “ruling class” could justify them.
Does that tell us that our bureaucrats are too stupid to keep our nations safe, as Dearlove rightly recognizes as the first responsibility of government? Or are these self-destructive national policies proof that Western bureaucracies are waging war against Western citizens? Certainly Western governments are guilty of failing their peoples. The only question remaining is whether their failures stem from a combination of incompetence and hubris or treason and malice.
As Western citizens ponder that question, they are quickly taking matters into their own hands. Spaniards in Ceuta are destroying government shelters built for foreign invaders. A British village has voted to secede from the U.K. after the government announced plans to house an army of foreign immigrants next door. The price of government betrayal might soon be the fall of a Western capital.
Recognizing problems is not good enough. Governments that cause more problems than they fix do not deserve to survive.
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There Are No Solutions
Thomas Sowell’s Tragic Vision and the Illusions of the Anointed.
BY: Lars Moller, The American Thinker (September 22, 2026).
At 96 years of age, Thomas Sowell is one of the most formidable minds in contemporary American thought. Without any desire to bask in the media spotlight, he personifies integrity as a scholar, a luminary whose body of work combines empirical rigor, historical breadth, and an unyielding commitment to human dignity irrespective of race. His insistence on true meritocracy—judging individuals by their capacities and achievements rather than by collective grievances or engineered outcomes—marks him as a rational defender of the individual against the sentimental collectivism that has come to dominate elite discourse.
Sowell’s philosophy rests on what he terms the Tragic (or “constrained”) Vision of human nature, a perspective that confronts the permanent limitations of mankind and rejects the utopian—and revolutionary—fantasy of perfectibility. This vision, elaborated most systematically in A Conflict of Visions (1987), supplies the intellectual architecture for his entire oeuvre and explains both his enduring influence among serious readers and the studied neglect he has received from much of the academic left.
Sowell defines a vision not as a formal ideology but as a pre-theoretical sense of how the world operates and what human beings can realistically achieve. The Tragic Vision holds that human nature is fixed, flawed, and inherently limited. Men and women are driven by self-interest; their moral and intellectual capacities cannot be fundamentally remade by education, environment, or social engineering. Consequently, social life must be organized around systemic processes—markets, the rule of law, inherited institutions—that channel imperfect motives towards tolerable results.
The Utopian (or “unconstrained”) Vision, by contrast, treats human nature as malleable and perfectible. It places its faith in the deliberate intervention of enlightened elites who will guide the benighted masses towards a final state of justice and harmony. Where the Tragic Vision seeks “trade-offs” that minimize suffering within the bounds of reality, the Utopian Vision demands “solutions” that eliminate social ills altogether.
Sowell’s anti-utopianism flows directly from this analysis. Utopians regard every persistent problem—poverty, crime, inequality—as evidence of insufficient will or the malicious obstruction of reactionaries. Because they believe human nature can be re-engineered, failure is never accepted as structural; it is always moral. This mindset produces the familiar division between the Anointed, those who claim superior insight into the common good, and the Benighted, the ordinary population that must be managed. It also produces a systematic disregard for accumulated experience. Centuries of trial and error, tradition, and historical data are subordinated to abstract ideals. The result is a pattern of unintended consequences: policies designed to abolish hardship frequently generate new and more intractable forms of hardship because they ignore incentives and the stubborn facts of scarcity and self-regard.
The practical corollary is Sowell’s most frequently cited observation: there are no solutions, only trade-offs. Every policy choice exacts a cost. In criminal justice, the utopian seeks to eradicate crime by curing its supposed root causes—poverty, trauma, social exclusion—while the tragic realist accepts that some measure of predation is endemic and therefore concentrates on deterrence, knowing that deterrence itself restricts freedom and consumes resources. In economics, the utopian demands equal outcomes; the tragic realist recognizes scarcity and therefore defends competitive markets as the least destructive mechanism for generating abundance. The search for a final equilibrium of perfect justice, Sowell warns, is an illusion that historically justifies the concentration of power necessary to force imperfect human beings into an idealized mold.
This intellectual stance has earned Sowell the quiet hostility of many left-leaning reviewers. Supporters have long noted that his major works are more often ignored than refuted in mainstream academic journals. The empirical challenges he poses to progressive orthodoxy on race, culture, and economic mobility appear to trigger a defensive withdrawal rather than open engagement. The fear of being labeled politically incorrect or worse discourages serious debate. Critics, for their part, insist that the issue is methodological rather than political: they charge selective use of data and an attachment to outdated libertarian models.
Yet the pattern of non-engagement remains striking. Books that dismantle the central premises of the anointed class receive far less scrutiny than their intellectual weight warrants. The result is a form of soft marginalization that leaves Sowell’s arguments circulating largely outside the institutions that claim a monopoly on sophisticated social analysis.
Sowell’s own prose embodies a related contempt for intellectual dishonesty. He has little patience for the esoteric and verbose constructions that cloak weak reasoning in the language of hidden power structures and systemic forces. His style is the philosophical counterpart of Ernest Hemingway’s: direct, concrete, and stripped of ornamental complexity. Where much contemporary academic writing multiplies abstractions to evade accountability, Sowell insists on clarity that exposes the actual claims being advanced.
The preference for plain speech is itself a moral stance. It treats the reader as a rational agent capable of following evidence rather than as a subject to be managed through rhetorical fog. In an age when anti-Western ideology often traffics in sentimental narratives of perpetual victimhood and colonial original sin, Sowell’s rationalism recalls the deeper foundations of Western civilization itself—the insistence that argument, evidence, and institutional constraints matter more than feeling or ancestral grievance.
The same tragic sensibility links Sowell to his longtime friend and Hoover Institution colleague Victor Davis Hanson. Hanson approaches the identical human limitations through the lens of classical history and military experience. Where Sowell draws on economics and social statistics, Hanson draws on Thucydides and the record of Mediterranean warfare. Both reject the unconstrained premise that administrative elites can perfect society. Both treat cultural patterns—habits of work, property rights, free speech, and the capacity for self-government—as decisive over centuries rather than as epiphenomena of recent power relations. Hanson’s praise of Sowell’s cultural trilogy—Race and Culture (1994), Migrations and Culture (1996), Conquests and Cultures (1999)—underscores the point: these volumes reframe questions of inequality and achievement within a global historical frame that refuses to treat the American experience as unique or uniquely pathological.
The two scholars share a methodological insistence on concrete metrics and narrative clarity over post-modern jargon. They also share a late-career critique of the contemporary university, which they see as increasingly devoted to the insulation of the Anointed from the consequences of their own theories.
What emerges from this body of thought is a sober assessment of the human condition. Western civilization has rested, more than any other, on the rational acknowledgment of limits—on the construction of institutions that channel self-interest rather than pretend to abolish it. The sentimentalism of much anti-Western ideology, by contrast, treats those same institutions as the original source of injustice and therefore as candidates for radical dismantling. Sowell’s work stands as a sustained rebuttal to that sentimentality. It does not promise the end of hardship or the arrival of perfect equity. It offers instead the hard discipline of trade-offs, the empirical study of what actually works across cultures and centuries, and the defense of individual dignity against both racial essentialism and the soft despotism of experts.
In an intellectual climate increasingly hostile to such realism, Sowell’s independence and clarity remain rare and necessary. The cost of ignoring them is not merely academic. It is the continued substitution of utopian aspiration for the imperfect but hard-won arrangements that have, against considerable odds, produced the freest and most prosperous societies in human history.
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Democrats bet on AI apocalypse politics for the midterms
Voters still care more about prices, public safety and the economy
BY: Robert Knight, The Washington Times (September 20, 2026).
A whiff of the apocalypse is in the air.
It is similar to that of climate change hysteria, when we were told by Al Gore and Greta Thunberg that we faced an unspeakable fate unless we gave up fossil fuels.
Sen. Bernard Sanders, Vermont independent, warned six years ago that Earth faced “irreparable damage” in six or seven years. By God’s grace, Americans took it with a grain of salt.
Most people rejected giving up the cheap, reliable energy and free markets that enabled America’s prosperity and lifted billions worldwide out of poverty.
Now, we are being told daily that artificial intelligence will destroy humankind in the next 10 years. The panic was magnified when an Anthropic researcher, Jacob Coxon, resigned and posted to X on Sept. 8 that AI developers were “gambling with our lives.”
The post somehow instantly went viral, with up to 170 million views, and Mr. Coxon got celebrity treatment from the media.
Former President Barack Obama, who knows a thing or two about effective demagoguery, has told Democratic leaders to put opposition to AI and data centers at the center of their campaigns, so expect more scare stories.
Never mind that communist China, which steals our technology and hacks our systems, is helping fund the opposition. China’s state media and Russia’s RT network are churning out propaganda to slow down America’s AI industry, according to two reports by the Bitcoin Policy Institute.
Radical groups in the U.S. have received millions of dollars from Neville Roy Singham, a billionaire communist who lives in Shanghai and is married to CodePink co-founder Jodie Evans.
Mr. Singham is one of the main funders of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, which “has been an influential organizer in a national campaign against AI and data centers, including 21 fights across 14 states, that produced moratoria, zoning rejections, and cancelled projects worth billions,” the report said.
It is not all “astroturf.” Who wants a data center in their backyard? The report acknowledges that “much American opposition to data centers is indisputably authentic. But two things can be true at once: 1) There is a foreign influence campaign against American AI; and 2) Americans have genuine concerns about data center buildout that need to be heard.”
We are also being fed a narrative that we have flat-out lost the war with Iran. The subtext, with a sniff of antisemitism, is that Israel put us up to it.
Those Iranian nuclear enrichment facilities that President Trump took out with airstrikes in 2025? Ancient history. Who cares if he denied the bomb to murderous Islamists?
Meanwhile, gas prices are above $4.25 a gallon, with diesel at a record high of more than $6, fueling more fears of inflation.
Americans will eventually benefit from Mr. Trump’s deal with Venezuela to tap into a reserve of 65 billion barrels of oil, and America’s oil production is increasing. Iran’s regime may be on borrowed time, but the news mantra is all bad news, all the time.
In about seven weeks, American voters will decide whether to keep the Trump train rolling or hand control of Congress to the Democrats, who are preparing nonstop investigations to cripple him — again.
Love him or hate him, Mr. Trump, backed by a Republican Congress, has managed to secure America’s borders and deport thousands of illegal immigrants. His administration has taken aim at sex experiments on children and at men competing in women’s sports, forced NATO to fund more of its own defense, reignited America’s manufacturing base and greatly reduced the nation’s crime rate.
A president can do a lot with his pen and phone, as Mr. Obama said, but real change comes from legislation.
Consider the Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act and the Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The first was a massive pinata for the climate lobby, with a $1.2 trillion price tag over 10 years. The second gave tax breaks to seniors, overtime workers, those who work for tips and those with car loans. It also made the 2017 Trump tax cuts permanent.
Democrats are banking on high gas prices, the AI panic, Trump hatred and the media’s cover-up of the party’s embrace of open borders, socialism and Islam.
Mr. Trump would do well to curb his penchant for firing off intemperate texts at the slightest provocation. What was refreshingly candid in 2016 could be a turn-off in 2026.
Republicans must bring down gas prices, remind Americans that the Republican Party is the party of law and order and that the Democrats — who favor abortion up until birth — have gone over the cliffs of perversity.
On Sept. 14, the Republican National Committee posted footage of Texas Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico being asked to name his “favorite drag queen in Texas.” Grinning girlishly, he exclaimed, “Oh gosh, it’s got to be Alyssa Edwards!”
Republicans are using the clip in Texas for the campaign of Senate candidate Ken Paxton. They must ask Democrats everywhere about Mr. Talarico.
Amid the manufactured apocalyptic atmosphere, “normal versus crazy,” plus the prayers and engagement of millions of God-fearing Americans, may just keep Congress under Republican leadership.
GFK
