COMMENTARY
Essays on politics, economics, culture, and international affairs—written from a classical liberal, historically grounded perspective. These commentaries aim to clarify, challenge, and occasionally provoke, drawing on history, theory, and experience to make sense of the present.
The Republican and Democratic parties have effectively declared war on classical economics. By disregarding the foundational principles that built liberal democratic capitalism, they undermine an economic order that has enriched much of the world. Classical economics rests on a simple premise: freedom in economic life leads to spur greater prosperity than the heavy-handed control of…
I started this website in 2007. Following the example of other bloggers who maintained careers and wrote on the side, I published anonymously and avoided details about myself. I’ve changed the name of the website three times, preferring Chicago Fog for both its simplicity and reference to where I live. Writing was a hobby. I…
As the kids say, it’s been a minute. There’s no shortage of subjects to write about but time and energy are finite. I’ll start there. A full-time corporate career and part-time academic pursuits leave little time for writing. The short stories I’m always threatening to publish never measure up. I feel like the long historical…
We’re tired of mass-killing psychos. I think it’s best not to use their names or refer to the moronic ravings they spew before embarking on their psychopathic journeys. Imagine being one of these crazies. If you’re filled with revulsion within one second of picturing yourself holding a weapon or behind the wheel of a vehicle…
Originally this post was going to be a book review page–one of the many I use as references in Chicago Fog’s essays and other posts. But as I read Jonathan Rauch’s The Constitution of Knowledge I realized I had a lot of thoughts on the book, and most of those thoughts were critical. So I wrote this very…
My plan to post a short reflection every week failed almost immediately. The dual demands of a full-time job and part-time academia meant little time for part-time writing. Nevertheless, I’ll try again. Inflation, Elon Musk buying Twitter, and the leaked first draft opinion for Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization eclipsed the Russo-Ukraine War in commentariat…
Larry Summers was on Ezra Klein’s New York Times podcast to discuss the state of the world economy (here is the transcript). It was worth listening to only to hear Klein getting mugged by reality, although he still seemed to want to beleive Covid and Ukraine caused high inflation. Say what you want about Summers, but he admitted he…
SCOTUS nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s hearings were mostly uneventful. So far she’s saying what she needs to say to get appointed. She strikes me as a good addition to the Court because I don’t think she’s an extreme judicial activist. She handled the unfair question about the “definition of woman” as well as can…
Very few people read. Readers make the investment of precious time and energy need a return on that investment. In thinking about this website, I wonder if I’ve had a good sense of what people want to read. I think it’s fiction–but that takes me a long time. And I think it’s essays–but I’m bad about…
It’s October 2021 and the simulation is getting weirder and weirder. Strange how opinion journalists’ inevitable exhortation “we must do something” has become “we must do everything.” In the last 20 years, national rhetoric heated-up faster than temperatures in pre-Millennium climate change projections. In America, there was governmental overreaction to the three great calamities of…
President Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. To most, that sentence states a fact. To many others, that sentence is just an ideological argument revealing someone’s epistemological preferences. And that’s the state of American civic life so far in 2021. The Art of the Steal Trump is a fascinating character. Before getting to denouncing him,…
I’ve always found it difficult to stay in the present. Chicago Fog comes from a love of history and a fascination with the ideas that shaped today’s world. At the same time I’ve always enjoyed futurism and the vision of science fiction writers, especially those who write near future realism. The context for science fiction,…
I’ve witnessed history being made four times in my half-century of life: the end of the Cold War, 9-11, the Financial Crisis of 2007-08, and now the Coronavirus pandemic. Those events—spaced roughly by 10 years—play outsized roles in public dialogue and analysis. They are omnipresent in people’s imaginations as they wrestle with current affairs. However,…
Have you ever taken a personality test? I had to take one several years ago as part of an employer’s training program, doing different versions of the Myers-Briggs test and being scored an INTP or an INTJ. My scores for Thinking and Introversion were at extreme ends, I favored my Intuition over my Sensations, but I…
To be alive means to cope with constant change, just as it is that living means we face death one day. Nothing about us is permanent except the matter we are comprised of (or, at least, that is what we are told by physicists). We are also told by evolutionary biologists that as animals we…