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Dr. Beth Haynes makes a surprising but warranted claim in her recent article for Huffington Post: “Very few Americans have health insurance . . . because what people call health insurance really isn't insurance at all.” Real insurance, Haynes explains, covers high-cost, catastrophic events, not routine care. What usually passes…

As Ayn Rand observed, “There is a fundamental conviction which some people never acquire, some hold only in their youth, and a few hold to the end of their days—the conviction that ideas matter . . . that knowledge matters, that truth matters, that one’s mind matters.” Joshua Lipana was…

Although you’re far more likely to die in a car crash than at the hands of a mass murderer, you face some risk of a criminal assault or a terrorist attack, especially when our government is failing on multiple fronts to eliminate the threat of terrorism. So it is worth…

At the fifth annual Tax Day Tea Party in Chicago, Jonathan Hoenig delivered an excellent speech on the principles of Americanism and the need to return to them. Focusing on what made America unique in history, he pointed out what it means to be free and what it means to…

As the New York Times’s Suzanne Daley recently reported, Denmark’s massive welfare state imposes “the highest marginal income-tax rates in the world” in order to subsidize “able-bodied” Danes with “no intention of taking a demeaning job.” Consequently, the nation faces massive and growing unemployment; “only 3 of Denmark’s 98 municipalities…

During a pre-game ceremony at Fenway Park last weekend, the Boston Red Sox commemorated the city’s return to normalcy following the capture of the Boston Marathon bombers. Addressing the crowd, and on live television, popular Red Sox slugger David “Big Papi” Ortiz shouted, “This is our f***ing city, and nobody…

Boston bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev once said, complaining about American culture, “There are no values anymore.” What his actions demonstrate is that there are no values through Islam, the religion to which he turned for guidance and meaning. According to the FBI, “in early 2011, a foreign government” informed the…

Events last week surrounding the hunt for the Boston Marathon bombers were instructive regarding the contradiction that is anarchy. Anarchy, the absence of government, leaves political justice to the will of the general public. How would that have played out in this instance? Had there been no government—that is, no…

My dear friend, and assistant editor of this blog, Joshua Lipana died this morning after a heroic, nine-month battle against cancer. To know Joshua was to love him. To know him well, as I did, was to love him like another self. Joshua loved life with a contagious passion. He…

As reported by the AP, doctors have used a novel device to successfully treat chronic heartburn. Whereas heartburn, or acid reflux, is familiar to many as an occasional, fleeting pain, in some individuals it occurs chronically and can cause real harm. Such chronic heartburn is called gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) and…

First, television host and university professor Melissa Harris-Perry said that “kids belong to whole communities.” As I pointed out, “a child belongs neither to his parents nor to ‘whole communities,’ but to himself. When someone belongs to someone else or to a group of other people, that person is a…

I spoke with Joshua yesterday, and there is some good news. He has had three sessions of chemotherapy in the past several days, and his doctors say the treatments have killed a substantial amount of the leukemia. They are, however, concerned that a lot of the cancer is still “hiding”…

The movie 42: The Jackie Robinson Story is not a full biography on the life of Jackie Robinson, the black baseball player who broke Major League Baseball's "color line." Rather, the film covers the three year period from the 1945 signing of Robinson to a minor league contract by Brooklyn…

In an online article that swept the Web, Isabella Dutton, a fifty-seven-year-old mother of two grown children, admits publicly that she regrets having children. She never wanted a child, yet had two because she felt it would be “unfair of me to deny [my husband] the chance to be a…

In the latest episode of Reason at Large, I answer a question from Jason: "You've written and spoken at length about why capitalism is the only moral social system, and I find your arguments very convincing. But in daily conversations with people, I don't have an hour to make the…