Spring 2015 • Vol. 10, No. 1

Examines the role of faith in Islamic jihad and shows that to accept faith as a means of knowledge is to aid jihadists at the most fundamental level.

Muslims who wish to violently suppress freedom of speech can find plenty of support for their cause within their religious texts. But there is a more fundamental reason why so many Muslims oppose freedom of speech, beyond the contents of their religious texts: the very existence of freedom of speech is at odds with their faith-based worldview.

“Piketty’s Rickety Assault on Capital” dismantles and dispatches Thomas Piketty’s arguments against free markets and the principle of rights, including the “fuzzy math in Piketty’s alleged laws of capitalism.

“Circumcision in America” traces the history of and rationales for nontherapeutic circumcision, sheds medical and ethical light on the widespread practice, and argues that Americans should take a principled stand against it.

Leaders of the Catholic Church (and many other religions) see your life not as yours, but as God’s or society’s, and hold that you have a moral duty to stay alive for God or for others, even if you face unspeakable suffering and impending death due to terminal illness.

A person with a terminal illness or the like has a moral right to decide whether to keep living or to take his own life to end his suffering. But many conservatives feel they have a right to impose their will on an individual facing such a choice—and to use government to enforce their will.

Both Brittany Maynard and Christina Symanski bravely chose to decide for themselves the terms on which they would live and die—and both women bravely chose to make their decisions and struggles public in order to highlight the inhumanity of laws forbidding assisted suicide.

Google’s owners own the company; it is their property and their enterprise to operate as they see fit. But for years various government entities have sought to violate—and in some cases have succeeded in violating—the moral rights of Google’s owners to operate their business according to their own judgment.

New federal regulations intentionally target private, for-profit colleges. The government should not be involved in lending money to students at all. But so long as it is, and so long as it regulates these loans, it is morally obligated—and should be legally obligated—to treat all students and all educational institutions equally under the law.

Brittany Maynard’s decision to take her own life to end her suffering, rather than wait for her aggressive brain tumor to kill her, has prompted a national debate about assisted suicide laws. Individuals with terminal illnesses or devastating trauma have a moral right to decide for themselves whether to continue living or to end their suffering.

Eric Brown's death highlights an important truth that everyone who cares about individual rights and liberty must come to see: Government ultimately enforces laws by the threat or use of physical force. Lawmakers should pass only laws that protect individual rights by banning the use of physical force, fraud, and the like.

The solution to the problem of police brutality is not to presume white officers guilty and the black men they confront blameless, nor to focus only on black victims of police abuse; rather, the solution is to demand justice for each individual, as judged by the relevant facts of a given case. Because all lives matter.

Let us not whitewash events surrounding Sony’s now-cancelled film The Interview: The North Korean government apparently perpetrated multiple acts of war against the United States, its people, and their liberties, waging cyber warfare against Sony (of which Sony Pictures is headquartered in California) and threatening to blow up American theaters full of people.

Contrary to Jonathan Coppage’s claims, services in a market economy are fundamentally dependent on the ownership of property—both physical and intellectual—not somehow untethered from it. The Hank Reardens of the world, the industrial “makers” whom Coppage demeans, continue to play a fundamental role in the economy, and they always will.

City government ought not turn the police into rights violators or extortionists with its ill-conceived policies; instead, it should direct police officers to protect people’s rights and to do only that. That would foster greater community support for the men and women in uniform who regularly risk their lives to protect our rights.

Barack Obama recently announced a plan to use taxpayer money to pay the full tuitions of community college students. This proposed program is immoral and destructive on several counts. To begin with, the program would violate the rights of taxpaying Americans who would be forced to fund the program.

The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, by Alex Epstein. New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2014. 256 pp. $27.95 (hardcover). Who would argue that producing and using fossil fuels is not only not shameful, but also positively virtuous? Alex Epstein would. And he has done so eloquently and thoroughly in his book, The…

The Frackers, by Gregory Zuckerman. New York: Portfolio, 2013. 404 pp. $29.95 (hardcover). The Frackers: The Outrageous Inside Story of the New Billionaire Wildcatters, the second book by Wall Street Journal reporter Gregory Zuckerman, tells the story of the development, over the past several decades, of the amazing technology by…

Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials that Shape Our Modern World, by Mark Miodownik. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013. 272 pp. $16.45 (hardcover). Reviewed by Daniel Wahl In May 1985, a young Mark Miodownik sat on a train, with a fresh thirteen-centimeter stab wound in his back, and thought…