Politics

Remarks from Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent at The Economic Club of New York’s America 250 Gala Dinner: American Economic Statecraft in the 21st Century June 23, 2026 As prepared for delivery. Thank you for the invitation to be here on this wonderful occasion. As a long-time member of the Economic Club of New York, I know that it occupies a place of great significance in our nation’s discourse. For generations, few institutions have done more to shape how we confront

Human Nature versus Laissez-Faire Floating Abstractions, Hamiltonian Production, and the Objectivist Civil War Ayn Rand put forward a view of laissez-faire capitalism that still organizes the political loyalties of a great many serious people. It is also a view that contains several controversial points, and she herself stated the most awkward of them without embarrassment: her version of laissez-faire has never existed. She says so in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, especiall

Drawn Out of the Water Compassion as a Virtue, a Feeling, and a Political Career An essay in the company of Emmet Fox and the Sermon on the Mount There is a moment, familiar to anyone who has ever watched the news with a pulse, when the face on the screen does its work. A child. A flood. A neighborhood that looks like a war zone without the courtesy of a declared war. Something in the chest tightens. The eyes do that warm, inconvenient thing. You feel for them. Then, if you h

The American Ideal had been on a slow-motion diet for years—less freedom, more paperwork, and a steady indoctrination of lectures from people who thought the Constitution was a rough draft for a HR manual. Somewhere between the bureaucrats who measured patriotism in forms filled out in triplicate and the foreign busybodies who treated the United States like a noisy neighbor who needed a noise ordinance, the old idea of a self-reliant, mouthy, inventive republic started lookin

Bribery, Blackmail, and the Fine Art of Running the World: A User's Guide to Modern Governance Ah, democracy. That noble experiment where We the People elect our leaders to serve the public interest with integrity, transparency, and the occasional $10,000 donation from a guy who owns an island full of secrets. But let's be honest, folks—bribery and blackmail aren't bugs in the system. They're the operating system. The quiet engine humming beneath the marble halls, the private

The Divine Tariffs of the Faithful vs. the Immaculate Laissez-Faire of the Pure Oh, gather 'round, ye seekers of truth and prosperity, for we stand at the dawn of a philosophical cage match so gloriously absurd it could only have been scripted by a committee of mischievous angels with too much time on their hands. On one side, we have the Promethean Action crowd: a movement steeped in the ancient glow of Plato, Leibniz, Nicholas of Cusa, and Dante. These folks look at human c

The Delaware of Destiny, or: How Two Men Crossed Rivers (One Frozen, One Full of Alligators on bath salts) and Lived to Appoint the Next Generation of Troublemakers There is a particular flavor of courage that history reserves for the men who look at a map, notice that the enemy has all the good real estate, and decide the map is wrong. George Washington had it in spades. So does Donald Trump. The difference is mostly wardrobe and the fact that one of them crossed an actual r

I’m a professional laugh-getter, not a philosopher. . But even I know that if your entire political philosophy rests on “government should be so small you can voluntarily fund it like a GoFundMe for national defense,” you might be setting yourself up for the most polite apocalypse in human history. Welcome to Ayn Rand’s laissez-faire capitalism—the unicorn of economic systems. It’s never existed, which is convenient because existence would require actual humans, and humans ar

Look, I’m no philosopher. But even I know that when a self-proclaimed disciple of Ayn Rand starts sounding like the guy at the cocktail party who just discovered socialism after one too many mimosas, something’s gone sideways. And that something is usually the same thing that’s gone sideways with most of us at one point or another: the gap between what we say we believe and what we actually do when the rent comes due. Let’s call our hero Dr. Randian McAtlas. Tall, probably o