Is Libertarianism a Bad Idea?

Understanding what it means to be human

India is, by all accounts, an interesting place. In 1960, the average Indian made $83 a year, a value that’s shot up to $2411 today.¹ With a population of 1.4 billion, these earnings add up, and India’s total GDP now surpasses that of the UK. The change was most dramatic around the turn of the century, when employment in the service sector surpassed industry and agriculture combined, and transportation networks blossomed across the country.

From a humanitarian standpoint this is a wonderful development. And yet, money is not the only thing India is amassing, as mountains of garbage tower over the landscape:

In 2018, The Economist noted that “Even by the standards of poor countries, India is alarmingly filthy.” This may be rather an understatement, as India’s holiest river is essentially a river of trash:

Interestingly, the problem of pollution predates India’s economic upswing. Early in the previous century, Ghandi was noticing the same problem:

Mahatma Gandhi wrote that when he visited the famous Kashi Vishvanath temple in Varanasi, he was “deeply pained”. He described how the approach to one of the most holy sites in Hinduism was through a narrow and filthy lane, swarming with flies, the gutters overflowing, and rotten and stinking flowers were piled up within the precincts of the temple.²

But why is it like this in India? I read that it’s because “there is no sense of ownership in metros...” or that “It has the capacity to clean up, but not the political will” or that “It's very simple, people don't see public spaces as their own.” Writing for Economic Progress, Sangeeth Varghese explains that India is

gripped by a strange case of Tragedy of the Commons... Those who are in a position to appropriate to themselves the returns — be it time, money or resources — do not bother about the after-effects of their mode of exploitation. For them, factory shutdowns, environmental degradation and corruption are not things that have to be bothered too much about as long as they are meeting their selfish ends.³

One tends to presume that economic and social progress coincide, yet this seems not always to be the case. Individuals meeting their selfish ends may indeed boost the economy, but are all values economic? Very, very slowly, the unwelcome idea emerges that maybe, somehow, an excess of individual initiative might be contributing to all of this. Maybe a lack of collective action is actually the problem.

I

I was primed for libertarianism as soon as I set foot in school. The regimentation, the poorly differentiated instruction, the patronizing lessons droning on and on blended together with drills, tests, and alienation from the other students to inspire in me a profound abhorrence for the institution. Most galling was the fact that I had absolutely no choice about whether I was going to attend school, and there was no end in sight—not until the age of 18.

By the time I made it to high school and first heard the word libertarianism defined, I was all in. The idea that the individual could be responsible for himself, win or lose, succeed or fail, through his own voluntary agency, thrummed through me. I wanted the chance to become educated or not, to work or not, to keep the money that I earned at whatever job I chose without giving it away in taxes. Most desperately I yearned for the possibility of being allowed to fail. I wanted a life without guardrails, a chance to make real decisions for myself. The idea that paternalistic restrictions would protect me was profoundly, viscerally wrong—the phrase “it’s for your own good” felt like a slap in the face.⁴

I refused to play team sports or wear uniforms; instead I became absorbed in martial arts, and jogged through the neighborhoods alone at night. When military recruiters approached me I demurred; the idea of “yes sir” in a uniform made me laugh.⁵ If research finds libertarians are unemotional like rightists, thoughtful and imaginative like leftists, and less interdependent but more intelligent than either side,⁶ then I fit the bill. My friends were all over the place politically, but when it came time to marry and settle down, it was another libertarian physicist I chose to be my Mrs. Apple Pie.

And in college, one of my favorite books was What it Means to be a Libertarian, by Charles Murray⁷ (Gen Z readers: a cancelled white guy).

I want to frame this discussion of libertarianism in terms of Murray’s work because he’s the most modest and most moderate libertarian writer I’ve encountered. Murray was never so extreme as to call all taxation theft, or to say no governmental agencies should exist. He clarified his personal position by claiming that there are three (but really only three) legitimate roles for government:

The first legitimate use of the police power is to restrain people from injuring one another. Government accomplishes this end through criminal law and tort law…

The second legitimate use of the police power is to enable people to enter into enforceable voluntary agreements—contracts. The right of contract and the edifice of law that goes with it is what enables us to do business with people we do not know or have no reason to trust.⁸

OK, no hitting people in the face, no selling oregano in baggies labelled “MARIJUANA,” so far so good. Murray’s third reason for government intrusion in people’s lives is where things get interesting, and he devotes an entire chapter to discussing it:

The third legitimate use of the police power is the most difficult to pin down and the most subject to abuse. It involves that elusive concept, a public good.⁹

A public good is defined here in terms of nonexclusivity (it’s impossible for government to protect you environmentally or militarily without protecting your neighbor in the same way) and jointness of consumption (your taking advantage of street lighting doesn’t “use it up” to prevent your neighbor from seeing at night).

An activity may legitimately be treated as a public good when individuals are called upon to do things that benefit the whole community. For example, a democracy cannot function without an educated electorate. The cost of providing an educated electorate should be spread over all those who benefit, which means virtually everyone who lives in a democracy... This is a classical liberal argument for treating education as a public good¹⁰

My initial reaction was to turn this around and say “Yeah… So are we really, really sure a healthy democracy is worth forcing education of millions on children and adolescents for more than a decade of their individual lives?” But when I encounter kids who complain about hating school, I can at least point to some kind of civic benefit they might believe in. The argument says that education is a public good because we all benefit from voters making educated choices in democratic elections, which, granted, is kindof hard if the voters are mostly uneducated.

But there’s a deeper issue at play here. When I read Murray’s discussion further, I thought “OK, but doesn’t allowing the government to step in and protect a public good just mean the government has carte blanche to do whatever it wants? Isn’t everything potentially a public good? And don’t our very lives depend on public goods, like air or water?” At the time I didn’t really think about culture; the only example of a public good that mattered was something tangible, like streets without India-level garbage everywhere.

Murray at least partially anticipated my response. He admitted that there’s a slippery slope, and though he wrote that we should show that a government service we want to push on everyone doesn’t benefit us more than others, the main brake he tried to apply was the principle of subsidiarity:

The legitimate functions of government should be performed at the most local feasible level… The political process ineluctably tries to expand the definition of what constitutes a public good. Keeping the definitions as local as possible acts as a brake. When the mistakes become too egregious, people can leave town.¹¹

Since reading this, I have definitely experienced mistakes made at the local level. In the face of severe social decay, my response has been, in fact, to leave town. But looking across the map of the United States, I’m starting to wonder how may towns there still are for people to leave to, and how well they’ll fit in when they get there. Now that I’ve moved more than once, I’m starting to wonder: Is moving a solution, or does it just run away from a problem?

Maybe what we really should wonder is why libertarianism matters at all. The focus is obviously on individual rights, but the justification for putting rights front and center—or even believing those rights exist—is lacking.

Murray tried to ground it all in self ownership, under the principle that each person owns himself. But ownership is a cultural idea, and even restricting the discussion to Western thinkers within our own cultural mainstream, it’s not universally agreed that we own ourselves. Christian thinkers commonly reject the idea of self-ownership by pointing out that our lives are a gift, not something that we made on our own.¹² Philosophers like Hume have taken issue with the idea that a person can own anything at all, and conclude that ownership exists only as the product of social convention or the laws of a sovereign state.¹³ And strangely, perhaps, the freedoms that flow from the idea that we own ourselves may not mesh very well with who we are as adults, and where we came from as children.

Life in a Communist Dictatorship

Every healthy family follows this creed: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs, and forget about voting, because you’ll just end up with the same people in charge every year.

Sure, we could pick at the details. Maybe the ideal family really looks less like a communist dictatorship and more like the Juche idea, with smiling depictions of our current and previous leaders all over the walls. But however you conceptualize it, the generic healthy family really has a strong flavor of totalitarianism. Children are essentially low status citizens with limited economic power and severely limited freedom of movement, whose only rights are the rights to be taken care of. As a teenager I liked to talk about how “nuclear family = communism” just for a laugh (and to get a rise out of unfunny people). But no matter how slow I may be on the uptake, here, after thirty years even I’m ready to ask the question: might there there be a reason healthy families look like communist dictatorships?

Most political and philosophical ideologies crack when trying to deal with children; seriously, they can’t handle kids. Take modern American leftism. Does the left’s insistence on human equality extend to my mostly potty-trained three year old? Do toddlers need disability services to provide equitable access to cultural spaces like universities or art museums? Are they oppressed because they earn less than their parents or older siblings? And are toddlers involuntarily complicit in their own oppression when they accept, uncritically, the support their parents offer them along with problematic restrictions on their ability to watch Minecraft videos at 3 in the morning?

But if children form a glaring exception to the left’s usual attitude toward disempowered groups, at least the left will try to help kids out. Libertarianism is much worse. Because if the only justifications for government intrusion in our daily lives are 1. to prevent us directly injuring others, 2. to protect voluntary agreements, and 3. to maintain a public good, well, doesn’t libertarianism allow us to legally neglect and abandon our children? Opinions are divided,¹⁴¹⁵ but libertarians are pretty consistent about parents being able to keep loaded firearms around the house and use whatever drugs they like (maybe at the same time). The libertarian response is often just to shrug: “Does this mean there will be tragic stories that could have potentially been avoided under a more restrictive society? It does.”

Children don’t thrive under libertarian conditions. The best you can hope for as a child is, in fact, the opposite of libertarianism: the authoritative parenting style. Authoritative parenting is reasonably described as a highly intrusive nanny state that provides extensive support to its constituency while demanding compliance with endless regulations. The permissive parenting style is less demanding, the authoritarian style is less supportive, and hands-off parenting is often simply described as neglectful; all of these result in worse outcomes for children than the strict and emotionally close authoritative style, whether you’re looking at grades,¹⁶ early alcohol use,¹⁷ or depression.¹⁸

There could easily be some kind of reverse causation here, or hidden factors involved. Maybe alternatives to the authoritative parenting style are mostly just used by crazy people, or the very poor, or under times of familial stress. Maybe obnoxious kids are too much trouble to monitor or support, and then it seems like we’re neglecting them when really we’re just sort of fed up. But the whole thing starts to look more like cause and effect when we examine the outcomes of teaching styles on student performance in middle and high school, and find the same benefits from authoritative teaching as we do from authoritative parenting.¹⁹

OK, but those are still just kids we’re talking about, right? Just adolescents in middle and high school? Sure. But here are findings for college students: “The authoritative teaching style was associated with setting high academic standards, greater student interest, and more favorable student evaluations of instructors.”²⁰

Now those college students weren’t subjected to authoritative teaching constantly. They were still free to make their own decisions, and to enroll in or drop the course as they chose. If the idea that humans crave authoritative leadership rubs you the wrong way, it’s still broadly consistent with the evidence to say something like, “humans require decreasing restrictions and support as they move into adulthood.” But there’s absolutely no evidence for the idea that libertarianism works for the younger generation. When it comes to the governance of children, adolescents, and even college students while they’re in the classroom, structure and support are the keys to success, not freedom.

This isn’t merely an abstract rule. This relates very clearly, very directly, to problems all Western children face right now due to the rapid advancement of technology and the sluggish advancement of cultural values. 21st century children who are seen as owning themselves, with all the attendant freedoms this implies, become readily addicted to their cell phones, resulting in anxiety,²¹ depression,²² cyberbullying,²³ and suicide.²⁴

Better parents already knew that they needed to treat their children as vulnerable to the harms presented by the proliferation of cell phones, so they created structure and rules surrounding electronics for their kids. But by definition, not all parents are better parents. What we are seeing now on a widespread, cultural scale is the laissez faire result of the government shrugging when people buy cell phones, and parents handing their kids a phone whenever they get bored. Gen Z as an entire generation suffers from anxiety and depression on account of the unregulated saturation of technology in their culture.²⁵

Culture

When people talk about India being filthy, we can see what they’re talking about. There’s no question that coordinated, collective action is lacking. Even though photos don’t transmit the olfactory experience, we have direct and tangible evidence of the cultural-wide failure to deal with garbage.

The United States is the same: We have a freedom problem. But this is an invisible problem, a problem always caused by someone else, or something else; a problem that is primarily experienced in the hearts and minds of the youngest generation, who grow up overweight, depressed, fearful of school shootings, fearful of being recorded saying or doing something embarrassing, fearful of running out of charge on their phones.

The fragmenting culture isn’t something you can easily photograph (though there are noteworthy exceptions). But you can document the effects, as a recent Rand study did when it examined the relative decline of America’s power:

Its competitive position is threatened both from within (in terms of slowing productivity growth, an aging population, a polarized political system, and an increasingly corrupted information environment) and outside (in terms of a rising direct challenge from China and declining deference to U.S. power from dozens of developing nations). Left unchecked, these trends will threaten domestic and international sources of competitive standing, thus accelerating the relative decline...²⁶

The report focuses on charting a pathway for national renewal. However, its authors also admit that renewal may not be likely:

Recovery from significant long-term national decline is rare and difficult to detect in the historical record… There is no emerging consensus on the barriers to renewal that demand urgent action, and the essential problem is seen in starkly different terms by different segments of society and groups of political leaders, which creates a distinct challenge for the multiple efforts.²⁷

This is the geopolitical angle, which I’ve written more about here. The day to day experience of American decline is much more personal:

• Antidepressant Use On the Rise Among Young Adults

• Dating is hard today, and people are lonely

• Obesity Rates Have Tripled Over the Last 60 Years

• Gender dysphoria in young people is rising—and so is professional disagreement

• US has been falling behind on life expectancy for decades, study shows. Yes, really—even as medical technology has been improving, our life expectancy has been going down. Just follow the blue line:

From wikipedia; the US has now fallen behind China and Saudi Arabia

In case I’m accused of cherry picking to support a narrative, it’s worthwhile to go on:

• America Is Having a Moral Convulsion: Levels of trust in this country—in our institutions, in our politics, and in one another—are in precipitous decline

• Half of Americans anticipate a U.S. civil war soon, survey finds

• Gun violence is remaking America's classrooms

Let’s stop here—this last issue is all American, and all libertarian. I first discovered that America’s libertarian gun policies were related to mass murder when, many years ago, I combed through national rates of mass shootings and compared them with gun ownership rates. As it happened, there was a strong relationship between those two things.

From wikipedia

Seen through the eyes of a libertarian, this was surprising. Shouldn’t the freedom of Americans to defend ourselves have been protecting us from gun violence? Evidently not—and a new analysis from 2023 reiterates the lessons no one mentioned to me in 1993: The United States has not only far more civilian-owned guns than every other developed country,²⁸ it also has far more murder sprees, accounting for 73% of the total mass shootings out of all developed countries.²⁹

Interestingly this 2023 analysis found that foreign born perpetrators were more common in developed nations than elsewhere. A check on whether this means foreign-born adults are more likely than native-born adults to perpetrate mass murder suggests the answer is yes.³⁰ Americans lets everybody in, Americans lets everybody have guns, and America lets everybody live with the consequences.

And the consequences don’t show any sign of getting better; as our culture increasingly blurs the line between fame and infamy, as spree killings make their way more frequently into the news, mass murder is gradually becoming normal.

A 2020 study published in Criminology and Public Policy looked at the causes for this, and found evidence that spree killers are increasingly engaged in competition with one another, learning how to optimize their body counts from the successes and failures of past spree killers. Why in the world would they be doing this? It isn’t just a question of guns. The study authors found evidence for several factors which have been increasing in American society, of which here are a few:³¹

The Real Problem with America

Documenting rising trends in obesity, antidepressant use, and spree killings risks confusing specific effects with the real problem. Obesity, antidepressants, and body counts feel like physical problems, but the problem isn’t physical at all: the problem is the disintegration of American culture itself.

We depend upon our culture to function. People often think of culture in a very vague way, or in terms of the kinds of high-profile works of art and literature that educated people are supposed to like. But culture gives us much more basic things than Shakespearean literature or the Washington Monument. It gives us language, norms about the meaning of money, a shared interpretation of the double-yellow line. Even the smallest disagreement about things like who is going to use which runway can be absolutely catastrophic; without culture nothing functions.

As a young libertarian I wanted the freedom to go to school or not, to earn and spend my own money by my own choice. But I took for granted that there would be a market around to provide the goods I’d like to buy, and that I’d be able to get information about the quality of different goods and services by asking people around me in common words. I took for granted that water would run clean out of the taps, that I wouldn’t have to concern myself with thievery or home invasion, that something fun to listen to would be playing on the radio, that there would be something worth watching on television or at the movies, that there would be someone worth talking to face-to-face, and that it would be quiet enough where I lived to hear myself think. I took culture for granted, and now that culture I depended on is fading away.

Culture is a Libertarian Blind Spot

The blind spot I had as a young American was systemic, part of a broad, deep libertarian scorn for the entire idea of a group. Ayn Rand held that “Any group or collective, large or small, is only a number of individuals;”³² Wilson writes that “Groups are grammatical fictions; only individuals exist.” This is just vapid posturing by people who have no understanding of biology. Humans aren’t jellyfish or jaguars. Humanity is a social species whose members thrive by cooperating, and the dismissive libertarian attitude towards the cultural values that make cooperation possible is why libertarianism failed.

Occasionally, looking back, libertarians notice that democracy doesn’t seem particularly supportive of libertarian outcomes,³³³⁴ as people will always vote to increase regulations, debt, and the size of the state. One natural recourse is to blame democracy and hop on over to neoreaction, fine. But when democracy returns unlibertarian outcomes, perhaps it might have something to do with the way libertarians are blind to the critical importance of culture, and of education and religion as means for maintaining and transmitting values. Culture influences how people vote. If libertarians cede control of that culture to their ideological opponents, is it really a surprise that people don’t defend libertarianism at the ballot box?

When they understand this at all, libertarians demur, saying “People should be allowed to believe whatever they will.” Well, how has that been working out for us? And more to the point, do people ever just believe whatever they will? Most of us are not independent thinkers. Even those of us who might like to believe we really really seriously are independent thinkers³⁵ are unconsciously susceptible to the impacts of culture. This is why libertarianism is only really even a thing in America; independence and personal initiative are peculiar American values, especially as you move west of the Mississippi.

Adapted from Reason Magazine using data from Jason Sorens

Surprise, surprise: Where I grew up in the Southwest, Robert Heinlein, Ayn Rand, and Charles Murray were all over our bookshelves. People susceptible to those writers will be influenced by them, just like I was. This wouldn’t have been a huge problem if libertarianism had managed to maintain a foothold in the schools, the churches, or the media. But libertarians ignored all three areas where they might have been able to guide the values of future generations. Instead, they made common cause with conservatives about guns, the environment, and the economy, and with liberals about immigration, and patted themselves on the back while the country came apart at the seams.

Does Libertarianism Have a Future?

Perhaps alone among libertarian writers, Charles Murray had a sense of the importance of culture. He’s written a great deal about culture, particularly in Coming Apart,³⁶ and even in his earlier writings on libertarianism he departed from a Randian focus on selfishness to ground his ideas in an appeal to the human desire for collaboration: “Deprived of the use of force, human beings tend to cooperate. Literally and figuratively, they live and let live.”³⁷

This kind of thinking is extremely appealing. Unfortunately it doesn’t mesh with the way activists used force to drown out Charles Murray when he tried to speak at Middlebury college in 2017. When political science professor Matthew Dickenson wrote about it afterwards, he said,

Somehow we, as an academic community, must teach students the reason why when confronted with what they sincerely believe to be hurtful speech the proper response is not to impose their views on everyone else by shutting that speech down. I am not sure the best way to do this.  But, at the risk of appearing naive or hopelessly idealistic, or both, I am committed to trying.³⁸

I appreciate Dickenson’s commitment to trying to teach people about the importance of free speech. Although a cynic may have dismissed his words as empty, I’m willing to believe he was being completely sincere. Unfortunately it doesn’t really matter, because seven years later, Middlebury remains among the 20 worst colleges in America for free speech.

America has lost a great deal in the years since I was born. But readers of my blog can probably tell that the loss of our ability to speak directly, sincerely, and freely is the loss that cuts the worst. America is still a place where the options to own guns, and to enter or leave, are only minimally regulated. Yet along the way, we lost the ability to speak openly and honestly with one another. Which of these freedoms do we really need more?

I invite my readers to reflect on the way you are getting this not from my voice, not face to face, not even with a name attached, but on a blog post written by “Apple Pie.” This is the only way I can really talk to you anymore.

What Should We Have Done?

I think about this a lot.

Utilitarianism and libertarianism, embarrassingly, have a lot in common. Each one begins with an unsupported claim about how we’re supposed to make judgments, and then proceed from there. Utilitarianism starts with the principle that maximizing human happiness is a moral good, and runs with that. Libertarianism starts with the idea that it’s immoral to violate human rights, and runs with that. The former is as humorous to me as the latter is appealing, but they’re both equally arbitrary. Like it or not, founding a political or philosophical system on an arbitrary idea is a recipe for failure.

Yet both utilitarianism and libertarianism point to something useful: Human happiness matters. Human freedom matters, too.

Clearly things are more complex than just saying “OK people, rights is it, that’s what’s important.” But it’s obvious that we do need freedom. The desperation people feel to escape countries like North Korea, where citizens have no choice regarding employment or place of residence, and are arrested for things like praying and studying the Bible, proves that there’s a real pit of authoritarianism into which a country can fall.

But how we weight different freedoms doesn’t look like it’s just a question of “my right to swing my arm ends at the tip of your nose.” After many years, I have learned to ask libertarians these questions: Is a house I never set foot except to collect rent really as much my property as the house I built with my father and lived in for half my life? Are my obligations to nurture and protect my children really just voluntary? And most critically, do I truly have no responsibility to the culture that provides not only economic opportunities, but meaning, to my entire life?

We can value liberty as much as we like, but if we insist the answer is “yes” to these questions, we don’t understand what it means to be human.

1. Macrotrends (2024). India GDP Per Capita 1960-2024. www.macrotrends.net, Retrieved March 5th, 2024.

2. Varma, P. K. (2017, September 15). Cleanliness isn’t next to godliness: From temples to upscale neighbourhoods, Indians show extraordinary tole. Times of India Blog. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/toi-edit-page/cleanliness-isnt-next-to-godliness-from-temples-to-upscale-neighbourhoods-indians-show-extraordinary-tolerance-to-filth/

3. Sangeeth Varghese - Agenda Contributor. (n.d.). World Economic Forum. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/authors/sangeeth-varghese/

4. More interesting from a psychological standpoint was the attendant morality which emerged from this: an insistence that rights exist as a fundamental aspect of reality, rather than merely as a legal allowance granted by convention. Easy to see where I had picked this up, since the phrase “basic human right” was very much in the air in the 1990s. (To a certain extent, it still is). It wasn’t until I had grown up that it even occurred to me that I didn’t know why rights exist—and as soon as I asked the question, it echoed hollowly in my ears for hours until the chilling realization emerged that I couldn’t prove rights exist at all outside of our own minds.

5. Human domestication is a topic floating around lately. While I don’t have any numbers, I would definitely guess that leftists are most domesticated where they nestle in their urban hives; then country conservatives would be intermediate, and libertarian lone wolves the least.

6. Iyer, R., Koleva, S., Graham, J., Ditto, P., & Haidt, J. (2012). Understanding libertarian morality: The psychological dispositions of self-identified libertarians. PloS One, 7(8), e42366. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0042366

7. Murray, C. (1997). What it means to be a libertarian: A personal interpretation.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid.

12. Kohler, Thomas (n.d.). Do We Own Ourselves? Institute for American Values, https://instituteforamericanvalues.org/catalog/pdfs/wp-62.pdf

13. Waldron, Jeremy, "Property and Ownership", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2023 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/property/.

14. Walker, John (1991). Why Parental Obligation? Libertarians for Life, https://l4l.org/library/whyparob.html

15. Bruenig, Matt (2015). Rothbard’s Point About Child Neglect. Matt Bruenig Dot Com, https://mattbruenig.com/2015/02/06/rothbards-point-about-child-neglect/

16. Masud, H., Thurasamy, R., & Ahmad, M. S. (2015). Parenting styles and academic achievement of young adolescents: A systematic literature review. Quality & quantity, 49, 2411-2433.

17. Čablová, L., Pazderková, K., & Miovský, M. (2014). Parenting styles and alcohol use among children and adolescents: A systematic review. Drugs: education, prevention and policy, 21(1), 1-13.

18. Piko, B. F., & Balázs, M. Á. (2012). Control or involvement? Relationship between authoritative parenting style and adolescent depressive symptomatology. European child & adolescent psychiatry, 21, 149-155.

19. Dever, B. V., & Karabenick, S. A. (2011). Is authoritative teaching beneficial for all students? A multi-level model of the effects of teaching style on interest and achievement. School Psychology Quarterly, 26(2), 131–144. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0022985

20. Bassett, J. F., Snyder, T. L., Rogers, D. T., & Collins, C. L. (2013). Permissive, Authoritarian, and Authoritative Instructors: Applying the Concept of Parenting Styles to the College Classroom. Individual Differences Research, 11(1).

21. Kim, K., Yee, J., Chung, J. E., Kim, H. J., Han, J. M., Kim, J. H., ... & Gwak, H. S. (2021). Smartphone addiction and anxiety in adolescents–a cross-sectional study. American journal of health behavior, 45(5), 895-901.

22. Yang, X., Zhou, Z., Liu, Q., & Fan, C. (2019). Mobile phone addiction and adolescents’ anxiety and depression: The moderating role of mindfulness. Journal of child and family studies, 28, 822-830.

23. Hoge, E., Bickham, D., & Cantor, J. (2017). Digital media, anxiety, and depression in children. Pediatrics, 140(Supplement_2), S76-S80.

24. Kim, M. H., Min, S., Ahn, J. S., An, C., & Lee, J. (2019). Association between high adolescent smartphone use and academic impairment, conflicts with family members or friends, and suicide attempts. PloS one, 14(7), e0219831.

25. Vultaggio, G. (2021). “The Most Anxious Generation”: the relationship between Gen Z students, social media, and anxiety.

26. Mazarr, Michael J., Tim Sweijs, and Daniel Tapia, The Sources of Renewed National Dynamism. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2024. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA2611-3.html. Also available in print form.

27. Ibid.

28. Karp, Aaron (2018). "ESTIMATING GLOBAL CIVILIAN-HELD FIREARMS NUMBERS." JSTOR Security Studies Collection.

29. Silva, J. R. (2023). Global mass shootings: Comparing the United States against developed and developing countries. International journal of comparative and applied criminal justice, 47(4), 317-340.

30. Fridel, E. E. (2021). A multivariate comparison of family, felony, and public mass murders in the United States. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 36(3-4), 1092-1118.

31. Lankford, A, & Silver, J. (2020). Why have public mass shootings become more deadly Assessing how perpetrators’ motives and methods have changed over time. Criminology & Public Policy, 19(1), 37‐60.

32. Rand, A. (1964). The virtue of selfishness. Penguin.

33. Hoppe, H. H. (2018). Democracy–the god that failed: the economics and politics of monarchy, democracy and natural order. Routledge.

34. Brennan, J. (2016). Against democracy. Princeton University Press.

35. Read: the author of this blog as a teenager, though in fairness I was haunted by the knowledge that something like 90% of variation in religion was geographic.

36. Murray, C. (2014). The coming apart of America’s civic culture. Journal of Character Education, 10(1), 1-11.

37. Murray, C. (1997). What it means to be a libertarian: A personal interpretation.

38. Dickinson, M. (2017, March 5). Murray and Middlebury: What happened, and what should be done? Presidential Power. https://sites.middlebury.edu/presidentialpower/2017/03/04/murray-and-middlebury-what-happened-and-what-should-be-done/