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The Lighthouse®

The Lighthouse® is the weekly email newsletter of the Independent Institute.
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Volume 24, Issue 38: October 1, 2021

By Victor Davis Hanson (American Greatness)
Think for a minute. When did we become a nation of socialist AOCs wearing “Tax the Rich” dresses to $35,000-a-ticket celebrity galas, without mandatory masks, while being served by masked servants—a now tired script from the Obama birthday bash crowd to the grandees at the Emmys? Did anyone just five years ago believe the following could possibly happen in America—and invoke almost no popular outrage from a somnolent public? READ MORE »



By K. Lloyd Billingsley (American Thinker)
Angelo Codevilla (Senior Fellow, Independent Institute), a man of “remarkable intellect and insights,” passed away this month after a long and productive career. In recent years, Codevilla watched as the ruling class morphed into an all-out oligarchy, As he explained last May, “the exercise of coercive powers by and for self-selected elites who claim to know better and who validate one another is the very negation of the constitutional republic within which Americans have lived since 1776. It is oligarchy.” And in his response to the pandemic, Codevilla might have saved the best for last. READ MORE »



By Ronald L. Trowbridge (The Hill)
On July 28, U.S. District Judge William G. Young ruled against mandatory cross-examination by colleges investigating sexual assault cases on grounds that it is capricious. Pursuant to that ruling, the acting assistant secretary for civil rights in the U.S. Department of Education, Suzanne B. Goldberg, declared on Aug. 24 that the Office for Civil Rights will no longer enforce mandatory cross-examination rules in postsecondary sexual assault cases. Is that position fair to either accuser or accused? READ MORE »

In All Fairness
Equality, Liberty, and the Quest for Human Dignity
Edited by Robert M. Whaples, Michael C. Munger, Christopher J. Coyne


By Richard K. Vedder (Forbes)
Washington University in St. Louis had an astonishing 65% rate of return on investments in their endowment in the 2020-2021 academic year. News reports suggest high returns at many other schools, too. One generalization holds: a large majority of the top schools in all Forbes college rankings are private institutions with large endowments. Money seems to buy better students via bigger scholarships, and more prestigious professors. READ MORE »



By Ivan Eland (The National Interest)
The Biden administration claims to support reforms that would restore badly damaged presidential guardrails and norms. However, reports are that the White House is dragging its feet on the restriction of presidential emergency powers and the facilitation of enforcement of congressional subpoenas against the executive (and probably other proposed reforms as well), with the possibility of a loss of one or more houses of Congress to the Republicans in 2022 looming over the latter objection. However, it is no exaggeration to state that the republic has been imperiled by decades of executive corruption and aggrandizement at the expense of the other branches of government. READ MORE »





  • Catalyst
  • Beyond Homeless
  • MyGovCost.org
  • FDAReview.org
  • OnPower.org
  • elindependent.org