My daughter Katie was 20 years old.She was a college student.She had dreams, plans, friends and a future stretching out before her.
On January 19, 2025, while visiting friends in Urbana, Illinois, she was sitting in the back seat of a vehicle stopped at a red light when an intoxicated driver slammed into it at nearly 80 miles per hour.Katie and another young woman were killed.
Three others were seriously injured.Every parent who loses a child asks why.Over the last year, I have spent countless hours examining not only the actions of the man responsible for the crash, but also the policies and institutions that helped create the circumstances that made it possible.What I have discovered is not merely a failure of one individual.
It is a failure of accountability.GRIEVING ILLINOIS FATHER CONDEMNS SANCTUARY ‘CHAOS,’ PLEADS FOR ‘COMMON SENSE’ AFTER DAUGHTER’S DEATHEconomist Thomas Sowell warned about the power of big government.(Fox News)More troubling, it reflects a broader trend in American politics: the tendency to prioritize systems, ideologies and political objectives over individual human beings.The great political debates of the 20th century were never simply about economics.
They were about power; how much government should possess, how much authority should be concentrated in the hands of political leaders and what happens when those leaders become convinced they know what is best for everyone else.Economists are often portrayed as cold, clinical or detached; people who reduce human life to numbers, charts and equations.Yet some of the clearest and most profoundly human warnings about the dangers of concentrated power came from economists who understood that freedom, dignity and human flourishing are inseparable from individual liberty.EVILS OF COLLECTIVISM ARE JUST WARMING UP.
‘RUGGED INDIVIDUALISM’ BETTER BE READYFriedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell were not merely defending markets.They were defending the individual against ...