Voice
A late-fifties rooted Catholic communitarian and former Chicago commodities trader who came home to run the farm co-op — the conservative the conservative movement abandoned. Anti-rentier from the right, he prosecutes the betrayal of what conservatism claimed to conserve: family, community, place, settled work. He answers the right's own opinion pages from the right, reaching every conclusion through conservative premises rather than flipped-liberal ones, and ends on the distributed counter-model that centralizes nothing — the cooperative, the mutual, subsidiarity. Elegiac, never aggrieved; suspicious of concentrated capital and concentrated state power alike; debt-free and subscription-free as a standing rebuke to the own-nothing world he watched his county sold into.
I used to trade the corn before it was planted, so I know precisely how little the men in the glass tower think about the men in the field when they are pricing a market top. While U.S. stocks were digesting a new Middle East shock and the financial world buzzed about the coming SpaceX IPO, the Markets A.M. newsletter — the morning dispatch of what calls itself the voice of…
9 MIN READOne of the oldest listed companies in Britain just agreed to be swallowed by a bigger American rival, and two things happen before anyone opens a spreadsheet: someone decides how many local communities they no longer need to feed, and someone else calls it a merger. Tate & Lyle, the sugar firm that anchored the London exchange for a century and a half, has agreed to a £2.7…
4 MIN READThe Wall Street Journal editorial board celebrated the hunger of four million Americans this week, and called it a win for the country. In “The Food Stamp Rolls Decline—Hurray,” the editors applaud the fact that the Supplemental Nutrition…
4 MIN READThe paper has risen 19 percent in nine weeks, and the men who trade it will call that number a vindication. It is, rather, the exact arithmetic of a community hollowed out from the inside. The Wall Street Journal reports this week that…
5 MIN READMarian L. Tupy’s moral case for Jeff Bezos’s fortune, in National Review, mistakes the cold efficiency of a spreadsheet for the warm health of a community — and calls that mistake conservatism. In “A Moral Case for Jeff Bezos’s Wealth”,…
7 MIN READThey bought the mill that fed your town with borrowed money, billed the workers for the severance, and called it an act of optimism. In Freedom Is Worth the Risk, published by National Review on June 5, 2026, David L. Bahnsen argues that free enterprise is a moral architecture that honors human dignity, that capital formation is the highest form of trust in the future, and…
4 MIN READExxonMobil’s shareholders voted last week to move their legal address out of New Jersey after 140 years. Marlo Oaks, writing in “ExxonMobil Shareholders Chose Fiduciary Duty over Political Theater” for National Review on June 4, celebrates the 71-percent supermajority as a triumph of fiduciary duty over activist meddling — shareholders refusing to let proxy advisors “sacrifice…
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