Austin Bramwell | FrumForum

Stories by Austin Bramwell

Austin Bramwell is a writer living in New York City. His work has appeared in Critical Review, First Things, Modern Age, The Weekly Standard and other publications.

The Left’s Laffer Curve Myths

Austin Bramwell wrote on February 17th, 2011 at 11:35 am

By writing off Reagonomics as just a crank tax-cutting doctrine, opponents of supply side economics ignore the real reasons the policies were so successful. more

40 Comments

Thomas’ Financial Forms: No Scandal Here

Austin Bramwell wrote on January 25th, 2011 at 1:30 am

Liberal groups are crying “gotcha!” after news that Justice Thomas failed to report his wife’s income, but the lapse is more overblown than serious. more

53 Comments

Rand Paul’s New Gambit: Sabotage Federal Regs

Austin Bramwell wrote on November 9th, 2010 at 1:01 pm

Rand Paul’s proposal that federal regulations automatically expire after 2 years will only increase costs for both government and the private sector. more

24 Comments

Breaking with Groupthink on Affirmative Action

Austin Bramwell wrote on August 30th, 2010 at 12:32 pm

America’s major corporations often laud the importance of diversity in higher education. But are they doing so freely? more

24 Comments

Corporations Are People, Too

Austin Bramwell wrote on August 16th, 2010 at 9:36 am

It’s impossible to engage in political debate without encountering someone who feels that corporations are uniquely malevolent or dangerous. more

41 Comments

Losing the Fight Against Loitering

Austin Bramwell wrote on August 7th, 2010 at 3:46 pm

The judicial campaign against anti-loitering laws has often been heedless of the public’s interest in being free from chronic public nuisances. more

33 Comments

Voters Want Solutions, Not Libertarianism

Austin Bramwell wrote on July 30th, 2010 at 11:40 am

FF Symposium: The new wave of conservative independents aren’t looking for extreme libertarian policies, but rather a party they feel they can trust. more

18 Comments

How Not to Fix Our Failing Schools

Austin Bramwell wrote on July 20th, 2010 at 5:25 pm

By forcing accountability standards on schools, Washington is making many of the problems in American education worse. more

9 Comments

How Not to Fight Kagan

Austin Bramwell wrote on July 7th, 2010 at 6:44 pm

An outfit called the Judicial Crisis Network has led the opposition to Elena Kagan. But many of their statements have discredited their own message. more

18 Comments

Media to Tea Partiers: Can You be More Racist?

Austin Bramwell wrote on April 19th, 2010 at 12:14 pm

Many in the media have accused the tea party protests of being motivated by racism. The most troubling critiques though actually seem to fault the tea partiers for not discussing race enough. more

94 Comments

The unacknowledged though painfully obvious assumption of The Mount Vernon Statement is that the values we all share necessarily translate into the conservative movement’s policy agenda, as if no additional intellectual work were needed. more

1 Comment

Conservatism Isn’t Dead, It’s Just Intellectually Boring

Austin Bramwell wrote on September 5th, 2009 at 3:01 am

NM SYMPOSIUM: The actual picture Tanenhaus draws is of a movement stuck helplessly in a rut. Right-wing intellectuals should eschew the movement and reintegrate into the mainstream, not because the movement threatens the Republic, but because freedom of thought can only be found outside of it. more

21 Comments

Universal Coverage: We Have to Build on What We’ve Got

Austin Bramwell wrote on August 25th, 2009 at 1:45 pm

There is no way to move from the current system to a system where everyone is insured without cutting back on their benefits and thereby angering them considerably. Instead, Republicans should endorse universal healthcare access within the system we already have. more

3 Comments

Not to Praise WFB, But to Bury Him

Austin Bramwell wrote on June 26th, 2009 at 8:23 am

As you may have heard, the novelist Christopher Buckley and the popular historian Richard Brookhiser have each written a book about Buckley’s father, the late William F. Buckley Jr. Neither is just about WFB. Buckley’s Losing Mum and Pup tells what it was like – from battling grief to ghostwriting eulogies – to bury both more

2 Comments

Gay Marriage: A Way Out, Part 5

Austin Bramwell wrote on May 13th, 2009 at 8:06 pm

This is part four of a series. Read part one here, part two here, part three here, and part four here.

In my previous post, I argued that believers in marriage equality, as a matter of principle, should oppose the movement for government-endorsed same more

27 Comments

Gay Marriage: A Way Out, Part 4

Austin Bramwell wrote on May 13th, 2009 at 11:03 am

This is part four of a series. Read part one here, part two here, and part three here.
In my previous post, I argued that the government does not have a general policy of favoring marriage over relationships. (On the contrary, in some ways the government’s policies disfavor marriage.) Rather, the government has a variety of policy goals more

7 Comments

Gay Marriage: A Way Out, Part 3

Austin Bramwell wrote on May 12th, 2009 at 8:59 pm

This is part three of a series. Read part one here and part two here.
In previous posts, I argued that marriage traditionalists have no reason to oppose the right of same sex couples (or other unmarried persons) to enter into private covenants governing the division of property and income. In this post, I argue that they more

35 Comments

Gay Marriage: A Way Out, Part 2

Austin Bramwell wrote on May 11th, 2009 at 8:42 pm

This is part two of a series. Read part one here and part three here.
In my first post in this series, I “unbundled” the concept of marriage. That is, I divided the features of marriage into three categories, the private (ie., the marriage contract set by the parties), the government (ie., the legal consequences of marriage), more

28 Comments

Gay Marriage: A Way Out, Part 1

Austin Bramwell wrote on May 11th, 2009 at 12:43 pm

This is the first in a series. Read part two here, and part three here.
This post and the four that will follow argue for a conclusion that will strike many readers as preposterous: The goals of those who favor marriage equality, I believe, are not inconsistent with the goals of those who defend traditional marriage. Not more