Courses

Ethan Yang

Ethan Yang is the SFL Bastiat House Coordinator and a Prometheus Fellow attending the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University pursuing a JD with a concentration in antitrust. He is also a Google Public Policy Fellow and an Adjunct Research Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research where he is the host of the AIER Standard Podcast. On campus, he is a member of the GMU Journal of Law, Economics, and Policy and a member of the Federalist Society chapter. At AIER, his scholarly focuses include Chinese political economy, law and economics, and foreign relations. He was also a law clerk at the Pacific Legal Foundation and interned at the Cato Institute. Before law school, Ethan attended Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, where he served as SFL’s Northeast Regional Coordinator. His work has appeared in various outlets ranging from TV, radio, and print media.

Blog Posts

My Experience with Campus Climate at a Liberal Arts College

April 12, 2024
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Civil Liberties

William F. Buckley famously authored God and Man at Yale in 1951. In it, he decried his alma mater’s overt efforts to undermine what he called good, American values such as faith, capitalism, and individualism. Today, I assert that institutions of higher schooling everywhere undermine — or fail to instill — other crucial values; values that underpin the very idea of higher education. In particular: appreciation for freedom of speech, academic freedom, open debate, and fearless, intellectual rigor.  For more on freedom of speech, see Prof. Peter Jaworski’s Learn Liberty Video, The

Five myths about antitrust

August 24, 2023
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Economics

Antitrust law is a complicated and obscure area of the law, sometimes called competition law or anti-monopoly law, that has risen to global preeminence. Although the field has typically been for only the most niche individuals, someone who enjoys both law and economics, today, it is almost impossible to avoid. Indeed, the news headlines are full of op-eds and stories about the need to break up Big Tech, Big Pharma, and the dangers of rising corporate concentration.  It should be no surprise that the Biden Administration named antitrust enforcement as one of the main planks of “Bidenomics.”

Why does liberty work?

January 19, 2023
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Liberty

A progressive might say that society is like a flower garden, you need a strong central government to organize and plan its growth, much like a garden requires a competent gardener. A conservative would say that a lighter touch is preferable, a garden will prosper on its own but it needs to be trimmed and watered which is why there still needs to be considerable room for the government to run society. Someone who believes in liberty would say that society is made of people, not flowers and it isn’t right nor productive to impose a collective vision on free individuals. They believe

A world unsafe for autocracy

October 26, 2022
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Role of Government

President Woodrow Wilson once proclaimed that the US should seek to make the world “safe for democracy.” His words called for a more activist foreign policy and the creation of ambitious, but ultimately failed, international projects such as the League of Nations. To his credit, after his tenure America did have impressive accomplishments: defeating communism and rebuilding countries like Nazi Germany into flourishing democracies are notable examples. Washington still holds an essential role in stewarding global liberty, but new times call for a new strategy that builds off the lessons of

Checking in on China: why hard times lie ahead

July 15, 2022
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Civil Liberties

If the leadup to 2020 was the period of an ascendant China, today should be dubbed the period of an embattled China. It has seen breakneck economic growth, massive infrastructure expansion, a modernizing military, pervasive integration with the global supply chain, and the masterful consolidation of power by the current president Xi Jinping. China seemed like the inevitable replacement for the allegedly declining global superpower, the United States of America. Although Washington certainly has its hands full with problems at home, Beijing has also stumbled upon considerable roadblocks of its