The fable of Purim ends with the slaughter of over 75,000 non-Jewish Persians by the Jewish Persians after one official's (Haman's) plot to kill the Jews is exposed when the king is alerted by his Jewish wife. That's a mighty big conspiracy! God makes no appearance. An inspiring story for sure! The closest thing today to the villain, Haman, is Netanyahu and his team. Boo!
Nearly everyone complains about capitalism's defects, or market failures. In fact, those are social failures, not specifically market failures, which show up when many rational individual actions create a social situation that displeases everyone. This means that government dirigisme -- state direction or displacement of the market -- cannot be a remedy because who do you think staffs the government and how do they get there? A big difference between the two systems -- market and state -- is that while the market diminishes social defects, the government magnifies them.
The establishment debate over foreign policy isn't between realists and whatever their opponents call themselves. It's a debate over who's more realistic. It reminds me of the debate between the Federalists and Antifederalists. No one wanted to be considered against federalism, but the centralizers had beaten the real federalists to the label Federalist.
This is America, last I checked. Surely, the government would not force the sale of a social-media company or ban its app from the Google and Apple stores. Would it? Well, yes, it would, could (perhaps), and might. A bill in Congress, backed by the government's nominal chief executive, could become law. The House of Representatives passed it last week by an overwhelming bipartisan majority -- despite valiant efforts by Rep. Thomas Massie, R-KY, plus a few others -- and it is now before the Senate. That bill would establish fuzzy criteria defining a "foreign adversary's" alleged influence...
Centralized power has a problem: the individual. Every person is a potential disrupter of The Plan, and disruption must be forbidden. Otherwise, why have a central plan? This applies regardless of whether the planning is economy-wide or for particular sectors, such as medical services. (See F. A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom.)
If you have not mastered Frédéric Bastiat's "What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen," how dare you vote! How arrogant of you to presume to set rules for everyone else! Do something constructive on election day: stay home and mind your own business.
I find the phrase "identify as" strange. Yoda might say, "No. Be or be not. There is no 'identify as.'"
Trump promises to slam a 100-percent tariff on [Update:] imported cars made in Chinese-owned factories in Mexico. He announced this not to a group of prospective car buyers but to a group of car makers. So what else is new? Car buyers, who outnumber the well-organized car makers but are not themselves organized, would have to pay more for cars they do not want if Trump got his way. That's the point. This is America first? No, it is not. It is "An Interest Group Whose Votes I Want" First versus everyone else. That's always the case with protectionism. Stopping consumers from buying whatever...
