Back on March 19th, 2020, I pointed to this piece by Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas at my blog – Coordination Problem — where he states very clearly the reality constraint in public policy deliberations in the current coronavirus crisis. Without committing one way or...
Hayek
FDR, Demagogue Champion of Leviathan and War
by Jim Bovard | Apr 13, 2020 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy, Politics
Sunday was the 75th anniversary of the death of Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt was sainted by the media even before he died in 1945. CNN last week trumpeted FDR as “the wartime president who Trump should learn from.” A 2019 survey of historians ranked FDR as the third...
Why Central Planning by Medical Experts Will Lead to Disaster
by Gary Galles | Apr 10, 2020 | Economics, Events, Featured Articles
A great deal of the coverage of the COVID-19 crisis has been apocalyptic. That is partly because “if it bleeds, it leads.” But it is also because some of the medical experts with media megaphones have put forward potentially catastrophic scenarios and drastic plans to...
Warren Harding and the Forgotten Depression of 1920
by Tom Woods | Apr 6, 2020 | Economics, Events, Featured Articles
It is a cliché that if we do not study the past we are condemned to repeat it. Almost equally certain, however, is that if there are lessons to be learned from an historical episode, the political class will draw all the wrong ones — and often deliberately so. Far...
Politicians Have Used This Crisis to Remind Us They’re Mostly Wannabe Dictators
by Jim Fedako | Mar 26, 2020 | Featured Articles, Politics
The virus has unleashed petite tyrants to haunt their tiny jurisdictions, using the cover of crisis to arrogate powers belonging to the people. Witness Robert J. Taylor, mayor of Ostrander, Ohio (population: 643 in the 2010 census), who just declared his village to be...
To Kill Markets Is the Worst Possible Plan
by Richard Ebeling | Mar 20, 2020 | Economics, Featured Articles
Momentous events usually leave strong memories on those who have lived through them, and those memories often become passed on to later generations in the form of historical interpretations of why and what had happened in the past. This has certainly been so in the...
In A True Free Market, It’s Hard To Be Rich
by Zack Sorenson | Feb 7, 2020 | Economics, Featured Articles, Libertarianism
One interesting feature of libertarian theory is its ability to offer a critique of corporate capitalism from the perspective of laissez faire economics. The political economics of societies with large corporations are troublesome, and if you read left-wing literature...
The Future Of Civilization Depends On Libertarian Morality
by Zack Sorenson | Jan 6, 2020 | Featured Articles, Libertarianism
The header image for this article comes from a mural featured at the library of the University of Oregon. It is set to be replaced because of an accusation of being ‘racist’. The incident is a reminder that our intellectual heritage as members of the ‘American race’...
Blog
Submarine Blues: Over-budget and Not Underwater
I often bag on the US Navy surface fleet as a sad shadow of the fleet that used to be. The nuclear submarine fleet is joining that maritime house of woe. U.S. Navy Captain Jerry Hendrix, who in a recent assessment observed: “In fact, production of new submarines...
Pegasus Down: The Refueler Follies March On
The KC46A is the replacement for the renowned KC135 refueling bird which had the last production aircraft rolled out in 1965. The KC46A is plagued with problems to include the bone-headed notion to put the refueling crew in the cockpit instead of the rear of the...
Blaming Freedom
Freedom is nearly always blamed for the bad consequences of unfreedom, that is, of government intervention. Take immigration. We hear these days that migrant gangs are killing, terrorizing, and stealing from Americans. Some immigrants without government papers have...
Insurrection of the Mind.
Star Trek Insurrection is not one of the better films in the series, but it seeks to address issues of humanity that sometimes only science fiction can. Immortality, the value of life and human relationships with technology. It is fitting that the film starts with the...
They Know the Truth
Cut from the book. After catching Woodward faking that Lavrov quote, I had to cut all the citations from that book out of mine. But I'll leave this here at least because it's funny: Insider journalist Bob Woodward wrote in 2024 that the administration recognized...
Bob Woodward Badly Misquotes Russian FM Lavrov
I emailed Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward: Dear Bob, It appears that you have misquoted FM Lavrov on page 88 of your new book. Lavrov’s full quote was: “Those who mechanically repeat the points made in Bucharest and insist that ‘third countries’ have no right to...
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