The Woke Cartel and Twitter’s New CEO

2023-04-21

The federal government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released new price inflation data last week, and according to the report, price inflation during the month decelerated slightly, coming in at the lowest year-over-year increase in twenty-three months. According to the BLS, Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation rose 5.0 percent year over year in March before seasonal adjustment. That’s down from February’s year-over-year increase of 6.0 percent, and February is the twenty-fifth month in a row with inflation above the Fed’s arbitrary 2 percent inflation target. Price inflation has now been at or above 5 percent for twenty-three months in a row.
Meanwhile, month-over-month inflation rose 0.1 percent (seasonally adjusted) from February to March. That’s down from February’s

2023-04-20

Since its emergence in 1871, the Austrian school of economics has provided systematic opposition to empiricism in the development of economics. The Methodenstreit persists, even with different players. Several papers and publications have criticized the concept of economics based on empirical evidence. Positivism, and its different currents of thought, are consistently criticized by Austrian economists.
But the roots of attempts to make research objective are much older. In the Renaissance, the development of natural sciences neglected essentialism. Essentialism was seen as part of the Middle Ages and so was attacked by Renaissance thinkers.
We can also remember Francis Bacon, an English philosopher. Bacon advocated for the mathematization and quantification of every human experience as

2023-04-19

Thirty years ago, FBI tanks smashed into the ramshackle home of the Branch Davidians outside Waco, Texas. After the FBI collapsed much of the building atop the residents, a fire erupted and 76 corpses were dug out of the rubble. Unfortunately, the American political system and media have never honestly portrayed the federal abuses and political deceit that led to that carnage.
What lessons can today’s Americans draw from the FBI showdown on the Texas plains 30 years ago?
Purported Good Intentions Absolve Real Deadly Force
Janet Reno, the nation’s first female attorney general, approved the FBI’s assault on the Davidians. Previously, she had zealously prosecuted child abuse cases in Dade County, Florida, though many of her high-profile convictions were later overturned because of gross

2023-04-18

Most readers might not remember Daniel Ellsburg, but for those of us who came of age during the Vietnam War, the maelstrom that formed around him and his actions helped to define that era. Ellsburg, of course, is famous because he leaked a number of internal government documents called the Pentagon Papers in which the writers expressed skepticism about the chances for U.S. success in the Vietnam War.
Ellsburg chose to leak to the New York Times and the Washington Post, which at that time (as well as today) were the print voices of the political and academic elites. By 1971, when the papers printed some of the documents (after the U.S. Supreme Court voted 6-3 to allow publication), the war was well out of favor with the Democratic Party – whose politicians had started the war in the first

2023-04-15

Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.
Taxes are the price we pay for civilization.
I like to pay taxes. With them I buy civilization.
—Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
During tax season, many people try to provide you with practical ways to lower your tax bill and mitigate your exposure to both tax payments and reporting. Instead of repeating such advice, I would rather discuss the role of taxes in society or, in particular, why we don’t need taxes.
Almost everyone recognizes that paying taxes causes psychological harm along with other negative effects. However, it is commonly said that despite all the drawbacks, taxes are the price we pay to live in a civilized society, which is what the sign in front of the Internal Revenue Service building in Washington, DC, proclaims.