What Can We Learn from the Latest Pentagon Audit? Both Plenty and Not Much
2024-02-09
No one was surprised last November when the Pentagon failed its sixth audit, serving up a sorry record of zero and six. The accomplishment received little mainstream media coverage. Scott Ritter excoriated his former employer (and mine) over the fraud, pointing out that the money wasted and the scope of the United States military activity is so massive, it is nearly incomprehensible to most Americans.
Ritter points out that audits are done by accountants, and while failing these audits is undesirable, passing them also means very little. His assessment? “When you allocate money to a system that has been allowed to become conditioned to operate without accountability, don’t be surprised when the shiny mansion on the hill you thought you were buying turns out to be little more than a house
The Dangerous Consequences of the German Historical School
2024-02-09
Ludwig von Mises spends a good deal of time attacking the German Historical School of Economics in Human Action and other works. The doctrines of the school are no longer influential, although as the philosopher and economist Birsen Filip notes in her recent book The Early History of Economics in the United States: The Influence of the German Historical School of Economics on Teaching and Theory (Routledge, 2023), things were once different. Germany was the principal place for graduate work in economics in the years from the latter part of the nineteenth century to World War I. The leading lights of the school—who included Wilhelm Roscher, Bruno Hildebrand, Karl Knies, and Gustav Schmoller—were scholars of immense erudition who impressed many of their contemporaries, and many people
Social Insecurity: It’s Not Wrong to be Concerned about Facts
2024-02-07
A December 19, 2023, article by Brett Arends on MarketWatch caught my eye with the oh-so-clickable title of “This Is the Scariest Number for Social Security.” Given the fact that many corporate media articles today focus on pointing out to the rubes how their senses are wrong and, gosh golly, everything is just peachy, it did not shock me to learn that Mr. Arends was not referring to the program’s unfunded liabilities or the projected depletion of the trust fund. No, Mr. Arends contends that the real problem is the dragooned citizens who foolishly worry about Social Security’s solvency—and the “quiet effort” to rabble-rouse:
The scariest number may be 71%. That astonishing figure, from a new poll, is how many have been persuaded that cuts to Social Security—potentially deep cuts—are either