In 2022, JetBlue and Spirit Airlines announced an agreement to an acquisition of Spirit by JetBlue in a $3.8 billion transaction, mostly involving an exchange of stock. The acquisition would have catapulted JetBlue from a distant #5 in the airline industry (behind United, American, Delta and Southwest) to a near rival, perhaps expanding the Big 4 to a Big 5.
Projects that the government undertakes are likely to be of a questionable nature. The fact that the private sector did not undertake these projects indicates that these projects were not demanded or prioritized by consumers. For example, if the government decides to build a pyramid, it is evident that most people regard this as a low or non-existent priority.
DOJ prosecutor Gaston replied: “I would like to take a special assignment of finding and prosecuting [habited nuns].”
“Wall Street cannot be counted on to do anything to move the American monetary system towards the proper sound money standard we so desperately need – indeed, quite the opposite.”
Government debt is no longer a distant policy problem—it is a present economic reality shaping everything from inflation to interest rates. The United States continues to run massive deficits year after year, with total debt climbing into levels that would have once been considered unthinkable. Yet, despite the scale of the problem, political incentives remain unchanged: spend more, borrow more, and push the consequences into the future.
In 1971, when the last formal link between the dollar and gold was severed, more than a monetary system collapsed. Something more subtle, and more consequential, was quietly abandoned: the very idea of a limit—not a technical constraint subject to adjustment—but an ontological boundary separating what can be deliberately produced from what can only emerge through human action over time. Once that boundary disappeared, money ceased to resist and became, for the first time, fully administrable.
In 1901, on far-away Balangiga—a village in Eastern Samar of the Philippines—an American general gave an order that stripped away any notion of “civilizing” or “Christianizing” a foreign people: “Make it a howling wilderness.”
From our freedom to use or transform our private property emerges the freedom to trade it with anyone we choose. This freedom to trade inadvertently transforms mankind into a global supercomputer where private sector companies are always engaged in the process of economic competition which motivates companies to innovate and copy the innovations of competitors.
