(This is based upon a talk I gave at a recent Mises Circle meeting in San Diego.)

I have lived in California for more than four years, having married a lifelong California girl a while back, having come here after retiring from being a college economics professor in Western Maryland at the end of 2021. Presently, we live in Roseville, a city of nearly 150,000 that has been called one of the country’s most livable cities.

There are still some Trump supporters out there who continue to bill the Trump administration as some kind of great victory for the forces of populism against the “deep state.” A year into the second Trump administration, it is clear this is not a serious position. The populism of the Trump campaign has clearly failed and what we ended up with instead is a continuation and strengthening of the status quo. Over the next three years of this second Trump term, the welfare-warfare state will only get larger.

Francis Fukuyama’s famous wager was not that events would stop, but that Western liberal democracy had emerged as the endpoint of humanity’s ideological evolution and the final form of human government. That thesis always carried a whiff of triumphalist fatigue: the Cold War had ended, the Soviet alternative had collapsed, and the managerial nation-state of the Atlantic world presented itself as history’s mature form.

Remember Mortgage-Backed Securities (MBS)? Since the Financial Crisis of 2008, they became a multi-trillion-dollar tool for the Federal Reserve to artificially prop up the housing market through its money creation process. At its peak in 2022, the Fed’s MBS holdings reached $2.74 trillion.