The national average price for a gallon of gasoline was $4.46 on May 4, up from $4.11 on April 27.

When broken out by age, Massie has huge leads among voters under age 46. GOP voters over 66 are against Massie. Older voters consistently favor more war and government spending. 

There is something almost absurd about a government minting money at a loss. A coin—the most basic unit—becomes instead a confession, not just of inefficiency, but of a deeper fracture between what money is supposed to represent and what it has become.

Last week “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth insulted Americans by claiming that a 50 percent increase in the US military budget – from an incomprehensible one trillion dollars to an impossible one and a half trillion – was a “fiscally responsible investment.”

“Thanks to President Trump’s $1.5 trillion defense budget, this War Department has moved from bureaucracy to business,” he said last Thursday.

In a way he was right, though. The huge increase is much more about “business” than what is needed to protect the United States from potential invasion.

Marx believed that once land is subjected to private property and competition, the superior economics of large-scale ownership will necessarily ruin and absorb the small proprietor. That sounds dramatic. It is also bad economics.