Six months after Zelenskyy’s historic humiliation in the Oval Office, Trump’s meeting with Putin hopefully signals an end of the Russia-Ukraine war. From a moral point of view, this is to be welcomed, as the war—from both sides—has been morally illegitimate from the outset.
America is supposed to be a democracy, and people worry about whether elections are genuine or rigged. Should voting by mail be allowed? Should voters be required to show ID? In the current political climate, such questions are important, but there is an underlying premise that libertarians have good reason to question.
Last week President Trump took steps to re-name the Department of Defense the “Department of War.” The President explained his rationale for the name change: “It used to be called the Department of War and it had a stronger sound. We want defense, but we want offense too… As Department of War we won everything…and I think we…have to go back to that.”
Following Jerome Powell’s latest signal on rate cuts, economist Steve Hanke, Applied Economics Professor at Johns Hopkins University, explains why markets and policymakers keep fixating on the wrong variable. Interest rates don’t drive the cycle, he argues—changes in the money supply do, with long and variable lags.
Since 1978, a federal subsidy program (49 U.S.C. 5311) has funneled taxpayer money into intercity bus routes. Fast forward to today, and this initiative has failed. Instead of attracting riders, politicians have often crafted routes to win votes. As a result, subsidized bus routes have been squandering taxpayer money for 46 years.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) is widely seen as a pillar of financial stability—a quiet assurance that bank deposits are safe, that the system is sound, and that the public need not worry. But this narrative conceals a deeper truth: deposit insurance is not an assurance of monetary integrity, it is a warning label that confirms systemic fragility.
One of the main allegations of “racism” made against the South is that white Southerners were historically against black suffrage. As the historian Eric Foner sees it, during the Reconstruction Era the federal government—guided by principles of racial justice and equality—forced a reluctant South to give black citizens the vote. Yet, during this era, roughly 1865 to 1877, black people in the North also did not have the right to vote. For example, in Connecticut,
It is popular in economics to employ metaphors in order to provide support to a particular idea. For example, concepts like “priming the pump” through expansionary monetary policy. In another case, Milton Friedman—the leader of the monetarist school of thought—employed a guitar string metaphor or the “plucking model.” By this metaphor, the stronger one pulls the string down, the stronger the string will go up.
The importance of hierarchies lies in the fact that not all individuals possess the same abilities or interests, and there exists a natural elite with a greater capacity to lead. Just as within a firm there are different levels of responsibility, there is no reason to believe that social order should not reflect a similar structure.
