Can an act be virtuous if it is compelled? Can a society be considered moral if an action deemed impermissible for one person becomes permissible when performed by another? If authority alone can transform vice into virtue, morality loses its claim of universality, and what remains is a doctrine of exemptions.

Economic distress is on almost everyone’s mind lately. Inflation, high prices, stagnant wages, declining purchasing power, inequality, and recurring financial crises are often treated as separate problems requiring separate government solutions. The Austrian School begins elsewhere. From Carl Menger and Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk through Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich A. Hayek, and Murray Rothbard, Austrian economists argued that these problems are frequently connected consequences of interventions that distort the signals by which a market economy coordinates itself.

There is an old and familiar saying about difficult personal or social situations. When a weak or broken personality is faced with a difficult or dire situation the individual ignores the problem and pretends to be confident and cheerful about what is to come. Here, the individual is said to be “whistling past the graveyard.”

In “Lincoln as Statesman,” a chapter in his book On Statesmanship (Yale University Press, 2026; vii + 312 pp), Steven B. Smith portrays Lincoln as a political leader of almost superhuman wisdom and virtue. He says:

The Iran war could claim a casualty far more consequential than a missile battery, an air base, or an oil tanker: the petrodollar system.

“The lesson of the Cornell controversy is that justice is not measured by whether prosecutors satisfy public anger. It is measured by whether they faithfully apply the law.”