According to a new report released Wednesday by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Consumer Price Index increased in March by 8.6 percent, measured year over year (YOY). This is the largest increase in more than forty years. To find a higher rate of CPI inflation, we have to go back to December 1981, when the year-over-year increase was 9.6 percent.

The war in Ukraine has generated commentary from a wide variety of observers in many fields. But economic science is the only field that can provide lasting solutions. And economics delivers the same time-honored solution: the free-market economy is the only way to durable peace between Russia and Ukraine.

The immediate goal is to defuse the crisis. Any immediate steps, however, must be consistent with the ultimate goal of a genuine free-market economy for Russia and Ukraine. Three immediate steps are required to defuse the crisis:

Inflations have an inbuilt mechanism which works to burn them out.

Government (including the central bank) can thwart the mechanism if they resort to further monetary injections of sufficient power.

Hence inflations can run for a long time and in virulent form. This occurs where the money issuers see net benefit from making new monetary injections even though likely to be less than for the initial one which took so many people by surprise.

Some journalists like Steve Portnoy of CBS seem unable to grasp that escalations that might lead to nuclear war are a bad thing. The journalist seemed incredulous last week when asking White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki why the United States has not started a full-on war with Moscow. Psaki’s position—with which any reasonable person could agree—was that it is not in the interest of Americans “to be in a war with Russia.”

Interventionist sentiments have prevailed in the guiding of US foreign policy, one could argue, since 1917. From the US participation in World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Persian Gulf Wars, the Afghanistan war, the “war on terror,” to say nothing of other minor interventions by force in Grenada, Panama, the Balkans, Somalia, etc., one could conclude that the United States is not shy about using military force to advance its internationalist inclinations.

 It is also important for the State to inculcate in its subjects an aversion to any “conspiracy theory of history;” for a search for “conspiracies” means a search for motives and an attribution of responsibility for historical misdeeds.

My daughter sometimes surfs the bore wave that heralds the incoming tide at Turnagain Arm, Alaska. The wave, or waves, to be exact, can reach a height of ten feet, but are usually smaller. Regardless of the size, the waves draw surfers from all over, each looking for the rush of riding a crest, and hoping not to crash in the foam.

Following the 2019 Women’s World Cup, the issue of women’s pay moved even more to the front pages as Women’s soccer star Megan Rapinoe spoke out:

Men are so often paid and compensated on the potential they show, not necessarily what they’ve actually done—which normally I would say, we outperform what our contract was.