Events in Ukraine are happening very fast, and if I tried to predict what will happen there, my prediction would soon be overtaken by events. But one thing is certain. We need to understand the background of the crisis, and we also need to remember the basic principles that should guide American policy.

To understand the background, the best guide is Stephen Cohen, a world-renowned authority on both the Bolsheviks and contemporary Russia. He pointed out in November 2019:

Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was met with unprecedented economic sanctions by the United States and its allies in order to cripple Russia’s capacity to wage war. Never before in post–World War II history has an economy of Russia’s size been reprimanded with such force.

Governor Lael Brainard gave an eloquently titled speech on April 5 called Variation in the Inflation Experiences of Households. The speech centers around the “heterogeneity of experienced inflation,” or the understanding that individuals experience currency debasement in a variety of ways.

Governments lie about the inflation rate and benefits from it, so, it is no surprise when they talk against deflation (for the purpose of this article, assume inflation as a general increase in prices and deflation as the opposite), which would be good for consumers and the economy, but bad for the government.

Economists teach that institutions determine long-term economic growth—but are some institutions more crucial than others? The legendary Douglas North (1989) popularized the idea that the Glorious Revolution in England culminated in the imposition of institutional constraints on the monarchy. North argued that such an arrangement enabled growth by restricting the authority of political actors to extract resources.

“To mount an effective response to the reigning egalitarianism of our age, therefore, it is necessary but scarcely sufficient to demonstrate the absurdity, the anti-scientific nature, the self-contradictory nature, of the egalitarian doctrine, as well as the disastrous consequences of the egalitarian program. All this is well and good. But it misses the essential nature of, as well as the most effective rebuttal to, the egalitarian program: to expose it as a mask for the drive to power of the now ruling left-liberal intellectual and media elites.

The philosopher Hilary Putnam was not a friend of the free market—far from it. At one time he supported the Progressive Labor Party, a Communist faction that admired Mao’s red Chinese tyranny, and though he abandoned that extreme position, he remained a socialist. He thought that an obvious refutation of the libertarianism then professed by his Harvard faculty colleague Robert Nozick was that it rejected public education.