It was a bloodless coup d’état against an unresisting Confederation Congress. The original structure of the new Constitution was now complete. The Federalists, by use of propaganda, chicanery, fraud, malapportionment of delegates, blackmail threats of secession, and even coercive laws, had managed to sustain enough delegates to defy the wishes of the majority of the American people and create a new Constitution. The drive was managed by a corps of brilliant members and representatives of the financial and landed oligarchy.

Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War
by Samuel Moyn
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 400 pp.

Samuel Moyn is a distinguished intellectual historian who teaches both history and law at Yale. His earlier books were written for an academic audience, but in Humane he has an urgent message that he wishes to convey to the general public. There has in recent years been a movement to make war more humane, especially by minimizing death or injury to noncombatants. Moyn thinks this movement poses a danger:

Lamentations that the waves of innovation are receding have engulfed policy circles. Distinguished economist Robert Gordon avers that the days of transformative innovations are over. Like Peter Thiel, he is disappointed at the incremental nature of modern-day inventions. The declinist thesis is predicated on the assumption that groundbreaking innovations like the steam engine, electricity, and the telephone are becoming exceedingly rare. Educing evidence to prove this observation has been quite easy, but we are less astute at understanding why innovation is declining.

Political correctness is the hottest topic of the season, but few pause to ponder its costs. Exposing the idiocy of political correctness manifested by the venom of cancel culture offers short-term enjoyment without bestowing intellectual insight. Readers may celebrate the trenchant critiques of identity politics penned by James Lindsay and other thinkers, and yet fail to recognize that if political correctness had not succeeded in infesting powerful institutions astute thinkers would be compelled to produce illuminating works relevant to their academic interests.

Canadians are heading to the polls on September 20, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s questionable ethics are under a microscope, with Chris Selley of the National Post suggesting that Canadians “could do a lot worse than choosing whichever leader they judge the most eager and likely to govern with integrity.”

The speculation of whether Biden will reappoint Powell has been gaining media attention, as Powell’s term expires in February of next year. A few peculiarities stand out, as reported by the New York Times when they asked:

Should he reappoint Jerome Powell to lead the Federal Reserve when Mr. Powell’s term ends early next year, or select a replacement who is more fully aligned with the Democratic policy agenda?

But what about Fed independence?

“Government is that great fiction, through which everybody seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.”

~ Frederic Bastiat

If everyone was irrational all of the time we would be in big trouble. You’d never know when someone was suddenly going to swerve off the road for no apparent reason and drive into a building, or start babbling to you in tongues over the phone when all you wanted to do was order a pizza.

Most libertarians reject the utilitarianism as a moral philosophy because it would seem to grant people the right to initiate force upon one another (via the state) so long as the cause is thought to promote happiness.1 The paradox is that, while a free society does not aim at the maximization of happiness, only in a free society is the maxim

The official line on vaccines is that they are extremely effective at protecting against serious illness. And yet these same people are also claiming that the unvaccinated are a major threat to the vaccinated.

More specifically, President Biden claimed on September 10 that vaccine mandates were to “protect the vaccinated workers from unvaccinated workers.”

The very size and scope of the United States federal government is likely something that Ludwig von Mises could not have imagined, despite writing the book which foretold the results of such a behemoth, Bureaucracy.