According to a Reuters poll conducted on Sunday, only 27% of Americans support the US attacking Iran. 43% of Americans oppose the war. 

When I taught economics at the University of Guelph, I assigned an optional book report on Bureaucracy by Ludwig von Mises, originally published in 1941. The assignment was strictly for bonus points.

On February 2, the Trump administration announced a plan—dubbed “Project Vault”—to spend $12 billion (funded mainly by borrowing almost all of the US Export-Import Bank’s available capital) to create a “critical” minerals stockpile.

The moral perversity of U.S. foreign policy is on full display right now with respect to two Latin American countries — Cuba and Venezuela. The fact that the both political parties, the mainstream press, and many regular Americans, including Christians, display no moral outrage over this perversity only goes to show the depths of moral depravity into which our nation has plunged.

Let us imagine for a moment that we are in a museum. In one wing, the great achievements of government intervention are shown: highways, dams, public schools, and countless other ingenious designs, organizations, and feats. Things which we use in our everyday lives which, for better or worse, supposedly ensure the smooth flow of society. Plaques and posters on the walls of this wing boast of the millions of jobs and trillions of dollars created by the state, and list the many ways by which it has contributed to the growth of the free market.

“If I have an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about the solution,” Albert Einstein is reported to have said. The importance of identifying the relevant question applies equally to political discourse. Many political interventions depend entirely on how the problem is framed in the first place.

In any debate, the side that gets to define the question enjoys a significant advantage over their opponents. There is often ample room for manipulation in posing the question. 

A world-historical financial event was the 1971 default by the United States on its international commitment to redeem dollars for gold, thereby creating a purely paper, Nixonian global monetary system. Since then, the value of the United States dollar in gold has dropped by more than 99 percent. The amount of dollars that an ounce of gold will buy has gone up by about 140 times.

Apparently to illustrate that the state of California has little interest in controlling its fiscal profligacy or in protecting the property rights of anyone who can be demonized as rich, a union-backed state ballot initiative titled “The Billionaire Tax Act” has been proposed.