The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes
by Zachary D. Carter
New York: Random House, 2020, 656 pp.

In the aftermath of the Virginia gubernatorial elections, armchair pundits are still offering their spin on the upset that Republican challenger Glenn Youngkin pulled off against former governor Terry McAuliffe. While there’s a lot of talk about the results of this election being a referendum on the Biden administration’s plummeting approval rate and mishandling of the economy, education is one local contributing factor behind Republicans’ strong performance in the Old Dominion that cannot be overlooked.

The latest quarterly filing statement of the Swiss National Bank (SNB) has been issued. Switzerland’s publicly traded central bank had a decrease in the value of its US stock holdings by around $5 billion in Q3 of 2021, ending the quarter with a value of $157 billion. SNB currently has a profit of over $40 billion for the 9 months ended in the year. Perhaps subjective, it looks like a banner year for an entity who turns a profit through currency manipulation.

You will not be surprised to learn that my answer is no, but what I’d like to discuss in this week’s column is an argument by an eminent philosopher that we should. Robert Hanna is an authority on Kant (Objectivist readers will already see trouble ahead), and in an article published online this month, “Gun Crazy: A Moral Argument for Gun Abolitionism,” he calls for the repeal of the Second Amendment.

Sergeant Javier Esqueda of the Joliet Police Department in Illinois thought he was doing the right thing by leaking a video recorded from inside of a squad car that showed a black man, Eric Lurry, in medical distress from a drug overdose being

I just received an intriguing email. The author suggests that Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged features Ludwig von Mises in one of the secondary roles (yet still as a hero). I had not at all seen the point that my correspondent raises, but I think he is right. When I wrote the Mises biography, I did not take the time to look up Atlas Shrugged again (I had read it in the mid-1990s), otherwise I might have noticed. Anyway, here is the message:

Dear Prof.,

In a surprising development, Republican governor Kevin Stitt has refused to implement the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate. This has placed the governor directly at odds with Pentagon brass and with the White House as it aggressively attempts to enforce its latest vaccine mandate for all military personnel. The Washington Post sums up the situation:

Throughout the corona “pandemic” the Holy Grail of public health officials has been vaccination: only by vaccinating enough people—first the elderly and infirm, then all adults, and now even children—can the nefarious virus be beaten.