Canadians can mark it on their calendars: Sept. 20, 2021, was Groundhog Day.

In An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith described what he called the Invisible Hand - a metaphor to describe the mechanism of the market and the social benefit that individuals who participate in the market in self-interested ways intentionally and unintentionally serve others.

The Biden administration’s rhetoric on the debt ceiling has become nothing short of apocalyptic.

According to popular thinking, it is held that by means of statistical and mathematical methods one can organize historical data into a useful body of information. This in turn can serve as the basis for the assessments of the state of the economy. It is also held that the reality is elusive. Hence, it is not possible to know its true nature.

A correspondent sent me an argument I hadn’t heard before that concludes that it’s not morally permissible for libertarians to work for public universities, and in this week’s column, I’d like to examine that argument. To telegraph where I’m going, I don’t think the argument works, but even if I’m right, it doesn’t follow that it is morally permissible for libertarians to work in public universities. To show that requires much more than a refutation of one argument for its impermissibility.

The argument I want to look at, stated in the words of my correspondent is this:

In America today, we have seen a radical acceleration in the form of advancing covid tyranny, political censorship, central bank–fueled inflation, the mainstreaming of cultural Marxism, and a federal regime looking to turn the tools of the war on terror against its own citizens.

After twenty years of failure in Afghanistan, the US government is embarking upon yet another unwinnable war. This time around, however, the military-industrial-congressional complex isn’t pulling the strings.