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Some things never change in American foreign policy.

On February 25, the House of Representatives passed the Equality Act, a bill that is touted as a step forward for civil rights in the United States. If enacted, the bill would add sexual orientation and gender identity to the federally protected classes that cannot be discriminated against and would expand where such protections are applied.

Economist Thomas Sowell once said that the word ‘racism’ is like ketchup: it can be put on practically anything. Today, since Robin DiAngelo et al have decided that all white people are racist, it could be argued that the word has lost some of its power; if we’re all racist, then calling us just that isn’t particularly effective.

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The discontent and unrest that followed the 2020 presidential election was, at least in major part, one of the innumerable destructive consequences of an almost 250-year-old error in economic theory made by Adam Smith: namely, the belief that profits are a deduction from wages. (See the first eight paragraphs of chap. 8 , bk. I of The Wealth of Nations.)

It’s hard to crack the headlines of the financial pages, what with GameStop, bitcoin, Tesla, and squeezes of one sort or another. There is a squeeze in commercial real estate that won’t shock anyone, or shouldn’t. That squeeze is tenants unable to pay owners and owners unable to pay lenders. 

It’s possible the pandemic will fizzle, someone will snap their fingers, and everything will revert to the precovid economy. But indications are that commercial real estate will take lumps, some that will be fatal. 

[Chapter 5 of Rothbard’s newly edited and released Conceived in Liberty, vol. 5, The New Republic: 1784–1791.]

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