As the dust settles following the GameStop frenzy in late January, it is clear that one of the biggest losers in the controversy in Robinhood. Robinhood is a trading app that markets itself as a platform for ordinary retail investors seeking to buy and sell securities without the cost of an expensive broker. Or, more romantically, Robinhood claims it has “democratized” investing.

Professor Philipp Bagus has published a remarkable article making the case for developing a political economy to help us understand the 2020 coronavirus and similar events prone to mass hysteria.

Dominion Voting Systems is suing MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell for $1.3 billion. This comes in the wake of other Dominion lawsuits against Trump advisors Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell. All are accused of lying about Dominion’s supposed complicity in using the company’s vote-counting software to favor presidential candidate Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election.

All students of economics will sooner or later be confronted with the standard neoclassical analysis of deadweight loss from taxation. The point of this analysis is not to clarify what the government’s tax revenues should be used for, but rather how and where the government should tax in order to minimize distortions in the market structure—in a sense, in a way that hurts the least. Ideally, the tax should be “neutral.”

Crisis of the Two Constitutions: The Rise, Decline, and Recovery of American Greatness
by Charles R. Kesler
Encounter Books, 2021
xviii + 451 pp.