It is trivial to say that any cardinal number can be added to another to answer the question of “how many” or “how much” of something there is. The trick lies in teasing some relevance out of the resultant sum. The relevant tradeoff in constructing any aggregate is between the advantage of reduced complexity of a unique figure summarizing data and the disadvantage of the information lost from any individual figure within the set.

In recent years, especially as media pundits and politicians talk up the idea of how divided the American population is along ideological lines, talk of secession has become more frequent and more urgent. For several years now, a quarter of Americans polled have claimed to support the idea of secession.

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Those of us who support a noninterventionist foreign policy find in Murray Rothbard’s work an inexhaustible source of facts and arguments. Mises, by contrast, usually doesn’t comment on foreign policy issues. Sometimes he did, but you won’t find in his published writings his views on the Cuban Missile Crisis or the Arab-Israeli conflict. I’d like to suggest, though, that a fundamental theme in his work supports noninterventionism.

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In the words of Ronald Reagan, here we go again. The unbelievable hatred that Democrats, liberals, progressives, and the mainstream press have toward President Trump continues to consume them, with the latest manifestation being a second impeachment of President Trump, just a few days before he leaves office.

It is amazing to me that President Trump has pardoned some people whom he considered heroic while continuing to leave Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, two genuine heroes, in the lurch. Assange, of course, is getting the worst of it, given the brutal conditions under which US and British officials have incarcerated him in England. But it still can’t be a bundle of joy for Snowden to be living in Russia, given the societal jail-like environment that comes with living under the Russian regime.