President Trump has said often that he had “created the greatest economy the world has ever seen, until the China virus came.” Maybe some people believe that, but if the economy was so great why did the Fed keep interest rates at zero and its balance sheet at $4 trillion? 

The president is bragging about the third quarter GDP bump; however, as David Rosenberg tweeted, “Even with the Q3 GDP snapback, a snapback that is now stalling, 2020 likely goes down with a –4% print, by far the worst year for the economy in the post-WWII era.”

The United States election campaign is focused primarily on how much the next president will spend and the measures to combat coronavirus. Both issues should point to one conclusion: unlike what candidate Biden wants to do, the next United States president should not copy the European Union.

As we face a second wave of coronavirus outbreak in Europe, we know that the March measures and aggressive lockdowns were a grave mistake.

There might not be a lot to cheer about in 2020. With rioting, looting, and draconian lockdowns, America seems to be on the precipice of social unraveling thanks to misguided policy decisions and the culture of divisiveness fomented by political elites and the media class.

But in any moment of crisis, there are always new avenues for innovation that make people better off. Yes, private individuals can take advantage of precarious situations and turn them around for good purposes. Just look at homeschooling.

If it seems like the topic of secession is increasingly in the media in recent years, it’s not just your imagination. From “Calexit,” to Brexit, to Catalonia, and to Scottish independence, the topic of breaking up nation-states into smaller pieces has increasingly forced itself into the foreground.

Equality

Nowhere is the difference between the reasoning of the older liberalism and that of neoliberalism clearer and easier to demonstrate than in their treatment of the problem of equality. The liberals of the eighteenth century, guided by the ideas of natural law and of the Enlightenment, demanded for everyone equality of political and civil rights because they assumed that all men are equal.

The British philosopher Antony Flew is best known as a leading “ordinary language” philosopher. In reaction to the attempt by the logical positivists and others to settle philosophical disputes through resort to an “ideal language,” the ordinary language movement contended that philosophical muddles often arise through lack of attention to the ordinary use of words. Flew, like his mentors Gilbert Ryle and J.L. Austin, was at the peak of his fame in the 1950s and 1960s. But he continued his work long after that.