Susan Neiman is a philosopher who has written well-regarded books on Kant and on the problem of evil. Last year she published a book with an unusual title: Learning From the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil. Neiman lives in Berlin and directs the Einstein Forum. She is interested in how Germans deal with the crimes of the Nazi era. In her opinion, Germans after World War II ended were largely defensive, refusing to own up to their guilt. Nowadays, though, things are better. German youth feel appropriately guilty, though much work remains to be done.

In his bid for the presidency, Pete Buttigieg rhetorically grabs a tiger by the tail, so to speak. Not the Siberian tiger still clutched by Russia, but an American mountain lion.

The tails in both instances are vestiges of towns and cities far from viable markets, a situation that leaves those remaining with little hope for economic expansion. These lives of despair are encouraged by government policies purporting to revitalize rural areas whose futures have long since passed. So, instead of migrating to areas with remunerative prospects, folks remain.

President Trump’s pardon of Michael Milken would have delighted Murray Rothbard. Milken, who was famous for his “junk-bond” takeovers of various companies, served twenty-two months in prison for federal crimes that involved market trading. Murray Rothbard thought that Milken was a hero. As he explained in an article written in 1989: 

Former Mises Fellow Peter St. Onge, senior economist at the Montreal Economic Institute cowrote an op-ed in the Globe and Mail (Toronto) that highlights the increasing importance of part-time workers and the benefits they provide customers over traditional lines of work. 

Undoubtedly, the Democratic Party has made a left turn, but how far left have they found themselves in the first half of the twenty-first century? Many right-wing pundits, political analysts, and laypersons persistently and interchangeably call them “Marxists,” “communists,” or “socialists.” But such imprecise use of these terms tells us little about what ideology these people have actually adopted.

Listening to the howls from Democrats and the applause from Republicans, one would think President Trump’s proposed fiscal year 2021 budget is a radical assault on the welfare state. The truth is that the budget contains some minor spending cuts, most of which are not even real cuts. Instead they are reductions in the “projected rate of growth.” This is the equivalent of saying you are sticking to your diet because you ate five chocolate chip cookies when you wanted to eat ten.

One of the defining characteristics of advocates for socialism is an obsession with equality. According to this line of thinking, inequality is the central problem of the modern world, and it demands a centralized solution. Thus, socialists—and more mild social democrats—push to use the power of the state to force the transfer of wealth from the productive and successful to those who are less so. This is the way to achieve social justice, they contend.

But inequality is not the societal plague that socialists allege it to be.

When the Soviet Union began its collapse in 1989, the world witnessed decentralization and secession on a scale not seen in Europe since the nineteenth century.

Over the next several years, puppet regimes and states-in-name-only broke away from Soviet domination and formed sovereign states. Some states which had completely ceased to exist—such as the Baltic states—declared independence and became states in the own right. In total, secession and decentralization in this era brought about more than twenty newly independent states.

The Longines Chronoscope television series ran from 1951–55 and was hosted by William Bradford Huie, Larry LeSueur, and Henry Hazlitt. The series consisted of fifteen-minute episodes featuring interviews with many notable people of the time, such as Eleanor Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Joseph McCarthy, Earl Warren, Clare Booth Luce, Henry Steele Commager, Everett Dirksen, John Foster Dulles, Marriner Eccles, J. William Fulbright, Barry Goldwater, Averell Harriman, Hubert Humphrey, Henry Cabot Lodge, Dean Rusk, Robert A.