[Vladimir Bukovsky, tr. Alyona Kojevnikov, Judgment in Moscow: Soviet Crimes and Western Complicity (Ninth of November Press, 2019), 707 pages.]

Recent protests in Hong Kong, along with the resulting fall out from international corporations questioned for their relationships with mainland China, has placed a renewed focus on the authoritarianism of the Chinese Communist Party. This has led to several articles identifying ways in which Western countries have learned from the CCP, including Europe’s growing embrace of web censorship and growing interest in the social credit system rolled out in 2018.

The literature on John Maynard Keynes’s life and ideas is enormous. However, his defenders have neglected his views on population. Why? His ideas in this area are highly problematic. This article provides documentation that shows Keynes advocated extensive government controls on the size and quality of the population.

Perceived as a by-product imported from the West, liberalism — often known in the English-speaking world as “classical” liberalism — has been rejected as an ideological model to define the political culture and systems of the African continent. It was primarily rejected because liberalism, like its related economic system capitalism, is observed as the system of the oppressor, the European colonizer who seeks to maintain his domination upon the African people by sustaining his order.

A state-owned cryptocurrency is, in itself, a contradiction in terms. The main reason why citizens want to use cryptocurrencies or gold is precisely to avoid the government or central bank monopoly of money.

For a currency to be a world reserve of value, widespread means of exchange and unit of measure, there are many things that need to happen, but the first pillar of a world reserve currency is stability and transparency.

US Banks are seeing a larger number of new entrants into the industry. Chime, a mobile-only bank, has opened two million online checking accounts and is adding more customers each month than Wells Fargo or Citibank. Firms from outside traditional consumer banking including Square, Goldman Sachs (Marcus), and Robinhood are entering the industry as well.

[This article originally appeared in Studies in Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric 57, no. 1 (2019): 161–174. Reprinted here with permission.]

Were an American from the mid-nineteenth century to time-travel to modern America, he’d be truly amazed to find that Americans are often expected to thank soldiers “for your service” and to act as if the military was doing the taxpayer a favor.

The lionizing of government employees in uniform has become standard fare in the post-9-11 world, with special discounts for members of the military, early boarding on airplanes, and free meals at restaurants.

This is the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall — one of the most glorious moments in the modern history of freedom. I first passed through that wall while hitchhiking around Europe in the summer of 1977.