Academic life today, and our culture generally, is beset by a “woke” madness. Marxist termites are attempting to destroy Western civilization. The problem isn’t confined to Critical Race Theory, the subject of an earlier column. It goes far beyond that. The rot is everywhere. Fortunately, those devoted to true academic freedom are resisting this onslaught against us. But we need someone to galvanize the struggle for academic freedom; someone to be the voice of our battle. We have that voice.

The idea of secession for some regions of the United States—sometimes simplistically called “national divorce”—has increasingly been mentioned as a way to deal with the apparent growing divide between what are crudely called “red states” and “blue states.” Polls suggest that perhaps a third of the American population “indicated a ‘willingness to secede’” 

Murray Rothbard called Richard Cantillon the “father of modern economics.” While that title is often given to Adam Smith, Rothbard suggested that all the good things in Smith were first discovered by Cantillon or other pre-Smithian economists and that virtually all of Smith’s original ideas were “a significant deterioration of economic thought.”

In last week’s column, I discussed Scott Sehon’s new book, Socialism: A Logical Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2024), and this week, I’d like to continue the analysis of the book, focusing on Sehon’s discussion of rights under socialism. The main topic we need to look at is whether socialism violates important rights that people ought to be accorded in a just political and social system.

After spending months trying to sell his economic agenda under the banner of “Bidenomics,” the president’s team is frustrated. Voters aren’t believing them when they say that the economy is doing excellent and that Joe Biden deserves the credit.

To prevent public debt from soaring in the wake of the global financial crisis in 2009, Germany has enshrined a “debt brake” in its constitution. The debt brake sets strict limits on federal public debt levels and restrains government borrowing. This fiscal rule has served its purpose, and public debt has been on a downward path, dropping by about 15 percentage points of gross domestic product (GDP) since its introduction. Yet the government suspended it during the pandemic and raised an extra €370 billion of debt in 2020 and 2021.