A glance at the introductory sections in the 2024 budget put forth by the Biden administration might invite dangerous bouts of laughter if only the topic were not so serious and our so-called leaders not so delusional.

As a frequent X/Twitter user, I follow a variety of accounts that touch on a number of niches: whether that is economics, finance, Catholicism, college football . . . or in this case, Lord of the Rings. A popular Twitter account that regularly shares content related to J.R.R. Tolkien’s work broke from character to offer an insight on another tweet. In the tweet he refers to, a food inspector is shown interrupting the business of a diner, which the poster laments.

In 2008, the Republican party conspired to deny Ron Paul a floor speech and to generally ignore him at the GOP convention in Minneapolis. The GOP, after all, had bent over fought against Paul every step of the way so it could nominate uber-establishment Republican John McCain instead. As a result, Paul’s supporters organized the “Rally for the Republic” and anti-convention down the street from the establishment convention. The rally sold more than 10,000 tickets and was broadcast on C-Span. 

About a month ago, I called out Paul Krugman for blaming economic pessimism on Republicans. He compared the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index to what he sees as a “surreally good” economy and came to the conclusion that the survey respondents must be warped by partisanship.

The nineteenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hill Green was one of the key figures in the transition from classical liberalism to “modern” liberalism, in which the state, no longer a mere “night watchman,” if it ever was that, takes on a much more active role. The state in Green’s view ought to aid people in realizing their “real selves,” and doing this often involves supplying them with various goods and services. For this reason, Green is regarded as one of the intellectual founders of the “welfare” state. But for Green the state was much more than a provider of welfare.

A clip from the 1990 movie Home Alone where the lead character purchases groceries, household goods, and toys recently went viral because he paid a total of $19.83 whereas today the same purchase would cost over three times as much. Ironically, while this evidence of the Federal Reserve’s failure to maintain the dollar’s value was going viral, stocks rose because investors believed the Fed had successfully engineered a “soft landing” by bringing down price inflation without causing a recession and would soon begin reducing interest rates.

The world suffered a great loss when the Australian journalist and documentary filmmaker John Pilger died December 30 at the age of 84. One fact stands out foremost in his decades-long career as a writer and intellectual: He opposed war and fascism. He thought that the United States and Britain all too often supported war and fascism, and he often had occasion to criticize other intellectuals as lackeys of the state, in a way that will remind readers of LRC of Murray Rothbard’s similar attacks on “court historians.”

In the debate over immigration among laissez-faire liberals and libertarians, one aspect of the open-borders side becomes quickly apparent: the debate generally ignores problems related to geopolitics such as international conflict, ethnic strife, and expansionist states. Rather, the libertarian advocates of open borders tend to focus overwhelmingly on why rich countries should open their borders to migrants from lower-income countries.

Not many people know that Oregon decriminalized all drugs through a ballot initiative. The Wall Street Journal recently ran an article: “Oregon Decriminalized Hard Drugs: It Is Not Working.” The question here is, why not?

In 2020, the State of Oregon decriminalized all drugs, including hard drugs such as heroin, crystal meth, which you will remember as the centerpiece of the hit series Breaking Bad, and fentanyl, a highly dangerous synthetic opiate. Fentanyl is another example, really the latest step-product, of the war on drugs.