President Trump and his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, told us the US had to assassinate Major General Qassim Soleimani last week because he was planning “imminent attacks” on US citizens. I don’t believe them.

The National Bureau of Economic Research recently published a study which concluded that the grading policies for STEM classes contribute to the gender gap in the STEM field.

The study finds that STEM classes, on average, assign lower grades compared to non-STEM classes and that this tends to deter women enrolling. Women — who value higher grades more than men — are apparently put off by the lower average grades in STEM subjects. This is despite the fact that “women have higher grades in both STEM and non-STEM classes,” according to the study.

During the 2016 race, presidential candidate Gary Johnson was asked what action he would take in response to the refugee problem created by the destruction of the Syrian city of Aleppo.

In response, Johnson asked, “What is Aleppo?” Once prompted with enough reminders, Johnson was finally able to answer the question.

On January 3, Iraqi prime minister Adel Abdul Mahdi condemned the US’s killing of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani and Iraqi militia commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, calling the airstrike a “massive breach of sovereignty.” Abdul Mahdi

The US government tells us that Iraq is harboring anti-US Iranian forces and must be bombed. Yesterday, the US bombed Baghdad International Airport, killing seven people, including an Iranian general and two Iraqi politicians. Meanwhile, US marines invaded Iraqi sovereign territory — in a move euphemistically called “arrest raids” — in an effort to capture an Iraqi member of parliament and a militia leader.

But how is it that Iraq is so full of anti-US politicians and militia leaders working with Iranian forces?

ABSTRACT: The goal of this article is to extend the argument about the possibility of economic calculation under socialism first advanced by Ludwig von Mises (and later extended by Rothbard) to a related topic, the possibility of developing a comprehensive plan of production as a whole when all of the means of production are owned by a single entity. A division of ownership of the means of production permits a division of intellectual labor, a necessity when the scale of production is large.

ABSTRACT: This article is an evaluation of the General Theory largely on its own terms. Extensive quotations from The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money are used in order to allow Keynes himself to expound the theory. The goal of this article is to show that even on its own terms the General Theory must be considered a failure, for the problem it purports to solve, involuntary unemployment, does not exist. Many of the individual points made here have been made before, but no references are provided.

Some economists, such as the 2017 Nobel Laureate Richard Thaler and his colleague Cass Sunstein, have proposed an unusual justification for government interference with people’s choices. They do not intend, they say, to override the preferences that people have. They don’t want to tell people what they “should” want, according to an external standard that people don’t accept.