If there’s anything I hate, it’s a taxpayer-funded, pro-government party. I hate state dinners, I hate inauguration galas , and I hate the president’s proposed “Salute to America.”

The July 4 event, will feature military tanks lined up on the National Mall, war plane flyovers and a televised national address by the president. There will also be two firework displays.

And the event certainly won’t be free:

With the beginning of the American Revolutionary War at the outbreak of Lexington and Concord, two truths about the Revolution already stand out clearly. One is that the Revolution was genuinely and enthusiastically supported by the great majority of the American population. It was a true people’s war against British rule. The American rebels could certainly not have concluded the first successful war of national liberation in history, a war against the world’s greatest naval and military power, unless they had commanded the support of the American people.

President Donald Trump’s plan to give an Independence Day televised address from the Lincoln Memorial has outraged manypundits and plenty of normal Americans, too. There has rarely been a shortage of political buncombe on July Fourth but Trump could, as usual, break all records.

Few people who write for the news media — most of whom have only ever studied journalism or “mass communications” — know much about markets or entrepreneurship. Thus, it’s not difficult to understand by people who are not entrepreneurs or capitalists get labeled at such in newspapers and on TV news shows.

Every now and then, even The New York Times publishes an op-ed which suggests that war with Iran is maybe not the best option.

The current head of the International Monetary Fund, Christina Lagarde, is the likely replacement for Mario Draghi at the European Central Bank. Draghi’s eight-year term ends on October 31.

Earlier today, the internet was aflutter with rumors that we were on the verge of an international crisis following schedule changes involving Russian President Vladamir Putin and Vice President Mike Pence. While it appears there two events were unrelated, a different sort of tragedy struck the international stage hours later when it was announced that Christine Lagarde had been named the new head of the European Central Bank.

What the heck is going on? A friend asked. When I started the Institute in 1982, Austrian economics was on the defensive, socialism in the ascendency. Over the next several decades, we made real progress, thanks to our donors and scholars.

Now the Left is on the march. If we listen to the mainstream media, it’s an unstoppable parade of evil. Not so, of course.

[The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities. By John J. Mearsheimer. Yale University Press, 2018. Xi + 313 pages.]

Morgarten, Switzerland – Here, in 1315, a force of Swiss mountaineers ambushed an invading force of Austrian feudal knights who had come to reassert Hapsburg feudal rule over the rebellious Swiss.

The burly Swiss farmers and woodsmen from the forest cantons Unterwalden, Uri, and Schwytz fell upon the close-packed Austrian knights and men-at-arms, using long pikes or deadly pole axes known as halbards, and massacred them without quarter.

Two years later, a second Austrian expeditionary force was caught by the Swiss peasant infantry near Lucerne at Sempach and crushed.