Quit College—or Better Yet, Don’t Even Start

When I was in university a decade ago, this was some wacky, contrarian advice. It wasn’t unheard of for intellectual, middle-class youngsters to opt out of college, and it was still the early days of efforts like Praxis, but realistically there didn’t seem to be any alternatives. So, I went to university because that’s where you learn things and become a grown-up . . . or something.

President Joe Biden announced last week that the United States would be funding – and possibly fighting - three wars in three different parts of the world at the same time. It is an ambitious foreign policy for a president who doesn’t even seem to be able to express a coherent thought without the help of a teleprompter.

Nearly every word of Biden’s speech was untrue, including the preposterous suggestion that “American leadership is what holds the world together. American alliances are what keep us, America, safe.”

On a recent broadcast of NPR’s All Things Considered, host Ari Shapiro talked with U.S. Representatives Nancy Mace (R-SC) and Barbara Lee (D-CA) about their bipartisan bill to address the backlog of rape kits in the United States.

First of all, modern man, living in a price inflationary economy, in a debt economy, tends to be short-sighted and reductionist in his vision. He tends to be short-sighted because he needs to bring money on the table every single month. He needs to service his debt.

So, he cannot just lay back as our ancestors would have done in the 19th century. They had no debt. If there’s no money forthcoming in any month, or maybe there’s a bad year and so on, well, we get over this. We have some savings, and so on, we get over the time.

Trying to keep up with economic news is exhausting. Tune into the financial news channels or scroll through any number of economic blogs, and you’ll be hit with a fire hose of alarming headlines, scary-looking graphs, and a tone-deaf establishment emphatically declaring that the economy is better than ever.

On Thursday, some of the world’s most prominent policymakers and regulators met at the 18th Central Bank Conference on the Microstructure of Financial Markets in Washington, D.C. The title may be a mouthful, but much can be learned from Vice Chair Philip N. Jefferson as he identifies organizations taking part in the event, including: