The latest annual Social Security trustees report recently came out. One of its “lowlights” was the program’s massive unfunded liabilities (currently a $42.1 trillion cumulative shortfall under intermediate population and economic growth assumptions), reiterating what has long been known, though frequently ignored. The program is far from sustainable. Continuing the status quo, is not an option, despite being the default approach every time government decision-makers just kick the can down the road.

Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom reached its 75th anniversary this year. This classic, published near the end of the World War II, was incredibly influential. In fact, Milton Friedman wrote that he had made it a practice to ask believers in individualism how they got there in the face of the “collectivist orthodoxy,” and reported that the most frequent answer involved The Road.

UPDATE: As of late Wednesday, the de-criminalization measure managed to close the gap of what had earlier been a 55 to 45 percent loss. It looks like the measure has now narrowly passed, and voters’ laissez-faire attitudes toward mushroom consumption apparently (barely) overcame other concerns. The article has been modified to reflect this outcome.

Turkey has been almost constantly in the news over the past year, as troubling headlines about its economy and political situation continue to pile up. In a currency meltdown that escalated last summer, the Turkish lira has plunged by nearly 40%, threatening the Turkish economy as a whole. In January, inflation topped 20%, with skyrocketing food prices having an especially severe impact on the population. At the same time, unemployment hit 14.7%, its highest level in a decade, and a figure that’s only expected to rise further, as the Turkish economy is projected to contract by 2% in 2019.

Behind the Huawei story, we must not forget there is a wider financial war being waged by America against China and Russia. Stories about China’s banks being short of dollars are incorrect: the shortage is of inward capital flows to support the US Government’s budget deficit. By attracting those global portfolio flows instead, China’s Belt and Road Initiative threatens US Government finances, so the financial war and associated disinformation can be expected to escalate.

Public high schools still aren’t taking school security seriously. Last month, hundreds of thousands of students in the Denver area stayed home from school when a woman in Florida suggested online that she was “obsessed” with the Columbine shootings.

In its latest budget request, the Trump administration is asking for a near-record $750 billion for the Pentagon and related defense activities, an astonishing figure by any measure.

In the last decade or so, a handful of Austrian economists have been aggressively promoting a strange story of the postwar development of the Misesian tradition.  In their telling, Friedrich Hayek and Israel Kirzner were busily developing Mises’s approach to economic theory and method when Murray Rothbard showed up and shunted the methodological train onto the wrong track.  For this reason, Rothbard and his followers—who these storytellers collectively and derisively refer to as “the Rothbardians”—are to be read out of the Austrian movement.  In an