The Treasury Department released new budget deficit numbers this week, and with two months still to go in the fiscal year, 2019’s budget deficit is the highest its been since the US was still being flooded with fiscal stimulus dollars back in 2012.

As of July 2019, the year-to-date budget deficit was 866 billion dollars. The last time it was this high was the 2012 fiscal year when the deficit reached nearly 1.1 trillion dollars.

The government — we are told — is necessary to protect us from the excesses of capitalism, and whatever gripes the average person might have about their elected officials, almost all of them can agree upon this.

The second and third volumes of Marx’s Kapital were published posthumously under the editorship of his close associate Friedrich Engels in 1883 and 1894, respectively. It is a curious fact that by then the underlying foundations of Marx’s economic system as presented in the first volume in 1867 were completely outdated. In a sense, the whole starting point of Marx’s analysis was obsolete before its ending saw the light of day. This obsolescence has not hampered in the slightest the tremendous success of Marxism in the political and cultural realm.

A recent article in the Guardian trumpeted the findings of a new study published in Science that found massive tree planting would be — by far — the cheapest and most effective approach to mitigating climate change.

A West Virginia state lawmaker plans to re-introduce a bill next session that would require Congress declare war or call forth the state militia before the West Virginia National Guard could be released from state control and sent into combat. Currently, as The Intelligencer (of Wheeling) puts it: “the authority to activate the Guard rests with West Virginia’s governor.”

There are two fundamental arguments most commonly made against gun control.

The Anti-Crime Argument

The first one is based on the idea that persons have a fundamental right to self-defense against ordinary criminals. That is, in a world where criminals have access to either legal or illegal weapons, ordinary people ought to be able to arm themselves for purposes of self defense.

When Paul Hayes was arrested in Kentucky for writing a fraudulent check, he faced his third felony charge. At the time, Kentucky had a law in effect known as the Habitual Criminal Act, which imposed a life sentence for any third-time felony conviction. The prosecutor in the case, however, was at liberty to decide whether or not to charge Hayes under the Habitual Criminal Act. He offered Hayes a deal: either plead guilty and accept a five-year sentence, or go to trial and risk life in prison.

The Federal Reserve, responding to concerns about the economy and the stock market, and perhaps to criticisms by President Trump, recently changed course on interest rates by cutting its “benchmark” rate from 2.25 percent to two percent. President Trump responded to the cut in already historically-low rates by attacking the Fed for not committing to future rate cuts.