In a very limited sense, there is private education in the developed world, but almost always private schools are heavily regulated by the government. There is also the issue of compulsory attendance laws. Competition in schooling that is unapproved by government bureaucrats is prohibited since attendance does not qualify as actual “education” in the eyes of the government. We, therefore, lack the means to compare an actual free market in education with government schooling.

If we analyze the ranking of the main technological companies (2017), there is not a single European among the top fifteen. The vast majority are North American and Chinese companies.

It is even more worrying. If we go to the top 50 global technology companies, only four are European, but when we analyze those four, it is more than debatable that they are leaders in innovation, patents and market power. The European indexes of “technology” include, diplomatically, a few industrial conglomerates that have long lost the technological race.

Sales of Class 8 trucks (18-wheelers) hit the ditch in January, with orders down 58 percent from a year ago hitting a level not seen since October 2016, near the end of the transportation recession, “when Class-8 truck orders had plunged to the lowest levels since 2009, and truck and engine manufacturers responded with layoffs,” writes Wolf Richter.

David Rosenberg tweeted a graph of the plunging Baltic Dry Index with the comment, “Is there a more deflationary chart than the Baltic Dry Index of global freight rates?”

There’s a retirement crisis in America today. The national savings rate is at a putrid 3%, consumer debt levels are hitting all-time highs, and stock portfolios are shedding their value amid the popping market bubble.

If you think that the “tax the rich” rhetoric from the left-wing of the Democratic Party is primarily about economics you would be sadly mistaken. After all, there isn’t enough tax revenue in the highest income bracket, even with a 90% marginal rate, to fund anyone’s pet social program for more than 48 hours. Do progressives know this? Of course they do.

One of the principal aims of the progressive (i.e., leftist, liberal, socialist) movement is equalization of income and wealth. They think it’s unfair, even immoral, for some people to have more when others have less. They especially decry the existence of billionaires but their lament oftentimes extends to millionaires as well, sometimes even to anyone who has more wealth than someone else.