This week we witnessed the horrible spectacle of Nikki Haley, President Trump’s Ambassador to the United Nations, joining a protest outside the UN building and calling for the people of Venezuela to overthrow their government.

“We are going to fight for Venezuela,” she shouted through a megaphone, “we are going to continue doing it until Maduro is gone.”

This is the neocon mindset: that somehow the US has the authority to tell the rest of the world how to live and who may hold political power regardless of elections.

The “libertarian socialists” have struck again.

It began when a state Libertarian Party chapter posted a link to a court decision about an employer that did not allow its employees to have dreadlocks.

This was “discrimination,” the suit against it alleged.

Not so, said the court. The “race-neutral grooming policy,” it declared, was not discriminatory, since a hairstyle, unlike a racial identity, is not an “immutable physical characteristic.” Therefore, an employer is at liberty to enforce such a requirement.

On Sunday, October 7, 2018, Brazil holds its presidential election and will vote for the national deputies, the state governors, and the senators. Brazil has a diverse party system with tens of political parties. When no candidate reaches more than 50 percent in the first run, the two candidates with the highest score will compete against each other in the second vote few weeks later.

In discussions of international trade, the pervasive mind-set is that exports are a positive entry in a country’s “economic well-being” ledger, while imports are a negative entry in the ledger. In other words, exports are intrinsically “good” and imports intrinsically “bad.”

Throughout my time as an economics student at a public university, I’ve been taught lies on a weekly basis. On the first day of my “Principles of Macroeconomics” class, I was shown a quotation from John Maynard Keynes, and the semester preceded with the professor stumping for Keynesian pseudoscience day after day. I was taught that the prices were determined by some equation the professor made up. I learned that business cycles were the result of “animal spirits,” and the only way to solve this problem is for the government to step in and spend more money.

Even before Trump was elected it was already clear that no one should expect him to cut spending and rein in annual budget deficits. Trump has always been about buying votes with more and more spending.

On June 18th, President Trump announced that he was directing the Pentagon to develop a new branch of the U.S. military, a “Space Force” that would give the U.S. “dominance” in that realm.

In August, Donald Trump signed into law a massive new military budget for fiscal year 2019, which began on Monday: