Burning Down the House: How Libertarian Philosophy Was Corrupted by Delusion and Greed
by Andrew Koppelman
St. Martin’s Press, 2022, 320 pp.

On Monday, thirty members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus called on the Biden administration to pursue a negotiated peace settlement or cease-fire with Ukraine. The letter from the Progressive Caucus is careful to praise the administration for its ongoing efforts to fund Kyiv’s war effort, but also concludes that not enough is being done to encourage a negotiated settlement.

Everyone expects the Federal Reserve to increase rates next week. The CME Group assigns a probability of 97% that the Fed’s target rate will rise from 3.0-3.25% to 3.75-4.0%. With the Fed hiking for quite some time, and inflation maintaining a 40 year high, at least two things should now be apparent: Raising rates to fight (price) inflation does not work and the Fed will continue raising rates to fight inflation.

Billionaire Jeff Bezos has become a target of ridicule because his ex-wife MacKenzie Scott has been doling out colossal sums to charity. Compared to Scott, Bezos’s donations are quite slim and many are painting him as stingy. But are critics misguided in how they perceive the utility of philanthropy?

Since the reordering of Augustus, during the first two centuries of the empire, the Roman state manipulated the intrinsic value of the denarius argenteus, the main axis of the imperial monetary system, from the theoretical 3.892 grams and between 97.0 and 98.0 percent silver to 3.22 grams and 56.5 percent silver at the end of the second century AD.