Commercial real estate continues to suffer despite the Federal Reserve’s attempt at ameliorating the capital markets with a 50-basis point rate cut in September.

War and Individual Rights by Kai Draper; Oxford University Press, 2016, xii + 254 pp.

Before anyone gets their hopes up about a reduction in government expenditures resulting from the upcoming Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), remember that, once rolling, a log rolls in one direction—downhill—until stopped. But have any of us ever tried stopping a log as it accelerates down a hill?

Henry Hazlitt said that to cure inflation, stop inflating, but surprisingly, most economists and politicians don’t want a cure.

A central debate in the philosophy of science concerns the purpose of scientific theories: should they aim to represent the world as accurately as possible or is it sufficient for them to produce useful predictions? Milton Friedman’s influential essay The Methodology of Positive Economics argues for the latter, suggesting that the primary goal of a theory is to generate accurate predictions, regardless of whether its assumptions reflect reality.

In Costa Rica, and in most Latin American countries (Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Colombia, etc.) the aguinaldo—a legally-mandated Christmas bonus—is an acquired labor right and is meant to provide workers with additional financial security. Unlike discretionary year-end bonuses in the United States, this one is an obligatory payment enforced by Costa Rican labor law.

It is popularly deemed a sign of moral superiority and a mark of the “progressive” mind to heavily criticize the existence of inequalities of wealth and income within the social order of the division of labor and private ownership in the means of production. However, the sober mind, careful of being unduly biased by errant ideological presuppositions, is often found to hold views that run contrary to the prevalent lines of reasoning advanced by these critics.