President’s Day was this week, and there was no better way to celebrate than making the case for abolishing the position. As Ryan McMaken noted, history has vindicated the fears of the Anti-Federalists that were concerned that the position vested too much power into the hands of a single ambitious politician.

In the days following the 2016 election, there were already worrying signs that the Trump administration didn’t merely view the War on Drugs as a useful source of rhetoric to please some Conservatives. With the appointment of Jeff Sessions — who appears to be a true believer in the War on Drugs — the threat to federalism, states’s rights, and local control was all too real. 

​Minouche Shafik of the Bank of England recently spoke to the Oxford Union in defense of the monetary Experts. The “Experts,” she pointed out, “have come in for a great deal of criticism of late.”  She suggests this phenomenon may have something to do with the 2008 financial crisis. She also mentions various currency manipulation and interest rate scandals as possible motivations for public outrage. We applaud her keen insight.

Recently, Harvard political theorist Danielle Allen wrote in the Washington Post of “The most important phrase in the Pledge of Allegiance” — “with liberty and justice for all.”

On Monday, January 23rd, President Trump announced a hiring freeze on federal workers, with an exception for jobs that are ostensibly related to national security or public safety. The exception includes uniformed military personnel, but does not include the military’s civilian support staff, which already numbers around 750,000.

Budget deficits are often in the media spotlight. The budget deficit is defined as the difference between what the government spends and what the government collects. When the government spends more than it collects, a budget deficit exists. When the government collects more than it spends, a budget surplus emerges.

Turmoil in the international political arena has driven home the point that politics is about the art of compromise. Not the kind, voluntary type of compromise one is expected to make every so often in a happy marriage, or in business negotiations on a free market. Politics breeds a type of coercive compromise which can only be achieved by backing down on your principles, or better yet, if you hold no principles to begin with. The most skilled politicians know that this is the way up into the political world.

In the wake of the Senate’s confirmation of the appointment of Betsy DeVos, the protests from the left prompted Republican Congressman Thomas Massie to offer them a way to get rid of DeVos: eliminate the Department of Education. 

According to Massie, he’d been planning to introduce the bill for more than a year, and the controversy over DeVos appeared to be as good a time as any.