Boris Johnson’s Conservatives won an outright majority in yesterday’s general election, pushing the Tories to an 80-strong Commons majority in what The Daily Mail called a “staggering election landslide.”

Given that the Conservatives employed an election slogan of “Get Brexit Done,” it appears the election was largely a referendum on Brexit. The Conservative victory suggests Johnson will now move forward much more quickly on putting a UK-EU agreement in place for UK withdrawal.

“Marxism and the Manipulation of Man”

When the Berlin Wall fell 30 years ago this year — and the Soviet Union not long after — many thought socialism had been relegated to the dustbin of history. Unfortunately, the ideology responsible for the death of over 100 million people in the twentieth century is once again spreading throughout the West.

We continue to live in the shadow of Karl Marx.

A recent paper in the Journal of Consumer Psychology (JCP) has started a debate on the accuracy of “loss aversion,” the idea that people are driven by fear of losses more than they are by the potential for gain.

Americans have witnessed people picketing in support of a $15 minimum wage. It’s called “The Fight for $15.” Florida citizens will even vote on embedding a $15 minimum wage in their state constitution in the November 2020 election. A minimum wage plebiscite is pending in Idaho in 2020. If the past is any indication, the prospects for the Florida Idaho initiatives are good. Of the 27 state minimum wage votes since 1988, 25 passed. The two that were rejected, Missouri and Montana, were in 1996. For the 25 that have passed, electoral margins have almost always substantial.

Though widely dispensed with in the field of economics, the notion of “wage slavery” is still common among progressives and socialists of many stripes.

It is not uncommon, especially on social media, to run into people insisting that employers are “stealing” part of their labor because the wage they receive from is less than the contribution of their labor to the final value (i.e., selling price) of the finished good.

Below is one example that exemplifies the argument.

When I was asked to write an article about the impact of negative interest rates and negative yielding bonds, I thought it was a chance to look at the topic from a broader perspective. There have been lots of articles speculating about the possible implications and focusing on their impact in the short run, but it’s not very often that an analysis looks a bit further into the future, trying to connect money and its effect on society itself. 

Economists, conservative investors, and market observers have been issuing stern warnings for years regarding the severe impact of the current monetary policy direction.

Last month, Fox Searchlight Productions released Terrence Malick’s new film A Hidden Life, about Austrian conscientious objector Franz Jägerstätter. Jägerstätter was executed in 1943 for refusing to fight for the German state. Malick’s film portrays the effects of this act of resistance, especially the devastating effects on Jägerstätter’s wife and his children. It is an important film which shows the real-life implications of resisting the state in a totalitarian world.