Europe is today in the midst of a debate on the future of the European Union. It is not the first one: back before the Maastricht Treaty was passed in 1992, political leaders were discussing as well about where the EU, or as it was called back then, the European Community, was heading. Should it go the way of the “ever closer union,” or revert back to the fundamental principles? There was a split going through Europe on questions like this.

Somehow, an all-star Hollywood cast created The Company Men (2010) and it got past the usual censors. The movie is an effective rebuttal to Arthur Miller’s 1949 Death of a Salesman. The recently-laid-off characters spend the movie living their lives after rounds of layoffs. In doing so, they effectively act out a debate between a proponent of communism — Karl Marx, and a proponent of the free market — Carl Menger.

Earlier this week Aaron Ross Sorkin wrote an interesting article at the New York Times where he draws the connection between many of the political trends in this country—Trump and attacks on trade, rise of democratic socialist politicians, and the rise of general skepticism of the “expert class”—to the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.

We are constantly bombarded with bad news. There are disasters, dangers, challenges, and woes. On the political scene, we find perpetual discord peppered with lurid denunciations and shrill condemnations. Media reports are alternately dismaying, disappointing, distressing, disgusting, or depressing. But despair not, friends: All is not lost!

Here let me serve you a heaping helping of good news: The world is more prosperous and more peaceful than it has ever been before.

The Federal Reserve’s changing of the guard — the end of Janet Yellen’s tenure and the beginning of the Jerome Powell era — has me remembering what it was like to grow up in the former Soviet Union.

If you follow financial news related to Fed policy, you would have noticed a recent push for the use of “a new monetary tool,” called countercyclical capital buffers. Some prominent Fed officials and Fed watchers — the monetary version of all the king’s horses and all the king’s men — have decided the time is now to start raising such requirements, notwithstanding resistance to their implementation.

Financial media-administered history lessons — whether by commentaries or interviews — on the Great Crash that occurred 10 years ago are frightening. The would-be history teachers are in total denial (or ignorance) of the key fact that 2008 was a monetary-made disaster. This climate of denial continues to foster ever greater danger in the future not to mention a heavy cumulative burden in the decade since — as measured by prosperity lost.

With Hurricane Florence making landfall in the Eastern United States, the usual reports of the “evils” of the private sector price gouging the poor, desperate people in the disaster zone tend to crop up. The economic arguments as to why this claimed problem really isn’t a problem have been covered extensively.