On June 28th, 2015, Elon Musk’s SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched a Dragon resupply ship not into space, but rather into the Atlantic Ocean. It was a catastrophic failure that cost taxpayers $112 million. The payload that was meant to resupply the International Space Station (ISS) went up in a huge plume of smoke and flames. However, even though SpaceX did not complete their mission, they still received all but 20 percent of the full payment.

As Ron Paul once wrote, “politicians who compromise and seek bipartisanship are the most dangerous among the entire crew in Washington.” This week Trump began making his Clinton-esque pivot toward being such a president, making deals with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer on the debt ceiling and immigration.

In September 1949, Yale University Press published Ludwig von Mises’s economic treatise, Human Action. Later in 1949 another book appeared, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. 

Almost everyone has at least heard of Orwell and Nineteen Eighty-Four. The same is unfortunately not true of Mises and Human Action.

Most economists believe that a growing economy requires a growing money stock, on the grounds that growth gives rise to a greater demand for money, which must be accommodated. Failing to do so, it is maintained, will lead to a decline in the prices of goods and services, which in turn will destabilize the economy and lead to an economic recession or, even worse, depression.

Since growth in money supply is of such importance, it is not surprising that economists are continuously searching for the correct — or the optimum — growth rate of the money supply.

Leading Federal Reserve policymaker Stanley Fischer has hit out at plans to unwind banking regulation, calling it a “terrible mistake.”

President Donald Trump and republican politicians have advocated the repeal of Dodd Frank, a major piece of post-crisis legislation, and the loosening of some capital and liquidity requirements in a bid to ease banks’ ability to lend.

In the wake of hurricane Harvey, disaster experts were shocked by how few deaths resulted from the storm: ““It was astounding that we didn’t have a much larger loss of life,” said Phil Bedient, co-director of a Rice University effort to research severe storms and evacuations. 

In recent years, I’ve increasingly suspected that when it comes to foreign policy, the realists offer some of the most sane observations.