Why are we fighting over confederate monuments?

Because people feel strongly about this issue? Because they are being removed? Because some groups are trying to exploit the situation to get attention?

Or is there another reason?

While we are fighting over Confederate monuments relating to events almost two centuries ago, we are not focusing on:

The Senate Intelligence Committee recently passed its Intelligence Authorization Act for 2018 that contains a chilling attack on the First Amendment. Section 623 of the act expresses the “sense of Congress” that WikiLeaks resembles a “non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors and should be treated as such.” This language is designed to delegitimize WikiLeaks, encourage the federal government to spy on individuals working with WikiLeaks, and block access to WikiLeaks’ website.

Very often bad and failed ideas do not die, they simply reappear during periods of supposed social and political crisis in slightly different intellectual garb, and offer “solutions” that would merely help to bring about some of the very types of crises for which they once again claim to have the answers. Socialism in its various “progressive” mutations represents one of the leading ones in our time.

The movement to legalize marijuana at the state level is often described as “nullification.” Strictly speaking, however, this is not nullification.

The German election is a month away and with that also comes a real rarity: a party getting into parliament which is on the “right” of Angela Merkel’s CDU and its Bavarian partner, the CSU. Over the last decades, this has been a no-go zone in German politics, too severe were the memories of the Nazi era.

On 23 August 2017, the president of the European Central Bank (ECB) gave a speech titled “Connecting research and policy making” at the annual assembly of the winners of the Nobel Price for Economics in Lindau, Germany.1  What Mr Draghi talked about on this occasion — and especially what he didn’t talk about — was quite revealing.

The Federal Reserve tries and tries and just can’t muster up some price-tag ripping price inflation. Blowing up its balance sheet from $900 billion to $4.5 trillion would have seemed to send us to Zimbabwe, but no, prices just won’t cooperate with the monetary masterminds toiling away in the Eccles Building.

Like his godfather — the legendary provost of Trinity College, John Pentland Mahaffy — Walter Starkie (1894–1976) was one of the great Irish conversationalists. When I met him in 1969, he bowled me over. I was then a senior at UCLA, writing a paper on British foreign policy in the Spanish Civil War. I interviewed Starkie, then in his early seventies and teaching in six different departments. He had been head of the British Council in Spain during World War II and was intimately familiar with all the major Spanish and British political figures of the 1930s and ’40s.

Leftwing Vox.com recently published a welcome and thoughtful piece on the virtues of devolving political and legal power away from the federal government toward states and localities. This is exactly the kind of conversation honest Americans need to have if we are serious about preventing the kind of political violence witnessed recently in Charlottesville and Berkeley.

America has two democracies, one political and the other free market. The concept of a political democracy dates back to Plato and his “Republic.”

Ludwig von Mises and my mentor Dr. Bill Peterson (a student and colleague of Mises) wrote extensively about our market democracy. Both of these great men are now just a memory but their legacy defines America. The political class dominates the news, while the market provides the solutions chosen by our citizens.