When we think about terrorism we most often think about the horrors of a Manchester-like attack, where a radicalized suicide bomber went into a concert hall and killed dozens of innocent civilians. It was an inexcusable act of savagery and it certainly did terrorize the population.

What is less considered are attacks that leave far more civilians dead, happen nearly daily instead of rarely, and produce a constant feeling of terror and dread. These are the civilians on the receiving end of US and allied bombs in places like Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Somalia, and elsewhere.

According to the Nobel Laureate in Economics, Milton Friedman, the root of the business cycle is the fluctuations in the growth rate of money supply.

Friedman held that what is required for the elimination of these cycles is for central bank policy makers to aim at a fixed rate of growth of money supply:

The US bond market trades at a quite high valuation. For instance, the 10-year US Treasury bond presents a price earnings (PE) ratio of 43. In other words: It takes 43 years for the investor to recoup the bond’s purchase price through coupon payments; the bond market’s PE ratio even went up to 68 in June 2012 and July 2016, respectively.

As Congress debates the American Health Care Act, its members should remember the benefits in cost and quality generated by the free market. What Americans need is not another complicated insurance scheme, but a return to health care that patients pay for themselves.

Conservatives and progressives alike spent the 20th century arguing for universal political principles. But the world is not so malleable; even in a hyper-connected digital age elites struggle to maintain support for globalism against a tide of nationalist, populist, and breakaway movements. Libertarians should embrace this reality and reject universalism for the morally and tactically superior vision of radical self-determination.

Memorial Day provides the political class countless opportunities to ruin an otherwise thoroughly enjoyable holiday weekend.  Like clockwork, local congressmen, mayors, city council members, et al. materialize at parades, picnics, and churches to give speeches about “freedom.”

But what does freedom really mean?

States have always thrived on the fear of the taxpayers, and states have always justified their existence in part on the idea that without the state, we’d all be overrun by barbarians, or murdered by our neighbors. Charles Tilly, a historian of the state, frequently noted that the modern state as we know it, was born out of war, and was created to wage war. War and the state are inseparable. 

The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics
by John B. Judis
Columbia Global Reports, 2016

The Trump administration released its 2018 budget this week. Once again we saw the media try to play up decreases in proposed spending as a form of draconian cuts, ignoring the fact that Trump’s plan still reflects a significant increase in federal programs.