Ludwig von Mises maintains that there are two ways of looking at ethics: one is that ethics is about how each person can satisfy his personal preferences, and the other is that there is an objective law that dictates what people ought to do. Mises places almost all ethical systems except for utilitarianism, which he sometimes call eudaemonism, in the latter camp. These systems include natural law ethics, divine command ethics, and Kantian ethics. Natural law ethics says that human beings have a certain nature or essence that dictates what they ought to do.

Economist Brad Delong believes that the US economy is in the midst of a soft landing, and that the Federal Reserve should have started cutting interest rates in January. Delong fears that the Federal Reserve “might upend America’s soft economic landing” if it doesn’t begin cutting interest rates soon.

In the currency playground, the United States is the world’s biggest bully. With the world’s reserve currency Uncle Sam doesn’t use the dollar for diplomacy but for destruction. Responding to Russia’s attack on Ukraine in 2022, the U.S. “responded with an extraordinary amount of sanctions and cutting off Russia from the dollar-based system in almost every way imaginable,” Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal said on the Odd Lots podcast.

Some of us may remember the Helen Lovejoy character in The Simpsons, who would appear any time some catastrophe befell the town and plaintively wail, “Won’t someone please think of the children?!” The joke here, of course, is that as long as you do something in the name of helping children, it must be right, and you must be virtuous.

The Secretary of the Treasury and the Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers are the two principal economic advisors for any president. President Biden chose Janet Yellen as Secretary of the Treasury and Jared Bernstein as the Chair of his Council of Economic Advisers.

Stephanie Kelton asked Bernstein a basic question about Biden’s monetary and fiscal policies. Bernstein responded with a shocking statement.

“The US government can’t go bankrupt because we can print our own money”

April 30 was the anniversary date when North Vietnamese forces forced U.S. officials to exit Vietnam, much to their chagrin. That was after some 58,000 American men had died for nothing, not to mention the tens of thousands of injured American soldiers and the millions of Vietnamese who were killed or injured as a result of U.S. intervention in Vietnam’s civil war.

If you’re wondering why you should buy gold or worry about a financial meltdown I have two words for you: Jared Bernstein. He is the Chief Economist for Joe Biden. In a clip from an upcoming documentary “Finding the Money” Bernstein is asked about the federal government’s borrowing process and he stumbles and bumbles, saying “The US government can’t go bankrupt because we can print our own money.” It gets worse from there.

[Dangerous Ground: Squatters, Statesmen, and the Antebellum Rupture of American Democracy by John Suval, Oxford, 2022, 281 pp. ]