In July 2023, the Federal Reserve Bank (FRB) announced FedNow as their foray into the US dollar central bank digital currency (CBDC) payment service. The service is offered to insure immediate CBDC payments are made to a registered individual and/or business buying and selling products and/or services. The FRB offers CBDC as a quick payment convenience to Americans when many see it as a subtle expansion of FRB monetary management power and control.

Donald Trump’s victory in last week’s election reinforced the impression that he and his followers have “taken over” the Republican party. The campaign saw Republicans like Liz and Dick Cheney switch sides and back the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris. Now—after Trump won a second term—the right is locked in an impassioned struggle to pressure the president-elect to appoint some Republicans to important executive roles and to freeze others out of the administration entirely.

Like many of you, I was happy that Donald Trump won the election. Kamala Harris is a committed Marxist, supporter of baby killing, and passionate advocate of the woke ideology. In foreign policy, she would have been guided by the neocons who control brain dead “President” Joe Biden.

But we shouldn’t be complacent. Trump is far from ideal, and we need to do all we can to work against the policies he favors that are inimical to a free society. Beyond that, we need to work for a fully libertarian society, as advocated by Murray Rothbard and Ron Paul.

Two days after Donald Trump became the first American since Grover Cleveland to win nonconsecutive presidential elections, the Federal Reserve announced a quarter percent cut in interest rates. Following this announcement, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell held a press conference where he said that he would not comply with any presidential request that he step down before his term ends in May of 2026.

Europe was slowly, painfully recovering from WWII. Liberalism—which had seemingly won the day against fascism in the West—was seeking to revitalize itself. It had tried before the war—through the Walter Lippmann colloquium—to moderate itself back into relevance. Many of the figures from the colloquium were intent to try again, with lessons learned from the war. One attendee—Ludwig von Mises—had no intentions of moderating, and was even more convinced that such a road led to destruction.

The first Trump term was notable for countless terrible appointments Trump made. This was true in terms of both politics and policy. On the political end, Trump appointed people who routinely sought to undermine him politically. Many of Trump’s own appointees would go on to campaign against Trump in 2020 and 2024. Trump’s more clueless followers assured us that this was all, somehow, 4-D chess. Of course, it wasn’t. The 4-D chess trope has always been, as the kids say, “copium.” 

Just ignore the economists, says a recent article in The Atlantic. Well, what about listening to economists concerning the devastating effects of price controls? If we ignore economists, then it would be easy to ignore market interventionists’ uncontrollable and intoxicating need to impose price floors and ceilings in marketplaces and the effects of these controls on society at large.

The images coming out of Latin America are hard to ignore. Tens of thousands of gang members in Bukele’s El Salvador lined up, shoulder-to-shoulder, waiting to be placed in prison, their rights suspended as a result of a crackdown on gang activity. Hundreds of government workers for AFIP—Argentina’s version of the IRS—standing in a multi-level gallery, papers drifting down to the bottom floor as they learn the agency has been shuttered.