[This article is chapter 5 of Breaking Away: The Case for Secession, Radical Decentralization, and Smaller Polities.

The Program for International Assessment (PSA) recently released its 2022 assessment of the math and reading skills of students from over 200 countries. This is the first assessment since 2018 and it provides more evidence that schoolchildren were damaged by the COVID hysteria. American students’ math scores were lower than 27 of the 38 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The other OECD countries do not have any reason to celebrate, as the average math scores of students in all OECD countries declined by 17 points.

In last week’s column, I warned that brain-dead Biden and his gang of neocon controllers want to use illegal immigrants to join the armed forces in order to suppress patriotic rebellion against their plans. If we want to know what suppression would be like, we have a good precedent. After the War Between the States, the Union’s “Reconstruction” tyrannized the South.

“Who controls the past now, controls the future. Who controls the present now, controls the past.”

That is from “Testify,” a song by newly minted rock ‘n’ roll Hall of Famers Rage against the Machine. I don’t know if Phillip W. Magness of the American Institute for Economic Research is fan enough to be familiar with that, but I bet he knows the original source: George Orwell’s 1984.

The Federal Reserve’s inflation of the money supply and interest rate manipulation distort capital markets through, among other things, the creation of asset bubbles. As the cost of borrowing decreases and cheap money floods an economy, speculation in capital markets increases, leading to prices unmoored from fundamentals.

Wonka (2023) is a prequel film to the beloved story Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl. Wonka tells the story of a young Willy Wonka, an up-and-coming chocolate salesman and magician, who challenges a chocolate cartel’s dominance.

I often think of the great Henry Hazlitt, a hero and supporter of the Mises Institute. He was a tireless voice of reason. He once said at a Mises birthday celebration, “We have a duty to speak even more clearly and courageously, to work hard, and to keep fighting this battle while the strength is still in us. Even those of us who have reached and passed our seventieth birthdays cannot afford to rest on our oars and spend the rest of our lives dozing in the Florida sun. The times call for courage. The times call for hard work.

The New Deal’s War on the Bill of Rights: The Untold Story of FDR’s Concentration Camps, Censorship, and Mass Surveillance
by David T. Beito
Independent Institute, 2023; x + 379 pp.