[Marcuse by Jacob McNulty, Routledge, 2025; 262 pp.]

Once again, we have efforts to release Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from the conservatorship of the Federal Housing Finance Agency in which they have been confined for nearly 17 years—ever since the US Treasury did a 100 percent bailout of their creditors in 2008. Pros and cons are hotly debated relative to the proposed release of the twins that continue to rank among the largest systemically important financial institutions in the world.

Milton Friedman, who achieved most of his fame in the 1980s with the television series Free to Choose, first proposed vouchers for education in the 1950s. Fundamentally, the idea was for the government to give parents a voucher equal to the amount the government spends per child in government schools, in order to pay for their children’s tuition in private schools. Therefore, vouchers are as much tax-funded as education provided by the government, but Friedman believed that they would expand freedom of choice and improve schools and educational outcomes.

Liberation Day morphed into an Obliteration Day of everyone’s retirement account in a matter of minutes as Trump’s tariffs were announced to a crowd of hard hats and soft heads in the Rose Garden April 2. Donald Trump has the dream of Americans working on assembly lines and operating sewing machines. Any country selling more goods to the US than buying from the US is screwing the US, according to Trump’s reasoning. And, America has been taken advantage of for decades, according to the President.

As markets plummeted, the tin-eared president posted on Truth Social,

President Trump issued separate presidential proclamations to increase tariffs to 25 percent on all US steel imports and raise tariffs from 10 to 25 percent on all aluminum imports effective February 11, 2025.

Historical myths and economic fallacies are stubborn. They are also easily repeated. Perhaps one of the most stubborn myths—and other myths related to it—is that Roosevelt’s New Deal policies brought about economic recovery from the Great Depression.