Praxeology and Animals

Many academic fields are devoted to reconstructing reality, to make reality fit their socialist ideals better. Those who wish to reconstruct reality argue, for example, that there is no reason why some animals should be regarded as “wild.” They argue that we should seek “new ways to think and act in a world dominated everywhere by human power and activity” and that there is no reason to exclude the animal world from that enterprise.

Public Goods, Government Transfers, and Lawsuits for Clean Air and Climate Mitigation

Since the 1930s New Deal and the 1960s Great Society, the US federal budget has shifted from providing pubic goods to distributing transfers (in the form of both spending and lending) to favored groups, a continually metastasizing shift that has now created a federal budgetary and debt crisis. It has also allowed politicians to perfect the fine art of buying votes by awarding federal transfers to select voter groups as a means to winning elections.

War and Inflation

You can line up 100 professional war historians and political scientists to talk about the 20th century, and not one is likely to mention the role of the Fed in funding US militarism. And yet the story of central banking is one step removed from the story of atom bombs and death camps. It is the most important priority of the state to keep its money machine hidden behind a curtain. Anyone who dares pull the curtain back is accused of every manner of intellectual crime. We must end the conspiracy of silence on this issue.

Milei Snubs the Spanish Political Establishment

Argentinian president Javier Milei recently snubbed the Spanish political class by visiting Spain and refusing to meet with any government officials, attending a rally of the opposition party Vox, and insinuating that the socialist Spanish president’s wife—currently at the heart of an anticorruption case—was corrupt. In retaliation, the Spanish president recalled his country’s ambassador from Buenos Aires.

Argument by Fiat

The economist and social critic Glenn C. Loury has written a book sure to attract attention, but in what follows, I don’t propose to address what is likely to be the principal source of that attention. In Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative (W.W. Norton, 2024), Loury has offered an account of his life that reads like a romantic thriller. Readers in search of salacious gossip will find it in abundance.