It was a laughable moment when President Joe Biden said at a press conference during his visit to Hanoi that the United States wasn’t seeking to contain China. Despite efforts by the Biden administration to send its top officials to quell any suspicion that Washington, DC, was trying to contain China, Beijing has realized that the efforts were merely a cover-up.

Snow White (2024) is a terrible movie. Granted, I don’t have any particular insights into the film, but economics teaches me that everyone involved in that movie believes it’s a terrible movie, and I’m willing to bet that they’d know. So, unless this movie surprises absolutely everyone involved in making it, it’s a terrible movie.

“So what?” you might ask. But this example reminds us that the Fed’s inflationary money policies destroy all values, including artistic values. Let me explain.

The New York Federal Reserve said on Tuesday, September 5, 2023, that the estimate for the neutral rate for Q2 has eased to 0.57 percent from 0.68 percent in Q1. Analysts typically translate that rate into a real-world setting by adding the neutral rate to the Fed’s 2 percent inflation target. The current reading suggests that a federal funds rate of around 2.5 percent would represent a neutral setting. Given that the Fed’s current target rate range is between 5.25 and 5.5 percent, this suggests that the interest rate policy remains very restrictive.

The movement for effective altruism (EA) has grown in popularity since the late 2000s, largely due to the work of academic philosophers Peter Singer and William MacAskill, who also defined many of its core ideas.

Practically all schools of contemporary economic thought recognize that value is subjective. Although mainstream economists merely pay lip service to value subjectivity—and, in practice, treat value as objective so that they can analyze so-called utility functions—it is still a core assumption in modern economic thought.

The middle, compromising stance of those called “centrists” or “moderates” is very often mistaken for a balanced and reasonable position. Little else is worse than an entire world tricked into what rationally amounts to crime, thinking it is balanced, realistic, and optimal. The centrist has become convinced that their middle position is the only fair and just stance, and that anything else is imbalanced extremism. The opportunity to rationally examine these assertions has never been as important as it is now.