The United States is continuing its practice of insisting dominance in the Indian and Pacific oceans. Washington maintains a large military base on Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, and is now beginning to examine the Cocos Islands’ strategic value. American action increased significantly in the region after the British left Mauritius in 1968. At that point, the British decided to hang on to the Chagos Islands, incorporating them into the current British Indian Ocean Territory.

The First Amendment: Essays on the Imperative of Intellectual Freedom

by Tara Smith, Onkar Ghate, Gregory Salmieri, and Elan Journo

Ayn Rand Institute Press, 2024

418 pp.

What is the source of human rights? Are they derived from man’s nature, or are they simply privileges that the government grants to its citizens? Or is some intermediate view also an option? According to Murray Rothbard and Ayn Rand, the first of these positions is correct.

On November 30, 2022, ChatGPT was made available to the general public, and the world was forever changed. While many had prophesied about the potential impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for years, ChatGPT gave us the first glimpse into an AI-powered future. The novelty of OpenAI’s creation propelled interest in AI into the stratosphere, while at the same time reigniting concerns about the impact of AI on the economy.

A study from The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco claims that most of the price inflation that plagued the US economy over the past few years was due to global supply chain disruptions, due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Is this a valid study, or an attempt by the Fed to evade responsibility for our recent economic troubles?

The central problem with government economic policies is that many bad economic policies are politically advantageous. Hence, politicians enact policies that many of them know don’t work just to stay in power. Price controls are bad economic policy. Democrat Presidential candidate Kamala Harris wants to empower the Federal Trade Commission to stop “food price gouging” with what would amount to price ceilings.

The Penn Wharton Budget Model, a think tank headquartered at the University of Pennsylvania, recently released a study claiming former President Donald Trump’s economic plans would add about four trillion dollars to the national deficit over ten years while Vice President Kamala Harris’s economic plans would add about two trillion dollars.

Ludwig von Mises was a champion of an ideal of liberty in an age of central planning and socialism. In his book Liberalism, the state is “the social apparatus of compulsion and coercion that induces people to abide by the rules of life in society,” and the function that Mises assigns to the state in the liberal doctrine is the protection of property, liberty, and peace. Then there is the law, which consists of the rules according to which the state proceeds.

If one has the patience or the curiosity to go down certain conservative rabbit holes in social media, one will encounter a small corner of the movement in which one finds a latent or explicit desire to somehow rehabilitate Adolf Hitler and the National Socialists (i.e., the “Nazis.”)