Most people have a negative view of business monopolies. Whether for allegedly exploiting workers, causing inefficiency, or crowding out potential challengers, most government-granted monopolies undoubtedly hurt entrepreneurs and customers.

This basic distrust of monopolization disappears as soon as one enters the floors of the United States Senate or Congress. Government-forced monopolization arises in virtually every industry, but nowhere is it as costly as in healthcare.

The unipolar dominance of the American Empire has allowed it to command an outsized share of the world’s resources in exchange for green pieces of paper. That dominance, and the dollar’s hegemony, nears its end.

Federal deficits continue to spiral upward, but deficits aren’t just a function of federal spending. Deficits aren’t necessary if tax revenues increase to match spending. But that’s certainly not where we find ourselves in 2023. Rather, federal spending is rising even as federal revenues have fallen, year over year, for ten of the last twelve months. Moreover, on a quarterly basis, federal receipts have been falling—quarter-to-quarter—since the third quarter of 2022.

In 1994, Murray Rothbard released what was, in my opinion, one of his best articles of all time: Tobacco Smokers: America’s Most Persecuted Minority. A serious read of it shows that his concern is not just regarding the loss of tobacco smoking – for that matter, he was not even a smoker - but rather a rise of left wing neo-puritanism.

In my experience of public policy discussions, one of the most frequent weasel words used as an intended trump (not Trump) card has been “fair.”

Like another commonly played political trump card, “need,” fairness does not have a clear meaning. That provides a great deal of wiggle room for equivocation, almost always used to justify forcing some Americans to pay for what someone else wants.