In recent months, Americans were treated to a particularly cheap political spectacle: negotiations over the debt ceiling.

“Extreme right-wing Republicans have hijacked the debt ceiling process,” said Vermont senator Bernie Sanders.

On June 20, the Pennsylvania House of Representatives passed a bill to raise the commonwealth’s minimum wage to $15 per hour by 2026. Although the bill is unlikely to pass the state senate, it seems only a matter of time before the minimum wage is raised from its current $7.25 per hour, where it has been since 2006.

The Democratic Socialists of America promotes a supposedly pro-Indigenous people platform. They stress that they do not want to further the “dispossession and exploitation of Indigenous people” while also recognizing the sovereignty of Native Americans. The Communist Party USA’s political program also stresses the inclusion of Indigenous people in the working-class movement.

During the three years after World War II, Germans—facing a ruined economy and wildly depreciating currency—turned to cigarettes as a medium of exchange on a massive scale. Allied occupation authorities strictly forbade this black-market currency exchange, but it literally saved the lives of many German civilians—and inadvertently made many American GIs rich.

Murray Rothbard once proposed:

Quick: Which is America’s Most Persecuted Minority? No, you’re wrong. . . .

Why do individuals pay higher prices for some goods than others? The common reply references laws of supply and demand, but what are these laws? The answer is found in the law of diminishing marginal utility.

Daniel Ellsberg died on June 16, and he remains one of the nation’s most prominent whistleblowers who leaked secret government information to the public. Upon his death the general consensus among the writers of memorials for Ellsberg was that he was right to leak government secrets. As the editorial board at The Orange County Register recently put it, he was “a true American hero.”