The Federal Reserve’s Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) on Wednesday raised the target policy interest rate (the federal funds rate) to 5.25 percent, an increase of 25 basis points. With this latest increase, the target has increased 5 percent since February 2022. This is the highest rate reached since August 2007, shortly before a recession began in December of that year. 

In the book Green Tyranny—a fantastic history of the environmental alarmism movement—author Rupert Darwall lays responsibility for the beginning of this movement at the feet of the Germans and the Swedes.

This spring marks the twentieth anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. After an initial frenzy of war fever in the early years of the war, support for the war has since largely evaporated. Nearly two thirds of veterans now say the war was “not worth fighting.” Two thirds of American adults say the same thing. Even among Republican veterans, only a minority say the war was worth it. 

Fed officials are meeting today to discuss the central bank’s next course of action amidst bank failures and persistent inflation.

Is Social Justice Just?
Edited by Robert M. Whaples, Michael C. Munger, and Christopher J. Coyne
Independent Institute, 2023; xxiii + 348 pp.

Before one can answer the question posed by this excellent book’s title, one needs to ask what social justice is, and answering this proves to be no easy task. As Robert Whaples says, “For many, the term social justice is baffling and useless, with no real meaning. Most who use it argue that social justice is the moral fairness of the system of rules and norms that govern society.”