Preserving culture is so crucial to a group’s identity that it has become sacred. For many the contents of culture don’t matter as long as they are preserved. But such a nihilistic approach to culture has led to failure and will continue to do so. Culture is a social technology that allows societies to function within a specific institutional setting. So, a constellation of traits could be useful for people living in a premodern setting but maladaptive in a postindustrial context.

The carbon capture pipeline is the result of the latest gift to rent-seeking “titans of industry” and interestingly, may be used on some existing projects that came to be, years ago, due to rent seeking. More on this below.

Just over a week ago, America’s national debt surpassed $32 trillion. As of Friday this week, it climbed to $32.1 trillion, and the prospects for reducing the debt appear to be nonexistent. This is primarily due to the continuous raising of the debt ceiling and the role played by the Federal Reserve in the money creation process.

According to Fox Business, the bill passed last week:

Not many are aware that one of the greatest works against the encroachment of the state originates from a German thinker. As early as the late eighteenth century, Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) raised the question of the general limits of state activity. Humboldt wrote his Ideas for an Attempt to Determine the Limits of the Effectiveness of the State in 1792.

President Joe Biden’s Federal Trade Commission (FTC) appointees have an affinity for returning to an earlier era’s antitrust enforcement, sometimes summarized as a “big is bad” or “neo-Brandeisian” approach. The most famous (or notorious) current example is the FTC’s opposition to the proposed merger between Microsoft and Activision.