In a bold and transformative move, President Donald Trump announced his administration’s intention to downsize the federal government by offering compensation to federal workers who voluntarily resign. This policy aims to enhance the efficiency of the American economy by reducing bureaucratic inertia and reallocating human capital to more productive sectors. While the proposal has sparked controversy, it represents a crucial step towards fostering a dynamic and innovative economy.

The 1929 Stock Market Crash led to the largest economic recession in modern world history. Today’s octogenarian Americans knew of the vast devastation started by the stock market crash from first hand witnesses—their parents.

Last week, leaders of European governments got very upset with the new Trump administration. First, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said a return to pre-2014 Ukraine-Russia borders was an “unrealistic objective” in the coming peace negotiations and that European leaders shouldn’t assume American troops would be present on the continent forever.

“Workers across the country responded with anger and confusion,” the Associated Press reported last week, in response to the Trump administration’s layoffs of probationary workers.

Now that the US and Israeli military has bombed almost all of Gaza into a smoldering ruin and killed tens or hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, President Trump has proposed getting Jordan and Egypt to house the remaining Palestinians. He has threatened to withdraw US taxpayer “aid” to these countries if they do not accept his proposal. This is essentially a revival of Lincoln’s lifelong dream of deporting or “colonizing” all of the black people out of the United States.

The wailing sound you heard last Thursday was the chorus of the Beltway warmongers shrieking in despair at President Trump’s suggestion that there was no reason for the United States to be spending one trillion dollars on “defense.”

“…[O]ne of the first meetings I want to have is with President Xi of China and President Putin of Russia, and I want to say let’s cut our military budget in half. And we can do that, and I think we’ll be able to do that,” the President told reporters.

February 11 would have been the 96th birthday of Burt Blumert, one of my greatest friends and a great champion of Rothbardian libertarianism. (He actually died in 2009.) Some of my readers, especially the younger generation, might not recognize his name, because Burt was a quiet man who worked to do good behind the scenes. In this week’s column, I’m going to tell you about Burt—both what he did and what he was like as a person.

The 20th century was full of ideological movements. Were we to look at American-made political movements alone, we can see the Progressive Era, the New Deal, the several Civil Rights Movements coupled with 60s Radicalism, Reagan-era American Conservatism, and closing the century off with a weird mixture of Bush-Clinton-Bush-era Conservatism and Liberalism. One American-made political movement that is not talked about enough, however, is technocracy.

In his 1963 essay, “The Negro Revolution,” Murray Rothbard observes that by the 1930s and 1940s American intellectuals had embraced two principles:

(1) all races and ethnic groups are intellectually and morally equal or identical, and (2) that therefore no one should be allowed to treat anyone else as if they were not equal, i.e., that the State should be used to compel absolute equality of treatment among the races.