According to Jordan Peterson, left-wing totalitarians are characterized by an ideology in which group identity is paramount. I will demonstrate that this is a misconception. Historically, socialists have fought against feudalism and capitalism in the name of emancipating the individual from any kind of group or class identity. The totalitarian tendencies of socialist thinking stem from its insistence on using the state as an instrument to destroy all group identities and bonds that (allegedly) hinder the individual from becoming truly free.

One of the key myths of the twentieth century is the benign role played by international, American-led institutions after the Second World War. American liberals/progressives, fresh from imposing the New Deal in the thirties and planning and directing a world war, turned their eyes to international affairs: the United States had a world historic mission of messianic proportions: lifting developing countries into modernity by remaking them (and all other countries, for that matter) in America’s own image.

Alex Pollock explains that something is wrong with the Fed, big time. And it really shows in 2022. Pollock writes::

The powerful and prestigious Federal Reserve is having a tough year in 2022 in at least three ways:

• It has failed with inflation forecasting and performance;
• It has giant mark-to-market losses in its own investments and looming operating losses;
• It is under political pressure to do things it should not be doing and that should not be done at all.

Forecasting Inflation

A famous aphorism says, “You cannot hit a target you cannot see,” which expresses a more general truth. We cannot hit what we cannot see, because seeing allows us to discern things of interest from everything else; it focuses on a signal, on a target, rather than the noise around it.

This is an actual news headline from the Associated Press, published over the weekend:

Fed tackles inflation with its most diverse leadership ever

People across the globe are demanding that governments repudiate the legacies of colonialism. Some think that true independence requires liberation from colonial institutions, while for many, preserving colonial laws is indicative of mental enslavement. Such arguments are emotionally appealing but intellectually unsound.

The recent hefty depreciation of the yen to a twenty-four-year low against the dollar has raised eyebrows due to the yen’s traditional safe haven role in times of turmoil, such as the war in Ukraine. The yen’s decline had already started when major central banks signaled a tightening of monetary policy to fight inflation while the Bank of Japan (BoJ) doubled down on its loose monetary policy and zero target for ten-year bond yields.