While geopolitical commentators are fixated on Russia’s border with Ukraine, a more interesting development is slowly boiling underneath the surface of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict that could potentially reorder international relations—namely, the death of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
It has become something of a habit in both the American and Canadian media to insist that the Canadian trucker protest against vaccine mandates is an “illegal protest.” They are “illegal border protests,” one American news affiliate proclaims. Canada’s National Post dutifully refers to the protests in its headlines as illegal acts.
On February 14, Justin Trudeau invoked emergency powers to crack down on the peaceful truckers’ protest in Ottawa. The Emergencies Act became law in 1988, and it has never been used until now. The act contains
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
By David Graeber and David Wengrow
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021
Xii + 692 pages
Saifedean Ammous hosts the podcast The Bitcoin Standard where he discusses bitcoin and economics from the Austrian school perspective. He is the author of several books, including The Bitcoin Standard, The Age of Cryptocurrency, and The Fiat Standard.
Lord Acton was one of the greatest classical liberal historians of the nineteenth century, but his view of the War between the States has in some circles occasioned dismay. Acton, in a letter of 1866 to Robert E. Lee, said, “I deemed that you were fighting the battles of our liberty, our progress, and our civilization; and I mourn for the stake which was lost at Richmond more deeply than I rejoice over that which was saved at Waterloo.”
Economics is about human action and choice within the context of scarcity. The problem facing economists is how to understand and explain human betterment, which is another way of saying production. The critical question, posed correctly by economist Per Bylund, starts with scarcity as the default point for understanding purposive human behavior.
