The California Bullet Train has become the Eternal Project That Won‘t Go Away no matter how big a failure it has become. Political inertia is a powerful force and California politicians have used it to deceive voters and taxpayers, who will face a reckoning.
South Vietnam ceased to exist as a separate country 50 years ago. What followed was an object lesson on the failures of socialism, as Marxist ideology turned Vietnam into one of the world's poorest countries. Vietnam‘s “second revolution” was successfully embracing a market economy.
When modern progressives claim to support equity, what they really mean is the confiscation of wealth and transferal of private property to politically-favored groups. These policies have a sorry history from Reconstruction and continued through the 20th century communist regimes.
The welfare state is supposed to signal the existence of the “compassionate” society that provides care for all. However, this “compassion” has resulted in the proliferation of social pathologies that undermine civilization itself.
People claim to support “equal opportunity” over the idea of equal outcomes, but when one examines both concepts, it becomes obvious that neither is possible or even desirable. Murray Rothbard understood more than most that equality of opportunity is a chimera.
While focusing on the Holocaust, people often forget the economic fallacies of the Third Reich. Hitler‘s policies were based upon socialism and state control, and no regime can prosper under those conditions.
Excerpts from the 2025 Memorial Lectures presented at the Austrian Economics Research Conference in Auburn, Alabama.
The covid-19 pandemic gave rise to widespread lockdowns and some of the greatest peacetime infringements on personal liberties in history.
The Green New Deal was proposed in 2019 and became the legislative centerpiece of the Biden administration. Like the first New Deal, it has garnered favorable media coverage, legislative hype, unkept promises, and a dismal track record.
“It is ideas that group men into fighting factions, that press the weapons into their hands, and that determine against whom and for whom the weapons shall be used.”
