Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes
In the 1990s and for years into our century, it was common to ridicule the government for being technologically backwards. We were all gaining access to fabulous things, including webs, apps, search tools, and social media. But governments at all levels were stuck in the past using IBM mainframes and large floppy disks. We had […]
Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes
In a lifetime of observing policy controversies and court cases, we’ve never witnessed anything as crucial to the future of the idea of freedom itself compared with what will transpire on March 18, 2024. On that day, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in Murthy v. Missouri concerning whether the government can force or nudge […]
Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes
Editors’ Note: We agree that it certainly looks like Mr. Trump will be the Republican nominee. It would be very helpful to avoid similar abuse again (likely coming from another pandemic or for reasons of environmental extremism). Mr. Trump publicly should say he was wrong, and today sorry, for the COVID-19 abuse that began under […]
Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes
Francis Collins was head of the National Institutes of Health – Anthony Fauci’s parent bureaucracy – during the wreckage caused by the Covid response. Ultimately, Dr. Collins bears a huge measure of the responsibility for the disaster, even if he played the role of the stooge. It was he who wrote Fauci with the demand […]
Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes
Elon Musk is the world’s richest man but also the number one target of the world’s richest governments and their associated industrialists. The reason traces entirely to his independence of mind and the actions that follow from that. In times of censorship, he bought and now protects a free-speech platform, the only one remaining with […]
Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes
National Public Radio was in a frenzy this morning but it felt like the movie Groundhog Day: they were spreading tremendous alarm about the rise of Covid cases. We have to stop the spread, the announcer said, and that’s why masks are coming back to classrooms. However, they added, relief is on the way in […]
Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes
It’s not capitalism. It’s not socialism. The new word we are hearing these days is the right word: corporatism. It refers to the merger of industry and state into a unit with the purpose of achieving some grand visionary end, the liberty of individuals be damned. The word itself predates its successor, which is fascism. […]
Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes
In the old Soviet Union, citizens were not required to be a member of the Communist Party. But if you were not, you could never expect to rise far professionally or socially. You would never be the head of a department in the university, a factory manager, much less the General Secretary. They were always […]
Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes
Americans woke up on Good Friday 2023 – the first Easter weekend in three years that held out the possibility that it would be somewhat normal – to a grim reality on Twitter. It was consistently blocking all engagement from any post with a link to Substack. I first saw the rumor and then tested […]
Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes
Jordan Peterson’s interview with Jay Bhattacharya is one of the more insightful conversations to come out of the post-pandemic period. It’s fascinating to see Peterson coming to terms with the sheer scale of the lockdown during which time he was rather sick. We could have used his voice then and I have no doubt that […]
Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes
The latest of the Twitter Files is reported by Alex Berenson, who was granted access to messaging systems from the times before Elon Musk took over. His first round of reporting concerns the role of Scott Gottlieb, who is a perfect example of an influencer who is technically outside of government but might as well […]
Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes
Anthony Fauci is finally gone from his government perch. Let us recall that it was he who set this calamity in motion, squandering his credibility, while taking down public health and much else with it. More than anyone, he bears responsibility, even if he was acting on others’ behalf. That is especially true if he […]
Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes
From the beginning of the Covid panic, it felt that something was very wrong. Never had a pandemic, much less a seasonal pathogenic wave, been treated as a quasi-military emergency requiring the upending of all freedoms and rights. What made it more bizarre was how alone those of us who objected felt until very recently […]
Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes
A series of revealing texts and tweets by Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced CEO of FTX, the once high-flying but now belly-up crypto exchange, had the following to say about his image as a do-gooder: it is a “dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us.” Very interesting. […]
Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes
It looks as if we can add another line to the long list of lockdown harms. Sloth. This explains so much actually. For months, we’ve been watching working/population ratios and labor participation rates and have been stunned by how they both continue to plummet. We search for explanations. Early retirement. Women driven out due to […]
Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes
The FBI has raided Donald Trump’s home in Florida and opened a private safe, hanging around for hours looking for classified material that might be there. They were likely looking for items that Trump believed he had declassified – the president can do this with anything – but is still holding in his possession. Top […]
Estimated Reading Time: 15 minutes
The December 2020 resignation of Dr. Deborah Birx, White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator under Trump, revealed predictable hypocrisy. Like so many other government officials around the world, she was caught violating her own stay-at-home order. Therefore she finally left her post following nine months of causing unfathomable amounts of damage to life, liberty, property, and […]
Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes
We are now experiencing an economic crisis that could get worse. Financials are in bear markets. Inflation is roaring. The recession could soon become official. Many voters are looking to their elected representatives to address the problem. What follows are questions that I would like to pose to any and all candidates for office concerning […]
Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes
The jobs report this morning seemed like good news (3.6% unemployment) until you look at the details: “The U.S. labor force shrank by 363,000 people in April from a month earlier, the Labor Department said Friday. The labor force participation rate, or the share of American adults working or looking for a job, ticked down […]
Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes
When I was a kid — and the same with my parents when they were young — you could count on certain fundamentals in politics. The Chamber of Commerce represented business, and business generally favored free enterprise. Not always, but mostly. Small businesses could become big and big could become small, but they generally opposed […]
Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes
Feeling outgunned, outnumbered, overpowered, smothered, and censored? Many people who oppose Covid lockdowns and all their associated restrictions feel this way. It’s hard not to. You can hardly post on social media without triggering warnings, corrections, and sometimes outright blocks. Bans are part of the mix too, the complete deplatforming of people merely because they want their […]
Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes
It’s taken much longer than it should have but at last, it seems to be happening: the lockdown paradigm is collapsing. The signs are all around us. The one-time hero of the lockdown, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, has seen his support tank from 71% to 38%, along with ever more demands that he resign. Meanwhile, […]
Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes
Going to the grocery store in Massachusetts in 2020 guaranteed you would breathe heaps of sanitizer. A full-time employee scrubbed down shopping carts between customers. Conveyor belts at the checkout counter were blasted and wiped between every sale. Glass surfaces were sprayed as often as possible. The plastic keypads on credit machines were not only […]
Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes
I’m sitting at a bar in Texas, surrounded by maskless people, looking at folks on the streets walking around like life is normal, talking with nice and friendly faces, feeling like things in the world are more-or-less normal. Cases and deaths attributed to Covid are, like everywhere else, falling dramatically. If you pay attention only to the […]
Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes
All this talk of a $15 national minimum wage prompted me to revisit the standard textbook on economics of the US Progressive Era. Principles of Economics, by Frank W. Taussig (1917) is a pretty interesting book overall and it does hold up in general as an elucidation of then-existing knowledge and pedagogy. There is one section, however, where […]
Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes
When lockdowns first happened, my initial thought was geeky, and only later did I begin to realize the implications for human rights and liberties. My thought was: this is going to be devastating for future capital investment. The basis of my fear was the knowledge that in almost all poor countries, property rights are insecure, […]
Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes
Every political ideology has three elements: a vision of hell with an enemy that needs to be crushed, a vision of a more perfect world, and a plan for transitioning from one to the other. The means of transition usually involve the takeover and deployment of society’s most powerful tool: the state. For this reason, […]
Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes
Shell-shocked is a good way to describe the mood in the U.S. for a good part of the Spring of 2020. Most of us never thought it could happen here. I certainly did not, even though I’ve been writing about pandemic lockdown plans for 15 years. I knew the plans were on the shelf, which […]