The soccer World Cup, the largest sporting event on the planet, will start on Sunday, November 20, in Qatar. The participants and the public at large face a dilemma. By enabling the success of the event, are they condoning human rights abuses and the absence of basic freedoms? Or are they doing just the opposite by bringing attention to those very issues with their participation and forcing the host country to give the people a taste of freedom for the duration of the tournament and a chance to engage in a frank discussion with the outside world? 

If you look up “capitalism fights racism” in Google, the top search results will show articles like: “Is Capitalism Racist,” “Capitalism without Racism: Science or Fantasy,” and, “The Rise of Capitalism and the Emergence of Racism.”

In August, the Tulsa police department held a press conference about how its new Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs), a controversial piece of surveillance technology, was the policing equivalent of “turning the lights on” for the first time. In Ontario, California, the city put out a press release about how its ALPRs were a “vital resource.” In Madison, South Dakota, local news covered how the city’s expenditure of $30,000 for ALPRs “paid off” twice in two days.

The Army wants to rename Fort Hood, Texas, after the late Gen. Richard Cavazos, who served in Korea and Vietnam. A better candidate could be the highest-ranking casualty of a deadly battle fought right on the base.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Clyde Wayne Crews measures and studies the impact of regulations issued by the U.S. federal government. Over the past year, Crews has had to become something of a detective because the numbers published in the Federal Register‘s online database weren’t adding up.

Today (November 9, 2022) is World Freedom Day, which began in 2001 to commemorate the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of communist rule in Central and Eastern Europe.

“Seniors are getting the biggest increase in their Social Security checks in 10 years through President Biden’s leadership,” a White House Twitter post recently proclaimed. CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale had a problem with it. The 8.7 percent increase, biggest since 1981, “is not because of any positive Biden leadership.” 

When a former Treasury Secretary looks at the U.S. government’s current fiscal policy, what do you suppose keeps them up at night?

Hundreds of millions of Americans suffer the effects of being forced to move the hands of their clocks back or forth by an hour every year. Daylight saving time ends in the wee hours of Sunday, November 6, except for the residents of Arizona, Hawaii, and the outlying U.S. territories, where people avoid the hassle by remaining on standard time year-round.

Jerome Powell and the Federal Reserve Bank are doing the right thing by pursuing a tighter monetary policy to fight inflation. They are just a year and a half too late doing it, which allowed inflation to get out of control.

As I’ve noted in many previous blog posts, including this one, the signs of impending inflation were clear long ago. Still, government officials and Fed members from President Biden to Jerome Powell claimed that inflation was transitory and would soon come back down. Move along: nothing to see here.

The events of the past year and a half present a good lesson in monetary politics. I don’t know whether or not that talk about transitory inflation was the sincere belief of those who publically made the claim, or if the assertion was politically motivated. But it seems that if “inflation is transitory” was Biden’s line, those at the Fed would have been creating some friction by disagreeing.