I’ve had some recent correspondence from a friend in Georgia (the former Soviet Republic, not the home of the Bulldogs) who had some interesting observations on how Russians have reacted to the war and how it has affected Georgia.
It’s no secret that interest rates rose sharply in 2022. After sitting on its hands for more than a year, President Biden’s inflation forced the Federal Reserve into action. Its response was to hike interest rates; now, its interest rate hikes are biting into the economy.
Walter E. Williams titled one of his books, More Liberty Means Less Government. Less government means less government intervention, less government extraction, less government spending, and less government employment. More liberty means less government.
A recent social media post by former U.S. President Donald Trump called for the termination of the U.S. Constitution, or parts thereof, giving new meaning to cancel culture. The post brought to mind a passage from Cato’s Letters.
A common literary storytelling device uses an off-page (or off-screen) character to drive a story’s plot and character arc. Readers usually never see these characters. They typically appear as ghosts, in dreams, or as memories. While they don’t always interact directly with the characters, their presence is known and influences decisions.
New Twitter boss Elon Musk is exposing how the federal government outsourced censorship duties to social media platforms. Musk’s Tweet of “my pronouns are/Prosecute Fauci” drew more than one million “likes,” and the billionaire and his followers have a case.
The recent decision by the Federal Reserve to approve a half-point interest rate hike is an anticlimactic development. The increase matched predictions, but it does little to address the real issue at hand: inflation is not going down by any meaningful degree for the average American.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has taken at least 18 trips on private jets, funded by taxpayers, including a trip to Montreal, Canada, to receive an award. Politicians and bureaucrats indulge in this kind of waste all the time. Still, with Secretary Buttigieg, a former candidate for president, it merits a closer look.
2022 is almost over, which makes it an excellent time to take stock of the nation’s fiscal situation. In its 2022 fiscal year, the U.S. government:
The boundaries between physical and digital spheres are collapsing. The digital sharing of personal information is now embedded into the economic and relational activities of daily life. Following the COVID pandemic, the popularity of work-from-home and other hybrid work relationships continued to erode traditional boundaries.
