With the first pick in the 2021 NFL draft, the Jacksonville Jaguars selected Trevor Lawrence, a quarterback out of Clemson. Lawrence boasted a winning percentage of .944, completed 66.6 percent of his passes and accounted for 90 touchdowns with only 17 interceptions.

With the fifth pick in the 2021 NFL draft, the Cincinnati Bengals selected wide receiver Ja’Marr Chase out of Louisiana State. In 2019 Chase had 84 catches for 1,780 yards, and 20 touchdowns, and was a member of LSU’s national championship team. 

I am delighted to announce that The Essential James Buchanan, which I co-authored with Don Boudreaux, has been published by the Fraser Institute. The book can be purchased on Amazon Kindle for $.99 or downloaded at no charge from the Fraser Institute’s website, and will also be available soon in hardcover and paperback for those who like to hold real books.

George Orwell has a famous insight from his 1945 work Notes on Nationalism.

“One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.”

Most people run into this insight in a paraphrased form.

“There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.”

That’s not something Orwell said or wrote, but is often attributed to him because of the power of his insight.

Orwell’s insight comes to mind because of the Biden-Harris administration’s implicit adoption of what’s called Modern Monetary Theory, which holds that “deficits no longer matter”.

Smaller cities and bigger towns in the heart of America are seeing a considerable influx of new residents, and with this, we should soon expect to see a boost in their economies as well. But while there is enough data to support the notion that Americans in large cities like New York City and San Francisco are moving to smaller metros, legacy media is resisting it, choosing to, instead, deny that the government-led interventions prompted by covid-19 have hurt Americans enough to force them to flee. 

But despite their attempt to ignore the economic reality of a large portion of the urban population, the economic downturn brought by the lockdowns forced some people to rethink their living arrangements. 

The progressive U.S. Senator and presidential aspirant Robert (“Bobby”) Kennedy campaigned successfully during the 1960s on the strength of a line pinched from the playwright George Bernard Shaw (Back to Methuselah, 1921): “You see things; and you say ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say ‘Why not?’” These hypnotic words were uttered by the Serpent in the socialist playwright’s Garden of Eden.

Progressive politicians who seek to “perfect” individuals and societies by governing in this cavalier manner succumb to the fallacy of Shaw’s Serpent. The proof of fallacy is revealed in the thick history of failed utopian attempts to govern as if individuals and societies were as malleable in fact as they are in political theory. Such attempts have condemned hundreds of millions of ordinary individuals to lives of abject misery and desperation.

Do the U.S. national debt and the government’s budget deficits matter?

If you listen to the economists shaping the Biden administration’s policy agenda, they say they do not. Their basic argument is that with interest rates so low, the government can borrow as much as politicians want to spend. They think they never have to worry about paying the debt.

Political and social experiments come and go like the seasons. Grand ideas for perfecting humanity flare, run their course, and then pass away, leaving behind only their smiles, wreckage, unpaid bills, and national catharses. Glorious summers of impossible, something-for-nothing progressive promises are followed by discontented winters of squandered opportunities for restoring eternal, classical-liberal values. Radical social experiments, whose outcomes routinely fall short of their intentions, fail in part because of their dead weight, and partly because postmodernist individuals balk at the social coercion that gives progressivism its traction.

President Biden has pledged to reduce US greenhouse gas emissions by 50% by 2030, and to achieve net zero emissions no later than 2050. This is nothing more than political rhetoric: an aspiration, but not a climate policy. For those who support those announced goals, the president’s pledge, if it has any effect, will hinder actually accomplishing them.

With regard to climate policy, the main problem with President Biden’s declaration is that he has suggested no actual policies that he would promote to reach those goals. The announcement is designed to appeal to those who support reducing greenhouse gas emissions, thereby creating the illusion that he is doing something to further those goals rather than actually doing something. This should reduce any pressure from that group, making it less likely that he will actually implement policies to advance those goals.

The recent presidential elections in Peru have confirmed a pattern that has been in evidence for several election cycles. Peruvians have made it a habit of voting in the first round of the elections so as to place themselves, with regard to the second round, in impossible situations—i.e. having to pick between two unpalatable candidates.

In this case, the April 11th elections saw Pedro Castillo, the candidate of Peru Libre, a party that defines itself as Marxist-Leninist, has Venezuela as its model and some of whose members have been close to organizations that act as fronts for Shining Path, the terrorist organization, obtain the largest number of votes. The runner-up was Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of Alberto Fujimori, who governed dictatorially in the 1990s and has been imprisoned for human rights abuses and corruption. Keiko herself, who has led the party for years, faces charges of money laundering.

Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin has been convicted of murder and manslaughter in the death of George Floyd. Floyd, who died after Chauvin knelt on his neck for more than nine minutes, became a rallying point for protestors around the country. Floyd’s death sparked conversations about systemic racism in policing and in the country as a whole.

The conviction is being called historic. Although we can expect the outcome to be appealed, the fact that Chauvin was tried, much less convicted, is noteworthy.