It is an article of faith among conservatives that government programs are wasteful expenditures. This is the standard line of the Wall Street Journal editorial pages and the Republican Party. Going further, Charles Murray’s book Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980, argued that expanding welfare programs during the 1970s increased poverty in the United States […]

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The recent collapse of Silicon Valley Bank demonstrated in clear terms that financial reality is a shared hallucination. And financial reality, a useful social construct, goes a long way to shaping our physical reality. For the businesses threatened by a potential meltdown of the bank, a cashflow freeze meant the difference between real people getting […]

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Majority members on the House Oversight Committee are about to attempt another effort to cast the FBI as an evil force in our body politic. In a six-hour hearing in February, they hoped to link the FBI to a conspiracy involving both Twitter and then-presidential candidate Biden. The majority claimed, without evidence, that these alleged […]

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Lawyers often warn younger associates never to ask questions of a witness on cross-examination unless they know what the answer will be. The House Oversight Committee recently demonstrated a related point best described through an analogy: if you want to establish that the moon is made of green cheese, don’t subpoena astronomers to testify at […]

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Many of us are familiar with the phenomenon of “dorm room philosophy” and its derivative field, “dorm room economics.” Often, it is rooted in the clunky prose of Ayn Rand and the simple, common-sense decrees of Austrian economics, along with the limited life experience common to all young people — particularly young men. Rand’s “objectivism” […]

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