Category: Politics
Texas District Court Judge Who Ruled on Mifepristone was Handpicked by the Same Network that Brought the Lawsuit
by Anne Nelson | Apr 18, 2023 | Health, PoliticsOn April 7, U.S. district judge Matthew Kacsmaryk made headlines with an unprecedented ruling suspending the 2000 FDA approval of the abortion medication mifepristone. The ruling marked the first time a court has tried to invalidate the approval of a medication over the objection of the FDA. Within an hour of Kacsmaryk’s ruling, a legal […]
The New Populist Bogeyman: Central Bank Digital Currencies
by Dave Troy | Apr 11, 2023 | EconomyOnline propagandists and populist candidates have set their sights on a new enemy: Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). These currencies differ from private-sector cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin in that they are state-sanctioned and operated. Newly-expressed concerns over CBDCs augment long-running populist disdain for the Federal Reserve and other central banks. Opponents of CBDCs cite the potential […]
Money Matters, Especially When It Comes to Children
by Steven Pressman | Mar 28, 2023 | EconomyIt 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 […]
The Wide Angle: Financial Unreality and The Cult of Pinochet
by Dave Troy | Mar 27, 2023 | Economy, The Wide AngleThe 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 […]
The Virtue of Reasonable Belief
by Louis Clark | Mar 13, 2023 | PoliticsMajority 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 […]