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from FEE (Foundation for Economic Education)
RIGHT-CENTER BIAS, HIGH, non-profit organization
With the growing chorus of free-market economists calling out the president’s proposal, hopefully the public will soon realize that there’s no economic justification for Biden’s political spending push.
President Biden has abandoned bipartisan compromise and pushed full-steam-ahead to pass his entire sweeping $1.9 trillion COVID-19 spending package. The president’s proposal includes $1,400 “stimulus” checks for more Americans, $350 billion to bail out state and local governments, a renewal of super-charged unemployment benefits through September, money for vaccine distribution, a federal $15 minimum wage, and much, much more. Democrats in Congress are determined to mark up the bill over the next few weeks and pass it by early March. But the state of the economy doesn’t support this spending bonanza—not even close.
A $7,500 investment in bitcoin in 2015, when economist Paul Krugman described it as "bubble" rooted in "libertarian ideology," today would be worth $1.2 million.
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from First Things
THE GLOBAL CHRISTIAN RIGHT
The Religious Right that rose and flourished during the 1970s and 1980s has been pilloried for some time and from all sides. Secularists attack it for trying to erect a theocracy in the US of A, forgetting that Baptists like Jerry Falwell were heirs of Roger Williams. Some Evangelicals criticize its blinkered focus on moral and sexual issues—abortion, school prayer, gay rights—and its indifference to systemic injustice. Others equate the Religious Right with white supremacy, charging that it was a rearguard effort by white Christians to shore up their eroding status. Some of these critiques have some force, but all ignore the crucial role that world evangelism, international and multi-ethnic networks, and activism to protect religious freedom played in the Religious Right’s agenda.
TOWARD A FAMILY WAGE
Family policy has assumed center stage on the American right. Lawmakers are focused on the impending passage of a COVID relief bill that could include, for the first time, a national family benefit for parents. Sen. Mitt Romney has put forward his own version of a pro-family policy, which promises to fund a child allowance for years to come. How should Christians react to such proposals? ... While policy debates are often arcane disputes, the question of family allowances is quite simple. In a world where a wage that could sustain a family is a distant memory, generous family allowances provide one of the only ways to support family life. Romney's plan no doubt needs careful scrutiny. The devil of policy is always in the details. But the basic idea points us in the right direction. Injecting purchasing power into the heart of the home will turn our economy further in the direction of the family—the economy's starting point and its ultimate measure.
from First Things
THE GLOBAL CHRISTIAN RIGHT
The Religious Right that rose and flourished during the 1970s and 1980s has been pilloried for some time and from all sides. Secularists attack it for trying to erect a theocracy in the US of A, forgetting that Baptists like Jerry Falwell were heirs of Roger Williams. Some Evangelicals criticize its blinkered focus on moral and sexual issues—abortion, school prayer, gay rights—and its indifference to systemic injustice. Others equate the Religious Right with white supremacy, charging that it was a rearguard effort by white Christians to shore up their eroding status. Some of these critiques have some force, but all ignore the crucial role that world evangelism, international and multi-ethnic networks, and activism to protect religious freedom played in the Religious Right’s agenda.
TOWARD A FAMILY WAGE
Family policy has assumed center stage on the American right. Lawmakers are focused on the impending passage of a COVID relief bill that could include, for the first time, a national family benefit for parents. Sen. Mitt Romney has put forward his own version of a pro-family policy, which promises to fund a child allowance for years to come. How should Christians react to such proposals? ... While policy debates are often arcane disputes, the question of family allowances is quite simple. In a world where a wage that could sustain a family is a distant memory, generous family allowances provide one of the only ways to support family life. Romney's plan no doubt needs careful scrutiny. The devil of policy is always in the details. But the basic idea points us in the right direction. Injecting purchasing power into the heart of the home will turn our economy further in the direction of the family—the economy's starting point and its ultimate measure.
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from Mises Institute
RIGHT-CENTER BIAS, MIXED
How the Fed Helped Pay for World War I
Populism May Be on the Rise Again in Europe
Following former president Donald Trump’s election defeat, the legacy media and Swamp creatures glowingly declared that populism is dead and buried, never to be resurrected on a massive scale ever again. But were the victories of Trump and Brexit matches that ignited the flames of populist movements? Despite the rest of Europe essentially dismissing figures and parties who championed comparable antiestablishment, anti-immigrant policies in 2017, voters might be giving these same forces a second look now that “the experts” have failed tens of millions of people in the age of the pandemiconomy. From France to Portugal to the Netherlands, the populist wave may rise once more.
The World Needs a Gold-Backed Deutsche Mark
RIGHT-CENTER BIAS, MIXED
How the Fed Helped Pay for World War I
Governments can pay their bills in three ways: taxes, debt, and inflation. The public usually recognizes the first two, for they are difficult to hide. But the third tends to go unnoticed by the public because it involves a slow and subtle reduction in the value of money, a policy usually unarticulated and complex in design. In this article, I will look under the hood of the Federal Reserve during World War I to explain the actual tools and levers used by monetary authorities to reduce the value of the public's money in order to fund government war spending. This example will help readers better understand the more general idea of an "inflation tax," and how such a tax might be used in the future to fund the state's wars. Just as kings debased coins to help pay for their wars, the Fed used inflation to help pay for US participation in World War I. It did so by creating and issuing dollars in return for government debt.
In late January and early February, protestors took to the streets of lower Manhattan to “re-occupy Wall Street.” Protestors were there to draw attention to the efforts by Wall Street elites to use their political influence with Congress and the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) to crush the traders—many of whom had rallied around certain groups within Reddit—who had embarrassed hedge funders and cost them billions through the now infamous GameStop short squeeze. Except in this version of “Occupy Wall Street” Republicans and conservatives are the chief participants.
Populism May Be on the Rise Again in Europe
Following former president Donald Trump’s election defeat, the legacy media and Swamp creatures glowingly declared that populism is dead and buried, never to be resurrected on a massive scale ever again. But were the victories of Trump and Brexit matches that ignited the flames of populist movements? Despite the rest of Europe essentially dismissing figures and parties who championed comparable antiestablishment, anti-immigrant policies in 2017, voters might be giving these same forces a second look now that “the experts” have failed tens of millions of people in the age of the pandemiconomy. From France to Portugal to the Netherlands, the populist wave may rise once more.
The World Needs a Gold-Backed Deutsche Mark
The seeds of sound-money destruction were sown at the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference, which established that US dollars could be held as central bank reserves and were redeemable for gold by the US Treasury at thirty-five dollars an ounce. This was the so-called gold exchange standard, but only foreign central banks and some multinational organizations, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), enjoyed this right of redemption. The system depended upon the solemn promise by the US that it would refrain from issuing unbacked dollars. The watershed event that ushered in a new malignant, pure fiat money era occurred on August 15, 1971, when the US abandoned the gold exchange standard in order to stop the drain on the US gold stock. American money printing had begun in earnest in the previous decade in order to finance Lyndon Johnson's "guns and butter" policy. The Fed monetized government debt to fund LBJ's Great Society welfare programs while the government fought a war in Southeast Asia at the same time. Dollar claims in the form of government bills and bonds built up at central banks around the world. At the recommendation of French economic advisor Jacque Rueff, a free market economist and gold standard proponent, French president Charles de Gaulle ordered the Bank of France to redeem 80 percent of its US dollar holdings for gold, per the solemn promise made at Bretton Woods. Thus began a run on the US Treasury's gold reserves that culminated in President Nixon taking the dishonorable action of abandoning the gold exchange standard. This set the course of unfettered fiat money expansion that has led the world to the precipice of monetary destruction. This end to the Bretton Woods system—itself already deeply flawed—ushered in the age of competing fiat currencies worldwide. We are now headed toward the chaotic destruction of this system as well.
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from New York Magazine
In the late 1940s and 1950s, Hollywood studios — under pressure from the right — promised they would not “knowingly employ a communist.” This blacklist eventually became notorious, especially in Hollywood, which came to lionize its victims in several films. And yet it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish the blacklist policy from the emerging current treatment of right-wingers. Earlier this week, Gina Carano, an actor in The Mandalorian, was fired from her job after a controversy over an allegedly anti-Semitic social-media post. In short order, UTSA, her talent agency, dropped her as a client. Many media accounts have taken the anti-Semitism charge at face value (USA Today: “… an anti-Semitic Instagram Story that she shared from another user.”) The post in question, which triggered a social-media firestorm that quickly led to her firing and loss of representation, was not anti-Semitic by any reasonable definition. The post simply argued (uncontroversially) that the Holocaust grew out of a hate campaign against Jews, which it then likened (controversially) to hatred of fellow Americans for their political views.
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from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington
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from TLS Times Literary Supplement
Newspaper · Publisher · Arts & Entertainment in London, UKWhy modernity led to secularization
Why do so many people in the modern West self-identify as atheists? What lies behind our growing tendency to place our faith and trust in something other than a transcendent deity? In different ways, both of these stimulating and provocative books address this cluster of questions. Written alongside and in partial dialogue with each other, they represent fresh attempts to grapple with the longstanding problem of why the rise of modernity has been accompanied by the decline of religion.
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