It is often difficult to figure out if those who are responsible for the country’s tax and spending policies are ignorant or worse, or if they think the voters are ignorant, or if it is a combination of the two. This past week, President Biden presented his proposed...

END OF THE U.S. DOLLAR MONOPOLY? China and Russia have announced they, along with Brazil, India and South Africa, are “working to develop a new global reserve currency” to compete with the U.S. dollar. The U.S. dollar has been the world’s currency since the end of...

WHEN GOVERNMENT FAILS, PRIVATE ENTREPRENEURS WILL EMERGE TO FILL VOID “Deficits don’t matter,” except when they do. Congress and the Biden administration are in one of their periodic fights about lifting the debt limit, with threats about “defaulting” on the debt. The...

Will institutions of higher education end up being instruments of oppression or places where free inquiry can liberate the mind of man? Oddly, this struggle is indirectly reflected in a couple of very different great movies. The first film is “Animal House,” released...

Does the expression “land of the free, home of the brave” still describe America? With the rise of the bureaucratic state and woke culture, we are becoming less free year by year. Rather than being brave in their willingness to defend the Constitution and fundamental...

IT CAN BE USED FOR SOCIETAL CONTROL, MISINFORMATION, DISCRIMINATION Remember travel agencies? Yes, a few still exist, but what was common is now rare — death by internet. Good travel agencies were helpful and provided important services, but what they did so well was...

“Note: This column was written by an actual person and not an artificial intelligence program.” Such disclaimers might well become common in the near future — with the advent of Open-AI’s ChatGPT, which can write essays or even term papers. Robots are rapidly taking...

What happens to a family whose yearly spending rises faster than its income? A painful day of reckoning arrives, requiring drastic cuts in its spending or a declaration of bankruptcy. What happens to a business whose debt burden grows to the point where the interest...

NO LOCKDOWNS, EVER AGAIN The pandemic-induced “lockdowns” were a huge mistake. There has been an enormous surge in excess deaths since the advent of COVID-19, but fewer than half of these excess deaths are due directly to COVID-19, except among the elderly. According...

In June 2021, a 12-story beachfront condominium in the Miami suburb of Surfside, Florida, collapsed without warning, causing the deaths of 98 people. It made headlines around the world for weeks, because the event was so rare. Mankind has been constructing multi-story...

THE RISE AND FALL OF EMPIRES The history of the world is in good part the history of the rise and fall of empires. The USA (American) empire is the latest, and even though it is only a little more than 200 years old, it is already showing signs of decay, which may be...

Congress just passed a $1.7 trillion (that is trillion with a T) budget that President Biden has signed. Those who voted for it claimed it was a Christmas gift to the American people, when in actuality it was a stocking full of coal (and most people had not even been...

THE CURRENT MADNESS SHALL PASS, AS IT ALWAYS DOES This is the time of year for good cheer and optimism. Most everything will get better — health, life spans, economic prosperity, etc. For the past three years, most of mankind has suffered directly or indirectly from...

BIGGER ISN'T ALWAYS BETTER There is an adage: In any organization, 20% of the people do 80% of the work, and 80% of the people do 20% of the work. Elon Musk is testing this out — in that he has been reported to have fired 80% of Twitter’s workforce. Twitter is still...

Part of being a child is partially living in fantasyland — which makes the pain of growing up much easier. Believing in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny brings a certain amount of joy. The Disney Corp. became very rich by catering to children’s fantasies (before it...

The U.N. annual climate conference (COP27) that just concluded in Egypt might have set the record for the greatest number of bad ideas ever presented at a major international conference. The expressed reason for these conferences is to solve the global-warming...

POLITICAL SAY GOES TO VERY RICH INDIVIDUALS WHO CAN AFFORD THE 'ACCESS' TARIFF Why are some countries rich and others very poor? At the top of this list, put corruption — both policy and personal. The enclosed table contains one of the common measures of country...

STOP ANY NEW DEFICIT SPENDING AND ALLOW INTEREST RATES TO RISE AT MARKET LEVELS Inflation makes you rich — well, not exactly — but it can make you appear rich. As a teenager, did you dream of having a $100,000 car and a million-dollar home? A few more years of the...