When economic anxiety strikes, protectionist politicians reach for the same dusty playbook: Slap tariffs on imports, invoke the national interest, and promise that “local industries” will rise like a phoenix from the ashes of the markets the government just torched. The approach sounds pragmatic—even patriotic—but in practice, especially in the Middle East, it has been a spectacular failure. The United States should not follow the same dead-end road. Take Egypt: In 2016, facing fiscal pressure and public dissatisfaction, […]
My apartment in Meudon is about 7 km away as the crow flies from the Eiffel Tower. On the fourth floor of my building the tower is easy to see. Yet for centuries Meudon was in the countryside, not a suburb of Paris like it is today (the suburban train to the tower takes 15 min). There were several large estates around the village. Almost all of them have now been carved up into individual lots for houses […]
Jonathan Newman joins Bob to explore the archaeological evidence for silver as money in ancient Mesopotamia, challenging Modern Monetary Theory and affirming Menger’s classic account of money’s market origins.
Maybe it’s just a sign of our angry and divided times, but I’m finding that critics often don’t read past the headline or the first couple of paragraphs before sending me a nasty-gram. So, in the interest of reading comprehension, I will start this unlikely-to-be popular column with some caveats. I believe dangerous predators should spend their lives behind bars. I do not believe incarceration should be a picnic. Although there are some people in our state’s prison […]
If you’ve ever played the online game Worldle, where players guess a country based on its silhouette, you’ll know the frustrating experience of failing to accurately identify the day’s blob that turns out to be some insignificant island territory. Frustrated Worldle players (at least American ones) can now have their revenge on these random statelets, thanks to President Donald Trump’s newly unveiled tariff regime. FULL LIST: Liberation Day pic.twitter.com/ZBiRuJBCAr — Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) April 2, 2025 Included […]
There is a pretty constant discussion on social media in general and the Catholic blogosphere in particular about the flight from marriage among young people. A subset of that discussion came up in a recent tweet, where discussants debated whether a woman who has reached 30 and not found her “ideal” will have to “settle” for an “average” guy. I know that such “discussions” are tilted clickbait, intended to elicit barbed comments. I, rather, want to go back to a […]
For the second time in a week, all nine members of the U.S. Supreme Court have rejected a sweeping assertion of executive power made by President Donald Trump in a case arising from Trump’s unilateral efforts to deport aliens from the United States. The first rejection came on April 7, when the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that all deportees under the Alien Enemies Act must be afforded due process of law, including “notice and an opportunity to challenge […]