HISTORY, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Hayek’s Nobel—50 Years Later The economic lessons Hayek taught us are as relevant today as they were 50 years ago. Peter Jacobsen

Posted By on December 13th, 2024

https://fee.org/articles/hayeks-nobel-50-years-later/

Fifty years ago, Friedrich Hayek and Karl Gunnar Myrdal won the Nobel prize “for their pioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations and for their penetrating analysis of the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena.” Hayek’s Nobel is notable for several reasons, and each relates to the importance of intellectual humility.

First, his Nobel address—delivered 50 years ago today—was an exercise in humility, as highlighted by FEE’s own Larry Reed. Hayek even went so far as to argue that there really shouldn’t be a Nobel prize for economists due to the disproportionate intellectual authority the prize bestows.

Second, Hayek’s work, including much of the work he won his Nobel for, is based on recognizing the limits of the intelligentsia to plan society and, in particular, the economy.

To understand Hayek’s work, we must understand two key contributions of his mentor Ludwig von Mises. It’s no surprise that Hayek’s Nobel would be connected to Mises. Nobel-winner Paul Samuelson, who departs from the work of Hayek and Mises on many points, has previously argued that Mises himself would have won the Nobel had it been awarded earlier in history.

Economic Fluctuations

First, Hayek’s prize was linked to his work on money and economic fluctuations. There’s no doubt that this work is placed under the umbrella of Austrian Business Cycle Theory (ABCT). ABCT is by no means an invention of Hayek. Rather, he developed the theory which has its foundations at the beginning of the Austrian school with elements in Carl Menger, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, and finally Mises.

Hayek, in particular, focused on how capital goods transform over the various stages of production. As capital goods advance in time toward the customer, they fundamentally change in kind. So, when a central government monetary policy (such as an increase in the supply of money) causes an increase in long-term loans, these-long term loans change the structure of capital goods in society.

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The Left’s Assassination Lust Is Misdirected

Posted By on December 13th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/12/13/the-lefts-assassination-lust-is-misdirected/

The hero worship for Luigi Mangione, the accused executioner of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, is appalling to reasonable people. We understand, though, that on occasion Americans can have a legitimate grievance with their health insurance coverage. But the guilty parties are not corporate insurance executives. The culpable are the lawmakers and regulators in Washington who have hijacked the country’s health care industry.

Mangione, arrested Monday in Pennsylvania on fake ID and firearms charges, justified the slaying of health care insurance executives, which sent many on the left into spasms of delight.

“These parasites had it coming,” the new folk hero for elitists wrote in his manifesto. Sadly, Mangione, a son of privilege who favors the crumbling British government’s National Health Service, is not alone in his blind hatred for health insurance executives.

Former Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz, who has been publicly demonstrating her tenuous grip of reality and decency for years, has been a leader among the aggrieved. “And people wonder why we want these executives dead,” she posted on Bluesky only hours after Thompson was gunned down.

Then on Monday night on “Piers Morgan Uncensored,” she said that, “along with so many other Americans,” she felt “joy, unfortunately,” at the news of Thompson’s death. She quickly tried to backtrack when she realized how malicious and deranged she sounded. But out of the abundance – or maybe the emptiness – of her heart, her mouth spoke.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

The quiet radicalism of Jay Bhattacharya Putting this ‘heretic’ in charge of the National Institutes of Health is Trump’s best move yet. Brendan O’Neill

Posted By on December 12th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/12/11/the-quiet-radicalism-of-jay-bhattacharya/

Of all Donald Trump’s spicy picks for government, the wisest, in my view, is Jay Bhattacharya. The unassuming Stanford professor and famed lockdown sceptic might not come with an army of wellness bros, like RFK Jnr. He might not be as wisecracking as the state-dismantling DOGE double act of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. And his presence in the corridors of power is unlikely to freak out the deep state as much as, say, Tulsi Gabbard’s. And yet he will bring something precious to the second Trump administration, a virtue that is as essential as it is rare: the art of doubt.

This week, Bhattacharya gave his last health economics lecture to his Stanford students before he heads to Bethesda in Maryland to lead the National Institutes of Health. Dickens himself would have struggled to conjure up such a reversal of fortunes. For four, long years Bhattacharya was shamed as a scientific heretic. His blasphemy was to question lockdown. To give impious voice to his honestly held belief that it was wrong to lock down the entire population in response to Covid-19. For this, he was damned as ‘dangerous’, ‘reckless’, a threat to life itself, just as past heretics were branded the polluters of men’s souls and warpers of men’s minds whose ideas might even kill.

Yet here he is, in 2024, off to run the US government’s public-health research agency. The very agency whose aloof boffins and smug bureaucrats joined in the witch-hunting of him in the Covid era. The Hill calls it ‘the right kind of revenge’. For in appointing Bhattacharya to the NIH, Trump isn’t just flipping a fake-tanned middle finger at ‘the libs’. No, he’s handing the NIH to someone who is ‘eminently qualified’ to run it – Bhattacharya has been an esteemed professor of medicine for years – while also ‘replacing the arrogant, believe-our-science elitists’ with ‘a person they regularly disparaged’. Bhattacharya is being rewarded for his heresy, and it is richly deserved.

We should remind ourselves of the censorious lunacy that ruled in the Covid years. Bhattacharya’s thoughtcrime was to pen the Great Barrington Declaration along with two other scientists worried about lockdown: Martin Kulldorff and Sunetra Gupta. The declaration’s proposal was fresh and modest: that ‘focussed protection’ of the elderly and vulnerable might be preferable to blanket shutdowns of society. Yet if you went by the elites’ frothing response to the declaration, you could have been forgiven for thinking that Bhattacharya and Co had proposed that every Covid-addled youth snog the nearest 80-year-old.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

The American university is rotting from within The modern academy is a threat to reason, liberty and Western civilisation. Joel Kotkin

Posted By on December 12th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/12/12/the-american-university-is-rotting-from-within/

The Western world has many enemies – China, Russia, Iran, North Korea – but none is more potentially lethal than its own education system. From the very institutions once renowned for spreading literacy, the Enlightenment and the means of mastering nature, we now see a deep-seated denial of our common past, pervasive illiteracy and enforced orthodoxy.

The decay of higher education threatens both the civic health and long-term economic prospects of Western liberal civilisation. Once a font of dispassionate research and reasoned discussion, the academy in recent years has more resembled that of the medieval University of Paris, where witch trials were once conducted, except there is now less exposure to the canon.

American universities face an unprecedented challenge with the return of Donald Trump. His administration seems likely to attack such things as diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies, while pushing to defund programmes favourable to terrorists, expel unruly students and deport those who are in the US illegally. Loss of federal support to universities, the educrats fear, could cause major financial setbacks, even among the Ivies. Like medieval clerics, the rapidly growing ranks of university administrators, deans and tenured faculty have grown used to living in what one writer describes as a ‘modern form of manorialism’, where luxury and leisure come as of right.

Universities are likely to try resisting any changes, no matter how justified. Nationally, 78 per cent of professors voted for Kamala Harris. To many, Trump’s election represents a rebellion of ‘uneducated’. The University of California at Berkeley blames his rise on ‘racism and sexism’. Wesleyan University president Michael Roth calls on universities to abandon ‘institutional neutrality’ for activism in the Trump era, predictably comparing neutral professors to those who accommodated the Nazis. Democracy dies, apparently, whenever the progressive monopoly is threatened.

This arrogance reflects decades of the sector’s rising power and influence. University became the ultimate passport into what Daniel Bell called the ‘knowledge class’ a half century ago. A National Journal survey of 250 top American public-sector decision-makers found that 40 per cent of them are Ivy League graduates. Looking at the question globally, David Rothkopf, author of Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making, compiled a list of more than six thousand members of what he calls the global ‘superclass’: leaders of corporations, banks and investment firms, governments, the military, the media and religious groups. Nearly a third attended one of 20 elite universities.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The Explosion of Jew-Hate in Trudeau’s Canada By Terry Glavin

Posted By on December 12th, 2024

https://www.thefp.com/p/explosion-of-jew-hate-in-canada-trudeau-israel-palestine?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

There has been a 670% increase in antisemitic incidents in the past year. ‘It was like a dam burst.’ What happened and why? The Free Press investigates.We rarely run pieces this long. But today’s investigation—the story of how antisemitism became deeply embedded in Justin Trudeau’s Canada—called for it. This is a piece worth reading carefully. It is relevant not just to our many Canadian readers, but to anyone invested in the future of the West. —Bari Weiss
‘The Denial Is What’s Painful’
For Sarah Rugheimer, a professor of astronomy at York University in Toronto, the first sign of the virulent strain of antisemitism now embedded in Justin Trudeau’s Canada appeared on a lamppost.

It was a few weeks after the Hamas massacre of last October 7. Rugheimer, 41, was walking in a park near her home in the city’s quiet Cedarvale neighborhood when she saw a poster of the Israeli hostage Elad Katzir, a 47-year-old farmer from Kibbutz Nir Oz, covered with swastikas.

In the days that followed, as the war raged in Gaza, swastikas turned up all over Cedarvale. They also started appearing on the York campus, where Rugheimer serves as the Allan I. Carswell Chair for the Public Understanding of Astronomy. As fall turned to winter, a swastika showed up in the snow outside the campus building where she works.

An astrophysicist with a particular interest in the origins of life on Earth and the possibility of life on other planets, Rugheimer tended to confine her worldly concerns to scientific matters. So the swastikas came as a shock. But worse was to come.

She grew up in Montana, and her academic career took her around the world—from a PhD in astronomy and astrophysics at Harvard University to Scotland, England, and now Canada. But until taking up her post at York University two years ago, Rugheimer said she’d never encountered any overt antisemitism. Nor had she given much thought to her identity as a Zionist: Like the vast majority of Jews around the world, Rugenheimer believes in Israel’s right to exist.

Jew-hatred was a phenomenon of the fringes, she reckoned. “It wasn’t on my radar,” she told me. Now, it’s everywhere. “Every week there is a major incident in Canada, and multiple minor ones every day in my neighborhood.”

It was what was happening inside her university that disturbed her the most.

York’s student unions issued a declaration just after the attack calling the barbarism of October 7 a “justified and necessary” act of resistance against settler colonialism, genocide, and apartheid. The student groups found widespread support among York’s professors—some of whom Rugheimer considered friends.

A politics department faculty committee demanded the university enforce a definition of “anti-Palestinian racism” that encompassed any expression of sympathy for the right of Israelis to exist within their own state: “Zionism is a settler colonial project and ethno-religious ideology in service of a system of Western imperialism that upholds global white supremacy.”

She was shocked by the declarations, and the defaced posters, and the swastikas. But for Rugheimer there was something worse. “The denial is what’s painful,” Rugheimer said.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Evaporation of the Obama Mystique Obama’s behind-the-scenes political maneuvering culminated in a failed Biden presidency that ultimately led to a significant Democratic electoral defeat and rejection of his political legacy. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on December 12th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/12/12/the-evaporation-of-the-obama-mystique/

Barack Obama had long been rumored as the catalyst for the 2020 Biden nomination—and thereafter played the whispering puppeteer behind the subsequent lost Biden administration years.

As such he and his coterie proved the virtual architects of the Biden administration, one of the most unpopular and failed presidencies in American history.

Recall earlier that after a flailing candidate Joe Biden lost the first three 2020 primaries and caucuses, his inert campaign was headed nowhere.

Barack Obama and fellow Democratic insiders abruptly engineered the withdrawal of his rival 2020 presidential candidates: hard left but likely sure-loser candidates, including Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Pete Buttigieg.

The Obamas ignored or withheld from the public their own firsthand knowledge that Biden was suffering from signs of dementia.

Instead, they found Biden’s cognitive decline and his former concocted reputation as workingman’s Joe useful as a veneer for a veritable Obama third-term, “phone it in” administration. Or as wistful Obama once conditioned his dream of a third term—”If I could make an arrangement where I had a stand-in, a front man or front woman, and they had an earpiece in.”

The Obamaites then got their wish for four years of enacted hard-left directives that they could only have dreamed of while in actual power.

But their radical menu since 2021 had divided and nearly wrecked the nation—hyperinflation, 12 million illegal aliens, a ruined border, spiraling crime, a shattered foreign policy of appeasement, the popular backlash against DEI/Woke/trans chauvinism, partisan lawfare, and weaponization of the government.

And the ruling radicalism beneath the Biden facade eventually cost the Democrats nearly everything—the presidency, the House, and the Senate.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Renu Mukherjee A Supreme Disappointment The High Court’s refusal to hear a case involving admissions to Boston’s selective public schools is a setback for the movement to restore colorblindness in education.

Posted By on December 12th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/a-supreme-disappointment

On Monday, the Supreme Court denied certiorari in Boston Parent Coalition for Academic Excellence Corp.v. The School Committee for the City of Boston, a case that concerned the 2020–2022 admissions policy for Boston’s three selective public high schools. The policy, which aimed to reduce white and Asian enrollment in the name of “racial equity,” is yet another example of a school district engaging in racial balancing.

Boston Latin School (BLS), Boston Latin Academy (BLA), and John D. O’Bryant School of Mathematics and Science (O’Bryant) are selective public high schools that serve academically gifted students in the City of Boston. All are considered crown jewels of American public education and are consistently ranked among the nation’s top high schools by U.S. News & World Report. BLS, for example, is the oldest public school in America, counts among its alumni five signers of the Declaration of Independence, and offers 26 Advanced Placement (AP) courses. Many parents in Boston, particularly those who are Asian immigrants, view a child’s enrollment in BLS, BLA, or O’Bryant as a step toward the American Dream.

For years, the district based its admissions decisions on a student’s grades in English Language Arts (ELA) and math, as well as performance on an entrance exam similar to the SAT. District officials took the average of each applicant’s grades and assigned a value to that average before adding the applicant’s score on the entrance exam to create a “composite score.” Students with the top composite scores were awarded seats at BLS, BLA, or O’Bryant.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

The Coming Deportation War Will Democrat mayors go to jail to defend illegal aliens? by Thom Nickels

Posted By on December 12th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-coming-deportation-war/

Expect a liberal implosion when Tom Homan, President-elect Donald Trump’s new Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director — or “border czar” — begins mass deportations of illegal aliens immediately after Inauguration Day.

Homan has promised to target all aliens who entered the country illegally, regardless of criminal status.

The Left has already sounded the alarm bells, predicting concentration camps, screaming children as they are pulled from frantic parents, ICE storm troopers entering houses and workspaces with guns drawn in search of illegal migrants who only wanted a better life for themselves but who are now being hunted down like wounded animals — or so the legacy media will report.

This highly dramatic Democrat scenario is meant to pull at the heartstrings and to get Americans to have a Hallmark Card moment and say, “Enough, let these people stay…if only for the sake of the children.”

Speaking of the children, a federal judge—U.S. District Court Judge J. Campbell Barker—struck down a Biden administration program (“Keeping Families Together”) shortly after the November 5 election. The Biden program would have allowed illegal aliens married to American citizens to stay in the country and obtain legal status; as a bonus it offered them a fast-track to U.S. citizenship.

Barker declared “Keeping Families Together” violated U.S. immigration law. Similar challenges were successful in more than a dozen other Republican states.

The Homan policy, however, will not separate children from families but deport children and parents together. Homan, Trump’s former acting U.S. immigration and Customs Enforcement director, also has plans to cut funds to “sanctuary states” like California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, and New York.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Lipstick on a Political Pig The Dems offer “remedies” for the 2024 disaster to never happen again. by Bruce Thornton

Posted By on December 12th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/lipstick-on-a-political-pig/

The barnyard metaphor “lipstick on a pig” expresses the old wisdom that cosmetic changes can’t alter the essential nature of anything. Ever since the election, the Democrats, with a few exceptions, have been flailing about trying to explain how the unthinkable happened. Usually, the analysis––scapegoating is more accurate–– is accompanied by remedies that claim to make sure such a disaster never happens again. Most, however, are just variations of putting lipstick on their ideological pig.

Last week the Democrats elected a new chairman of the House Progressive Caucus, the point of the leftist spear carried by the leftist Dems that have dominated their party in the House for more than a decade. According to NBC’s Sahil Kapur, the prog’s new honcho, Greg Casar of Texas, is advising that the Democrats should finesse culture-war issues as actually economic ones, and thus create opportunities to plump for more dirigiste and redistributionist economic policies:

“The progressive movement needs to change. We need to re-emphasize core economic issues every time some of these cultural war issues are brought up,” Casar said. “So when we hear Republicans attacking queer Americans again, I think the progressive response needs to be that a trans person didn’t deny your health insurance claim, a big corporation did — with Republican help. We need to connect the dots for people that the Republican Party obsession with these culture war issues is driven by Republicans’ desire to distract voters and have them look away while Republicans pick their pocket.”

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Bye Bye Wray Having completed the destruction of the FBI, the Bureau Director leaves the stage. Robert Spencer

Posted By on December 12th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/bye-bye-wray/

Christopher Wray might not be the worst director in the history of the FBI. After all, there was James Comey, and before him Robert Mueller. Wray, however, who finally resigned on Wednesday, completed the work that Mueller and Comey began: he oversaw the total politicization of the FBI, and its transformation from a respected law enforcement agency into an American Gestapo, a tool of partisan politics that the Biden-Harris regime wielded like a club against its political enemies, real and imagined. Christopher Wray will not be missed. The question that he leaves in his wake is whether the damage he has done can be undone, and the FBI restored, or if the whole agency should simply be shut down.

While Christopher Wray was director of the FBI, agents of his crooked agency stormed Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home and scrutinized Melania Trump’s clothes closet for classified information. This was the first time in American history that a sitting president had weaponized the FBI against a political opponent, and Wray uttered not a public word about how the Federal Bureau of Investigation was becoming the Democrat Bureau of Lawfare and Harassment.

Trump wasn’t the only victim, either. The Biden-Harris regime  sicced Wray’s feds on angry parents protesting at school board meetings, worked with Twitter and other social media giants to silence and deplatform people with opposing views, and even sent spies into Catholic churches.

This is the legacy of Christopher Wray. And while all that was happening, Wray repeatedly insisted that “insurrectionists” and the “white supremacists” constituted the greatest terror threat the nation faces today. Not Islamic jihadists. Certainly not criminals crossing the open border and roaming free inside the United States. Wray’s ridiculous claims about “white supremacist terrorists,” as well as the agency’s focus on Jan. 6 “insurrectionists,” were a thinly veiled attempt to criminalize and destroy all political opposition to the Biden regime in the U.S.