Well, Donald Trump is now officially our president.  He delivered an interesting and a bit controversial inaugural speech yesterday, which I would like to try my hand at analyzing.  Before I do, may I mention others’ comments on it.  George Will called it “a most dreadful inaugural address” (National Review Online, January 21, 2017) and […]

I am sitting in the San Antonio airport, waiting for my flight back home, reflecting on an excellent Values and Capitalism retreat here and–the subject of this blog–my walk yesterday.  My goal was to walk to a bookstore about two miles from my downtown hotel.  I had mapped it out using Googlemaps and set out […]

Reports surfaced last night that set the social media world on fire. Apparently, President Obama and President-Elect Trump were briefed on information obtained by a former British intelligence agent who put together a file of opposition research. The file and the information is not classified, nor is it the product of our intelligence agencies. The […]

I have written on this blog before about the importance of the liberal arts, but I now have an interesting negative example of how universities have been marginalizing not only the liberal arts but also American civilization in particular.  Let me begin with a quote from this article by Ian Tuttle in the National Review […]

Director Dennis Villeneuve has crafted a masterpiece, a science fiction film that turns its gaze from the stars and into the corners of the human condition. Arrival deserves to stand alongside the best of the genre, like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Solaris, Interstellar, Contact, and Blade Runner. As I’ve written before, science fiction is at its […]

If you want to read a classic insider narrative of the degeneration and dysfunction of a large and powerful (and unlimited) federal bureaucracy, read here: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/443227/consumer-financial-protection-bureau-tragic-failures.  The article chronicles the work of one highly placed lawyer in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau  before it was slapped hard by the Federal courts. I have frequently written about […]

I was reading an interesting article in Reason today that directly addressed one of the major issues I have raised before and frequently alluded to (see http://reason.com/archives/2016/12/19/trump-versus-the-we-bes, December 20, 2016).  It has to do with the theme of “Trump versus the bureaucracy.”  One could substitute any president’s name in that slogan since the 1930s at […]

And if not, are there any implications for us in a political economy blog?  Michael Kruger over at The Gospel Coalition asks the question of whether all sins are the same, and answers no.  He notes that both people who take sin serious and those that don’t can come to this conclusion.  For the person who […]

This blog is generally about current policies or issues in the news or that are still current to a degree in the realm of political economy, politics, and economics.  I have been reading a really interesting book by Jonathan Wight, entitled Ethics in Economics: An Introduction to Moral Frameworks (Stanford University Press, 2015).  Wight addresses […]

In an article from CNS News dated December 16, 2016, we have the new but predictable Census Bureau statistics on median income for households in counties of the United States.  The first four richest counties are, …, you guessed it, all in the Washington, DC area, and range from about $99,000 per year to $122, […]