There’s no official definition for economic depression. Intuitively it means protracted recession when expectations sink and malaise sets in, to become the new norm. Breaking out would be daunting due not only to economic realities but also to political intransigence heightened by continuing culture warfare. Sound all too possible? Could America be verging on getting […]

David Ignatius for the Washington Post: For President Trump and his campaign, the Portland protests and similar eruptions elsewhere are a dream come true. This is a president who, quite literally, has nothing to run on — no positive achievements to show. His only chance is that his adversaries will create opportunities for him. Let’s […]

​Donald Trump is losing the election. Or is he? A devilish bit of Trumpism is now in the air, in Portland, Oregon. Conservative columnist Bret Stephens gives a clue to where Trump’s election strategy is headed. It’s about scaring conservative-leaning suburban women who might chose Joe Biden but fear if they do—without Trump as their […]

A new security law now governs Hong Kong. Traditional freedoms under British law have evaporated there. One wonders. A day following our election on November 3, will Americans awake to a profoundly painful reality? Will the United States have been fully taken over by an authoritarian regime, equivalent to the iron-fisted totalitarian government now overseeing […]

Absolutely. Adam Smith would wear a mask to protect others. He would respect and hold others’ needs on par with his own. He would expect them to do likewise. Smith did not endorse the pursuit of unbridled self-interest. Instead, he embraced self-interest, rightly understood. He was a moral philosopher; an ethicist. Smithian capitalism works when […]

A most-worthy Independence Day message worth repeating, from David Brooks of the New York Times: We Americans enter the July 4 weekend of 2020 humiliated as almost never before. We had one collective project this year and that was to crush Covid-19, and we failed. On Wednesday, we had about 50,000 new positive tests, a […]

Tragically, the path toward capitalism’s renewal—and America’s renewal—is blocked by Trumpian intransigence. It’s not the only blockage, of course. Adam Smith, moral philosopher and capitalism’s Eighteenth Century architect, held a singular vision, and one compatible with America’s founders: improvement of the common good, especially it’s material aspects. Smith’s prescription? To align self-interest’s pursuit with the […]

Albert Einstein eulogized Isaac Newton as brilliant even though his contribution was circumscribed by the time in which he lived. Newton’s imagination was unable to propel him beyond the limits of our solar system or beneath the level of the molecule. Similarly, Adam Smith was unable to foresee implications of a looming real-world crash manifested […]

1776 to 2020? Is America as we have known her coming to a point of no return? What’s just around the corner? What comes next? Are we staying up-to-the-moment with what America’s great minds and strong moral compasses are telling us? Here’s some powerful excerpts “screamed” at the American People on June 3, 2020. Some […]