The television sitcom Cheers has always been one of my guilty pleasures.  Next to Seinfeld, I consider it the best sitcom of my lifetime.  

After a decades-long hiatus, I recently started watching Cheers reruns on Netflix. A few nights a week, on nights when my wife puts the kids to bed, I watch Sam Malone and company as I sip a cold beer, unwind, and wax nostalgically for that (seemingly) gentler, simpler time. It feels very warm.

It’s not just the show’s soothing and sentimental theme song (see below). It’s the little things. Nobody is on a phone. People talk to one other. The humor is utterly devoid of politics (though Cheers was viewed as edgy and progressive in its day). When the show does feature politics, it’s not bitter or preachy—just funny and smart.

A great example of this last point is a famous episode in which Woody—the bumbling farm boy-turned bartender—runs for city council of Boston.

The genesis of Woody’s campaign stems from Frasier’s observation that a local politician named Kevin Fogerty (Phillip Baker Hall, the late actor who played “library cop” Mr. Bookman in Seinfeld) is an empty suit whose rhetoric consists of little more than patriotic platitudes (sound familiar?).

“There he goes, spouting a bunch of meaningless platitudes. Sure enough, the people are lapping it up like milk. Oh, the mentality of the voter in this country fascinates me. Someday, I ought to do a paper about it.”

When Sam takes issue with his point, Frasier asserts that American politics is so empty he could run a chimpanzee—or even Woody—and get 10 percent of the vote.

Sam bets him $10 he can’t. The race is on.

Humble Woody, of course, doesn’t feel up to the task, noting he’s not very eloquent.

“Nothing to worry about, Woody. Just tell some more of those farm stories—people seem to love those,” says Frasier. “If that doesn’t work, just say the word ‘change’ about a hundred times.”

Woody takes Frasier’s advice. The result? He not only gets 10 percent of the vote, but wins outright after Fogerty is exposed in a sex scandal.  

It’s brilliant comedy and exposes a dark truth about modern American democracy: People are poorly educated and easily fooled by rhetorical gimmicks.

That democracy has certain weaknesses is not exactly a new or profound idea. Plato was horrified of rule by the people. Churchill observed that “the strongest argument against democracy is a five-minute discussion with the average voter.” The Founders, too, were suspicious of pure democracy; yet they believed a democratic republic could flourish under an enlightened, informed, and virtuous populace.

Those three adjectives–enlightened, informed, and virtuous–are not the first to leap to mind for most people when they describe modern America.

What Cheers shrewdly observed, however, is that both the right and the left are susceptible to these rhetorical games—the platitudes just sound a little different.

Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign was built largely on patriotic bluster (“Make America Great Again” sounds like a slightly clumsier version of Fogerty’s rhetoric).

It sounded ridiculous to me, but it worked so well that his successor, Joe Biden, copied many of Trump’s platitudes—“Made in America!” and “Build Back Better,” among them—not to mention his protectionist policies.

Barack Obama, meanwhile, actually outdid Woody Boyd. He didn’t’ “just say the word ‘change’ about a hundred times”; he made change the theme of his campaign!

The truth is, US politics is an embarrassing joke. There might be a handful or two of good people Congress who have solid character, but by and large its a legislative body that consists of flatterers and fools (and plenty of outright charlatans).

Cheers saw this truth before almost anyone else.

One of the most famous quotes in history comes from Heinrich Heine (1797–1856), a German poet, essayist, and critic, widely regarded as one of the most significant literary figures of the 19th century.

Born in Düsseldorf on December 13, 1797, Heine grew up in a Jewish family but converted to Christianity as a young man. In 1831, Heine moved to Paris, where he became a cultural force in Germany and France. His later years were marked by illness, during which he produced some of his most introspective and poignant works, including Romanzero (1851).

Heine is one of those brilliant and deeply-interesting historical figures whom I probably would have known nothing about if not for the (aforementioned) famous quote he uttered in his 1821 play Almansor, in which he warns against book burning: Das war ein Vorspiel nur, dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen."

The English translation?

“That was but a prelude; where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people as well."

Many Americans are likely familiar with the quote, which seemed to prophesy the Nazis, who burned untold numbers of books as a prelude to Hitler’s Final Solution, which saw some 6 million European Jews exterminated.

But what I find most striking is a different observation from Heine, who warned what would happen if the influence of Christianity ever waned in Germany.

“Christianity – and that is its greatest merit – has somewhat mitigated that brutal Germanic love of war, but it could not destroy it. Should that subduing talisman, the cross, be shattered, the frenzied madness of the ancient warriors, that insane Berserk rage of which Nordic bards have spoken and sung so often, will once more burst into flame. This talisman is fragile, and the day will come when it will collapse miserably. Then the ancient stony gods will rise from the forgotten debris and rub the dust of a thousand years from their eyes, and finally Thor with his giant hammer will jump up and smash the Gothic cathedrals. ... Do not smile at my advice – the advice of a dreamer who warns you against Kantians, Fichteans, and philosophers of nature. Do not smile at the visionary who anticipates the same revolution in the realm of the visible as has taken place in the spiritual. Thought precedes action as lightning precedes thunder. German thunder is of true Germanic character; it is not very nimble, but rumbles along ponderously. Yet, it will come and when you hear a crashing such as never before has been heard in the world's history, then you know that the German thunderbolt has fallen at last. At that uproar the eagles of the air will drop dead, and lions in the remotest deserts of Africa will hide in their royal dens. A play will be performed in Germany which will make the French Revolution look like an innocent idyll.”

Heine wrote these words in The History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany, a work published in 1834—99 years before Hitler’s rise to power.

It is no small irony that following Hitler’s ascension in 1933, Heine’s words were among those to crackle in the flames at at Nazi book barbeques, alongside books written by luminaries such as Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann, as well as “un-German” authors like H.G. Wells, Hellen Keller, and Jack London.

Nor was it a surprise. Hitler’s disdain for Christian thinkers was well known in Nazi circles, as was his distaste for Christianity, which he mocked for its “meekness and flabbiness.”

“It has been our misfortune to have the wrong religion,” Hitler once complained. “Why didn’t we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good. The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity.”

(Author’s note: I’ll flesh out Hitler’s views on Christianity in a future post.)

“By pleading guilty today,” his attorney Tim Belevetz said, “Dr. Morens has taken responsibility for what he did and will continue to do so.”

The guilty plea puts to rest the notion that public health officials did not conspire to hide truths (and emails) related to COVID-19.

“…there was no conspiracy theory,” Matt Ridley said in response to Morens’ guilty plea. “There was a conspiracy.”

That Morens had broken federal laws in an effort to conceal records is not exactly a revelation. In 2024, while testifying before the House’s Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, lawmakers read to Morens his own emails, which revealed him brazenly discussing how to avoid Freedom of Information Act requests by deleting files.

“I learned from our FOIA lady here how to make emails disappear,” Morens wrote in one email.

“The best way to avoid FOIA hassles is to delete all emails when you learn a subject is getting sensitive,” he wrote in another.

The “sensitive” subject Morens was dealing with at the time was growing public skepticism of the government’s COVID-19 origin story.

In 2020, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of NIAID and Morens’s boss, testified under oath that the National Institutes of Health had not funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. In April of the same year, Fauci told reporters that scientists, in a recently published paper (“The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2”), had said it was not “plausible” that the virus could have emerged from a laboratory.

What Fauci did not say was that the study’s lead author, computational biologist Kristian Andersen, had an $8.9 million grant pending with NIH when the paper was submitted, or that Fauci had personally initiated the scientists’ examination of the origins question. Nor did Fauci tell reporters that in a Feb. 1, 2020, teleconference with a dozen scientists who studied the virus, a vast majority (10 of the 12) believed it was possible the virus had come from a lab.

Indeed, emails would later show that Andersen — the lead author of the paper — harbored strong suspicions that COVID-19 had emerged from a lab, not a wet market.

“Accidental escape [from a lab] is in fact highly likely — it’s not some fringe theory,” Andersen wrote to colleagues on Slack.

“[The] main thing still in my mind is that the lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened,” Andersen wrote in another message to colleagues.

Today, most U.S. agencies, including the CIA, agree with Andersen that COVID-19 probably came from a laboratory in Wuhan.

Yet for years, the public was given a starkly different story: COVID-19 came from a wet market. People who suggested otherwise were not just wrong; they were peddling a racist conspiracy theory.

“We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” said Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, in February 2020.

Daszak, like certain high-ranking public health officials, had reason to push a wet market origin theory. EcoHealth Alliance had received millions of dollars from the federal government, some for grants to study gain-of-function research on coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Read more

On X over the weekend, Star Wars Daily posted the following question: Do you think the Star Wars Sequel trilogy will eventually receive the same kind of love and reappraisal as the prequels did many years after their release?

My answer was simple: no way in hell.

The prequels were flawed, of course. But they were not disastrous. The Last Jedi was so bad that it ruined Star Wars for me. The Rise of Skywalker might have been even worse. Below is my review of The Last Jedi from nearly ten years ago, which explains how Disney ruined something beautiful.

—

In 1964, shortly after the release of Disney’s adaptation of P. L. Travers’ charming 1934 book Mary Poppins, J.R.R. Tolkien sent a letter to one Miss J.L. Curry of Stanford University. In the letter, Tolkien complained about the corrupting influence Walt Disney’s movies had on literary works.

“Though in most of the ‘pictures’ proceeding from his studios there are admirable or charming passages, the effect of all of them is to me disgusting,” Tolkien wrote. “Some have given me nausea.”

I always felt this was hyperbole on Tolkien’s part. But after watching the latest Star Wars installment, I now take Tolkien at his word.

The Last Jedi is not just bad. It’s a steaming pile of bantha droppings, a dumpster fire of intergalactic proportions. Disney is ruining all that was good and pure in a galaxy far, far away. (That’s the last bad pun, I promise.)

I took my four-year-old to see the movie. Dressed in full Darth Vader garb, he kept asking, “Dad, when is Luke gonna fight Kyla Rin”? (That is Kylo Ren in Four-Year-Old.)

“Soon buddy,” I’d answer. “Now shhhhh.”

Alas, I was lying. Luke never fights Kylo Ren because, somewhere between The Return of the Jedi and this film, our hero inexplicably transformed into a sulking pre-teen trapped in an old man’s body. It’s a convenient switch in that New Luke basically fits in with the rest of the Star Wars cast, an ensemble of one-dimensional characters full of banal one-liners. On the surface, these characters are diverse. In reality, they are pretty much the same: predictable, dull, and mildly irritating.

Rumors have been swirling for months that the rebooted Star Wars franchise was in trouble and that Kathleen Kennedy, president of Lucasfilm, was a ruthless control freak “desperate to stamp out any spark of originality” in the new trilogy.

I have no idea if Kennedy is a control freak. But this latest Star Wars effort suggests there is truth in the latter claim. There is nothing redeeming in the Star Wars reboot. Even the few breadcrumbs that had been left behind in The Force Awakens by J.J. Abrams, the teasing trickster who gave us Lost, have been swept away with little or no explanation.

I actually found myself rooting for the Empire the First Order. If one of those dreadnaughts had happened to swoop in and put the Resistance (and me) out of its misery, at least that would be interesting. My wish was almost granted.

Turns out Leia Organa isn’t much of a general. Late in the film, viewers watch (in boredom, not horror) as Resistance transports get snuffed out one by one like ducks on a frozen pond. A couple ships predictably escape. (Some will argue that this criticism of Gen. Organa’s military prowess is unfair, since she spends most of the film comatose. But directly engaging a fleet of Corellian-class Star Destroyers in the first place is dubious military strategy, in my humble opinion; a Fabian strategy would have been wiser.)

None of this, I should point out, bothered my four-year-old; he loved the movie.

This is to be expected. The Last Jedi feels very much like a film written by a child for children. Surely no adult would write a scene in which two crew members, in the middle of a battle, jet off to a distant planet in hopes of bringing back some unknown person who might be able to help them sneak onboard one of the enemy starships and disable its tracking system. (All in the space of 12 hours, mind you.) This is just one example of the lazy, unimaginative writing viewers encounter throughout this potboiler.

All of this is bad enough, at least for anyone who gives a damn about quality storytelling. But the deficiencies go beyond The Last Jedi.

The characters of the original films might serve no real purpose in this trilogy—they primarily are walking props designed to evoke nostalgia and sell tickets—but their very presence creates a continuity that threatens to undermine the wonderful piece of pop art that George Lucas created in the late 1970s and early 80s.

That’s a shame, particularly when one considers the merits of the last installment.

Gareth Edwards’ Rogue One is one of the finest films in the Star Wars franchise. Edwards succeeded by working effectively within the original Star Wars framework, a framework the latest films seem intent on wiping away.

Destroying the past is one of the most prominent themes in The Last Jedi. It’s the one thing on which the evil Kylo Ren and the wise Yoda can agree. After listening to Luke prattle on about how the Jedi must die for much of the film, viewers get to watch Yoda’s Force ghost call down lightning to burn down the Jedi Temple and the ancient Jedi scriptures within.

“Page-turners they were not,” Yoda quips. (Yes, he really says this.)

What possessed Kennedy to take the franchise in this direction is anyone’s guess, but it’s clear even some cast members had serious doubts about the direction (see the clip below).

It’s just entertainment, many will say; and they would be right. Still, like Tolkien, I take stories seriously. And watching a cherished story from my childhood be butchered in this manner is a bit sad and, to borrow Tolkien’s sentiment, nauseating.

—

Author’s note: Disney’s stock today is lower than it was in March 2017, when The Last Jedi was in post-production.

The review first appeared at Intellectual Takeout.

Hochul said that while New York had always been a leader in national innovation, the development of data centers threatened “to hike up utility bills, deplete our natural resources, and create uncertainty for New Yorkers.”

In some ways, the order came as little surprise. New York has had a long history of regulatory overreach, including strict regulations on showerheads and faucets, as well as bans on natural-gas stoves, furnaces, and boilers.

Yet it’s not just New Yorkers who have a beef with data centers.

Earlier this month, facing growing public fears about data centers, Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) announced a moratorium on the approval of new data center projects pending fresh audits by regulatory agencies of the projects’ possible impact on the Lone Star State’s electric grid.

The moratorium reflects a bipartisan wariness toward data centers that challenges typical political paradigms. Texas is not California or New York. It is a right-leaning state, filled with conservatives who, in the words of the Washington Post, “love free markets, the energy industry, development and small government.” The Washington Post interviewed one such conservative, a three-time Trump voter and self-described lifelong conservative, who detailed her concerns over data centers.

“We are the people who built this community, and we intend to pass it down to our children,” Nikki Meador, 43, told the newspaper. “We deserve protection, not to be sacrificed for outside investment. Industrialization is irreversible.”

Meador’s concerns highlight both a growing protectionist streak in the GOP and a broader problem facing data centers. Many people oppose data centers, but many have a difficult time saying precisely why they oppose them. Ask people, and you’ll get all sorts of responses. Some will cite high water or electricity usage, while others say they are too loud.

None of these concerns is illegitimate per se. But each is more complicated than opponents acknowledge.

It’s true that data centers use plenty of water — 17 billion gallons in 2023, to be precise. But so do, to pick two economic sectors, golf courses and almond farming. When you crunch the numbers, you’ll find that golf courses use roughly 30 times as much water as data centers. Almond farming uses roughly 100 times as much. These numbers change if you account for indirect water consumption associated with data centers, but their water consumption still falls well below that of almond farming and golf courses.

One of the most common concerns surrounding data centers is that they drive up electricity prices. Ask anyone, and they’ll tell you it’s true — even though several studies show this isn’t the case. In fact, a recent paper found that data center growth from 2015 to 2024 actually caused average electricity prices to “fall modestly.”

“Despite prevailing sentiment,” the authors noted, “the finding is consistent with economic reasoning: existing large power system fixed costs, economies of scale in transmission and distribution, and declining unit costs for generation imply that durable demand growth lowers average prices.”

A more recent concern over data centers is that they make a lot of noise. Well, so do airports. This isn’t to minimize noise pollution, which is a real and valid concern. But the U.S. economic system has a robust legal framework for addressing negative externalities.

Data centers are like any other industry: They come with economic benefits and economic costs. This is the reality of trade-offs, which brings me back to the GOP.

Republicans say they want to “revive U.S. industry” and attract “outside investment.” Yet these are precisely what a growing chorus of Republican faithful are now hostile to, at least when it comes to data centers. This was always the danger, if an overlooked one, of embracing economic populism.

For years, it was primarily the Left that wanted to ignore trade-offs and simply ban things they didn’t like — from plastic straws to gas stoves to gasoline-powered cars. True, banning data centers might be popular. But by placing political success over sound economics, the GOP stands to emulate its political counterparts, who long championed harmful but popular policies such as rent control and minimum-wage laws.

To be fair, Texas is just one state. And there’s fortunately not yet any real momentum for a national moratorium on data centers. Yet the bipartisan hostility toward data centers is deeply troubling.

Data centers are hardly the first target of a modern moral panic. From fears of population growth to the garbage crisis of the 1980s, and from plastic and DDT to acid rain and ozone depletion, Americans have experienced many.

But Republicans and Democrats alike should beware: If Americans succumb to the latest moral panic and decide bans on data centers are sound economic policy, politicians chasing votes could do serious harm to the U.S. economy.

This article first appeared in The Washington Examiner.

In May, Sebastien Lai spoke about the deteriorating condition of his father, Jimmy Lai. For more than 2,000 days, the Hong Kong freedom fighter has been a prisoner of communist authorities. For much of that time, Lai has lived in solitary confinement in a six-foot cell without ventilation. Sebastien Lai said his father, who turns 79 in December, is beginning to lose his teeth and fingernails and is suffering from a heart ailment.

“This is an elderly man,” Sebastien Lai said. “If he’s not saved now, he’ll die in prison.”

Days after Sebastien Lai spoke to CBS News, Donald Trump traveled to Beijing to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping, marking the president’s first trip to China since 2017. In the Great Hall of the People, the two leaders discussed trade, Taiwan, AI, regional security, and the future of US-China relations.

Jimmy Lai was not mentioned, but Trump later said his case came up during a private conversation at Zhongnanhai, the Chinese leadership compound.

“I would say the response to that was not positive,” Trump told Fox News, later adding, “I did not feel optimistic.”

‘He’ll Be Easy to Get Out’

Whether Jimmy Lai is freed or dies in a Chinese prison remains uncertain.

The pro-democracy media tycoon received a 20-year prison sentence in February after being convicted under Hong Kong’s National Security Law, which effectively made it a crime to argue that Hong Kong is a separate, democratic system from mainland China.

Lai’s conviction is purely motivated by the totalitarian demands of China’s Stalinist-style government.. He is likely to die in prison if Trump cannot convince Xi to release the former publisher of the Apple Daily. And Trump’s May visit to China appears to have been a missed opportunity.

While in Beijing, Trump secured what the White House described as a “historic” trade breakthrough. Yet the author of The Art of the Deal apparently left without any assurances from Xi regarding Lai’s fate.

In fact, the visit may have been a setback. Trump’s pessimistic assessment marked a sharp turn from statements he made before the 2024 presidential election, when he suggested that securing Lai’s freedom would be a breeze.

“I’ll get him out,” Trump told radio host Hugh Hewitt. “He’ll be easy to get out.”

Many would not be surprised that securing Lai’s release has proven more difficult than Trump suggested on the campaign trail. The more troubling question is whether Trump remains committed to freeing the Hong Kong publisher, whose only “crime” was insisting that the Chinese government honor its “one country, two systems” pledge when sovereignty over Hong Kong was transferred from the United Kingdom in 1997.

Causing ‘Bedlam’?

Securing Lai’s release was always going to be more difficult than Trump suggested on the campaign trail. But now the question is whether the president remains committed to winning Lai’s freedom.

It’s not just that Trump’s optimistic tone vanished. Observers noted that after his Beijing trip, the president adopted CCP talking points, saying Lai’s release would be “tough” because he had caused “bedlam” in Hong Kong.

As scholar George Weigel observed in First Things, causing “bedlam” apparently means “encouraging and participating in peaceful demonstrations demanding that the Beijing regime honor the commitments to freedom it made when Hong Kong reverted to Chinese sovereignty in 1997.”

Politics requires tact, of course, but it is difficult to see how portraying Lai as a rabble-rouser rather than a peaceful Christian dissident resisting communist repression helps Lai or advances the cause of freedom, for which Lai is in prison .

Having grown up on the streets of Canton before fleeing to Hong Kong at age 12, Lai saw firsthand the value of liberty and the prosperity it made possible. He rose from utter poverty to become a billionaire, prospering in the clothing business before launching his pro-democracy newspaper. The only “bedlam” Lai caused stemmed from his resistance to China’s authoritarian regime as it stripped rights from Hong Kong.

In 2012, shortly after Xi Jinping’s rise, Communist officials quietly circulated a directive calling for an ideological campaign against “Western values,” including free speech, media freedom, and judicial independence. Over the next decade, the CCP would slowly tighten its grip on power in Hong Kong, destroying both economic and political freedom in the process.

The billionaire Lai could have simply fled Hong Kong. Instead, he opted to stay in his adopted country and peacefully resist CCP oppression.

“I don’t have a sense of fear,” Lai said shortly before his 2020 arrest. “Especially if I’m doing the right thing.”

The Art of the Deal?

Trump undoubtedly knows all this, which makes one wonder why he has echoed CCP talking points that portray Lai as some kind of political agitator.

It is not as if Trump lacks leverage. He has repeatedly shown a willingness to use executive power to extract concessions in negotiations with allies and adversaries alike. Yet when it comes to China—and Jimmy Lai in particular—he has shown little inclination to use that leverage.

Worse, recent events suggest the Chinese may be playing the game better.

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Trump allowed a 2020 emergency order sanctioning nine Hong Kong and mainland Chinese officials to expire. The CCP-controlled Hong Kong government welcomed the decision as a “positive shift” in American policy, but it’s unclear what the US got in return.

Trump has long portrayed himself as a master negotiator willing to confront powerful world leaders.

Whatever the reasons for the delay, Trump’s reputation may be more intertwined with Lai’s fate than he realizes.

Lai is, in the words of the Wall Street Journal, “the world’s most famous political prisoner.” He is a Solzhenitsyn for our time. A devout Christian who spends much of his time in prison sketching scenes from Christ’s crucifixion.

If Jimmy Lai dies in prison, it will be a human tragedy and a profound injustice. Yet Lai seems to understand that his death and suffering would have a greater purpose.

For Trump, however, Lai’s death would represent something starkly different. The president has long scorned weakness. And though it would be unfair to hold Trump personally responsible for Lai’s imprisonment—the responsibility lies with Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party—if Lai dies in captivity, it would signal a kind of political impotence.

Fortunately for Trump, he’s not the only world leader whose reputation is at stake. If Lai were to die in a communist cell, it would be an even greater stain on Xi and the Chinese government. Indeed, Weigel has reported that some Chinese officials may recognize the danger: according to sources, officials in the foreign ministry have favored a “convict and expel” strategy to remove a diplomatic headache for Beijing.

Sebastien Lai also appears to understand this. In May, he was asked what he’d like to hear Trump tell Xi.

“It’s just telling President Xi that it’s not to his benefit that my father dies in prison,” Sebastien Lai said. “My father symbolically is a hero to many people around the world. He’s a man who’s given up everything he has for freedom and democracy.”

President Trump is in a unique position to help Xi see this, especially with the Chinese premier expected to visit the US next month. The primary focus of the summit is expected to be trade. Trump should make it clear that any trade deal includes freedom for Lai, the man who represents the best of what Hong Kong was, a man who has proven himself an apostle of freedom and virtue.

But the president better find the courage soon. Time is running out — for Trump and Jimmy Lai.

This article was first published on Civitas Outlook.

In 1937, Boris Orman was working at a bakery in Russia when he shared a joke over tea with his colleague.

“Stalin was out swimming, but he began to drown. A peasant who was passing by jumped in and pulled him safely to shore,” the joke went, according to British writer Jonathan Waterlow. “Stalin asked the peasant what he would like as a reward. Realising whom he had saved, the peasant cried out: ‘Nothing! Just please don’t tell anyone I saved you!’”

The joke is hardly the funniest ever told, but Orman was nevertheless one of countless Russians in the Soviet Union who received a 10-year stint in a labor camp for uttering the jibe. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the great Russian writer who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, got off a bit easier. He received a mere eight-year sentence in the Gulag after Soviet authorities intercepted a letter he wrote to a friend in 1945 that made a crack about Stalin and criticized the Soviet system.

One might be tempted to think the Soviets just had really bad senses of humor, but there’s a reason totalitarians and authoritarians seek to suppress jokes.

History shows humor is a tool that empowers. It can fortify humans during dark and deadly times, and it can destroy an idea just as effectively as reason, though it’s arguably most powerful when it’s combined with reason.

The most famous such example might be Jonathan Swift’s classic essay A Modest Proposal, a masterpiece of satire that exposed the impoverished conditions of the time by saying poor Irish families could alleviate their condition by selling their excess children to rich people for food.

Combining humor with pointed social commentary is a strategy employed by countless comedians—old and new—including Eddie Murphy, George Carlin, Dave Chappelle, and Bill Burr.

Which brings me to Mike Judge.

Beavis and Butt-Head on White Privilege

Judge, a writer, animator, and director, is probably best known for Beavis and Butt-Head, an animated show that ran on MTV in the 1990s and was turned into a feature film, Beavis and Butt-Head Do America, released in 1996.

Since then, Beavis and Butt-Head have mostly been retired, as Judge turned to numerous other projects, including Office Space (1999), Idiocracy (2006), and the HBO hit show Silicon Valley (2014-2019). But Beavis and Butt-head—a pair of metal head morons who snicker at childish things and make crass observations about “babes” and “scoring”—are back.

In 2022, a new Beavis and Butt-Head movie came out, Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe.

The premise sounds silly—especially when Beavis and Butt-Head rehash the same crude jokes and antics from 30 years earlier (“I am Cornholio; I need TP for my bunghole”)—but that was precisely what made the movie appealing to audiences.

“This is one of the stupidest concepts for a Beavis and Butthead movie I can imagine,” one YouTube commenter said. “It’s perfect.”

Not all the jokes were rehashed, however. The movie also explored a theme Beavis and Butt-Head audiences in the 1990s had never heard of: white privilege. One scene showed Beavis and Butt-Head in college learning about “white privilege” from a professor.

“This is a classic case of white privilege,” the instructor explains. “And you both have it.”

The duo had no idea what white privilege is, but several members of their class were kind enough to explain it to them.

“So, white privilege is when people, particularly men, automatically assume they can take whatever they want,” one young woman explains.

“And they never have to worry about getting stopped by the police,” another chimes in.

“And they have the inside track for any jobs …”

You get the idea. The funniest part of the clip is that, unlike most people, Beavis and Butt-head are not offended or ashamed when they hear this. They are excited.

“Whoa,” Butt-head says. “And we have that?”

“You sure do,” the professor answers.

Naturally, Beavis and Butt-head decide to use this newly-discovered power, but things don’t go as planned.

CRT and White Privilege

For those less familiar with white privilege, it’s just one aspect of a larger intellectual movement known as Critical Race Theory (CRT). Prominent thinkers have explained at length why CRT is a dangerous and damaging philosophy, one that undermines individuality, fosters a victimhood mindset, and divides along racial lines instead of uniting us in our common humanity.

Making the philosophical case against CRT is important, but I don’t think I’ve seen a single scholarly article or lecture expose white privilege and its talking points as effectively as Mike Judge did in that two-minute Beavis and Butt-head clip.

Which brings me back to the power of humor.

Satire and humor still have the power to destroy ideas, perhaps more than ever. This is precisely why comedians like Dave Chappelle and sites like The Babylon Bee in recent years were targets of the woke movement, which spent a great deal of energy working to suppress speech that violates its dogmas on race, gender, and class.

Fortunately, today’s commentators in America don’t face prison sentences like Boris Orman and Alexander Solzhenitsyn did—or like many Europeans do today—when they make jokes criticizing the ascendant orthodoxy, but they still face risks.

A version of this article first appeared on FEE.org.

From time to time, I get asked a simple question: Who’s your favorite economist?

The question is natural enough for anyone who works at an organization dedicated to the teaching of economics, but it’s a surprisingly difficult question to answer because there are so many economists who’ve shaped my thoughts and perspectives.

Ultimately, Thomas Sowell and Henry Hazlitt are at the top of my list because—unlike most economists—both men showed tremendous talent as writers and storytellers on top of their economic acumen. (Also, each man wrote an economics book—Economics in One Lesson for Hazlitt, Basic Economics for Sowell—that is essential reading to anyone seriously pursuing economics.)

Unfortunately, that question—Who’s your favorite economist?—is one we rarely hear asked today, which is why it caught my attention when economist David Henderson brought it up on Sunday.

For years, Henderson, a professor of economics at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, has told people Mick Jagger—yes, we’re talking about the lead singer of the Rolling Stones—was partial to Friedrich Hayek. It turns out that Jagger studied econ at the London School of Economics before he abandoned his studies to pursue his music career. (Opportunity costs strike again.) And apparently before belting out hits like “Sympathy for the Devil,” “Paint it Black,” and “Gimme Shelter,” Jagger came to appreciate the insights of the Austrian economist who would later win a Nobel Prize.  

The problem was, for years Henderson couldn’t remember where he’d learned Jagger was a fan of Hayek, but that changed when a reader showed him a Saturday Night Live clip from February 1993.

The skit, somewhat amusingly, begins with Wayne and Garth discussing Jagger’s favorite Rolling Stones songs before the discussion switches gears toward economics.

GARTH: “Okay, I have a question. You went to the London School of Economics, right?”

JAGGER: “Yeah.”

GARTH: “Do you think it’s a good idea to stimulate fiscal growth through a sharp increase in government outlays for infrastructure?”

JAGGER: “Actually, as a disciple of Friedrich von Hayek, I’ve always been skeptical about the larger government involvement in economic stimulus. I’ve preferred a market oriented approach to, uh, government spending and increasing deficits.”

The discussion doesn’t quite end there. Garth says “I didn’t figure you for a Keynesian economist”—an odd comment, since Jagger clearly is not one (but maybe that’s part of the joke?). Moments later Jagger begins to elaborate on his economic philosophy, which soon puts Garth to sleep. (Author’s note: the clip in question is no longer available because of copyright restrictions.)

Monetary policy aside, there are at least two reasons we can believe Jagger was not joking when he said Hayek—a classical liberal who opposed central planning—was his favorite economist.

For one, Jagger is a clear individualist with, at minimum, a libertarian streak. In the early 1960s, Jagger gave reporters an impressive response after he was asked if he’s responsible for young people who decide to take drugs.

“People have been talking about responsibility for a long time now about pop singers generally, and how everyone in the public now has a responsibility,” Jagger commented. “I’m not quite sure this responsibility is as grave as they make out because I believe that individuals really have to make their own minds up.”

Second, we have evidence that Jagger might be a closet libertarian. William Rees-Mogg (1928–2012), the famed British journalist who was editor of The Times from 1967 to 1981, reportedly was horrified to discover that Jagger had libertarian principles. In a 2012 article, the Financial Times reported that Rees-Mogg interviewed Jagger and was “astonished to discover a ‘right-wing libertarian’ who insisted, ‘I don’t really want to format a new code of living, a new code of morals.’”

Apparently, Rees-Mogg had never heard the Rolling Stones song “I’m Free,” which opens with these lyrics.

I'm free to do what I want any old time

I'm free to do what I want any old time

These lyrics represent the essence of freedom, and it’s at the core of not just rock n’ roll but all art, which is fundamentally an exploration and expression of the human individual. It’s long been my belief that this is why so many artists—from Bob Dylan to Bob Marley and beyond—seem to identify with individualism and liberty over collectivism and control.

This is why when Mick Jagger says he’s “a disciple of Friedrich von Hayek” he should be taken at his word—even if it’s in a Wayne’s World skit.

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This article originally appeared on FEE.org.

On Aug. 6, 1945, the Enola Gay dropped “Little Boy” on Hiroshima, instantly killing tens of thousands and marking the first use of a nuclear weapon in warfare. Three days later, a second bomb, “Fat Man,” was dropped on Nagasaki.

Within days, Japan surrendered, bringing World War II to an end.

For most Americans, the bombings were greeted with celebration. Polls at the time revealed that nearly 70 percent of Americans said the bombing was a “good thing,” while just 17 percent said it was a “bad thing.”

In some respects, this is no surprise. Thanks to the bomb, the war was over. Japan, the nation that had blindsided the United States at Pearl Harbor nearly four years earlier, had finally been brought to its knees, forced to surrender unconditionally.

Watching these events unfold from England, a professor of Anglo-Saxon literature saw something very different.

‘Utter Folly’

In 1945, J.R.R. Tolkien was a professor of Old English at Oxford and author of “The Hobbit” (1937), a book that would eventually become one of the most influential works of fantasy literature ever written.

Having served as a British Army officer in the trenches of World War I, Tolkien understood firsthand the horrors of modern warfare. Perhaps because of this, he recoiled upon learning of a new weapon that could destroy entire cities.

“The news today about ‘Atomic bombs’ is so horrifying one is stunned,” he wrote to his son Christopher. “The utter folly of these lunatic physicists to consent to do such work for war-purposes: calmly plotting the destruction of the world!”

Tolkien was no pacifist, and he recognized that U.S. President Harry Truman’s decision to drop this new superweapon might have a silver lining. “Japan ought to cave in,” he admitted.

But even as he acknowledged the bomb’s immediate military value, Tolkien feared its long-term consequences. Humanity had crossed a threshold from which there would be no return.

“Such explosives in men’s hands,” he wrote, “while their moral and intellectual status is declining, is about as useful as giving out firearms to all inmates of a gaol and then saying that you hope ’this will ensure peace.’”

On ‘Babel-Builders’

Today, discussions over the atomic bomb usually involve whether it was morally justified to drop it on Japan. Unlike in 1945, Americans are very much split on the matter. Recent polling shows 35 percent say the bombings were justified, while 31 percent say they were not.

The fact that a full one-third of Americans say they’re not sure if the bombing was the right thing shows how morally complicated the matter is. (If you doubt this, consider that General Dwight Eisenhower and Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy opposed dropping the bomb on moral grounds and because they doubted its military necessity.)

What is less often asked is whether the bomb should have been developed at all. The question is easy to dismiss. After all, Nazi Germany launched its own nuclear research program in April 1939. Had the Allies declined to pursue the bomb, they might have handed history’s most destructive weapon to Adolf Hitler.

There is also a philosophical hurdle. Science has long been celebrated as the engine of human progress. To oppose a scientific breakthrough on ethical grounds has a whiff of Luddism—a kind of rejection of progress itself.

Tolkien, once again, saw things differently. Though admitting “we’re all in God’s hands” now, he offered a word of caution about humanity’s growing faith in its own power. “He does not look kindly on Babel-builders,” he told Christopher.

By invoking the famous Old Testament story of the Tower of Babel, in which God confused and scattered the nations for attempting to reach the heavens, Tolkien was warning against a perennial temptation: placing human ingenuity and knowledge above moral wisdom.

The theme of man’s lust for knowledge and power would be developed in his next literary masterpiece.

‘An Allegory of Our Own Time’

In 1942, as the Manhattan Project was beginning in the United States, Tolkien was developing the core narrative of what would become “The Fellowship of the Ring,” the first volume of his “The Lord of the Rings” epic.

Though the book would not be published until 1954, Tolkien spent much of the 1940s writing and revising the manuscript. The story follows a fellowship of nine companions who embark on a perilous quest to destroy the One Ring, a weapon of immense power that threatens to destroy all of Middle-earth.

“You can make the Ring an allegory of our own time, if you like,” he wrote, “an allegory of the inevitable fate that awaits all attempts to defeat evil power by power.”

These words help explain why Tolkien viewed the atomic bomb with such horror. It was a weapon created to “defeat evil power” through overwhelming force. In Tolkien’s view, the danger was not simply the weapon itself, but the modern faith in power and the belief that it could be controlled by those who possessed it.

None of this is to say the Ring of Power is an allegory for nuclear weapons. It is not. Tolkien himself made that quite clear in a BBC interview in the 1960s. Yet a central lesson of his literary masterpiece is that some forms of power are simply too great for humans to possess.

This article first appeared in The Epoch Times.

I often dream about getting off the grid. Buying a farm somewhere and moving my family to some remote place where we’d raise chickens, while we continue to work.

Besides the fact that I don’t know anything about farming, the dream is not a total fantasy. It’s something we could probably do, considering my wife and I both work remotely (assuming we have internet).

What’s striking is how many people I know who share this dream. Numerous friends I speak with talk of their own fantasy, and some of them are taking concrete steps to make their dream a reality.

At some point it occurred to me my dream was neither particularly unique or new. Many people reading this article probably identify with it to some extent, and it was even the theme of a popular 1980s movie.

The film My Dinner With Andre (1981) explores the phenomenon I described above, as well as the conditions of our society that drive people to feeling this way.

My Dinner With Andre is one of the strangest movies you’ll ever watch, but it’s a very good one. (It was also a huge success, making more than $5 million at the box office on a $475,000 budget.) An American comedy-drama directed by Louis Malle, My Dinner With Andre follows the story of two old friends, Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn, who reunite for dinner at a restaurant. (Readers will likely recognize Shawn, a famous actor who played Vizzini in The Princess Bride. Andre is less well-known, but I remember him from Demolition Man.)

The movie centers around their conversation as they discuss their lives and experiences since they last met. Through their dialague, we get an insight into the different paths their lives have taken and how it has shaped them as individuals. The film offers an intimate look at friendship, life choices, and the power of conversations to shape our perspectives.

That a movie that involves two men sitting together in a restaurant having dinner and discussing their lives can be high entertainment might surprise some but people. But it is, and the movie is high entertainment because the dialogue is so engrossing. So real. The entire conversation “Wally” and Andre is captivating, but the most striking part comes when Andre talks about the feeling I described above.

See, actually, for two or three years now, Chiquita and I have had this very unpleasant feeling that we really should get out. That we really should feel like Jews in Germany in the late thirties. Get out of here. Of course, the problem is where to go, cause it seems quite obvious that the whole world is going in the same direction. See, I think it’s quite possible that the 1960s represented the last burst of the human being before he was extinguished and that this is the beginning of the rest of the future now, and that, from now on there’ll simply be all these robots walking around, feeling nothing, thinking nothing.

What is driving Andre to feel this way? It’s the belief—and I know how crazy it sounds—this he’s living in a society that has become an Orwellian nightmare, “a self-perpetuating, unconscious form of brainwashing created by a world totalitarian government based on money.”

I’ve posted a clip of the video below and a transcription of the conversation for your convenience. Watch it and think about it. Then ask yourself if America has gotten better since 1981 or worse.

I share this not to frighten people or make them feel hopeless. On the contrary, I share it to make people hopeful. To remind everyone (including myself) that we’re not robots; we’re humans with agency. We don’t have to live in the Matrix. We can leave it.

We may not have the power to change the world, but we have the power over ourselves and choices. That’s a reassuring truth for body and soul.

Andre: Okay. Yes. We’re bored. We’re all bored now. But has it every occurred to you, Wally, that the process that creates this boredom that we see in the world now may very well be a self-perpetuating, unconscious form of brainwashing created by a world totalitarian government based on money? And that all of this is much more dangerous than one thinks. And it’s not just a question of individual survival, Wally, but that somebody who’s bored is asleep? And somebody who’s asleep will not say “no”?

Andre: See, I keep meeting these people, I mean, uh, just a few days ago I met this man whom I greatly admire, he’s a Swedish physicist, Gustav Björnstrand, and he told me that he no longer watches television, he doesn’t read newspapers, and he doesn’t read magazines. He’s completely cut them out of his life because he really does feel that we’re living in some kind of Orwellian nightmare now, and that everything that you hear now contributes to turning you into a robot.

Andre: And when I was at Findhorn, I met this extraordinary English tree expert who had devoted his life to saving trees. Just got back from Washington, lobbying to save the redwoods, he’s 84 years old, and he always travels with a backpack cause he never knows where he’s gonna be tomorrow. And when I met him at Findhorn, he said to me, “Where are you from?” and I said, “New York.” He said, “Ah, New York. Yes, that’s a very interesting place. Do you know a lot of New Yorkers who keep talking about the fact that they want to leave, but never do?” And I said, “Oh, yes.” And he said, “Why do you think they don’t leave?” I gave him different banal theories. He said, “Oh, I don’t think it’s that way at all.”

Andre: He said, “I think that New York is the new model for the new concentration camp, where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves, and the inmates are the guards, and they have this pride in this thing they’ve built. They’ve built their own prison. And so they exist in a state of schizophrenia where they are both guards and prisoners, and as a result, they no longer have, having been lobotomized, the capacity to leave the prison they’ve made or to even see it as a prison.” And then he went into his pocket, and he took out a seed for a tree and he said, “This is a pine tree.” He put it in my hand and he said, “Escape before it’s too late.”

Andre: See, actually, for two or three years now, Chiquita and I have had this very unpleasant feeling that we really should get out. That we really should feel like Jews in Germany in the late thirties. Get out of here. Of course, the problem is where to go, cause it seems quite obvious that the whole world is going in the same direction. See, I think it’s quite possible that the 1960s represented the last burst of the human being before he was extinguished and that this is the beginning of the rest of the future now, and that, from now on there’ll simply be all these robots walking around, feeling nothing, thinking nothing. And there’ll be nobody left almost to remind them that there once was a species called a human being, with feelings and thoughts, and that history and memory are right now being erased, and soon nobody will really remember that life existed on the planet.

Andre: Now, of course, Björnstrand feels that there’s really almost no hope, and that we’re probably going back to a very savage, lawless, terrifying period. 

In 2021, a publicist pitched me on a story on the economics of OnlyFans. He wanted me to interview his client, a semi-famous performer who was making millions of dollars a year sharing content on the subscription-based online platform.

At the time, I didn’t know much about OnlyFans. I knew that many women were creating risqué content there, but OnlyFans was also in the middle of a PR blitz that said the company was moving away from strong sexual content.

I was curious, so I said I’d do the interview.

A few days later, I started researching my subject and quickly realized her performances involved more than stripteases. For many writers, the realization that the subject they were about to interview was making pornographic content would not be a problem. But for me, it presented issues—some ethical and others practical (I was writing for an online publication that was, in some ways, conservative).

After thinking it over for a few days, I decided to proceed with my interview with Brin (a pseudonym).

We met over Zoom and spoke for an hour. In some ways, it was like meeting a celebrity. I’ve interviewed famous subjects in the past—a member of the Eagles, a Marvel movie star, several politicians, Ken Burns, etc.—and it felt the same.

Brin was in her twenties and beautiful. She had already amassed more than ten million dollars in her short career. I knew from the photos her PR rep had sent (and my own research) that Brin was attractive, but she was also smart and charming, something I hadn’t expected. (I’ve seen Boogie Nights, and was expecting someone more like Roller Girl.)

Like other interviews with celebrities over the years, I did my best to pretend I knew what I was doing. Be friendly but professional. Ask important questions. Maintain good eye contact and nod when appropriate.

Brin was comfortable talking about herself and her industry. She had a boyfriend who was also a business partner, and OnlyFans was not their first business endeavor. (Their previous ventures were not in sex work.) She spoke of her industry in such glowing terms—adjectives like “empowering” were peppered throughout—that at times I found myself nodding along.

The interview went well, overall. But the story was killed for reasons I’ll explain later.

$630 Million in Dividends

Since my interview with Brin, OnlyFans has only grown. It’s not an exaggeration to say the brand is a household name. Even people who have never visited the website have likely heard of performers such as Lily Phillips, the OnlyFans model from the UK who made history (and went viral) after having sex with 101 men in one day.

To say that the growth of OnlyFans has been meteoric might sound like a cliché, but it’s true.

In 2017, the platform had 100,000 registered users. By 2021, the company boasted 188 million. In 2026, the estimate is close to 500 million.

The revenue growth has been just as impressive. In 2019, gross annual revenue stood at $270 million. By 2023, the total was $6.6 billion. The 2026 estimated revenue is $8 billion.

Performers like Phillips and Sophie Rain (pictured below), the 20-year-old professed Christian who grossed $43 million in a single year while advertising sexual purity, have made fortunes off the platform. Industry reports say that some 300 performers make more than $1 million annually—and they are not the only ones making bank.

Content creators on OnlyFans retain 80 percent of their earnings, while the remaining 20 percent goes to the platform, which had been owned by Ukrainian-American entrepreneur Leonid Radvinsky. A computer programmer by training, Radvinsky acquired a controlling stake in 2018 and by 2024 had collected $630 million in dividends, according to The Financial Times.

Radvinsky died in March 2026 following what his family described as a lengthy battle with cancer. He was 43.

Inflation and Decay

The rise of OnlyFans occurred at a unique time in history.

In 2020, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, governments worldwide implemented stay-at-home orders while simultaneously injecting massive amounts of money into the economy. Over the span of just 26 months, the Federal Reserve expanded the money supply by nearly 50 percent, pouring $7 trillion into the economy from February 2020 to April 2022.

Everyone knows what happened next. The price of assets exploded. Stocks went up. The price of land and gold and cryptocurrencies went up. Inflation followed. This is a familiar cycle—and a predictable one—to people familiar with the Quantity Theory of Money.

The idea that “easy money” breeds inflation and financial instability is hardly new. What has been explored less is the idea that loose monetary policy breeds loose morals. The famed economics writer Henry Hazlitt argued, “there is a striking decline in both public and private morality” during every great inflation.

Some might argue that the explosion of OnlyFans occurred merely by coincidence during the largest monetary expansion in U.S. history—and they might be right. But the economic historian Andrew Dickson White (1832–1932) might disagree if he were alive today.

White, a Yale-educated abolitionist and diplomat who co-founded Cornell University, was deeply interested in French history and collected a wealth of primary sources during his travels through Europe. In 1912, he published Fiat Money Inflation in France, a historical analysis of France’s disastrous experiment with paper money during the French Revolution.

White concluded that the erosion of sound money led to a corresponding “breaking down of the morals” of France.

“Out of the inflation of prices grew a speculating class; and, in the complete uncertainty as to the future, all business became a game of chance, and all businessmen, gamblers. In city centers came a quick growth of stockjobbers and speculators. ... In this mania for yielding to present enjoyment rather than providing for future comfort were the seeds of new growths of wretchedness...”

Performers, Consumers, and Vice

To be sure, the idea that monetary policy in any way helped produce the rise of OnlyFans is purely speculative. I’m not offering a model. I am merely pointing out that some prominent economists have historically linked loose monetary policy with loose morals.

And even this argument raises its own challenge: morality is inherently subjective and difficult to define, and economics offers little direct guidance on the matter.

While economics helps us understand incentives, trade-offs, and consequences—all essential to analyzing human behavior—questions of morality belong primarily to religion, ethics, and philosophy. Markets themselves are neither moral nor immoral. They are simply mechanisms through which people exchange goods and services, a point prominent economists have long recognized.

“It is not the fault of the entrepreneurs that the consumers, the people, the common man, prefer liquor,” the economist Ludwig von Mises observed, “to Bibles and detective stories to serious books, and that governments prefer guns to butter.”

In this sense, OnlyFans is simply offering a service in high demand, “providing the consumers with those things they ask for most intensely,” in Mises’s words.

This brings me back to the economics of OnlyFans. Estimates suggest that roughly 1.4 million American women perform on the platform. It would be easy to attribute OnlyFans’ success solely to the morals of those selling sexual content. But that ignores the other side of the market: the enormous demand for what they’re selling.

Performers can earn millions of dollars only because untold numbers of consumers are willing to put their credit cards down to pay for their services. To borrow Mises’s reasoning, it is not the fault of performers that consumers prefer OnlyFans to Substack.

This is not to encourage or condone the sex trade, but to illustrate that performers are responding to powerful financial incentives created by consumer demand. If there is a moral problem with OnlyFans, it does not rest solely with performers. It also rests with the consumers who sustain the market.

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Sir Karl Raimund Popper (1902-1994) is considered one of the greatest minds of the 20th century.

Born into an upper middle-class family in Vienna on this day (July 28) in 1902, Popper grew up surrounded by books and learning. His father was a bibliophile, and the younger Popper inherited this love for the written word. Though his family was of Jewish ancestry, Popper was baptized in the Lutheran Church; but as a young man he grew more interested in politics than religion. He flirted with Marxism before embracing an ideology of social liberalism that he carried throughout his life.

He enrolled in university in 1922, received a doctorate in psychology in 1928, and shortly thereafter published his theory on falsifiability, which defined testability of a hypothesis as a criterion of science. After a stint at the University of New Zealand, where he served as a lecturer in philosophy, Popper became professor of logic and the scientific method at the University of London.

Popper died in 1994 from organ failure associated with cancer. He is remembered for his prolific writing, penetrating mind (that was as broad as it was deep), and independent thinking.

Below are a few selections of his writing to serve as food for thought.

1. “There is an almost universal tendency, perhaps an inborn tendency, to suspect the good faith of a man who holds opinions that differ from our own opinions.” – As quoted in On the Barricades: Religion and Free Inquiry in Conflict (1989)
 
2. “Philosophers should consider the fact that the greatest happiness principle can easily be made an excuse for a benevolent dictatorship.” – As quoted in 1,001 Pearls of Wisdom (2006) 
 
3. “No rational argument will have a rational effect on a man who does not want to adopt a rational attitude.” – The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945)
 
4. “[W]e do not choose political freedom because it promises us this or that. We choose it because it makes possible the only dignified form of human coexistence, the only form in which we can be fully responsible for ourselves.” – (1958)
 
5. “True ignorance is not the absence of knowledge, but the refusal to acquire it.” – As quoted in “In Our Time’s Greatest Philosopher Vote” on In Our Time.
 
6. “The genuine rationalist does not think that he or anyone else is in possession of the truth; nor does he think that mere criticism as such helps us achieve new ideas. But he does think that, in the sphere of ideas, only critical discussion can help us sort the wheat from the chaff.” – All Life is Problem Solving (1999)
 
7. “You can choose whatever name you like for the two types of government. I personally call the type of government which can be removed without violence ‘democracy,’ and the other ‘tyranny.’” – As quoted in Freedom: A New Analysis (1954)
 
8. “It seems to me certain that more people are killed out of righteous stupidity than out of wickedness.” – Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (1963)
 
9. “Since we can never know anything for sure, it is simply not worth searching for certainty; but it is well worth searching for truth; and we do this chiefly by searching for mistakes, so that we have to correct them.” – In Search of a Better World (1984)
 
10. “The true Enlightenment thinker, the true rationalist, never wants to talk anyone into anything. No, he does not even want to convince; all the time he is aware that he may be wrong. Above all, he values the intellectual independence of others too highly to want to convince them in important matters.” – On Freedom (1958)
 
11. “If we are uncritical we shall always find what we want: we shall look for, and find, confirmations, and we shall look away from, and not see, whatever might be dangerous to our pet theories.” – The Poverty of Historicism (1957)
 
12. “If God had wanted to put everything into the universe from the beginning, He would have created a universe without change, without organisms and evolution, and without man and man’s experience of change. But he seems to have thought that a live universe with events unexpected even by Himself would be more interesting than a dead one.” – As quoted in Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes (1984)

The British Prime Minister’s famous quip captured an underlying truth: Socialism makes people poorer. By seeking to redistribute wealth rather than create it, socialist economies weaken the incentives and entrepreneurship that drive prosperity. Indeed, decades of economic research show that countries with greater economic freedom and stronger private property rights are wealthier than those built around central planning and state ownership.

Yet recent events in Nicaragua are a reminder that empty shelves and lower living standards are not the only problems with socialism. Earlier this week, Nicaragua’s longtime socialist leader, Daniel Ortega, announced that the country would abandon democratic elections.

Considering his intellectual influences, the result is no surprise.

Ortega, the son of a shoemaker, first came to power in 1979 after dropping out of law school to join the Sandinista National Liberation Front, a socialist revolutionary movement. He became an unapologetic disciple not just of Karl Marx but also of Vladimir Lenin, the Bolshevik revolutionary who brought terror as well as revolution to Russia.

“I admire Marx, I respect Marx, as I also admire and respect Lenin,” Ortega told the Los Angeles Times in the 1980s.

Like the Bolsheviks, Ortega had little hesitation about expropriating private property, helping himself to the luxurious mansion of a wealthy banker. Throughout the 1980s, Ortega implemented a familiar socialist playbook: nationalizing industries, redistributing wealth, and radically reallocating land, all while enjoying the spoils of what capitalists had built.

President Ronald Reagan famously dismissed Ortega as a “dictator in designer glasses.” Yet many argued Ortega was a reformer disinterested in personal power.

“He’s a man totally dedicated to the cause,” one diplomat told the Los Angeles Times in 1986, “and his life is given up to that cause. He’s not power-hungry for himself, for his own personal benefit.”

Yet the results of Ortega’s socialist policies were undeniably bleak.

In 1980, when the Sandinista government began implementing its reforms, Nicaragua’s per capita GDP was $659 (in current U.S. dollars), according to World Bank data. By the time he was voted out of office in 1990, it had fallen to $242.50.

This dismal economic performance, a 60% decline in per capita GDP, is no doubt why Ortega spent the next 16 years out of political power, losing elections in 1995 and 2001.

During this time, however, the former revolutionary underwent a transformation. Ortega abandoned the revolutionary Marxist slogans and the olive green uniforms. Instead, he spoke of unity and reconciliation, of aid to the poor and healthcare. He even became a “social conservative.”

Ortega’s pivot from Marxist revolutionary to “democratic socialist” paid off.

He returned to power in 2007 and was re-elected in 2011 after changing the constitution to overstay his term limit.

If Ortega’s first act illustrated socialism’s central failure — it makes people poor — his political rebirth revealed another: Socialism’s tendency toward authoritarianism.

In 2017, Ortega was sworn in a third time as president, with his wife serving as vice president. From there, things only got worse. In the spring of 2018, attempts to reform the country’s pension system were met with riots, followed by a brutal crackdown by Ortega’s forces. Hundreds were killed, including many university students.

In the aftermath, Ortega abandoned even the pretense of political freedom. His 2021 reelection, his fourth consecutive electoral victory, was denounced by international leaders as a sham after his government imprisoned or barred opposition candidates. A 2024 United Nations report noted the government continues “to persecute not only those who express dissenting opinions” but anyone “who does not fall directly under their control.”

Nicaragua’s descent fits a familiar pattern. The great socialist experiments of the 20th century confirmed that Marx’s economic vision was a recipe for poverty. After Castro took power, Cuba’s economy stagnated. Vietnam became the poorest country in the world after Saigon fell and its socialist blueprint was implemented. By the 1980s, reformers in the Soviet empire marveled at the abundance of an ordinary U.S. grocery store.

Yet socialism doesn’t just make people poorer. It’s also a recipe for tyranny, because it’s an economic system that concentrates power in the state.

Ortega will go down in history as yet another socialist leader who rose to power claiming to serve the proletariat, yet failed the power test. And Nicaragua’s sad plight is a reminder of Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman’s warning: Economic freedom is a necessary ingredient of political freedom.

As America experiences its own revival of socialist ideas, Nicaragua provides yet another reminder that adding “democratic” to socialism does not render it benign.

Designer glasses may change socialism’s appearance, but not its deadly consequences.

This article originally appeared in the Washington Examiner.

Researchers keep learning more about the benefits of book reading, which are so numerous it would be mundane to list them here. 

The problem is that many people struggle to read books. They are too easily distracted (a problem greater today than ever) or quickly grow tired. This problem is more acute if the reading is difficult and requires a bit more labor.

Our instinct in these situations is to plow through our fatigue or distraction and continue reading.

The French thinker Montaigne had a different strategy. He too, it turns out, was prone to distraction and fatigue when he’d read.

“My sight becomes confused and dispersed,” he wrote in his great work Essays. “I have to withdraw it and apply it again by starts…”

But Montaigne didn’t simply push ahead. He had a different tactic. 

If I encounter difficulties in reading, I do not gnaw my nails over them; I leave them there, after making one or two attacks on them. If I planted myself in them, I would lose both myself and my time; for I have an impulsive mind. What I do not see by the first attack, I see less by persisting. … If this book wearies me, I take up another.”   

This is good advice. As a young man, I often forced myself to finish a book simply because I had started it. The problem with this is that I often completed books that were no longer stimulating my mind. I was reading words on a page, but those words were no longer serving as intellectual nourishment for my mind.

It’s my hunch that more people would enjoy book reading and the many benefits that accompany it if they took up the same approach as Montaigne, a writer who inspired Shakespeare, among others. (In fact, several lines in Shakespeare’s play “The Tempest” were lifted directly from Montaigne’s essay “Of the Cannibals.”)

Reading need not be easy. But if one finds a book neither engaging nor stimulating, one might be better served by simply picking up something else for a while.

On September 25, 1780, George Washington was traveling through the Hudson Valley with a retinue of troops on his way to West Point, the fortified military post that had been under Benedict Arnold’s command since the summer.

Arnold was headquartered at the home of Col. Beverley Robinson when aides Alexander Hamilton and James McHenry arrived to inform him of Washington’s impending arrival. Arnold welcomed the officers, but shortly afterward, a dispatcher arrived with news that a spy had been seized north of New York City. Suddenly agitated, Arnold rose and departed, leaving a puzzled Hamilton and McHenry behind to await Washington.

When the commander-in-chief arrived, the men ate breakfast. Washington then crossed the Hudson River to inspect West Point, where he found the defenses languishing. There was no sign of Arnold.

Perplexed, Washington returned to the Robinson House, where he was handed a stack of dispatches, including papers taken from the captured spy, “John Anderson.”

Later, Hamilton and the Marquis de Lafayette returned to the Robinson House and, according to historian Ron Chernow, found the normally unflappable Washington “fighting back tears.”

“Arnold has betrayed us,” Washington whispered. “Whom can we trust now?”

‘Treason of the Blackest Dye’

Nearly 250 years after he led the heroic charge that turned the tide at the pivotal Battle of Saratoga, Arnold’s name remains synonymous with treachery.

The documents found in the boot of “John Anderson” — the alias of British Maj. John André — proved that Arnold had committed “treason of the blackest dye.” He would later publish a public letter admitting his guilt in a vain attempt to justify his actions.

Arnold’s betrayal has become part of American lore, a story nearly every schoolchild encounters. Yet the reasons for his treason remain a subject of debate.

The most common explanation is that Arnold grew embittered after Congress denied him a promotion despite his battlefield heroism. Although he was promoted to major general in May 1777 following the Battle of Ridgefield — where he led militia against superior British forces — several less-experienced generals had been elevated ahead of him. The decision surprised George Washington and convinced Arnold that political favoritism was shaping promotion decisions.

Additionally, the politically connected Horatio Gates, Arnold’s rival, received a medal for his leadership at Saratoga, though he’d been largely absent from the battlefield. The honor rankled Arnold, who suffered a second serious leg injury during the fighting when a British musket ball struck near his knee. The same gout-ridden leg had previously been wounded at the Battle of Quebec.

Promotions were not Arnold’s only bitter feud with Congress. While he served as military governor of Philadelphia following his injury, Congress accused him of corruption. Though a court-martial acquitted him of all serious charges, Arnold seethed over the accusations.

In his famous “Letter to the Inhabitants of America” (1780), Arnold refers to a group of men whose “Enmity... I prefer to their applause.” He was likely referring to members of the Continental Congress whose accusations and slights had wounded his pride.

‘The Corrupting Biblical Eve’?

All these examples help explain why Arnold, once an ardent patriot, committed treason in the basest of fashions: offering West Point to the British in exchange for a military pension.

But a second theory exists that is more disputed among historians. It involves Arnold’s second wife, Margaret “Peggy” Shippen, whom he married the year before he committed treason. (His first wife had died prematurely in 1775.)

Not yet 20, Shippen was attractive and came from a Loyalist family in Philadelphia — a city the British captured in 1777. During the nine months the city was Crown control, the Shippen home became a magnet for social gatherings among Loyalists and British officers. Some of the parties included a British major — John André, the very spy whom Washington’s forces later captured for conspiring with Arnold. (André was hanged in 1780, a move that caused a rift between George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, who believed André deserved a more gentlemanly death.)

Peggy Shippen’s role in the greatest treason in American history remains debated. The historian James Kirby Martin, author of Benedict Arnold, Revolutionary Hero: An American Warrior Reconsidered, argued that portrayals of Shippen “as the corrupting biblical Eve” who seduced her husband into betraying his country are false.

“What Peggy had were contacts with British officers, including John André, and it’s my opinion that she offered those contacts to Benedict Arnold whose anger led him to begin communications with the British,” wrote Martin.

Others disagree.

W. D. Wetherell, a longtime writer for the New York Times and The Atlantic, summed up Arnold’s betrayal in four words.

“Married the wrong person,” said Wetherell, who also described Arnold as among the hardest of human beings to understand in history.

Privy to the Plot

Historians continue to debate what ultimately drove Benedict Arnold to betray his country. Was it the influence of his young, attractive, Loyalist wife, or did accusations of corruption and repeated promotional slights prove too much for his pride to bear? Or was it some combination?

While there is no single answer, Wetherell’s assertion that Arnold “married the wrong person” rings true in light of the historical record. That record, however, suggests that Peggy Shippen was less corrupting Eve than Lady Macbeth.

In his prize-winning biography of Alexander Hamilton, historian Ron Chernow makes clear that Peggy Shippen had a devious streak and was far from a passive participant in Arnold’s treason.

On the day the plot was exposed, Hamilton found Peggy Arnold shrieking and babbling incoherently in the Robinson House, “in a gauzy morning gown with disheveled hair,” raving that soldiers were going to murder her son. Her hysterical behavior continued into the evening. It was “a command performance,” Chernow writes, an act designed to convince Washington and Hamilton that she was suffering a mental breakdown over her husband’s treason. The ruse worked on both men, who saw Peggy as a victim in her husband’s scheme.

“To their gullible minds, this behavior was proof that she must be a blameless victim of Arnold’s perfidy,” Chernow writes. “In fact, she had been privy to the plot, having acted as conduit for some of her husband’s correspondence with the British, and played her mad scene to perfection.”

The Character Test

Ultimately, the causes of Arnold’s treason do not really matter.

In either case, he betrayed a cause he once cherished, driven by personal ambition and selfish desire. One reason Arnold’s betrayal was so devastating to the cause was that men like Washington and Hamilton regarded him as a genuine patriot. His military record was exemplary, and his courage on the battlefield was nearly unmatched. The idea that such a man could sell out to the British — for a price of £20,000 (half a million dollars in today’s currency) — was almost unthinkable.

Whatever forces shaped Arnold’s decision, his treason ultimately stemmed from the same source: a failure of character.

Few historians today dispute the consensus that Arnold was “shabbily treated” by the Continental Congress. Yet one of the central tests of character is the ability to subordinate personal ambition and wounded pride to a cause greater than oneself.

Such talk may seem quaint today, but individual character is essential to liberty — a truth the Founders knew well.

“Give up money, give up fame, give up science, give up the earth itself and all it contains, rather than do an immoral act,” Thomas Jefferson wrote. “And never suppose, that in any possible situation, or under any circumstances, it is best for you to do a dishonorable thing, however slightly so it may appear to you.”

Arnold failed that test. For that reason, nearly 250 years later, his name remains synonymous with treason.

This article was first published by The Civitas Institute.

The classicist Edith Hamilton (1867-1963) once described how Athens fell in just a single page. It comes from her book The Echo of Greece.

Any of this sound familiar?

"What the people wanted was a government which would provide a comfortable life for them, and with this as the foremost object ideas of freedom and self-reliance and service to the community were obscured to the point of disappearing.

Athens was more and more looked on as a co-operative business possessed of great wealth in which all citizens had a right to share…. Athens had reached the point of rejecting independence, and the freedom she now wanted was freedom from responsibility. There could be only one result…. If men insisted on being free from the burden of a life that was self-dependent and also responsible for the common good, they would cease to be free at all. Responsibility was the price every man must pay for freedom. It was to be had on no other terms."

I’m familiar with Hamilton because FEE’s longtime president (and current president emeritus), Larry Reed, wrote a splendid article about her in 2021, explaining why Hamilton feared the decline of individualism more than atomic bombs.

Here is some biographical information on her.

“Born in Dresden, Germany to American parents, [Hamilton] grew up in Ft. Wayne, Indiana. Her mother and father desired the best education for their five children. They quickly realized that it was not to be found in the public schools. Edith and her three sisters and one brother were all homeschooled, and each one went on to become an accomplished professional.

Alice, for instance, achieved prominence as an authority in industrial toxicology and was the first female appointed to a faculty post at Harvard University. Norah was a pioneer in Art Education for underprivileged children at Hull House in Chicago and in New York City. Margaret was an eminent educator and biochemist. Arthur was an author, professor of Spanish, and assistant dean for foreign students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Edith earned honorary doctorates from Yale, the University of Rochester, and the University of Pennsylvania. Whoever said home schoolers are not properly educated or “socialized” never met the Hamiltons (or any of the many home school families I’ve known).

Edith served for 26 years in various capacities, including head administrator, for the Bryn Mawr School, a college preparatory institution for girls in Baltimore, Maryland. After retiring in her mid 50s in 1922, she decided to start a new career as a writer, one that would allow her to explore a lifelong passion for ancient Greece.

Her first book, The Greek Way, appeared in 1930 when she was 62. Over the next three decades, she would earn a worldwide reputation as an authority on the ancients. The Greek Way was a huge success, as were her later books such as The Roman Way (1932), The Prophets of Israel (1936) and Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes (1942). By 1957, nearly five million copies of Mythology alone had been sold.

She loved the ancient Greeks because like her, they loved the mind of the individual. ‘The Greeks were the first intellectualists,” she maintained. ‘In a world where the irrational had played the chief role, they came forward as the protagonists of the mind.’”

If you’re wondering why Greece emerged as the preeminent culture of the ancient world, I think you have part of your answer there. Here is a second, equally important part highlighted by Larry.

“To Edith Hamilton, the mind was each individual human being’s most unique and precious possession. She would be horrified by the notion of ‘the Borg’ in the Star Trek fictional universe. It postulated a single ‘hive mind’ to which humans would be subordinate and obedient. To her, the fact that we each have a mind of our own leads to one inescapable conclusion—namely, that to be fully human, we must be both free and responsible. She was a stalwart friend of the individual—his mind, his rights, and his freedom.”

There are no doubt other reasons why Greece thrived, but I think these are the biggest two reasons: they were a culture built on reason and individualism. Free trade, freedom, and self-reliance followed.

When freedom and self-reliance were replaced by a yearning for government to create “a comfortable life for them,” well, as Hamilton said, “there could be only one result….”

Summer blockbusters are back. Thanks to a slew of hits, Hollywood is eyeing its first $10 billion year since before the pandemic.

As a movie lover, this is welcome news to me. Stories are important to humans. They shape us, inspire us, and teach us what it means to be human (at least when they’re done right).

But can Hollywood still do this? I’m not sure it can.

I recently saw two of the summer’s hits—Disclosure Day and Masters of the Universe. Neither film was great, but to my surprise, Masters of the Universe was a much better film than Steven Spielberg’s latest effort.

Disclosure Day, which I saw with my two sons (ages 12 and 9), is a slow burn and never quite lands after it finally gets off the ground. The film follows a cybersecurity specialist (Some Guy) and a television meteorologist (Emily Blunt) who become entangled in a government conspiracy to conceal decades of extraterrestrial contact, racing to expose the truth before a shadowy defense contractor silences them as the world teeters on the brink of global war.

The movie explores some interesting ideas involving the intersection of extraterrestrial life and faith, but it’s not enough to save the movie or make us care about the characters. My youngest son kept grabbing my wrist to look at my watch, a reflex I had to fight myself several times during the film.

“You told me this was an alien movie,” he said as we left the cinema.

Skip this one.

Masters of the Universe is a better flick. And it seems to be picking up steam after a soft opening, enough to have already landed a sequel.

I grew up watching He-Man and playing with the toys. I had Castle Grayskull, and Ram-Man was my favorite action figure (after He-Man). The movie stays largely faithful to the characters from the original cartoon (minus Orko), though much of the story unfolds on Earth.

The plot is simple: After Skeletor invades Eternia, Prince Adam—the long-lost heir to the throne who has spent years living an ordinary life on Earth—must reclaim the Sword of Power and return home to confront the evil warlock.

Read more

On Thursday, Minnesota daycare owner Fahima Mahamud pleaded guilty to wire fraud and conspiracy charges, admitting she scammed a federal childcare assistance program. (She reportedly used the money to buy real estate.)

Prosecutors said Mahamud stole more than $4.6 million through false claims to the federal Child Care Assistance Program. Her daycare also collected some $850,000 from Minnesota’s Feeding Our Future program by falsely claiming to serve tens of thousands of meals each month.

Mahamud’s daycare, Future Leaders Early Learning Center in Minneapolis, might be familiar to readers. It was featured by YouTuber Nick Shirley in a viral video questioning whether some childcare facilities were operating as legitimate businesses.

Shirley, who visited dozens of Twin-Cities-area childcare facilities that he claimed were receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in government funding while doing little to serve the community, was widely mocked for his efforts. His man-on-the-street-style videos drew criticism from legacy media and politicians, who accused him of xenophobia and journalistic malpractice.

Writing in the New York Times, Peter Baker pointed out that “The Minnesota Star Tribune found no evidence of fraud at the day cares that Shirley visited.”

Like Seinfeld, the scandal was a show about nothing, a conspiracy theory built not on evidence but on the absence of evidence.

“The new conspiracists,” Baker wrote, “stay focused on their bread and butter: nothing.”

On one level, it’s easy to see Baker’s point. After all, empty daycares are not proof of fraud. To “real” journalists, documents are how reporters uncover the truth. The notion that a YouTuber with a camera had broken a massive scandal was likely difficult to accept, especially when the primary evidence was, in Baker’s words, “‘nothing’ — a blank facade.”

Baker might be onto something with his larger point about the weak foundations of modern conspiracy theories. But he owes Shirley a big apology, because the YouTuber helped expose a scandal that goes far beyond Mahamud. And it’s built on evidence much stronger than empty daycares.

Last month, Jay Swanson, a former manager of fraud investigations at Minnesota’s Department of Human Services, testified before Congress. He told lawmakers his team of former police officers had a “front row seat” to daycare fraud and came “face-to-face with the people committing it on a regular basis.”

“The childcare centers we investigated were not legitimate businesses,” Swanson said, “but were designed as a vehicle to steal as much money as possible as quickly as possible.”

Swanson’s testimony described evidence of kickbacks, as well as missed safety inspections because fire officials found “there were never any staff or kids there.”

The fraud was rampant and brazen. Swanson said new daycare centers were opening faster than his department could shut down fraudulent ones. But when he drafted a report to leaders at the Department of Human Services in August 2018, Swanson said he was ordered to delete his description.

“This will make us look bad,” he recalled a high-level DHS official telling him.

Swanson declined to amend his report, saying it would have been illegal to do so. Shortly thereafter, his authority was transferred to a newly hired consulting firm that had “no experience in public benefit program integrity.”

Fraud and improper payments are nothing new, of course. Federal programs are notoriously vulnerable and error-prone. Rampant Medicaid fraud has been an open secret for years, if not decades. Meanwhile, fresh research suggests there are roughly $10 billion in improper food stamp payments every year. The reason is straightforward: large bureaucracies face a basic economic problem. The people managing a program are often far removed from the people using it, creating information gaps and weakening incentives to detect abuse.

Yet, Minnesota’s daycare scandal is different. In this case, investigators uncovered fraud on a massive scale, but it was buried. This is not just fraud, but corruption.

You don’t have to like Shirley or his style of journalism to acknowledge that he helped expose a major fraud and corruption scandal and force accountability that had been missing. Since his reporting, the state has gone from denying the daycare fraud problem to implementing a mass crackdown. Fresh reports show Minnesota currently has 436 open daycare fraud investigations. Meanwhile, Swanson’s testimony provides (more) damning evidence that state officials were covering up the fraud.

Readers of the New York Times will know none of this, of course. While the newspaper has run hundreds of stories on Shirley, readers will find not one word on Mahamud’s guilty plea or Swanson’s testimony.

That’s a shame, because it’s a huge story that reveals an uncomfortable truth: Fraud in government systems is not just a problem of bad actors. It is a problem of bad incentives. And all too often, the people with the power to stop it are more interested in protecting themselves than doing the right thing.

In the summer of 2021, Twitter Founder and CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted a strange hashtag: #WTFHappenedin1971.

A few weeks later, Edward Snowden, the CIA subcontractor turned whistleblower who revealed the NSA’s unlawful mass surveillance program, shared a similar post.

It’s unclear if Dorsey and Snowden have similar ideological views, but it’s clear both men are seeking answers to the same question (or prompting others to look themselves): what in the world happened in 1971?

WTF Happened in 1971?

For those who aren’t aware, there is an entire website dedicated to that question: wtfhappenedin1971.com/.

The first thing that becomes apparent is that something happened in 1971. This fact is made clear by a series of charts, all based on government data, that show various odd economic trends began in that year.

Income inequality, for example, began to get much worse.

Wages, which had tracked closely with productivity and GDP growth for decades, began to lag productivity and economic growth (badly).

Inflation soared, growing at a faster rate than at any period in the previous century.

The income gap between black and white Americans, which had been closing rapidly since 1950, all but stopped closing.

These are just a few of the economic graphs one will find on wtfhappenedin1971.com. So the question remains: what the heck happened?

FDR, Nixon, and the Gold Standard

For years, I was always bored to death when I'd hear discussions about the gold standard. Monetary policy wasn’t just dull, but confusing. Some people blamed Nixon for taking the US off the gold standard; others would say, “No, no. It was FDR.”

So who was it? And what is “the gold standard,” anyway?

The gold standard is simply a monetary system that links the value of paper money to gold. The system, which was implemented in the US in 1834, set the price of gold at $20.67 per ounce, where it stayed until the early 1930s. In the 1870s, other countries followed suit, ushering in the Golden Age of gold (pardon the pun) and a period of great prosperity.

“The period from 1880 to 1914 is known as the classical gold standard. During that time, the majority of countries adhered (in varying degrees) to gold,” writes Michael D. Bordo at EconLib. “It was also a period of unprecedented economic growth with relatively free trade in goods, labor, and capital.”

The period’s end—1914—came with the beginning of World War I, when many nations turned to inflationary finance to pay for the bloodiest war in human history (at the time). From 1925 to 1931 a new gold era began with the Gold Exchange Standard, but it didn’t last long.

“This version broke down in 1931 following Britain’s departure from gold in the face of massive gold and capital outflows,” Bordo explains. “In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt nationalized gold owned by private citizens and abrogated contracts in which payment was specified in gold.”

FDR’s order—Executive Order 6102—forbade “the hoarding of gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates within the continental United States." Not only would individuals not be able to redeem their paper notes for gold under the order, but private ownership of gold coins and bullion was made illegal. (This unpopular law was repealed in 1974.)

So What about Nixon?

So it was FDR that moved the US off the gold standard? Not quite.

From 1946 to 1971, nations operated under a new monetary system: the Bretton Woods Agreement.

“The Bretton Woods system was designed by the Allied nations, led by the United States, near the end of World War II as a postwar international monetary order,” explains economist Jonathan Newman. “The US dollar would become the world’s reserve currency, which foreign governments could redeem for gold, even though US citizens could not.”

Did you catch that last part? Though citizens couldn’t exchange paper money for gold, foreign governments could. So the US dollar was still tethered to gold, which the US promised to redeem at an exchange rate of $35 per ounce. This meant the US couldn’t inflate the money supply without depleting its gold reserves.

Unfortunately, however, the US did inflate its currency, in large part to finance the escalating costs of the Vietnam War and LBJ’s Great Society. This is one reason, Newman explains, that the US depleted roughly 55 percent of its gold stock from the 1950s to 1971.

In that year—1971—facing depleted gold reserves and a dollar facing increasing inflationary pressure from government expenses, Nixon made a critical decision: he “temporarily” paused gold redemption.

Nixon’s move was not temporary, however.

That’s What Happened in 1971

So now you know what happened in 1971. The US became what is known as a fiat currency system, one in which paper is legal tender backed not by gold, silver or some other commodity, but by government decree.

The economist Thorsten Polleit described three things all fiat monies have in common:

1. the government (or its central bank) has the monopoly on production.

2. It is created by way of bank credit expansion (i.e. out of thin air).

3. It has no inherent value, it is simply brightly colored paper (or digital bytes) that can be produced whenever those in power deem it politically expedient.

This is why those in control like a fiat money system. It allows them to finance all the programs and agendas they otherwise couldn’t afford, from the War in Afghanistan to the Affordable Care Act to really expensive weapons systems.

Unfortunately, all that spending comes at a cost. Sure, the federal debt ballooned from $398 billion in 1971 ($2.7 trillion 2021 dollars) to $28.8 trillion today. But as the graphics above show, those are hardly the only costs. It’s no accident the top 1 percent hold a record percentage of all wealth in the US. The fiat money system has allowed those in power to debauch the currency to enrich themselves at the expense of others (inflation is a tax)—all in the name of altruism.

Economist Murray Rothbard liked to use a thought experiment to demonstrate how it worked. Imagine if “Angel Gabriel” appeared and multiplied the amount of money everyone had tenfold. Would anyone be richer? Not one bit. But now imagine that the money supply is increased but not distributed evenly. The Angel Gabriel increases the money supply for some—starting with privileged bankers who decide how it is distributed—but not others. Who benefits then? You guessed it: the people who get it first.

Edward Snowden and Jack Dorsey are asking the right question: what the [heck] happened in 1971? We know what happened, the question is: what will we do about it?

Monetary policy may be confusing and some may find it dull—though I no longer do. But one thing is clear: it’s monumentally important.

A version of this article appeared on FEE.org.

In what New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani described as a “historic victory” for tenants, New York City housing officials recently approved his rent freeze, which will lock in rents for roughly a million regulated apartments in the Big Apple.

Yet, one board member blasted the decision, accusing the board of ignoring its own economic research to reach a predetermined outcome after Mamdani packed the Rent Guidelines Board with partisans.

“This rebuilt board was required to deliver a rent freeze,” Christina Smyth wrote in a three-page resignation letter. “Everything since has been theater. The hearings, the reports, the public comment, the data. None of it was ever going to change the result.”

Smyth, a real estate lawyer appointed to the board by Mamdani’s predecessor, Eric Adams, was referring to the board’s own research reports, which indicate that net incomes for landlords are falling even as building operating costs are rising faster than inflation.

The board, Smyth said, was “knowingly disregarding its own evidence of rising costs and falling income.”

A quick look at the numbers shows Smyth is right.

Data collected by the board show that the price index of operating costs increased by roughly 33% from 2019 to 2025, as several categories outpaced inflation. Insurance costs saw the steepest increase by far, climbing 150%, while maintenance expenses rose 39% and utility bills increased 31%. Spending on labor, fuel, property taxes, and administrative costs generally tracked overall inflation. Meanwhile, the consumer price index rose by just 24%.

In other words, building operating costs have risen much faster than inflation in recent years. But the picture becomes more complicated when you turn to rent levels in New York City.

While landlords have struggled with surging operating costs, rents for stabilized housing have increased much more slowly. Largely because of the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act of 2019, which imposed new restrictions on what landlords could charge, rent for stabilized housing has fallen in real dollars.

The Rent Guidelines Board approved one-year renewal increases of 1.5%, 0%, and 0% (followed by 1.5% after six months) during the pandemic. While rent caps increased in the following years — to 3.25%, 3%, 2.75%, and 3% — rents rose by roughly 15% overall.

That is less than half the increase in operating costs over the same period and well below inflation.

All of this data comes directly from the Rent Guidelines Board, which means that when Smyth says the board is “knowingly disregarding its own evidence,” she is not wrong.

The board has rigged the game in such a way that many landlords can’t make money on their properties. According to data from the NYU Furman Center, the typical rent collected in 2025 from buildings that are more than 90% rent-stabilized was $1,395 per month. That is roughly equal to the operating expenses for those units.

All of this helps explain why landlords are increasingly saying enough is enough.

“Most landlords are walking away from [their buildings],” landlord Adrian Lawrence told the New York Post. “They’re not making a profit and they’re not going [to] put their life savings and investments into these buildings without the ability to make back the money with some profitability.”

Lawrence made those remarks before the Rent Guidelines Board approved the latest freeze.

Many landlords, reading the tea leaves after Mamdani’s victory, had already begun unloading properties at distressed prices in anticipation of even tighter rent restrictions. The board’s latest decision is likely to accelerate the fire sale.

Some supporters argue the freeze is worthwhile “so we can see if it works.” But that’s like jumping off a roof to find out whether gravity exists.

We don’t need an experiment to show that rent control doesn’t work. Price controls have been failing for thousands of years, and the economic costs of rent control have been documented for more than a century.

The Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck famously observed that rent control is “the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city — except for bombing it.”

The economics are straightforward and can be found in virtually any Econ 101 textbook. Cap rents below market levels, and landlords earn less, making it less attractive to maintain existing buildings or construct new ones. Over time, housing deteriorates, and new supply dries up.

St. Paul, Minnesota, learned this lesson the hard way. In 2021, the city enacted the nation’s strictest rent control law. Within a year, construction of new housing had stalled, prompting city leaders to walk back their policy, a retreat that only continued year after year.

Mamdani says things will be different in New York, contending that “socialists understand economics” just as well as capitalists. He’ll find that moving the immutable laws of economics is more difficult than leaning on a housing board to ignore its own data.

Rent Control Flashback (Video)

This article first appeared in The Washington Examiner.