It’s twelve days before the 2024 Presidential election, so as I write this monthly post I have no idea who the winner will be. But if Donald Trump is elected, itwill be mostly because he has a huge, loyal following, but in part because many Democratic policies of the last decades have been so stupid and so dangerous, defying common sense, that they make any flawed but more conservative candidate seem attractive to a lot of independent-minded voters of both parties. And a corollary to that...
This is a bit of an unusual post for me. As always, I want it to be informative and filled with truth. But this post begins with a dream. I dreamed that a year ago both of the self-centered old men finally got out of the Presidential race to become the Elder Statesmen of their respective parties. They were then able to share advice and to weigh in with opinions, while letting the next generation of potential leaders battle it out in the primaries to define the best ideas and the best talent to...
Let me stipulate up front that this post contains several generalizations which I know do not apply to everyone in every case described. But focus with me on the larger picture, and I hope you will find the generalizations to be useful, as well as the many embedded reference links. Given my history in Russia and Ukraine in the early days of commercial real estate, friends often ask me why the Russian people don’t stand up more to the obvious lies and terrible consequences of Putin’s war on...
We are collectively dealing with too many unnecessary social disasters. Henry Hazlitt called these disasters the inevitable result of focusing on the immediate and the isolated, rather than on the long term and the whole. Others call them unintended consequences. Parents warn about them by saying to their children, “From my experience, you should be more careful, because here’s what’s going to happen…” In Hazlitt’s short book, Economics in One Lesson, he wrote in Chapter 15: “In studying the...
I’m glad to be back after a six-month pause. During the break I finished and published my fourth novel, Nation On The Edge, which I hope you’ll read. And I released the audio version of On The Edge, read remarkably well by a computer! Old dog, new tricks. Pause or not, the fabric of our nation continues to be torn apart by deep division on a broad range of issues, and I want to suggest a way to pick up a needle and start sewing at least some of us back together, one stitch at a time. While...
A recent email to me from a frequent correspondent right after the SVB/Signature bank failures criticized some conservative news sources for blaming the banks’ problems on being “woke.” And he asked what does being woke even mean? He wrote: “Being ‘woke’ doesn’t mean anything except to right wingers and boomers. And no bank fails because of being ‘woke.’ They failed because of basic poor asset-liability management due to no supervision and being able to borrow billions from short-term...
This month, just before the Midterm Elections, I’m focused on the perfect storm created by the intersection of three disastrous forces running amok in our nation today. I wrote about the first force back in 2013, in “What We Don’t See is Killing Us”—I hope you will take a moment to read it, because it sets the stage for what is to follow. In that post, I extolled the writings of Henry Hazlitt on Economics, and particularly his observation that policies always have two effects: immediate and...
This month I have another Summer Quick-Post on a few problems, the solutions to which seem so obvious to me that either I am a simpleton, or the ruling class makes everything far too complicated (to try to stay in power?). Here they are: 1.There are millions of people desperately braving the worst possible conditions to get to America across our wide open and therefore dangerous southern border, mostlyhoping to work for their families. And there are millions of jobs going unfilled in America,...
The confluence of Father’s Day and my 75th birthday within two days of each other this year reminded me of the power of families, and of the key role of fathers in the family. My father turned 75 in 1993, when I was 46. Like all of us, he was imperfect. But he was faithful, loyal, and loving. If he had a motto, it was “Always Do the Right Thing.” He put himself through Georgia Tech after the Depression and then fought in World War II. His father was in the first class at the Auburn University...
This month’s post will probably be labeled by many as right up there with Don Quixote's "Impossible Dream", but I still have faith in people, and so I'm going to write it anyway. It's addressed to everyone, and particularly to Woke, secular progressives, who think the Judeo-Christian foundations of our nation’s laws and principles are not important today. They are. Please follow this argument: The terrible, destructive impact of Evil, always present but usually doubted by modern thinkers, has...
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