Journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who are famous for reporting on Watergate while working at the Washington Post, released a statement stating their disappointment. Former executive editor Martin Baron called the decision “cowardice, with democracy as its casualty.” Nineteen Washington Post columnists signed an op-ed calling the lack of an endorsement a “terrible mistake.” And the unions of both publications released statements expressing their concern over such a move.

Across the board, the cited concern is that we are just days away from a consequential election where one of the candidates poses a major threat to democracy itself. The rest of the media see the billionaires who own each outlet as “preemptively self-censoring” themselves to avoid offending Donald Trump. This “self-censorship” then, we’re told, makes it more likely that Trump will get elected.

The assumptions that underlie these concerns are worth unpacking. The first, and perhaps most foolish notion, is that an endorsement from the LA Times or Washington Post will be a consequential factor in this election. The audience of both papers already skews heavily Democrat. Also, it is no mystery to anyone who spends as little as thirty seconds scrolling through editorial headlines that the papers’ editors support Harris over Trump, and why.

A short look at the opinion and news stories in either paper is also enough to dispel the notion that either outlet’s executives are worried about displeasing Trump. Even in the “hard news” sections, Trump is framed as an unhinged fascist set to destroy the country to nurse his fragile ego, while Harris is a serious, stern, problem-solving public servant who, at worst, has made a few tactical mistakes on the campaign trail. No honest observer can seriously say these papers are “staying silent” about this election.

Above all, the intensity of the meltdown we’re seeing from media figures both inside and outside of these two publications reveals how profoundly out-of-touch most of the establishment media is about their own importance.

There was a time, mainly back in the mid-to-late-1800s, when the public got virtually all its news from newspapers. It’s hard to overstate how much power that put in the hands of the printers, and later editors and executives, who produced these papers.

As we go about our lives, we are constantly building and refining an internal model of reality that helps us better act to achieve our desired ends. Much of this model is fashioned from our own experience or the experience of our friends and families—which gets shared with us through advice and stories. To understand all parts of the world that exist outside the experience of ourselves and those we personally know, we rely on media. In the nineteenth century, the media consisted almost exclusively of books, pamphlets, and newspapers.

Because our internal models of reality are indistinguishable from reality itself and newspapers were effectively the sole source of information about current events, newspaper editors exerted an enormous amount of control over how the population saw the world. And their near-monopoly over public discourse about current events gave them a lot of authority when analyzing or endorsing the actions of politicians.

As other forms of media gained traction, however, the dominance of newspapers began to wane. That started with magazines—the first truly national news outlets—and it really accelerated with the rise of radio and television news. But the high cost of starting a new publication and the government’s early seizure of the airwaves kept control over the information space mostly in the hands of a small, establishment-friendly group.

That changed in the 1990s with the introduction of internet blogs. Suddenly, anyone with an internet connection could reach readers without filters, editors, or space constraints. It wasn’t obvious at first, but with this one seemingly-innocuous development, the establishment’s monopoly on the information space was shattered forever.

Now, three decades later, the consequences of such a change are much harder to ignore. From Occupy Wall Street, the Tea Party, and the campaigns of Ron Paul and later Donald Trump at home, to the Arab Spring and the passage of Brexit abroad, the internet has changed the world. Not only because it allowed people to see and hear dissenting views, but because it showed people that those views were popular.

In an election this close, neither candidate has been able to ignore the new reality we find ourselves in. Both Harris and Trump have appeared on popular podcasts, with Trump making such appearances a central part of his campaign. Last week, Trump sat for a three-hour discussion on the Joe Rogan Experience, which is technically the most-watched talk show of any kind in the world by far.

Trump’s appearance on Rogan has been viewed nearly forty million times on YouTube alone (Spotify and Apple Podcasts don’t publish download numbers, but both also account for a large portion of Rogan’s listenership, so the total number is likely much higher.) The interview towers over Kamala Harris’s recent interview with Fox News, which, at 8 million viewers, had been celebrated as the highest-rated interview of the 2024 election. The internet is no longer a sideshow in our media environment. It’s the main stage.

Which is why it’s absurd to see an absolute meltdown over whether two newspapers print formal endorsements for one of the candidates. The panic can only be understood as a symptom of the legacy media being unable or unwilling to face the fact that they are no longer the main force influencing and controlling how the public sees the world.

The establishment press does still pose a serious threat with all the various ways they distort our perceptions of the truth in ways that are politically-expedient for them and their friends in government. But the hysteria last week over the withdrawn editorial endorsements demonstrates that many are still hyper-focused on some media practices that today are largely irrelevant. And that’s grounds for optimism.

Those numbers are not surprising to anyone who consumes a lot of political media. Tune into the establishment-friendly press and you’ll be inundated with stories about voter suppression in red states, recaps of the most dramatic skirmishes that happened outside the Capitol on January 6, and warnings about how Trump and his allies could actually take power after losing the upcoming election.

The fear, from the establishment’s perspective, is that after losing, Trump will successfully pressure Republican legislators in battleground states to appoint “alternate” electors that will keep Harris below the 270 electoral votes needed to win, which would send the election to the likely Republican-controlled House.

Without very explicit evidence of decisive voter fraud that the political class outright ignores, it’s hard to see a scheme like this working—considering that Trump isn’t already in power, Democrats have passed laws in recent years making it harder to appoint alternate electors, and many of the Republican legislators Trump would rely on have shown a reluctance to go along with the former president absent strong pressure from their constituents. But that hasn’t stopped the fear-mongering.

On the other side, the Trump-friendly alternative media is full of stories about local and state officials overturning election security laws, deleting drop box surveillance footage, actively registering non-citizens to vote, losing entire trays of mail-in ballots, and other tales of vote manipulation and even outright fraud.

Pair these stories with all the left’s freakouts about “voter suppression” in red states and the various assertions of foreign influence operations and it’s easy to see how so many voters became convinced that a victory by the other side would be illegitimate. Now add the establishment panic about a MAGA plot to overturn the election if they lose and the right’s awareness of the political establishment’s preparations to do the exact same thing had they lost in 2020 and it becomes clear why many are worried about what awaits us after election day.

The collapse of the public’s trust in elections mirrors the collapse in trust in several other institutions, like the federal judicial system, public health authorities, and the news media. While uncomfortable, the public losing trust in untrustworthy institutions is a good thing. It’s a necessary first step if the country is ever going to get on a better path.

The federal justice system has been used to go after the establishment’s political enemies since the beginning, public health authorities demolished any credibility they may have had with their deadly, totalitarian response to COVID-19, and the American news media has been actively misinforming the public in politically-expedient ways for essentially it’s entire history.

In the past decade or so, the American public has developed a much healthier level of skepticism toward these institutions. It is perfectly reasonable for that skepticism to carry over to federal elections.

After all, the political class—which includes politically-connected businesses—is making trillions of dollars in revenue thanks to various wars, innumerable regulations that protect them from competition, easy money from the Fed, and other lucrative government programs. It is not much of a jump to assume that, if able, the very people who have repeatedly lied us into unnecessary wars to line their pockets would be willing to use whatever means necessary to expand and protect their power and profits.

Together with the establishment-friendly media, the political class has placed a very high social cost on questioning the security of our elections in every instance except when it conveniently places the blame on a foreign government that Washington wants to demonize. Questioning the legitimacy of elections is “dangerous” unless you’re accusing Russia or Iran.

And whenever someone with a big enough voice casts doubt on past elections in an “unacceptable” way, the establishment is quick to shout them down with the same meaningless denunciation that there is no evidence of “widespread” election fraud.

Of course, if there were to be a conspiracy to either foment or permit voter fraud in a way that successfully flipped a national election, it would not be “widespread,” it would be targeted. Elections like this one come down to a handful of precincts—most of which are toss-up suburban and rural areas that surround blue cities in swing states. A conspiracy to commit or allow “widespread” voter fraud would be pointless and all but guarantee its discovery.

This is not to say you should accept every claim made about voter fraud or even that there is definitive proof that any previous elections were stolen in this fashion. And it’s certainly not to say that violence is an appropriate or productive response if the upcoming election appears like it was stolen.

Only that it would be healthy for more members of the American public to start questioning whether our system really works the way we learned it did in elementary school—where the president represents our collective will and acts as we would act to address the problems we face at home and abroad.

That simple story is an illusion that conveniently frames whatever the government is doing to us as an embodiment of everyone’s wishes and any opposition as a selfish stand against what everybody else wants. Many Americans are appropriately questioning a lot of what they’ve previously accepted as true. They ought to question this too.

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But when Kennedy got to his third concern, it was striking how absent any discussion of it has been from our hyper-active national discourse. The issue was the scale of chronic disease affecting the American population and, especially, American children. Kennedy explicitly called this “the most important issue” and, as he laid out the scale of the problem, it’s easy to see why he feels that way.

As Kennedy said in the speech, two-thirds—or around 222 million Americans—suffer from chronic health issues. In the 1970s, the rate was lower than one percent. On top of that, nearly three out of every four Americans are now overweight or obese, and the childhood obesity rate stands at 50%.

There has been an explosion in diabetes in both kids and adults, as well as neurological illnesses and disorders like Alzheimer’s and autism. Kennedy also highlighted the sharp increase we’re seeing in food allergies, ADHD, and cancer, among others. His point is that, at the same time Americans are paying more for healthcare than the populations of nearly every other country, we are also quickly becoming the sickest.

What’s astonishing about all of this is that almost nobody denies the health emergency Kennedy lays out. Some argue that he is exaggerating a few of his numbers slightly or is misleading people with some rates of increase that are inflated by changes in how chronic diseases are defined and screened—something Kennedy and those he cites claim to have corrected for. But most of Kennedy’s critics in the media simply ignore what he says about this topic.

So, if the scale of the problem is this extreme and its existence is not controversial, why is this not the central issue in every national election? Simply put, because the chronic disease epidemic is making the political class absurdly rich.

In many ways, the problem has its roots in the Progressive Era at the end of the 1800s. At the time, there were several competing approaches to treating sick and ailing patients, each with its own network of doctors and professional associations. One such group was what their rivals called allopathic physicians. Their approach was to treat patients with painkillers and other drugs aimed specifically at reducing patient suffering.

Of course, for certain ailments, that is a perfectly reasonable approach. And, as one of many available in the early healthcare market, it provided many Americans who required such an approach the care they needed. But in the early 1900s, the allopathic doctors’ professional group—the American Medical Association (AMA)—decided to get with the times and lobby the government for special privileges.

As Patrick Newman explained in a lecture based on a chapter from his upcoming book, the AMA maneuvered its way into setting the official accreditation standards for the nation’s medical schools. With that newfound power, the association was able to both greatly restrict the supply of doctors—by forcing half of the country’s medical schools to close—and to certify their allopathic approach as the preeminent, legitimate, government-recognized form of medical care.

And the AMA was not alone. In most industries, powerful corporations and professional associations realized they could make a lot more money if they lobbied the government for monopoly privileges, lucrative subsidies, and cartel-preserving supply quotas. Similar efforts in the food industry resulted in the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and many so-called nutrition programs at universities with deep ties to the biggest food companies.

On the agricultural side, farming and meatpacking groups successfully lobbied for the creation of what would become the recurring five-year farm bill. This law contains a multitude of handouts and privileges for agricultural giants, such as supply restrictions that artificially raise the prices of some kinds of produce and subsidies that over-saturate the market with other crops and products.

Finally, drug manufacturers were able to get the government to criminalize competition in the pharmaceutical industry and to protect companies from liability for the side effects of many drugs. The government even mandates the purchase of some drugs with its immunization schedule—much of which is required to attend school.

Together, all these companies and interest groups use their government privileges to fill their pockets.

Big agricultural companies flood the market with highly subsidized crops which have alternative uses, like corn syrup and seed oils, that crowd out healthier options that consumers actually prefer. Food companies can then use these artificially cheap ingredients to produce highly addictive ultra-processed foods that their friends in the government and university nutrition programs then say are part of a healthy diet.

Americans, who are taught from a young age to trust the government and university-trained, state-licensed medical professionals, are easily hooked on these ultra-processed foods. That’s great for the food companies but terrible for our bodies. Many of the chronic diseases plaguing Americans can be drawn back to our consumption (or our parents’ consumption) of these addicting food-like substances.

But it doesn’t stop there. The flood of chronic illnesses caused by ultra-processed food is lucrative for the medical industry, whose allopathic approach ensures the root cause is never discussed, much less addressed, but is instead treated with a barrage of prescription drugs that solely attack the resulting symptoms. After all, addressing the root cause would be bad for the pharmaceutical industry’s bottom line. And doctors who don’t play along are systemically denied official, government-recognized credentials.

The extensive drug cocktail that most Americans are swallowing and injecting each day allows them to stay hooked on toxic foods that their bodies are trying to tell them are hurting them and, thanks to side effects, can even aggravate or cause other chronic diseases. The deadly cycle keeps accelerating and the large, politically-connected businesses in the agricultural, meatpacking, food processing, healthcare, and pharmaceutical industries grow absurdly rich.

But they’re not the only ones benefiting. Government bureaucrats enjoy an ever-increasing level of power and resources as companies lobby for them to intervene even more in their respective industries. Universities are gifted millions by food and drug companies to run friendly academic programs. And politicians get to appear heroic to both sides as they exploit how obviously awful the healthcare system is to fight distracting, meaningless battles over whether to cap the prices of a couple drugs—usually while pushing to send even more taxpayer money into the healthcare industry.

Government officials, industry insiders, and state-credentialed experts have nothing to gain and everything to lose by actually addressing our country’s health issue. That’s why there is no urgency, even in theatrical political fights, to talk about how sick Americans have gotten. As the problem worsens, however, it will be harder and harder to ignore.

Still, the path forward must start with rolling back the government policies and privileges that this massive, deadly racket is built upon. Because it is a grave mistake to rely on those benefiting from a problem to solve it.

The soon-to-be former president and most major players in Democratic politics quickly threw their support behind Vice President Kamala Harris. In the days since, Harris’ biggest potential challengers have either fallen in line and endorsed her too or began maneuvering to become Harris’ running mate. By Monday night, Harris “had the support of well more than the 1,976 delegates she’ll need to win” the nomination, according to an Associated Press survey. So, it appears all but guaranteed that Kamala Harris will be the 2024 Democratic nominee.

Because of her professional background, failed 2020 campaign, and tenure as Biden’s vice president, we can already be certain that a Kamala Harris presidency would be awful.

Harris represents not merely a continuation of the Obama-Clinton-Biden doctrine of progressive interventionism at home and abroad but an acceleration.

As vice president, she remained closely aligned with Biden on all of the worst things he’s done. She had a hand in his repressive response to the pandemic, championed his effort to expand the federal government’s industrial policy, and pushed him to attempt his illegal, regressive student loan forgiveness plan.

Early in Biden’s term, he put Harris in charge of the southern border, which anyone — regardless of where they fall on the topic of mass immigration — has to admit descended into utter chaos.

Harris’ foreign policy ambitions are nearly indistinguishable from Biden’s when it comes to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, as well as the U.S.’s provocative militarization in the Pacific, which puts us at risk of war with China and North Korea.

And when Harris differs from Biden, she’s always on the worse side.

In the 2020 campaign and early in her term as vice president, Harris did not support the bipartisan effort to end the war in Afghanistan. While Biden and his team handled the actual withdrawal terribly, leaving was the right move. The fact that Harris wanted to continue pouring our money into that failed state-building project speaks volumes about her.

In his term, Biden has helped pass and implement some terrible, costly, downright anti-human environmental policies. Harris has wanted to go much further and pass a colossal $10 trillion climate plan that, in the style of the Green New Deal bill she cosponsored in the Senate, seeks to restructure the entire economy to try and usher in a green utopia before 2050.

Harris is also worse than Biden when it comes to trade and the push for federally funded college.

As Ryan McMaken pointed out back in 2020, when Biden announced Harris as his running mate, many of her detractors go wrong by calling her a radical or a tool of the far left. In McMaken’s words, “The reality is actually far more alarming. Radicals have a tendency to lose political battles, because they often stand on principle. Harris is unlikely to have that problem.”

Not only does Harris not hold any concrete principles, her craziest policy ambitions fall well within the mainstream establishment consensus. That’s what makes Harris so dangerous as a potential president.

We live in a world where the federal government constantly intervenes in the economy, our lives, and regions around the world to redistribute money from poor and middle-class Americans into the pockets of the politically connected rich. Harris poses no threat to this scheme. And so, like Biden, her policy objectives are likely to face little institutional resistance from the media, wealthy corporate elites, and the bureaucratic administrative apparatus that makes up the bulk of the federal government.

And where Harris differs from Biden, it’s only because she’s pushing for policies that will garner even more power for the federal bureaucracy and more money for wealthy plutocrats than he was ever willing to try for.

In his one term as president, Joe Biden has done much to compound all the most pressing problems facing the American people. At best, a Kamala Harris presidency will continue where Biden left off. More likely, she will go even further.

Take, for instance, the latest jobs report. For the third month in a row, the American economy added significantly more jobs than most economists had been expecting—a total of 303,000 for March. On its face, that’s a good number.

But as Ryan McMaken laid out over the weekend, things don’t look as strong when you dig into the data. For instance, virtually all the jobs added are part-time jobs. Full-time jobs have actually been disappearing since December of last year. In fact, as McMaken highlighted, “The year-over-year measure of full-time jobs has fallen into recession territory.”

Also, most of these new part-time jobs are going to immigrants, many of whom are in the country illegally. There has been zero job creation for native-born Americans since mid-2018. While immigrants are not harming the economy by working, the scale of new foreign-born workers has papered over the employment struggles of the native-born population.

Further, government jobs accounted for almost a quarter of those added—way above the standard ten to twelve percent. Just like with government spending and economic growth, government hiring boosts the official jobs number while draining the actual, value-producing economy.

Some economists, like Daniel Lacalle, argue that the US economy is already experiencing a private-sector recession but that government spending and hiring are propping up the official data enough to hide it.

A recession is inevitable, thanks to the last decade of interest rate manipulation by the Federal Reserve—and especially to its dramatic actions during the pandemic. The recession-like conditions in full-time jobs is further evidence that Lacalle is right.

But jobs numbers are only part of the story. The stock market has been fluctuating a lot recently, not because of changing consumer needs or the adoption of some new technology, but based on what Federal Reserve officials are saying about what the central bank will do this year.

At the same time, prices are still high. And they continue to rise at a rate that frustrates even some of President Joe Biden’s biggest economic cheerleaders. Our dollars are worth about 20 percent less than they were four years ago, with no prospect of that trend reversing. That hurts.

But instead of addressing this economic pain, much less their role in creating it, members of the political class are still pretending everything is great. They’re even gearing up to make things worse by, for example, sending even more of our money to the Ukrainian government. All to prolong a war it’s losing, not because of a lack of money, but because of a lack of soldiers.

And at home, President Biden is scrambling to put the brakes on energy production and to transfer money from the working class to his base of college graduates, all before he’s up for reelection in November.

Predictably and appropriately, the establishment’s head-in-the-sand economic strategy is coinciding with a notable decrease in support for the Democrats—the establishment’s preferred party these days. President Biden is behind in the polls in six of the seven swing states and is losing support from working-class and nonwhite voters.

The political establishment and its preferred candidates deserve to lose support, not only for failing to acknowledge America’s economic problems but for causing them in the first place.

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Many journalists, commentators, and government officials—including a number of those claiming to have suffered from Havana Syndrome—argue that Russian spies are deliberately causing these symptoms with some type of nonlethal acoustic or microwave beam.

The 60 Minutes segment ran with this narrative and presented new evidence that a specific unit from Russia’s military intelligence agency (GRU) may have been behind several specific Havana Syndrome cases.

Anyone who has been following this story would find the examples in this new report familiar. An FBI agent at home in Florida experienced a sudden, intense ringing in one of her ears while standing by a window in her laundry room. She then felt pain and pressure in her head and chest. After the episode, the agent experienced memory issues and some occasional vertigo.

The second case featured in the segment was the wife of a Justice Department official stationed at the US embassy in Tbilisi, Georgia. The woman was also in her laundry room when she experienced a piercing ringing sound in her left ear that quickly grew into a headache. She then walked outside to find a man sitting in a car nearby who looked like a suspected member of Unit 29155, the GRU unit that 60 Minutes presented as the likely perpetrator of these attacks.

The journalists from 60 Minutes, The Insider, and Der Spiegel who collaborated on this report identify and track some men who are alleged to be members of the GRU unit in question and suggest that it is possible they were present in cities where US officials experienced Havana Syndrome symptoms. The other big piece of evidence was a document that apparently indicates that a member of Unit 29155 was given a bonus for performing good work on the “potential capabilities of nonlethal acoustic weapons.”

The producers sprinkle in other scraps of evidence along with interview clips with former intelligence officers and other officials to paint the picture of a nefarious group of Russian spies sneaking around the world to direct acoustic weapons or microwave beams into the homes of Americans working against Russia.

This is a textbook example of a conspiracy theory. But it also doesn’t make a lot of sense.

For an acoustic weapon to be behind these symptoms, soundwaves powerful enough to cause seemingly permanent damage to the target’s inner ear would have had to be directed through the laundry room windows, all without damaging the glass or even being heard by others nearby.

And as former Los Alamos scientist Cheryl Rofer explained in a 2021 article, microwave beams are similarly implausible. First, the power supply needed to generate microwaves powerful enough to injure someone’s brain would make a portable weapon impractical. Second, the range of such a weapon would likely be minimal, so it would be hard for the perpetrator to remain hidden from the target throughout the attack. Third, because of how microwaves generate heat, if a microwave beam powerful enough to damage the brain were directed at a target’s head, there would also be visible burns on the skin and flesh where the beam first made contact. There is no way to isolate the effect to one internal part of the body.

That’s not to say it’s impossible that any one of these sudden headaches and inner ear problems are somehow the result of an attack. But any honest observer would have to admit that, so far, the narrative put forward by 60 Minutes can only be considered an implausible conspiracy theory.

It is important for any truth-seeking news consumer to notice the contrast in how narratives that lack concrete evidence are portrayed by the so-called mainstream press.

Take, for instance, the idea that Hunter Biden may have landed his $83,000-a-month board seat for a Ukrainian gas company because it was understood that he could offer access to his father. Or that the SARS-CoV-2 virus originated not in a Wuhan market, but in the nearby virology lab that we know was conducting US-funded gain-of-function research on coronaviruses. Or that FBI informants, who had a heavy presence in the organizations that planned the rally on January 6, may have played a part in leading the crowd to the Capitol.

All three of these theories are way more plausible than the theory that the Russians are diverting some of their most elite intelligence operatives to go take potshots at the homes of US officials with an energy weapon that doesn’t make any physical sense. Yet only the latter gets a full, serious segment on the top Sunday night news program. Why? Because it contributes well to the anti-Russia narrative that the political establishment is trying to push. The others, in contrast, each go completely against the establishment’s preferred account. So, they are either dismissed, demonized, or outright ignored in the establishment-friendly media.

The discourse about Havana Syndrome makes it clear that members of the Washington establishment and their friends in the media are completely fine with farfetched conspiracy theories, as long as they find them useful.

Debates rage on social media and in the halls of Congress over the most trivial policy details. All while the financial markets swing dramatically with every political antic or geopolitical flare-up. It’s difficult to separate what’s meaningful from the distractions and the outright falsehoods in the daily information deluge. What’s important can get lost.

We live in the most materially wealthy era in human history. The amount of comfort, convenience, and abundance we enjoy today is astonishing when compared to all of human history. And yet young Americans are having a harder time affording the same lifestyle choices—like buying a home and raising a family—that previous generations enjoyed. Something is clearly working in our economy, and something else is clearly not.

And so, if we’re to stay grounded among all the noise of the economic news cycle, it is imperative we take a step back and understand what policies actually lie at the root of our economic problems as well as what’s responsible for all that’s gone right.

In the keynote lecture of the Mises Institute Supporters Summit earlier this month, Dr. Jörg Guido Hülsmann put the monetary system at the center not only of much of our economic pain but of our cultural problems, too.

Our monetary system, Hülsmann explained, is unprecedented in human history. Until recently, the only comparable historical examples were wartime economies fueled by money printing. But since World War II, the federal government has elected to subject us to a perpetual wartime economy.

The result has been eighty years of permanent price inflation. Those politically connected enough to get the newly created money early benefit greatly from this system. But for the rest of us, the adverse effects are hard to understate. For one, perishable goods—notably labor—trade at a discount compared to more durable goods and assets. That’s why it takes longer to build enough wealth on the labor market to afford durable things like houses.

Permanent price inflation also incentivizes debt financing, bringing about what Hülsmann calls a “culture of debt.” The monetary system encourages people to be more shortsighted and reductionist in their economic decisions. Politically, an indebted population is also much easier to control.

Other effects outlined in the speech are that firms become artificially big, the consumption of stuff takes priority over the cultivation and production of resources, the quality of our elites and leaders diminishes, and generosity recedes out of community life.

There are, of course, countless other problems facing us—even in the economic policy sphere. But the destruction of our money is the toxic root of so many of these other issues.

But understanding what’s causing the problems in our economy is only half the battle. We also need a firm grasp of what’s working. Because it’s not all bad. Plenty of wealth is still being created every day. And if we’re ever going to return to a sustainable, growing economy, we need to know how wealth is created.

Earlier this year, Mises Institute senior fellow Shawn Ritenour published an award-winning book on this exact topic, The Economics of Prosperity. In it, Ritenour uses economic theory and history to define the necessary conditions for economic growth. These are the market division of labor, a robust capital structure, and the subsequent improvements in technology. All of this production and investment must be coordinated, making entrepreneurs a necessary component of economic growth. In Ritenour’s words, “Economic progress is the happy consequence of a highly developed division of labor, taking advantage of an increasing capital structure, embodied in technically advanced capital goods, all wisely invested by entrepreneurs.”

Entrepreneurs are uniquely positioned to coordinate the process because, unlike political leaders, they are subjected to the feedback and incentives of the profit and loss system. That allows them to conduct economic calculation—constantly reallocating resources to their most valued uses.

Crucially, the entire process of economic growth relies on the institution of private property. As Ritenour explains, “People can only benefit from the division of labor if they are free to exchange the goods they produce.” Entrepreneurs need ownership over capital and resources to open new lines of production and sell the resulting products.

Finally, Ritenour cites the need for sound money. If entrepreneurs are going to conduct economic calculation, they need a reliable monetary unit. On top of that, none of the above conditions for growth matter unless people are willing to forgo some present consumption to save and invest in production—which is, remember, the exact kind of behavior that permanent price inflation discourages.

These kinds of big-picture considerations are often absent from the economic discourse of the day. That’s good news for the political class and their crony friends, who all benefit from the status quo. But for those of us who want to bring about meaningful change, these are the exact considerations we must work to keep front of mind, day in and day out. The political monetary system is a debilitating, destructive scam that needs to be exposed and abolished. We need a sound monetary system, and we need to recommit to the institution of private property. Don’t let the melodrama of the daily news cycle let you forget that.

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About the Author

Connor O’Keeffe (@ConnorMOKeeffe) produces media and content at the Mises Institute. He has a master’s in economics and a bachelor’s in geology.

But, as Murray Rothbard has pointed out, “human rights, when not put in terms of property rights, turn out to be vague and contradictory.” Your freedom to have an opinion does not grant you the right to express that opinion in venues or on media outlets you do not own. But if you pay to give a speech at a lecture hall and the government blocks it, this violation of free speech could be better understood as a violation of property rights. So how would property rights fare under the RESTRICT Act? Not well. The bill would not only block private companies from engaging in legitimate business practices but would further violate the property rights of American citizens and companies through an open-ended digital surveillance regime.

The RESTRICT Act seeks to give the Commerce Department broad new authorities to “identify, deter, disrupt, prevent, prohibit, investigate, and mitigate” information and communications technology products “in which any foreign adversary has an interest, and that pose an undue or unacceptable risk to U.S. national security or the safety of U.S. persons.” The bill defines foreign adversaries as China, Russia, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, and North Korea, but it allows the Executive to add and drop foreign regimes from the list without oversight from Congress.

The information and communications technology products highlighted in the act are expansive and unspecific. They range from desktop applications, mobile apps, web-based applications, payment platforms, and gaming systems to webcams, Wi-Fi networks, drone cameras, home surveillance systems, and even biotechnology.

It’s worth mentioning that the only real threat the alleged adversarial regimes pose is to Washington’s ability to exert military control over the entire globe. The root of this issue lies in America’s overzealous foreign policy aspirations—not in some irrational wish by these regimes to see American people harmed. The proper way to address these threats is to bring American foreign policy back in line with reality as Washington’s unipolar moment slips away. The RESTRICT Act ignores the root of the problem and instead attacks the rights of the American people.

Our right to property stems first from our right to self-ownership. We alone own our bodies. Any property claim made on our bodies is unethical and impossible. From self-ownership, property can be attained justly through homesteading—mixing one’s labor with unowned land resources. After property has been homesteaded, it can be justly transferred through gifts or voluntary exchange. That is how most property is justly acquired in modern societies.

Unfortunately, we do not live in a perfectly libertarian world. But property rights are still important and, to the extent they exist, must be defended. As such, if a someone wishes to read, watch, or listen to a foreign government—maybe they want to hear both sides of a geopolitical dispute to be better informed—and a website owner is willing to deliver that piece of media to them, it is completely within the rights of both the consumer and website owner to engage in that transaction.

Further, it is the right of those who own the internet service provider, data center, and optical fiber cables to make part of their infrastructure available for the information transfer if they find the price to be worth it. Even if the information originated from or encountered a foreign regime, any third party stepping in to stop this transaction would be violating the right of the individuals involved to control their own property.

The conduct that the RESTRICT Act seeks to prohibit is not a real crime. And beyond that, the state surveillance of private activity necessary to identify the relevant transactions is where the majority of property rights violations will occur. The bill makes numerous references to the use of information gathered by the director of national intelligence. Although we’re told US intelligence agencies focus on gathering information and conducting operations outside of the United States, whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that agencies such as the National Security Agency conduct mass surveillance of American’s communications. The RESTRICT Act could ratchet this up by extending the surveillance beyond communications to include digital information of any kind. By accessing devices without express permission, the federal government would further violate our property rights.

There is even more of concern. With its vague language, the bill gives the government much leeway in defining what qualifies as illegal information. We’ve already seen government officials and their friends in media conflate antiestablishment arguments with foreign disinformation. They’ve even falsely labelled accurate news stories as foreign disinformation. It’s not hard to see these same people using the powers granted to them by the RESTRICT Act to criminalize certain dissenting views under the guise of counterintelligence.

This awful bill seeks to prop up Washington’s disappearing global military dominance by making certain pieces of digital information illegal. The implementation of the RESTRICT Act would violate the American people’s basic right to control their property—all in the name of thwarting a fake crime. The bill isn’t protecting you from a threat. It is the threat. Don’t fall for it.

About the Author

Connor O’Keeffe is a writer and video producer at the Mises Institute. He has a masters in economics and a bachelors in geology.

Article cross-posted from Mises.