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Authored by Peter Jacobsen via the Foundation for Economic Education,

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is signaling the end of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The USAID website is currently down, and employees have been locked out of computer systems.

USAID has a controversial history and has been accused of imperialism by the left and waste and corruption by the right. In a previous article discussing National Security Study Memorandum 200, I highlighted one of these issues: a government document that proposed utilizing USAID (among other levers) to lower the population in developing countries under the guise of providing aid.

Many defenders of USAID argue that the fiscal concern behind Musk’s offensive is overblown because the agency represents less than 1 percent of the federal budget.

However, the fact that USAID is a small part of the budget gives us no information on whether or not it should be removed. In fact, it’s likely one of the best places to start slashing government spending. Why?

1) Bigger Cuts Cost More

If your goal is to cut down on spending, whether personal or government, larger expenditures are better to cut, everything else held constant. If you cut an item that represents 15 percent of your expenses instead of 5 percent, you’ll be making a bigger impact with—in theory—the same amount of effort. However, some things are more expensive to cut than others.

For example, personal finance classes often suggest that people can save by cutting back on meals out or buying coffee. Yet for most people, the monthly cost of eating out or getting coffee is a tiny fraction of their overall budget (much like USAID). So why start there?

You start with that because it is easy to cut those things out of life relative to big-ticket items.

For most people, expenditures on rent and mortgage payments dwarf coffee spending; however, it’s very difficult to lower spending on housing and transportation! For someone who has very little income to go around, even cheap housing will be expensive relative to his or her whole budget, and transportation is necessary for most jobs.

In the long run, people may be able to cut housing expenditures by finding roommates or downsizing, but the point is that in the short run, these big-ticket budgets are hard to modify. As such, cutting Starbucks and restaurant meals may be the easiest first step when we are struggling to make ends meet.

The same goes for the U.S. government. The big-ticket items for the budget (Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security) will be very difficult to address. Since those benefits are so large, modifying them will be expensive, both politically and financially. As such, even if these categories ultimately need to be tackled, this doesn’t imply that the government should be financially irresponsible with small expenditures in the short term.

In deciding what to cut, it isn’t just the total expenditures that should be considered; so should the difficulty associated with cutting it. Saying USAID is too small to cut is ignoring this important consideration. I put it like this on X:

“1 [percent] of the budget does not sound like a big cut, until you realize that getting a budget under control usually involves making lots of small cuts since large cuts are often infeasible.”

Ultimately, to borrow a modern version of a phrase coined by Benjamin Franklin, a penny saved is a penny earned. Small progress is still progress.

2) 0.7 Percent Is Not 0.7 Percent

The other problem with the “It’s only 0.7 percent” argument is that this view is too simplistic. In an accounting sense, it’s true that USAID accounts for only 0.7 percent of total spending. However, USAID’s impact on spending is not limited to what the department itself spends. USAID is a part of a network that includes various federal agencies and bureaucrats. These agencies can sometimes act as a team that works to increase overall spending. To understand this dynamic, we need to look at the economics of team production.

Economists Armen Alchian and Harold Demsetz were the first to highlight the importance of team production in firm decision-making. Team production is based on a pretty simple idea: The sum is greater than the parts.

Let’s say Patrick and I start a moving company. Imagine I can move 15 things per hour by myself and Patrick can move 20 by himself. However, if we work together, we move 40 things. In other words, working together makes us more productive than each person working individually put together (40>15+20).

The reason for this is obvious—some objects are better moved by teams. It would take an individual a really long time to move a couch by himself. Working as a team is more than doubly fast.

Since some of the boxes are essentially being produced by “the team,” it’s hard to account for who’s responsible for them.

In for-profit business, teams work together to produce revenue. But in government bureaucracies, teams often work together to grow their budgets (see this article for more detail).

So when the Department of Defense puts together its budget proposal and they use studies conducted by USAID to justify it, who is responsible for the increase? Well, the whole increase will be attributed to the DOD, but clearly USAID is partly responsible.

In this sense, bureaucracy has the ability to feed on itself, thereby making the impact of a relatively small bureau such as USAID harder to account for.

3) Establishing a Precedent

The last reason shutting down USAID is important can be highlighted with the following question: What was the last standing U.S. government department to be shut down permanently?

Can you think of one? Congratulations if so, because I can’t. The closest thing I can find is departments being renamed (Department of War became Department of Defense) or temporary departments being shuttered (such as the National Recovery Administration). But even in the latter case, much of the department got turned into what is now the Small Business Administration.

Shutting down USAID would set an important precedent. Our government, and society, needs to build up experience with and infrastructure for shutting down government bureaus. Complaining that USAID should not be a target for cuts because it is small is like complaining that someone is going on a five-minute run in an attempt to train for a marathon.

Of course a five-minute run doesn’t solve your problem of getting ready for the marathon by itself. That isn’t the point. The point is that the five-minute run gets your body used to running for five minutes. You increase from there.

For my money, the shutdown of USAID will be an important bellwether, indicating that Trump’s administration has the power to take on the deep state. If he can’t remove USAID, there’s no chance he’ll take on anything bigger.

Furthermore, I see this as a bellwether for the country itself. If the deep state in the United States is so strong that it’s impossible to cut off even an agency established by executive order that makes up only 0.7 percent of the budget, how can we expect to deal with an exploding debt interest problem and an insolvent social security system?

Many in D.C. scoff when you talk about the national debt. After all, people have been warning about the debt for decades now. However, as one of my friends recently pointed out, countries are never in sovereign debt crises—until they are.

*  *  *

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ZeroHedge.

Authored by Tom Ozimek via The Epoch Times,

A federal judge in Florida has ruled that video-sharing platform Rumble and Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), the parent company of Truth Social, are not required to comply with gag orders issued by a Brazilian Supreme Court justice.

The orders, issued by Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, had demanded the removal of U.S.-based accounts belonging to a prominent supporter of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, in a case raising concerns over international judicial overreach and free speech rights in the United States.

In a Feb. 25 ruling, U.S. District Judge Mary Scriven found that Moraes’s orders were unenforceable in the United States because they were not properly served under international law, including the Hague Convention and the U.S.–Brazil Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty.

“Under well-established law, Plaintiffs are not obligated to comply with the directives and pronouncements, and no one is authorized or obligated to assist in their enforcement against Plaintiffs or their interests here in the United States,” the judge wrote.

However, the judge denied without prejudice a request for a temporary restraining order filed by Rumble and TMTG, ruling that the case is not ripe for judicial review because no enforcement action had been taken against the two companies in the United States. This means the case could be revived if Brazilian authorities or another entity attempt to enforce the orders.

The lawsuit, brought by Rumble and TMTG on Feb. 19, accused Moraes of engaging in illegal censorship by issuing gag orders to suppress the U.S. accounts of a “well-known politically outspoken user” of Rumble, referred to in the complaint as “Political Dissident A,” later identified as Allan dos Santos. A supporter of Bolsonaro and a fugitive in Brazil, Santos is under investigation for allegedly spreading false information and hate speech.

Moraes’s orders required Rumble to suspend Santos’s accounts, block new ones, disclose user data, and appoint a legal representative in Brazil to submit to Brazilian judicial authority. The orders also imposed escalating fines and threatened to shut down Rumble’s operations in Brazil for noncompliance.

In their lawsuit, Rumble and TMTG argue that Moraes’s actions violated constitutional protections of free speech and contravened other U.S. laws, including Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which shields platforms from legal liability for user-generated content.

“The Gag Orders, as issued, censor legitimate political discourse in the United States, undermining fundamental constitutional protections enshrined in the First Amendment,” the plaintiffs said in the complaint. “Justice Moraes’s extraterritorial demands inflict immediate and irreparable harm on Rumble and TMTG by undermining lawful American political discourse, a right central to free speech under U.S. principles.”

After Rumble and TMTG filed their lawsuit, Moraes issued a demand that Rumble “immediately submit” to his authority or face consequences, according to the complaint. After Rumble failed to comply, Moraes ordered local telecommunications companies to shut it down in Brazil and imposed a daily fine of $8,700 on the U.S.-based company.

The two companies then filed a motion for a temporary restraining order on Feb. 22, warning that allowing foreign officials to bypass U.S. legal protections could set a dangerous precedent.

“If this type of end-run around U.S. law is allowed to stand, it will embolden other foreign officials to impose their censorship regimes on American companies without due process, suppress political discourse, and interfere with U.S. business operations without legal justification,” Rumble and TMTG wrote in the motion.

The Epoch Times reached out to the Brazilian Supreme Court with a request for comment on Scriven’s Feb. 25 ruling but did not receive a response by publication time.

Moraes has previously clashed with tech companies over censorship, most notably ordering a nationwide ban on tech billionaire Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, for refusing to remove certain accounts accused of spreading misinformation and failing to appoint a legal representative in Brazil. The ban was later lifted after X complied with the orders and paid millions of dollars in fines.

Last week’s Riyadh talks between the United States and Russia have led to another round of face-to-face bilateral negotiations, set for Thursday in Istanbul.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov confirmed the meeting while alongside the emir of Qatar in Doha. The oil and gas rick Gulf country remains a close ally of Turkey.

The Istanbul meeting is expected to focus on restoring diplomatic staff and full relations at each respective embassy. Both sides went through several rounds of expelling the other’s diplomats under the Biden administration, as relations hit a low-point during the Ukraine war, also amid US/EU-led sanctions on Moscow.

“Such a meeting will take place tomorrow in Istanbul. I think that its results will show how quickly and effectively we can move forward,” Lavrov said Wednesday.

The Turkish Foreign Ministry has also confirmed it is hosting the high-level talks. “As we have repeatedly stated, Türkiye is ready to provide all kinds of support to peace efforts, including hosting future talks,” a spokesperson said.

The Feb.18 meeting in Riyadh focused on kickstarting direct talks related to preparing for peace negotiations to settle the Ukraine war, but importantly this took place with either Ukrainian or European representation.

The meeting in Istanbul will make it clear “how fast and efficiently the sides can move forward,” Lavrov was cited in Russia’s TASS as saying.

Lavrov in a press conference was asked about reports that the West could permanently seize nearly $300 billion in Russian assets held abroad. “As for our assets, which have been stolen primarily by Europeans, no, you know, there has been no talk about it. But I have no doubts that this issue will not disappear as part of the settlement,” Lavrov responded.

The top Russian diplomat took the opportunity to blast European leaders for seeking to sabotage peace efforts involving the Trump White House:

Russia is waiting for Europeans to stop “lying that Russia blocks negotiations.” Europe is advancing a “hopelessly outdated and failed” policy on Ukraine and is pushing Kiev to continue fighting.

“When the political balance of power regarding Ukraine changes, as was evident in the United Nations vote, Europe immediately tries to undermine this trend, announcing new large military aid packages to Kiev, pushing it to continue fighting, and openly stating, as I think the Danish prime minister did, that peace is worse than war for Ukraine in this situation.”

Moscow believes that “the best aid from those who sincerely want to help resolve the conflict is to come to realize what caused it.”

He specifically called out the plans of some to create a European army to be sent to Ukraine. Russia has consistently rejected this as a real option for viable peace.

Despite positive momentum on peace from this White House, Trump occasionally reverts to hawkish talking points concerning Ukraine:

After Ukraine agrees to the mineral “deal,” Trump says in return Ukraine receives “the right to fight on.” He boasts that he was the one who first gave Javelins to Ukraine, which wiped out a lot of Russian tanks. He says US weapons could continue to flow to Ukraine “for awhile” pic.twitter.com/P1svBUrpmu

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) February 25, 2025

“The approach that is being imposed by the Europeans, first of all France and the British, is aimed… at heating up the conflict further and stopping any attempts to calm it down,” Lavrov said.

Authored by Peter Berkowitz via RealClearPolitics,

The accusation that he seeks dictatorial power has dogged Donald Trump since before he was elected president in 2016. Yet President Trump’s salvo of executive orders commencing shortly after he returned to the White House one month ago includes many that impose limits on government. Prominent among them is his Inauguration Day Executive Order, “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing.”

Trump’s Jan. 20 anti-DEI executive order rescinded the pro-DEI Executive Order – “Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government” –  that President Joe Biden signed in January 2021 on his first day in the White House. The Trump directive withdraws from the federal government authority Biden granted it to prefer some individuals and disfavor others based on race. On. Jan. 22, Trump went further, issuing an executive order that abolished affirmative action in federal-government contracting. This one revoked President Lyndon Johnson’s landmark 1965 Executive Order 11246, which has been interpreted as mandating racial preferences.

By terminating federal diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and affirmative action initiatives, the Trump administration aims to advance the president’s Second Inaugural Address promise to “end the government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life.” Instead, Trump stated, he would “forge a society that is colorblind and merit-based.”

On Feb. 12 in “Trump Is on the Wrong Side of History by Design,” New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie decried “the right-wing crusade against ‘diversity, equity and inclusion.’” Bouie acknowledged that “a certain set of well-meaning cultural liberals” along with “people of a more moderate or conservative persuasion” and even some critics of capitalism on “the political left” have respectable if not correct concerns about DEI’s excesses. But the Times columnist attributed thoroughly malign motives to Trump and his backers.

Coming from the Trump administration, argues Bouie, the terms “colorblind” and “merit-based” serve as dog whistles for racism and white supremacy. The Trump team opposes, Bouie contends, “the mere presence of a woman or nonwhite person or disabled or transgender person in any high-skilled, high-status position” (this will come as surprise to, among others, Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Attorney General Pam Bondi, US Ambassador to the United Nations nominee Elise Stefanik, HUD Secretary Scott Turner, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio). For Trump and the political right, the “alternative isn’t some heretofore unknown standard of merit; it is the reintroduction of something like segregation,” charged Bouie. Trump’s “attack on D.E.I. isn’t about increasing merit or fighting wrongful discrimination; it is about reimposing hierarchies of race and gender (among other categories) onto American society.”

In contrast to Bouie, on Feb. 14 in the Wall Street Journal, Rev. Corey B. Brooks, founder and senior pastor of New Beginnings Church of Chicago and CEO of Project H.O.O.D., welcomed Trump’s determination to terminate government classification of individuals, and intervention in social and political life, based on race. Nevertheless, in “Trump’s Colorblind Message Energizes Black Americans,” Brooks found “bittersweet” Trump’s inaugural-address promise to disregard race and focus on merit. Trumps words were sweet because, Rev. Brooks explained, “I live by them everyday as I minister to my community”; they were bitter because “I can only wonder where our community would be today if we had followed those words since the 1960s.”

Before then, a “culture of opportunity, self-reliance and meritocracy” enabled African Americans to build better lives despite racism. That changed when “far too many of us were seduced by post-’60s liberalism,” Brooks laments. “We were told by the federal government that bureaucrats would uplift us through social programs, housing, food vouchers, busing, racial preferences and one education plan after another.” Yet his “heart aches to see how a once God-fearing and hard-working people betrayed itself into poverty and, worse, into mental enslavement to the government.”

To restore his community’s culture of self-reliance, Brooks asks “only one thing from Mr. Trump – to come to my neighborhood and tell the people: ‘You are on your own.’” The president would “be echoing Frederick Douglass, who said after slavery, ‘I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us.’”

Bouie and Brooks advance fundamental alternatives. The New York Times columnist wishes to perpetuate government and private-sector discrimination to rectify America’s legacy of racial injustice. With decades of experience serving his beleaguered community in inner-city Chicago, the clergyman wants government to recede to give individuals, families, churches, and other voluntary associations the opportunity to organize and manage their lives.

Brooks’ view has several advantages. It conforms to America’s founding principles, which affirm equal rights under law. It fits with the limits on federal power built into the Constitution. It respects civil society as the domain where individuals take responsibility for themselves and one another. It is consistent with history: As Brooks argues, with the onset of government intervention in the 1960s, Chicago’s vibrant black communities of the 1940s and 1950s gave way to single-parent households, illiteracy, and crime. And it recognizes that government programs that treat people differently based on race promote dependency among the favored, resentment among the disfavored, and wariness among all.

Can the Trump administration dismantle the race-based programs that have been incorporated into American law? Thomas Powers addresses that question in “Trump and the DEI Counter-Revolution,” published in Quillette in early February. He gives reason to hope that the administration’s effort to rein in government’s power to allocate benefits and burdens based on race can restore respect for individual rights and equality under law.

Author of “American Multiculturalism and The Anti-Discrimination Regime” and professor and chair of political science at Carthage College, Powers identifies two principal accounts of the sources of DEI’s influence in American politics.

The first focuses on ideas and culture. It contends that DEI stems from variants on “radical progressive ideology.” These include “cultural Marxism (Christopher Rufo), postmodernism (James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose), or social-justice activism manifested as some strange new Puritanism (Andrew Doyle) or other quasi-religious impulse (John McWhorter).” If these critics are correct, argues Powers, then “the actions of the Trump administration are superficial and doomed to fail unless accompanied by some broader intellectual and cultural movement to change Americans’ hearts and minds.”

The second view concerning the rise and entrenchment of DEI concentrates on law and public policy. It is “advanced by authors like Richard Epstein, R. Shep Melnick, and Christopher Caldwell” and maintains that “DEI is the consequence of the civil-rights revolution broadly construed and of the contours of anti-discrimination law in its particulars.” If DEI is a creature of law and public policy, argues Powers, then “we have every reason to think that the Trump administration’s actions are going to change the landscape of democratic life for the long haul.”

Persuaded that DEI arises out of transformations in American law, Powers believes that the Trump administration may well succeed in undoing the diversity, equity, and inclusion regime. But the stakes go well beyond the law because, Powers observes, DEI is bound up with an ideology at war with basic principles of American constitutional government. It “champions the identities of groups, not the rights of individuals; it obliterates the boundary between public and private; it harnesses the state to legislate morality, not to protect liberty; it demands respect and is dissatisfied with mere toleration; and it stirs people up where the liberal tradition tries to calm them down,” he writes. “It has upended our understanding of something as basic to human life as ‘sex’ or ‘gender,’ and in political initiatives like the 1619 Project, would make contempt for modern life a kind of virtue.”

Nevertheless, Powers argues, DEI is in the main a product of progressives’ radicalization of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The act “banned overt acts of discrimination by government in public gathering spaces (Title II, covering ‘public accommodations’) and in employment decisions like hiring, firing, and promotion (Title VII).” However, progressives reinterpreted the act to authorize government pursuit of equality of result based on group identity. The shift from equality of opportunity at which the Civil Rights Act originally aimed to equality of result pursued by its progressive interpreters – sometimes backed by conservatives – required dramatic expansion of state power. The ambition to achieve equal group representation in positions of prestige and power compelled government to practice affirmative action, redistribute wealth, and police thought and censor speech to root out “hostile environment harassment” in government, the workplace, and higher education.

Successful legal reform, however, will take the nation only so far in placing civil-rights law on a sound footing. That’s because the two accounts of the sources of DEI that Powers identifies – ideas, and law and public policy – are intimately connected. America’s elite undergraduate institutions and law schools saturate the nation’s future lawyers, judges, and policymakers in progressive ideology.

To restore respect for individual rights, equality under law, and limited government, substantial reform must be undertaken concurrently in law and public policy and in education.

Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. From 2019 to 2021, he served as director of the Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. State Department. His writings are posted at PeterBerkowitz.com and he can be followed on X @BerkowitzPeter.

It’s been one month since U.S. President Donald Trump entered the White House and a lot has changed. 

In his first few weeks, the head of state wasted no time before withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement (again), pardoning roughly 1,500 people charged in the January 6 Capitol protests, hitting China with new tariffs, beginning “mass deportations”, reiterating his desire to buy Greenland, and moving to dismantle the United States’ main (so-called) foreign-aid agency, USAID. 

In terms of domestic policy, Trump has also proceeded to gut the federal workforce with mass firings.

As Statista’s Anna Fleck shows in the following chart (and likely unsurprising to most), opinions vary greatly across the aisle on the question of which federal departments and agencies should be reduced or eliminated.

 

You will find more infographics at Statista

According to a survey conducted by YouGov and the Economist between February 16 and 18, Americans are most at odds over the dismantling of USAID, while they tend to agree over keeping the DoD as it is. 

Republicans were generally more in favor of cuts, while Democrats had a far greater issue with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by Elon Musk

Immediately after taking office, Trump announced a 90-day freeze on all U.S. foreign assistance, including for USAID projects, and on January 31, DOGE shuttered the agency’s Washington site. 

The Trump administration has said it wants to align spending with the “America First” approach and says it is planning on merging the overseas aid agency with the U.S. Department of State.

Authored by Michael Snyder via TheMostImportantNews.com,

Do not read this article if you do not want to get angry.  The “healthcare industry” in the United States has become one gigantic money making scam, and tens of millions of American families now live in great fear of illness and disease.  Why are they so afraid?  It is because a single trip to the hospital can ruin you financially.  Even if you are covered by health insurance, medical debt can still wreck your finances.  In fact, most of the people that go bankrupt due to medical bills actually have health insurance.  Meanwhile, on the other side there are lots of people that are becoming fabulously wealthy from this system.  Our “healthcare industry” has turned large numbers of doctors, lawyers, health insurance company executives and pharmaceutical company executives into multi-millionaires.  

Of course the largest shareholders in our gigantic healthcare corporations are raking in the most cash of all.  The healthcare industry in the United States has become a cesspool of corruption and greed, and this has been the case for so long that we don’t even remember what a legitimate system even looks like anymore.

Many Americans truly believed that health insurance would protect them if something went terribly wrong with their health.

But then they discovered that health insurance companies will use their “delay, deny and defend” tactics to weasel out of paying what they owe any what that they possibly can.

Even if you do have a health insurance company that is relatively honest, and that is fairly rare these days, you are still just one really bad accident or one really bad illness away from bankruptcy unless you are independently wealthy.

Our healthcare system is designed to rapidly drain money out of us when we are at our most vulnerable.  If you have to call for an ambulance to take you to the hospital, are you thinking about how much your care will cost at that point?

Of course not.  You are just hoping that you will survive.

Today, it is so easy to rack up $10,000, $20,000 or even $30,000 in medical debt in the blink of an eye and many hospitals are becoming extremely aggressive about collecting on those medical debts.

I guarantee that many of you that are reading this article know exactly what I am talking about.

One trip to the hospital can wipe out years of financial savings.  But why should it cost so much?  In many cases, a doctor only spends a few minutes with you.

Sadly, you discover the truth when you follow the money.  There are a lot of people that are becoming exceedingly wealthy from this system, and unfortunately that does not include middle class Americans.

The following are 18 horrifying statistics about medical bills, medical debt and the healthcare industry that will make you so mad you will want to tear your hair out…

#1 According to the CFPB, approximately 100 million Americans are in medical debt right now.

#2 Even though the vast majority of the population is covered by health insurance, 62 percent of the two million personal bankruptcies that are filed each year in the United States are caused by medical debt.

#3 One survey found that U.S. households have piled up more than 220 billion dollars in medical debt.

#4 A three day stay in the hospital will typically cost you somewhere around $30,000.

#5 Americans spend more than 200 billion dollars treating cancer each year.

#6 According to the CDC, heart disease costs this country more than 250 billion dollars each year.

#7 According to the NIH, diabetes costs this country more than 400 billion dollars each year.

#8 A 25-year-old mother in Nevada was handed a bill for $700,000 after her baby daughter spent about two months in the neonatal intensive care unit.

#9 One study found that hospitals overcharge Americans “by as much as 18 times over their costs”.

#10 78 percent of U.S. adults have avoided hospital visits because they cost so much.

#11 Hospital profits have risen by more than 400 percent since 1999.

#12 A study that was conducted a few years ago determined that more than 90 percent of all hospital bills contain errors that can result in “overcharges, unnecessary costs, and insurance claim denials”…

According to a 2020 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, billing errors affected over 90% of hospital bills. These errors can result in overcharges, unnecessary costs, and insurance claim denials, leading to financial hardship for patients.

#13 The average family premium for employer-sponsored health insurance in the United States has skyrocketed to $25,572 annually.

#14 One survey found that 18 percent of all insured adults in the U.S. have had a health insurance claim denied within the past year.

#15 Since Obamacare became law, the annual profits of the five largest health insurance companies in the United States have gone up by 230 percent.

#16 In 2023, the six largest health insurance companies in the United States had combined revenues of almost 1.1 trillion dollars.

#17 In 2023, the CEOs of the five largest health insurance companies in the U.S. brought home approximately 75 million dollars in total compensation.

#18 There are five giant pharmaceutical companies that each make more than 10 billion dollars in profits each year.

Our healthcare system should not be based on greed.

It should be based on helping people and doing what is right for patients.

Other industrialized nations spend a much smaller portion of their GDP on healthcare, and many of their systems are actually more efficient.

What is wrong with us?

Why can’t we get our healthcare system fixed?

Can anyone answer that question?

Unfortunately, I don’t think that it is going to be fixed.

They have made trillions of dollars by keeping us sick and managing our illnesses.

When trillions of dollars are at stake, any effort to fundamentally fix the system will be met with overwhelming resistance.

So it appears that we are stuck with our current system for the foreseeable future, and that is very bad news for all of us.

*  *  *

Michael’s blockbuster entitled “Why” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.

On Wednesday, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders unveiled a series of bills, collectively referred to as the “Communist China Defense Legislative Package,” designed to curb China’s ability to conduct business within the state. 

The six proposed bills – some introduced and others still pending – target what the governor describes as “Communist China influence” in Arkansas.

Among the measures included are provisions to strengthen existing laws by reducing the timeframe for selling prohibited land holdings, banning CCP lobbying, and preventing any Arkansas municipality from having a sister city in China.

Additionally, any college or university hosting a Confucius Institute would be stripped of state funding, as the governor asserted China often uses such institutes for intelligence purposes.

Going forward, the state will also halt the use of made-in-China goods for promotional efforts.

Arkansas Gov. @SarahHuckabee announces legislation package to divest state resources from China and ban companies linked to the CCP from purchasing land near critical infrastructure.pic.twitter.com/Deom7260n7

— Josh Caplan (@joshdcaplan) February 26, 2025

“President Trump is the first president in my lifetime to take a hard line against Communist China and we are proud to support that work in Arkansas by getting Communist China off our land and out of our state,” Sanders said in a statement. “Once I sign this legislation into law, Chinese Communist Party-linked companies will be banned from owning property near critical infrastructure and lobbying on behalf of Communist China, Russia, and other foreign adversaries will no longer be allowed in the state of Arkansas. My administration is putting America and Arkansas first.”

The legislation’s lead sponsors are State Sen. Blake Johnson, State Rep. DeAnn Vaught, State Rep. Britt McKenzie, State Rep. Mindy McAlindon, and State Rep. Howard M. Beaty, Jr.

“Over the past two terms, the State of Arkansas has curbed the influence of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) within our borders, signaling a unified and bold stance against foreign interference,’ said Rep. Brit McKenzie. “From banning Chinese military drones, to prohibiting land ownership, and now instituting severe penalties and outlawing foreign influence peddling; These restrictions aim to protect Arkansas’s economic and security interests by limiting CCP-backed entities, full stop. I’d like to thank Governor Sarah Sanders for her partnership with the Legislature as these initiatives reflect Arkansas’s commitment to safeguarding our sovereignty and ensuring the well-being of our citizens.”

The move by Sanders coincides with growing concerns over China’s land grab across the United States.

Just this week, hedge fund manager Kyle Bass sounded the alarm over the threat, calling it one of the Chinese Communist Party’s “insane battlefield asymmetries.”

.@Jkylebass to @fortworthchris: China Has ‘Insane Battlefield Asymmetry’ in U.S. Land Ownership

“We afford them what I call battlefield asymmetries that we should not afford to them. It doesn’t matter who you are in China; you can come to the U.S., you can buy 10,000 acres of… pic.twitter.com/PoCf3m1Iyt

— Josh Caplan (@joshdcaplan) February 24, 2025

“We afford them what I call battlefield asymmetries that we should not afford to them,” Bass told Chris Powers on The Fort podcast. “It doesn’t matter who you are in China; you can come to the U.S., you can buy 10,000 acres of farmland in Iowa, you can buy farmland in Texas, or you can buy 100,000 acres of land between our most active airbase and the border, which happened here in Texas. You can’t believe that these things are happening.”

“When you ask about them buying land, it’s absolutely insane that they can buy land in size over here, and then what they do when you start being more vociferous, or you even start to draft legislation to prevent it – they get like local real estate agents that are Chinese, Chinese Americans, or naturalized Chinese citizens, and they say, ‘You are just a racist; how can you tell a Chinese family in America that’s become Americans they can’t buy a house?’ The Hayman Capital Management continued. “They create false equivalencies and functional racism, and they throw it all at the screen, and they were trying, you know, now they have you on your back feet; it’s just insane what they do.”

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has recently said the restriction of Chinese land ownership is a priority for the second Trump administration. “One of the very, very top of the list perhaps is the Chinese purchase of our farmland. A lot of that land is around some of our military outposts,” Rollins said. 

Authored by Mark Tapscott via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) officials repeatedly refused to allow investigators working for Senate DOGE Caucus Chairman Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) to examine documents related to U.S. tax dollars allegedly intended to help Ukraine combat the Russian invasion, investigators told The Epoch Times.

When the investigators were finally allowed to view the documents, it was “under surveillance in a highly secure room at USAID headquarters” even though “nothing USAID shared was classified,” said the investigators, who asked not to be named.

During their investigation, the Iowa Republican’s sleuths found millions of dollars of USAID programs “in secret slush funds being used to funnel millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars into Ukraine for questionable purposes unrelated to our own national interests,” they said.

“[Funds allegedly] intended to alleviate economic distress in the war-torn nation was spent on such frivolous activities as sending Ukrainian models and designers on junkets to New York City, London Fashion Week, Paris Fashion Week, and South by Southwest in Austin, Texas,” they said.

Among the secret slush funds was one providing $114,000 to fund purchases of “a premium, limited-edition furniture line,” and another $91,000 used to finance “a trade mission for a Scandinavian-style furniture line.”

Other USAID funding uncovered by the investigators included $148,000 for “a pickle maker,” $255,000 to “a producer of organic tea and coffee,” $104,00o for “an artisanal fruit tea company,” and $89,000 to support “a Ukrainian vineyard.”

USAID funding also provided $300,000 each to a dog collar manufacturer and a company selling a pet tracking application, $161,000 for “a purveyor of contemporary knitwear,” $126,000 for a “photographer for fashion design publications,” and $84,000 to support “a luxury bridal brand.”

Ernst first began investigating USAID in November 2023 with a letter to then-USAID Administrator Samantha Power.

“My support for providing weapons and munitions to Ukrainian fighters as they counter [Russian President Vladimir] Putin is steadfast,” Ernst told Power. “But I am weary of doling out nearly $25 billion in hardworking Americans’ tax dollars for so-called economic aid in Ukraine, including subsidies for overseas businesses such as a ‘luxury contemporary knitwear couture’ in Kyiv.”

In a Feb. 4 letter to U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Ernst said, “In a desperate attempt to limit congressional oversight of public information, USAID demonstrated intentional abuse of a system designed to keep our nation’s secret information secure.”

Rubio replaced Power as acting USAID administrator earlier this month. Most of the agency’s employees are on administrative leave, and a reduction-in-force process is being launched that could eliminate as many as 2,000 positions within the agency.

Information about Ernst’s investigation was made available to The Epoch Times on the same day that the House DOGE Subcommittee was preparing to convene a hearing focused on how USAID officials dispatched at least $122 million in U.S. tax dollars to multiple organizations operating in the Middle East with documented links to Hamas, Hezbollah, and al-Qaeda terrorist groups.

Middle East Forum (MEF) Executive Director Gregg Roman told The Epoch Times on Tuesday that he will testify before the hearing’s panel that “there’s a fox loose in the henhouse of our foreign aid system.” 

“This problem began under the Obama administration, grew under the Biden administration, and now requires immediate action to halt dangerous mismanagement and a fatal moral confusion,” Roman said. “We’re not just talking about waste, fraud, and abuse, this is a national security problem. Every misdirected dollar destabilizes conflict zones and puts American lives at risk.”

The terrorist links were confirmed by MEF investigators through U.S. government documents, USAID records, and other publicly available information sources.

The House DOGE Subcommittee chaired by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) is part of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee chaired by Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.). The House DOGE panel, like the Senate DOGE caucus, was formed in response to President Donald Trump’s creation of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) led by Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

DOGE is conducting forensic audits of federal spending at all federal departments and agencies. Among the first agencies to be examined was USAID.

“What the DOGE team has uncovered with USAID is shocking, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg,” Greene said in a statement announcing Wednesday’s hearing.

Authored by Nick Giambruno via InternationalMan.com,

Weekends and holidays are the perfect time to catch people off guard…

Like a street thug committing a mugging, capital controls blindside most people—otherwise, they wouldn’t be effective.

The government declares a surprise bank holiday and shuts down all the banks—mere hours after denying any such plans.

Then come the capital controls, preventing citizens from moving their money out of the country.

Cash-sniffing dogs—less friendly than drug-sniffing ones—suddenly appear at airports and border crossings.

At that point, your money is like a lobster in a trap. It doesn’t take much imagination to guess what comes next.

Once a desperate government has your money within reach, it will find a way to take as much of it as possible.

Don’t be shocked if your local currency suffers a massive devaluation, your bank deposits are suddenly worth a fraction of yesterday’s value, or an emergency tax is imposed.

Whatever the method or excuse, the outcome is always the same: a wealth transfer from you to the government.

This familiar pattern has unfolded in countless countries in recent years. No one should be surprised the next time it happens.

Governments facing financial trouble almost certainly resort to capital controls—a desperate, misguided solution with devastating consequences for ordinary people.

Just look at the recent history: Argentina, Lebanon, Venezuela, Iceland, Greece, Cyprus, Turkey, Russia, Ukraine, China, India, South Korea—and many more—have all imposed capital controls.

The lesson? Capital controls can happen anywhere, anytime.

Though unthinkable to most Americans, there’s a high chance they’re coming to the US. They’ve happened before—and could happen again soon.

Remember, in 1933, President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 6102 forced Americans to exchange their gold for US dollars under threat of a 10-year prison sentence and a $10,000 fine (over $235,000 in today’s debased confetti).

The official exchange rate? Unfavorable, of course—amounting to a 41% confiscation of purchasing power.

The US government then banned private ownership of gold bullion for 42 years—only allowing the plebs to legally own it again in 1975.

This isn’t speculation. It’s historical precedent. And history shows governments, especially in crisis, reach for capital controls.

Today, it’s clear the fiat currency system, centered on the US dollar, is crumbling.

Since Nixon severed the dollar’s last tie to gold in 1971, we’ve endured over 50 years of this experiment. Like spoiled milk left far past its expiration date, the fiat system has long outlived its shelf life.

Even the people running the system can see it—and they’re openly discussing what comes next.

That’s why there’s so much talk about resetting the monetary system… and without question, capital controls will be part of it.

All it takes is a crisis—real or manufactured—or a convenient excuse. Just a stroke of the president’s pen on a new executive order, and it’s done.

Expect it to happen.

Why and How Governments Impose Capital Controls

Capital controls are government-imposed restrictions on how people can use their money—an affront to anyone who values property rights and a free society.

Here’s how they work…

Governments may allow people to buy foreign currency (or gold) only at an “official” rate—which they set. Unsurprisingly, it’s always less favorable than the real, free-market rate. The gap between the two is nothing more than a wealth transfer to the government.

Another common tactic? Hefty taxes on international money transfers or foreign asset purchases.

Sometimes, governments go further—outright banning ownership of foreign assets or prohibiting any transfer of wealth outside the country.

No matter the form, capital controls share one goal: trap money within national borders to make it easier for the government to seize.

Of course, these measures come with a propaganda blitz designed to gaslight the public into believing capital controls are “necessary” to protect the average citizen.

Expect politicians to spin disingenuous narratives that cast them as saviors rather than aggressors.

And the mainstream media? They’ll echo these lies, demonizing anyone who dares oppose capital controls as “disloyal” or worse.

What Happens After Capital Controls

Capital controls are always a prelude to something worse.

Once governments trap money inside a country, wealth confiscation is usually just hours away. Anything they don’t steal immediately, they lock in for future grabs.

That’s why you must act before capital controls are imposed.

How much time do you have?

No one can say for sure—but acting well in advance is essential. It’s better to be a year early than a minute late.

Still, there’s one common warning sign I’ve noticed in every case of looming capital controls: It’s like someone waving a giant red flag…

A government official denying that capital controls are being considered.

Whenever a central banker or politician insists something “won’t happen,” you can almost bet it will—and soon.

In bureaucrat-speak, “No, of course not” usually means “It could happen tomorrow.”

As the old saying goes:

“Believe nothing until it has been officially denied.”

These denials aren’t random—they’re calculated. Politicians and central bankers must catch the public off guard to achieve their goals.

So when you hear the official denial, take it as your final warning: You likely have only hours left to act.

Three Ways To Beat Capital Controls

The solution is simple.

Move some of your savings outside your home country so it’s not trapped when the government imposes capital controls. You’ll have your wealth safely waiting for you on the other side.

Here are three practical ways to do that:

1. Open a foreign bank account.
Capital controls in your home country are unlikely to affect accounts held abroad. A foreign bank account ensures a portion of your wealth remains outside the reach of local authorities.

2. Invest in foreign real estate.
Real estate overseas is a powerful way to store significant capital. Your home government can’t easily seize property in another country—not without drastic measures, like an act of war.

3. Hold physical gold bullion in a non-bank vault abroad.
Storing gold in a wealth-friendly foreign jurisdiction—like Singapore, Switzerland, or the Cayman Islands—offers robust protection.

But here’s a critical warning: Do NOT store gold in a bank’s safe deposit box. Banks are prime targets when governments declare bank holidays or seize private assets. Instead, opt for private, non-bank vaults. Holding physical bullion in your possession or with a trusted vault provider ensures better security. (More details below.)

Conclusion

The dollar-based monetary system is unraveling—even the people running it know this.

They’re already preparing for what’s next with talks of a “reset.” And it’s virtually certain that capital controls will be part of the plan.

I believe this could unfold sooner than most expect—and when it does, it won’t be pretty.

We’re likely standing at the edge of a historic financial earthquake—one that could forever alter the US economy and become the biggest economic event of our lifetimes.

Yet, most people are clueless about what’s coming—and even fewer know how to prepare.

That’s why legendary investor Doug Casey and I released an urgent video revealing how to best store your gold.

Inside, we show you the most effective strategies to safeguard your savings from capital controls and looming wealth confiscations.

Capital controls are coming. Don’t be caught off guard. Click here to watch it now.

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Brownstone Institute,

The Trump administration, pushed by the Department of Government Efficiency and deployed by the Office of Personnel Management, has sent another email to all federal employees with a normal request to present five tasks accomplished in the last week. 

It’s an easy task. It takes 5 minutes. In the service industry, this is entirely normal, even routine. Taking inventory of the workforce is standard for any new management in the private sector. 

Oddly, absolute mania broke out among the pundit class. Government unions are preparing lawsuits. The panic and frenzy is palpable. As it turns out, no new president has ever done anything like this before, no Democrat who believes in good government and no Republican who supposedly distrusts bureaucracy. 

Something dramatic has hit Washington. It’s about more than Trump. 

The party now in control of the US executive branch is a third party built out of the corpses of two existing parties. It goes by the name Republican but this is nearly a historical accident. The GOP was a vessel that was least protected against invasion and occupation. It has now been nearly taken over by outsiders who had little or no influence within the party a decade ago. 

Nearly all the top people now in power – including Trump of course but also Musk, Gabbard, Kennedy, Lutnick, and so many more, to say nothing of the voters themselves – are refugees from the Democratic Party. Coalitions have dramatically changed. Voting blocs have migrated. And policy debates and priorities are nothing like they have been in any period since the end of the Great War. 

The occupiers left a Democratic Party that was and is busy consuming itself with Rousseauian frenzies on issues about which most people do not care or are otherwise completely opposed. The legacy establishment of the Republican Party, however, never welcomed them in. They were hated and resisted at every step. 

The Kennedy Migration 

To understand the remarkable speed and trajectory of this creation of a third party within the structure of two, consider that it was not even two years ago when Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., was first contemplating running for president as a Democrat.

The conditions were unique. He had gained an enormous following for his courage during Covid, standing up against the lockdowns, speaking out against the censorship and rights violations, and then decrying the imposition of shots that achieved nothing for public health. 

In 2023, President Biden was unpopular and not even credible as the chief executive, much less as a candidate for a second term. The thinking in the Kennedy camp at the time was that a run by Kennedy for the Democratic nomination would force an open primary and he could lead the party back to its roots, away from woke totalitarianism toward the political values of his father and uncle. 

In theory, all of this seemed plausible. His first rallies were crowded events, and the money poured in. Volunteers were signing up to work for the campaign. The first ads that appeared were nostalgic of a lost time, an America before the shattering of civic culture that came with the assassination of his uncle in 1963. The framing and even music of his campaign reflected such themes. 

If anyone could fix the Democrats, it was surely Kennedy with a lifetime of activism and experience in litigation against corporate capture of agencies, plus a recent campaign for human rights and free speech. The presumption here was that the Democrats had some base of support that still supported such values. And maybe that was right but his intentions ran headlong into the machinery of party leadership. 

His intention was to challenge Trump for the presidency, and the basis of the challenge was rather obvious. It was, after all, under Trump’s watch that the lockdowns began and the legal apparatus that led to the dangerous shots was deployed. It was Trump who kicked off the economic crisis with wave after wave of stimulus payments plus monetary expansion. As an empirical matter, he had presided over the worst invasion of rights of any president in history. 

That’s where matters stood only two years ago. When it became obvious that there would be no open primary, Kennedy was tempted by the lure of an independent run. The most immediate problem of gaining ballot access hit hard. The system, after all, is set up for two parties only and they want no competition unless such an effort works as a spoiler. That was not obvious with Kennedy – he drew equally from both sides – so everyone with power wanted him excluded. 

The other problem traces to the undeniable logic of winner-take-all elections. Under Duverger’s law, such contests tend to default to two choices only. This logic applies not just to politics but to all systems of voting. If you offer guests at a party the chance to vote on dinner, but the majority will prevail over the minority, everyone will immediately shift from voting for what they like toward voting against the food they hate the most. 

For some reason, this pattern of strategic voting is hardly mentioned in polite company but it is a reality in US politics. Voters select against the candidate they fear the most and for the person they believe can win to forestall the worst possible outcome. In the Kennedy case, then, it meant that no matter how much people loved him, they would end up supporting either Biden or Trump regardless. 

It so happened that over the summer, this logic was pressing itself heavily on the Kennedy campaign even as Trump faced astonishing levels of deep-state lawfare plus an assassination attempt, which conjured up deep family trauma in Kennedy. This provoked some discussions between the two that resulted in a historic realignment in politics. 

During these discussions, Trump was frank about what happened during the Covid period. He had been lied to by his bureaucracy, the experts who had been assigned to him to say that this virus was a bioweapon with possible cure in the form of a new vaccine. With great reluctance and only for a limited time did he approve what everyone, including family members and conservative pundits, was telling him to do. 

As for Warp Speed, Trump had always considered it to be an aggressive push for a solution. International and domestic sources named Hydroxychloroquine as a workable therapeutic, and so he ordered it for mass distribution. 

It was essentially inconceivable in those days that the deeper bureaucracy would not only remove it and other repurposed drugs from distribution but even generate fake studies warning against them, all in an effort to push the new pharmaceutical product. Trump was surely astonished to see these events unfold in a manner that he could not control. 

In that connection, both Trump and RFK, Jr. agreed on the dangers to American health from a variety of sources, including that emanating from the overuse of pharmaceuticals. Trump learned from Kennedy’s expertise on this matter, and they experienced a meeting of minds. And not only on this but on the evils of captured agencies, censorship, and deep state manipulation of public culture in general. 

They would never agree on issues of oil and gas, of course, but on that topic too Kennedy had been moved by the Covid years to reconsider the supposed science behind climate change, especially that which recommended more human suffering as a means of solving a supposed existential threat. 

We may never know the fullness of what took place over those two days but the discussions changed history, bringing together two mighty forces in American culture that had long been separated by party label and tribal identity: bourgeois nationalism vs. the haut bourgeois crunchy liberalism of the Whole Foods set. As it turned out, they had a common enemy. 

Now Kennedy is the new head of Health and Human Services under the Trump administration, which is now undertaking the largest attempt at routing the DC establishment since Andrew Jackson. His goal is to turn around the whole ship of state, industry, and science, away from fakery and industrial corruption emanating from a single focus on infectious disease toward a new focus on chronic disease with science-based and natural solutions. That is a herculean task. 

The Musk Migration 

Elon Musk is the third force within this leadership triumvirate of the new party. Before 2020, he was a politically conventional investor and entrepreneur. Mostly he associated with the default party of the elites, the Democrats. Then lockdowns came. He was the only major corporate leader in the US and probably anywhere in the industrialized world who publicly stood up in protest. He said he would sooner sleep on the floor of his factory than close it. He refused vaccine mandates in all his companies. He pulled Tesla out of California and moved it to Texas. He moved all his corporate registrations out of Delaware. 

By 2023, he was a changed man, newly aware of the threat of Leviathan, and did a deep dive into anti-statist literature. He faced his own family battles over woke ideology, and this made his intellectual transformation complete. He entered the political season with a new consciousness. Whereas he once regarded the bureaucracy as annoyingly necessary, he increasingly viewed it as the source of unchecked tyranny. 

At one level, the meetup of Trump and Musk – like the meetup of Trump and Kennedy – was completely implausible. Musk regarded his greatest achievement as a businessman as having made the most mighty contribution to clean energy yet, having broken up the automotive monopoly and mass-produced the first commercially viable electric car. Trump, on the other hand, had sworn to smash electric car subsidies and called for deregulation of oil and gas. To link up with Trump meant having to put at risk even the tax break for consumers of EVs. 

But he was ready for that simply because, like Kennedy, he became convinced that Western civilization itself was at risk from a woke Leviathan that had shown its teeth in the most brutal way during the Covid years. His reason for purchasing Twitter for $44 billion was to bust up the censorship cartel that was constructed to enforce lockdowns and promote the vaccine. Once having taken over, he discovered the extent of government control, uprooted it, and unleashed free speech on the US. 

Here again, Musk shared this concern with Kennedy and Trump. All three linked up on the crucial issues: the desperate need to curb and crush the power and reach of the administrative state. This is an issue that crosses left and right, Democrat and Republican, liberal and conservative, and all other traditional categories. 

The Gabbard Migration 

In this connection, there was also the national security angle in which decades of neoconservative “forever wars” had bred resentment and failure abroad, thus bringing over the articulate Tulsi Gabbard from the Democrats to Trump’s side, together with other influencers like Pete Hegseth who saw traditional military concerns having given way to woke ideology that Musk despised and Kennedy found to be deeply corrupting of traditional liberal concerns. 

Their interests dovetailed with the revolt against globalism generally, which had taken the form of endless unwinnable wars, unchecked spigots of foreign aid, taxpayer pillaging in the form of subsidies to international syndicates of NGOs and agencies, plus the cruel deployment of immigration as a tool of electoral manipulation. It was the immigration point that triggered the populist push for the new nationalism that gathered in new refugees from the antiwar sectors of the left and right. 

Donald Trump himself has undergone his own migration. An industrial mercantilist from his earliest public statements, he gradually absorbed a de facto anti-statism once his ill-fated first term was subverted from within and then he faced unprecedented lawfare and even assassination attempts to stop his second term. When he told the Libertarian Party that this lawfare made him a libertarian in spirit, he was being truthful. Once it became personal, the new head of state effectively turned against the state and all its works. 

These are all circuitous paths but they reached the point of having huge influence over the public mind in the wake of the Covid years that discredited existing elites and prepared the way for a completely new way of going about government and public life. Given the meme culture of our time, this new party went by various names, first MAGA and then MAHA and then DOGE (in homage to the meme coin that started as a joke and then became real). 

MAGA/MAHA/DOGE is not exactly the catchiest name for the new ruling party but it is far more accurate than Republican, much less Democrat. It is a new party formed out of the discredited shells of the two existing parties that lost public trust over decades of misrule culminating in an ill-fated attempt to master the exigencies of the microbial kingdom. 

In a Kuhnian sense, the collapse of the orthodox paradigm (rule by administrative agencies informed by captured science) was complete by 2023, preparing the way for the pre-paradigmatic coalition of these fascinating characters, backed by popular movements that are mirrored in many lands, and generally sailing under the flag of populism. And here is the crucial fact: these leaders have their reach, influence, and power because the causes they represent have come of age with a population completely fed up with misrule by experts. 

These are new and highly promising times, as the old undergoes a merciful dismantling and something entirely new takes its place. We find the roots of the ideology of the administrative state in the works of Woodrow Wilson, and it takes only a few minutes of reading his deluded fantasies of how science and compulsion would forge a better world to see that it was only a matter of time before the whole experiment was in tatters. 

It took more than a century but that day is finally here. The paradigm has shifted. For all the messiness and frenzy – including the chaos, confusion, and betrayals – our times at least present opportunity to reassert a foundational principle of the Enlightenment; namely that the people themselves should have some fluid and influential role in shaping the workings of the regime under which they are forced to live.