The grocery receipt is where inflation arrives. It is not where inflation begins, and any politician who tells you otherwise is either innumerate or lying.

For millions of Americans, the economic debate has been reduced to terms even Washington cannot obfuscate: the price of food, the mortgage nobody can qualify for, the insurance premium that arrives like a subpoena. The distance between a paycheck and the obligations waiting for it has been shrinking for four straight years while the people responsible insisted everything was fine.

It was not fine. The reason has a name, a date, and a price tag, all of which the last administration would prefer you forget.

Political discourse begins its analysis now the public feels the pain, never at the moment the decision that caused it was signed into law. By the time the receipt lands on the counter, the men who wrote the check are gone, replaced by successors who inherit the bill and get blamed for it.

This is the first battle of the coming elections: consequences versus causes. It is a battle the left is desperate to fight on any ground except the historical record.

The Receipt Arrives After The Purchase

Inflation is the most politically

America has struggled to achieve decisive strategic outcomes against determined adversaries despite overwhelming battlefield superiority. The following three forces largely explain why.

First, politics increasingly dictates strategy, including when and—critically—how we fight. Second, institutional inertia prevents our military and defense industrial base from adapting to the speed of modern warfare. Third, declining patriotism makes it increasingly difficult to persuade Americans that national sacrifice is sometimes necessary, resulting in our military failing to achieve objectives in a politically timely manner.

These three problems build on one another, with politics the central obstacle. Without political unity, neither military reform nor industrial mobilization can occur.

Conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, coupled with China's control over critical minerals, pharmaceuticals, consumer goods, and its long-term ambition to dominate global trade and finance, are forcing the United States to reassess how to preserve the economic and military strength that underpins our prosperity. It's not that our leaders fail to recognize these challenges; the problem is that they are unwilling to level with the American people.

Mobilization Begins With Political Unity

Every successful American mobilization has begun with a common understanding that the nation faced a serious threat. During World War II, the Korean War, the Reagan military buildup,

My first encounter with trans was in the early 1950s, when Christine Jorgensen became the first widely known person to undergo "sex reassignment" surgery.  I remember some of my peers mocking Christine by threatening to swap the feminine lips and masculine mustache between Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head.  After some laughter, eye-rolling, and snide smiles, seven-year-olds settled the issue: It was ridiculous — we called it crazy — to believe that Mr. Potato Head could become Mrs. Potato Head any more than a man could become a woman.

The trans issue reemerged with the Reimer twins, Bruce and Brian.  In the 1960s, during what was supposed to be a routine circumcision, Bruce's penis was destroyed.  Dr. John Money at Johns Hopkins University saw an opportunity to demonstrate that sex roles are a blank slate at birth and are shaped by culture, not genetics.  He convinced Bruce's parents that with surgery, hormones, and therapy, Bruce could be successfully transitioned to female.  Bruce was castrated, given hormones, renamed Brenda, and not told that he had once been Bruce.  From the beginning, "Brenda" didn't like acting like a girl.  He tore off his dresses and played with his twin brother's toys more than his own.  After applying makeup, Brenda said he looked

In revealing the commonalities of the Reds and the Greens in the Red-Green Axis, we have elucidated their shared goals of violence, wealth redistribution, inequality before the law, a binary world, and monopoly rule by the elites. Here we explore their intent to reshape the totality of society.

Islamic political systems and Marxist-Leninist communism both claim more than the right to regulate what is currently unsettled. Each claims the standing authority to redraw, at will, the line between what the system controls and what it leaves alone. A domain currently left to private choice is never permanently protected from the system; it is simply not yet a priority.

The distinction between public and private in both systems is not a fixed boundary the directing authority respects. It is a boundary the directing authority draws and can erase.

Classical Islamic jurisprudence sorts every human act into one of five categories: obligatory, recommended, neutral, disliked, or forbidden. Nothing is unclassifiable; even silence in the texts produces a ruling—neutral—rather than an absence of one. That alone establishes comprehensive jurisdiction.

The more consequential mechanism is sadd al-dhara'i' or "blocking the means": a jurist may rule an otherwise

Article III of the Constitution allows Congress to establish courts below the Supreme Court, which includes federal District and Circuit Courts. If Congress can establish them, it can abolish them. In 1801, in the waning days of John Adams' presidency, Congress did just that and abolished the district and circuit courts of the District of Columbia.

These two courts display widespread intransigent partisanship and demonstrably poor scholarship, exemplified by this week's ruling on the new White House construction. Given the difficulty of removing so many bad judges in these two courts by impeaching them, it's time to repeat John Adams' move: Abolish these courts. Cases that normally would be heard in them should be assigned to courts elsewhere.

The case which most showcases the lunacy of the D.C. courts is National Trust for Historic Preservation in the United States v. National Park Service, et al. As is often the case in poorly reasoned opinions, the author substitutes words for reason.

As you may know, the old East Wing of the White House which, among other things, contained underground security facilities (bunkers, bomb-shelters, and military and medical infrastructure), presidential offices and some minimal public meeting spaces, was torn down and construction

I have a dream that American farmers, drillers, miners, industrialists, and manufacturers produce everything that American consumers need.  I have a dream that anything worth building is built in America, that any job worth doing is done in America, and that anything worth buying can be found and shipped within the United States.  

Why did we allow ourselves to be convinced that Americans should make only a few select things and buy everything else from foreign markets?  Why did we allow politicians and Wall Street investors to convince us that "free trade" requires slave labor from faraway lands?  Why did we spend a century ensuring safer work environments and more dependable wages for our skilled tradesmen only to export those jobs to adversarial nations that care nothing about worker safety or providing above-subsistence standards of living?  Why did we fight a Cold War in defense of freedom only to subsidize Chinese communism?  Why do we regulate ourselves to death in the name of "fighting global warming," while China and India inflict the worst environmental damage on the planet?

Prove these statements wrong: There is no worker on the planet more capable than an American.  There is no nation of people more innovative than the United States.  There is

When a judge sentences a violent criminal to twenty years in prison, citizens believe that society will be protected from that individual for the next two decades. In reality, however, it is far more likely that the perpetrator will only be detained for about eight years. That routine discrepancy can be called the sentencing illusion.

Politicians and prosecutors frequently stand before cameras to announce lengthy prison terms in order to encourage citizens to conclude that justice has been served and dangerous criminals have been removed from society for the duration of their declared sentence.

The reason for this delusion is self-serving for all involved. The pronouncement caters to political perceptions. The reality is a product of incentives.

Prosecutors seek to be portrayed as relentless advocates for justice, and judges want to appear as impartial guardians of public policy. Yet each operates under a set of incentives that point in a different direction. As a result, crime victims, police officers, and ordinary citizens are often shocked and frustrated to find that reoffenders are back to their predatory ways after only serving a fraction of their stated sentence.

To understand why this deception has become normal operating procedure for our justice system, we must understand

Some politically charged words become part of our common vocabulary almost overnight.  "Globalism" is a timely example.  Ten or fifteen years ago, calling someone a "globalist" didn't have much effect.  Today, it is well understood as a pejorative that highlights someone's allegiance to international institutions over those created within a nation state.

Although the term has been used in various academic circles for more than a century, it didn't become part of our common political parlance until anti-Establishment conservatives in the United States and Europe found it a useful taxonomic description of their ideological opponents.  In hindsight, it is surprising how long the word "globalism" remained dormant and hidden away in the context of political speech and debate.  

During the Cold War, however, the world was divided between the Soviet Union and the United States, between communism and freedom, between closed economies and open markets.  To the extent that nationalism and globalism were distinguished from each other, academics and political leaders did so under the umbrella of the Cold War contest between East and West to gobble up as many nation states as possible.  Both sides embraced a "domino theory" of geopolitics in which partisans fought for global domination, one nation at a time.

There was, however, an

The grocery store may be the least forgiving classroom in which to teach political economy. The shelves do not care about ideology. The checkout scanner does not respond to applause lines. A gallon of milk does not know whether it was purchased in a capitalist marketplace or a municipal experiment in economic justice. It only knows what it cost to produce, transport, refrigerate, stock, and sell.

That is the inconvenient thing about economics. The numbers have no political affiliation. They simply arrive at the register.

That reality is the great problem for economic promises. They sound wonderful from a podium. They become considerably more complicated somewhere between the warehouse and the shopping cart.

More than a century ago, Americans laughed at a song built around an apparently contradictory declaration: "Yes, we have no bananas." The joke worked because the contradiction was obvious. In modern politics, the same joke has returned wearing a suit and carrying a spreadsheet.

Which brings us to one of the more fascinating promises emerging from the modern urban left: the government grocery store. The concept has obvious emotional appeal. Groceries are more expensive than they were in 2019. Families are frustrated. Everyone would like to see lower prices at