Sovereign Man

It was January 2000. AOL had just announced it was buying Time Warner in what was then the biggest merger in history. Fourteen dot-com companies had bought Super Bowl ads, one of them starring a sock puppet that sold dog food. The US economy was growing at one of its... Read more

On Sunday afternoon, the power went out at ExxonMobil’s refinery in Channahon, Illinois, a southwest suburb of Chicago. Oil refineries run at tremendous heat and pressure, so whenever the power goes out, all that heat and pressure has to go somewhere. It’s basic physics. Hence why the plant burned it... Read more

Last week, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent sat down for a fireside chat at Southern Methodist University in Dallas and told the room what the plan is for the national debt. “We don’t have a revenue problem,” he said. “We have a spending problem.” Contain the spending, add 3% growth, and... Read more

At a time in my life which now seems centuries ago, I was once a young lieutenant, barely a year out of West Point, and I had recently been assigned to lead an electronic warfare platoon. Whenever my unit wasn’t deployed or in the field, most of my duty days... Read more

In July, the Canadian uranium miner Cameco stopped producing at its mine in northern Saskatchewan (known as ‘Cigar Lake’) for two weeks. Cigar Lake itself was fine, nothing was wrong with the mine. The problem was their sulfuric acid plant— a crucial ingredient in processing uranium ore— broke down. Normally... Read more

It’s so simple, how could no one have thought of this before? The man currently polling in second place to become the next President of France has put forward an ingenious solution to tackling France’s national debt, currently standing at around 117% of the country’s GDP. Jean-Luc Mélenchon says, “All... Read more

Sweden’s far left political faction is heading into its election next week promising to roll out a destructive idea that already failed once before in their country. The Left Party (the former communists) wants a wealth tax on billionaires… it’s Bernie Sanders’ dream come true. They’ve also floated a new... Read more

It’s been another busy week for the Inspired Idiots. Here are a few of the most absurd stories from the last several days in case you missed them. New York’s top socialist has a fake union card and a townhouse from Dad Gustavo Gordillo tells a great story. He’s the... Read more

In 1845, the French economist Frédéric Bastiat petitioned parliament on behalf of the nation’s candlestick makers. They were being ruined, he wrote, by an unscrupulous rival that was flooding the market with light at a price no honest candlestick maker could match. This light-producing rival, of course, was the sun.... Read more

Somewhere in America there’s a local ordinance that tells you which way your garage has to face. Another one dictates what your fence can be made of, and a third sets how many square feet of window your house needs. A few spell out the dimensions of particular features down... Read more

Hardly a week goes by without another data center announcement, and the projects have gotten so big that they’re now measured in gigawatts. A gigawatt is a billion watts of electricity. Running around the clock, one gigawatt is enough to supply about 800,000 average American homes— and a single large... Read more

In November 2008, California voters approved a ballot measure to build a bullet train from San Francisco to Los Angeles. It was supposed to be fast enough to make the journey in under three hours. And passengers could hop on by 2020, for a total cost of $33 billion. Eighteen... Read more