After ten months of lockdowns and shocking degrees of economic and social carnage, millions of Americans have decided that there surely must be some rationale for all the insanity and have signed on to become enforcers themselves, even and perhaps especially when the rules make no sense at all.

Though many of them are doing so in the shadows, there are entrepreneurs everywhere who are setting to work to solve the most pressing problems of our present and our future. The businesses those innovators introduce to the world will be all the more significant for the hurdles they surpassed.

When combined with the empirically verified reality that increased trade between nations decreases the likelihood of those nations getting into shooting wars with each other, what is left of the national-security exception to the case for unilateral free trade is very narrow indeed.

I have looked at other groupings of business; e.g., surveys of people in finance, and surveys of people in production. The other groupings don’t show meaningful differences. But, between small business versus big business, there are real differences.

To reduce the probability of such a horror, America needs real statesmen (leaders of any gender who seek to implement rational policies instead of engaging in constant partisan pandering) to emerge from this mess.

What are the implications of the Ripple suit for cryptocurrencies in general? Cryptocurrencies with a framework similar to Ripple’s obviously have a problem. Decentralized cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ether are far away from the situation creating problems for Ripple.

If we want to maintain our republic, and Western society as a whole, we need to remember the principles that we stand for, and reject the dictates coming down from maniacal politicians and bureaucrats who seek to slowly chip away at our individual liberties.

No matter what your opinion is on bitcoin, its financial returns are no longer astronomical. Plenty of upstarts, small caps, established companies and even other cryptocurrencies posted that kind of return in the strange financial year that was 2020. Welcome back to the lower troposphere, bitcoiners ‒ or as the rest of us call it: reality.

In an economic sense, similarities between the U.S. and China are greater than some want to believe. Thank goodness they are. Unlike when China was poor, nowadays its people have a rooting interest in our success. And our people benefit from their success.

Like many others, I am concerned about the sovereign debt market in the wake of Covid-19. But providing more funds to governments committed to maintaining an unsustainable course is not a solution. These countries need serious institutional reforms.