Utopia, you are standing in it!

While the revolutionary government frantically raised fresh troops and reorganised its armies, a Prussian-Austrian army under Charles Wilhelm Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick assembled at Coblenz on the Rhine. In July, the invasion began, with Brunswick’s army easily taking the fortresses of Longwy and Verdun.

The duke then issued a proclamation called the Brunswick Manifesto, on July 25, 1792. It was written by Louis XVI’s émigré cousin, Louis-Charles the Prince de Condé, declaring the intent of the Austrians and Prussians to restore the king to his full powers and to treat any person or town who opposed them as rebels to be condemned to death by martial law.

King Louis XVI of France and Navarre

Contrary to its intended purpose of strengthening Louis XVI’s position against the revolutionaries, the Brunswick Manifesto had the opposite effect of greatly undermining his already highly tenuous position. It was taken by many to be the…

Imagine if POTUS could fly from coast to coast in under an hour.

By Kyle Mizokami

Aug 7, 2020

Hermeus

The U.S. Air Force is funding an aviation startup working on a combined cycle engine. Hermeus’s combined cycle engine can work like a regular turbofan or ramjet engine, reaching a speed of Mach 5. The Air Force thinks the best application for the engine, oddly enough, is a future Air Force One.

Hermeus, a Georgia-based aviation startup, has announced a contract with the U.S. Air Force to develop its idea for a hypersonic aircraft engine. The Air Force department funding the project is the Presidential and Executive Airlift Directorate, the team that manages Air Force One. A Mach 5 aircraft could allow the president to fly from New York to London in 90 minutes, instead of the 7 hours it takes today.

The Air Force made the investment after Hermeus…

The real ‘news’ in today’s official GDP data for Q2 is not that the UK economy shrank for a second successive quarter in the three months to June, thus meeting the usual definition of a ‘recession’. That was a racing certainty anyway given the collapse in economic activity in April and the limited recovery in the monthly data for May, which had already been reported.

Given these numbers, it was also no surprise that the UK is likely to have recorded the biggest quarterly decline in GDP of any major economy (but I’ll come back to the significance of this later).

Indeed, as well as being ‘old’ news, this is not necessarily even ‘bad’ news. The slump was the result of the government’s decision to shut down large parts of the economy and to discourage many people from doing what they would normally be doing – in order to save…

Speculating about tax policy in 2021, with Washington potentially being controlling by Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer, and Nancy Pelosi, there are four points to consider.

1. The bad news is that Joe Biden has endorsed a wide range of punitive tax increases.
2. The good news is that Joe Biden has not endorsed a wealth tax, which is one of the most damaging ways– on a per-dollar raised basis – for Washington to collect more revenue.
3. The worse news is that the additional spending desired by Democrats is much greater than Biden’s proposed tax increases, which means there will be significant pressures for additional sources of money.
4. The worst news is that the class-warfare mentality on the left means the additional tax increases will target successful entrepreneurs, investors, innovators, and business owners – which means a wealth tax is a very real threat.

Let’s consider what would…