political narratives

  • Somebody Paid to Make Socialism a Slur

    ByChris Connors Jr.

    When your house is burning down, a truck the government owns shows up, staffed by government employees, and nobody calls it socialism. The VA owns its hospitals and employs its doctors, and the word mostly leaves it alone. Then in 1961 a record album full of that word helped kill hospital coverage for old people, and in 2025 a sitting senator aimed the same word, correctly, at a president buying ten percent of Intel, and the government kept buying. The definition never explains which way the word cuts. Something else does, and it has a price.

  • Who Pays to Stop Inflation?

    ByChris Connors Jr.

    We think inflation is bad, but almost nobody can say what it is. The United States has fought it with legal price ceilings, government rationing, a wartime tax that took most of corporate profits, and interest rates high enough to put twelve million people out of work. Every one of those methods worked by sending somebody the bill, and who gets the bill has always been a political choice. This is the cost of our attempts to battle inflation, what worked, what didn’t, and who paid.

  • The Wrong Thief

    ByChris Connors Jr.

    A man in Pennsylvania is one paycheck from losing the house his grandfather bought outright in 1962. He knows his rent went up. He knows his grocery bill went up. He knows that when he turns on the television, someone is shouting at him about a caravan. He is right that something has been taken. But he has been handed the wrong thief.