“Today’s inflation report,” US president Joe Biden told us on March 10, “is a reminder that Americans’ budgets are being stretched by price increases and families are starting to feel the impacts of Putin’s price hike.”

It’s the latest in a long line of dodges on the causes of US inflation, which took a dive in early 2020, then began its steady climb toward the current official rate of 7.9%.

The first explanation was that inflation increases were “transitory.” That explanation made sense. Or would have, anyway, if Congress and the Biden administration had brought government borrowing and spending levels back to pre-COVID-19 levels. Instead, they decided to go bigger. When the causes aren’t “transitory,” the effects won’t be either.

Because Biden and Congress were unwilling to rein in borrowing and spending (requiring the Federal Reserve to continue flooding the economy with newly created money), new excuses were required.

Next came “well, if you really think about it, inflation is GOOD — look, higher wages!” And,  the US Labor Department did report an average pay increase 4.7% in 2021. But since prices jumped by at least 7%, those “higher wages” actually amounted to significant pay cuts.

“Corporate greed” looked like the administration’s last pitiful stand. Companies were hiking their prices for no good reason except to line their  pockets, those scoundrels! Their own higher costs for labor and for their supplies and inputs couldn’t possibly have anything to do with it.

It looked like the game was up. “Corporate greed,” the last refuge of the inflationary scoundrel, didn’t pass the smell test either. The administration was fresh out of excuses. There was really nowhere left to go except admitting the truth:

Inflation is caused by increasing the money supply faster than society increases its production of goods and services for sale. Everything else is an effect, not a cause.

If we want lower inflation, the Fed has to stop creating huge numbers of dollars out of thin air, making the dollars in our wallets and bank accounts worth less (even, eventually, worthless).

The bare minimum requirement for THAT to happen is for Congress to stop borrowing all those trillions of those dollars. In fact, the ideal cure for inflation would be a free market in money that sends the fiat dollar to the dustbin of history in favor of competing currencies backed by promises or commodities more substantial than the “full faith and credit” of a government no one should trust at all.

Unfortunately, Vladimir Putin came to Biden’s rescue and gave him yet another lame excuse to draw out pain instead of facing, and acting on, the truth.

Don’t buy that excuse. Even if you can afford to. And with today’s inflation rates, you probably can’t.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Whenever and wherever too much government power produces bad policy and terrible results, US Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) can be counted upon to pop up with the same proposed solution: More government power and more bad policy. Surely that will fix it.

Current case in point: Oil prices.

“Putin’s war is causing gas prices to rise,” she tweeted on March 8, “but this is no excuse for large oil companies to pad their bottom line with war-fueled profits. Senate Democrats are watching closely — and already working on a windfall profits tax.”

And then, the very next day:  “We need to use every opportunity for economic pressure to hold Putin accountable — and @POTUS’ decision to ban Russian oil in the U.S. is the right thing to do.”

Oh, and by the way: “The President and Senate Democrats will use every tool to bring down costs for families.”

Every tool, that is, except resisting the temptation to  push those costs up with economic sanctions, strangling regulations, and punitive taxes.

It’s not that Warren is economically illiterate. As an entrepreneur of sorts, she flipped houses for a while before managing to parlay her terrible ideas into both political power and a series of sweetheart book deals that made her a multi-millionaire. So she can presumably do basic arithmetic well enough figure out that pushing costs up doesn’t bring costs down.

But if her problem isn’t stupidity, what is it? The most likely candidate seems to be jealousy.

She’s appalled whenever she notices that other people seemingly feel entitled to make their livings without her permission and absent her direction. Why, the nerve!

She can’t get her head around the idea that anyone, anywhere could possibly make anything work without the benefit of Elizabeth Warren’s omniscience and expertise.

She’s enraged when she learns that something, anything got done without a phone call to her office to get her blessing first.

She’s not content to just take a good deal of your money, borrow more money in your name, and spend that money as she pleases. She wants your attention, your allegiance, and your gratitude, too.

Well, why shouldn’t she feel that way, given that you and she have so much in common — you want to run your life, and she wants to run it too.

And if Elizabeth Warren running your life makes your life more difficult and expensive, she’s fine with that.

Are you?

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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In the fog of war, it’s difficult to tell which claims are true and which aren’t. What are Vladimir Putin’s forces up to in Ukraine? Apart from some high points (real or media-manufactured), it’s often hard to tell.

Even when we think that the US government’s claims are true, they’re difficult to credit as uniquely damning, because they almost always refer to behaviors the US government has no problem with when it’s the one engaging in them.

“[W]e have credible information,” Bathsheba Nell Crocker, US Representative to the Office of the United Nations, wrote in a letter to UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet in February, “that indicates Russian forces are creating lists of identified Ukrainians to be killed or sent to camps following a military occupation.”

That sounds pretty bad. In fact, if true, it IS pretty bad. It’s also something the US military and intelligence establishments have done for decades … so much so that these days it doesn’t even really try to hide it.

As the Future of Freedom Foundation’s Jacob Hornberger points out, the CIA made use of “kill lists” at least as early as 1954 in Guatemala. They were secretive about it — they won’t even reveal the names on those lists to this day — but there’s little doubt such “kill lists” were provided by the CIA to paramilitary death squads throughout Central America at least into the 1980s.

Since 9/11, the US government hasn’t even bothered to keep its “kill lists” especially secret. They don’t always share the names, but “targeted killings” are an openly admitted element of US warfare, even if US Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) gets slammed for saying the quiet part a little too loudly (“Is there a Brutus in Russia? Is there a more successful Colonel Stauffenberg in the Russian military? The only way this ends is for somebody in Russia to take this guy out”).

In 2003, the US Defense Intelligence Agency even had playing cards printed and distributed to openly and proudly publicize its Iraq “kill list.” Saddam Hussein (a head of state and thus as a matter of policy supposedly not subject to assassination like mere mortals) was the ace of spades. As of today, 48 of the 52 people on the “kill list” have been killed or captured.

The question isn’t whether Vladimir Putin should be ordering the murder or capture of Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other uses of “kill lists” to “de-Nazify” of Ukraine. Clearly he shouldn’t.

But from “kill lists” to cluster munitions and thermobaric bombs to outright invasions of other countries, the US regime should start meeting the same standards it’s demanding Vladimir Putin’s regime be held to. That seems like a low bar and easily gotten over.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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