In recent years, awards shows haven’t been as overtly political as in the first Trump presidency. That four-year period found the Oscars, Grammys, Tonys and other awards galas doubling as DNC events.
Brad Pitt accepted the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor (“Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood”) by including a John Bolton reference that aged badly … fast.
This brief snapshot shows just how far the program’s ratings have fallen over time with a mild recovery.
The Oscars:
1998: 55+ million viewers
2014: 40+ million viewers
2018: 26.5 million viewers
2021: 9+ million viewers
2023: 19+ million viewers
2025: 19+ million viewers
The constant messaging helped erode awards show ratings, although they weren’t the only factor. Blame media overexposure, the temptation of new leisure pursuits (doomscrolling, anyone) also played a role.
But a New York Times article once noted that Oscar producers could track the ratings minute by minute. And, when a star got political, the ratings took a hit.
Yet the powers that be refused to rein in their talent or suggest audiences might stick around longer if they kept to the business at hand.
Accept award. Thank God and/or your publicist. Smile and leave the stage.
The era of politicized awards galas has chased many center-Right to conservative viewers away, likely for good. In recent years, though, various shows have dialed down the political screeds.
Somewhat.
Sure, you’d hear an anti-Trump crack here or there, but the artists seemingly got the message that audiences want to see their gracious side, not their fangs.
Tell that to Legacy Media outlets. Mainstream reporters want more lectures, not less, and two new feature articles prove it.
How Award Show Speeches Are Slowly Going Activist Again
The recent Grammys let star after star savage ICE agents and push absurd progressive messages, like the “stolen land” canard. Now, The Hollywood Reporter wants more, more … more.
That is, unless those evil Republicans scare them into silence. The article suggests that Sen. Ted Cruz’s condemnation of Billie Eilish’s “stolen land” idiocy could censor future lectures.
He knows that comments like his can have a chilling effect on future political statements.
Of course, if the stars assembled to promote ICE, suggest abortion is a crime against humanity or share a similar right-leaning message, that story would never get written.
USA Today just published a piece gently egging on Super Bowl performer Bad Bunny to get political on the world’s biggest stage Sunday. Spoiler alert – he stuck to the music and pro-Puerto Rican messaging.
There’s no voice in the article suggesting the Super Bowl is that rare cultural moment that unites us, and an artist could offer a patriotic moment by simply … singing.
We’ve seen this play out before.
Remember how the press badgered both Taylor Swift and Jimmy Fallon to get political? In both cases, the subjects relented. Swift is now an outspoken progressive, and Fallon turned “The Tonight Show” in a lite-version of what Colbert and co. offer.
And he consistently trails both “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” and “The Late Show” in the ratings.
The latest example of the press bullying stars to get political, and by “political” we mean “progressive,” is Sydney Sweeney.
The beautiful actress got skewered in the press for her American Eagle ad last year tweaking the difference between “genes” and “jeans.” And, when she refused to apologize or say she’s an “ally” of any kind, the press doubled down.
She has been outspoken on politics – she doesn’t want to broach the subject. Period. Yet this Cosmopolitan feature story badgers her to speak out all the same.
There is a charged nickname that has stuck to you on social media: “MAGA Barbie.” I see it in Instagram comments constantly. How do you understand this label given that you’ve been private about your politics?
I’ve never been here to talk about politics. I’ve always been here to make art, so this is just not a conversation I want to be at the forefront of. And I think because of that, people want to take it even further and use me as their own pawn. But it’s somebody else assigning something to me, and I can’t control that.
The push to politicize every element of public life is hurting the country. Reporters don’t care.
They demand allegiance to their progressive cause, and if a star doesn’t fall in line, they’ll bully them until they do.
Staying neutral, or simply letting one’s talent speak the loudest, just won’t do.
Substantive change has occurred in the subjects examined in my second book, Gold and Liberty (AIER, 1995), since it was published three decades ago. That change has been mostly negative, unfortunately, especially during the first quarter of this century. As economic liberty has decreased, gold has increased, a historical pattern which is by no means random.
The theme of Gold and Liberty is straightforward: the statuses of gold-based money and political-economic liberty are intimately related. When a government is sound, so also is money. One of the book’s premises is that sound money is gold money (or gold-based money) because it’s economically grounded, non-political, and exhibits a fairly steady purchasing power over long periods. A second premise is that while sound government makes sound money possible, sound money alone can’t ensure fiscal-monetary integrity in public affairs.
A sound government is, in this sense, one that respects private property and the sanctity of contract, a state that’s constitutionally limited in its legal, monetary, and fiscal powers. Sound money is a predictable and reliable medium of exchange, serving as a reliable yardstick due precisely to the relative stability of its real value (that is, “the golden constant”). Unrestrained states “redistribute” wealth rather than protect it, tending to spend, tax, borrow, and print money to excess. That erodes an economy’s financial infrastructure.
The dollar-gold price reached yet another all-time high milestone ($4,000/ounce) in October, having surpassed $3,000/ounce last March and $2,000/ounce only thirty months ago. So far this month, it has averaged $4400/ounce – triple its level in March 2020 (when COVID lockdowns and subsidies began). Gold breached $1,000/ounce sixteen years ago, amid the financial crisis and “Great Recession” of 2009. Only two decades ago, it was $500/ounce.
What Bretton Woods Got Right
Under the relative discipline of the Bretton-Woods gold-exchange standard (1948-1971), when the dollar-gold ratio was officially maintained at a steady level ($35/ounce), the Fed’s main job was to keep it there and issue neither too few nor too many dollars. Its job was not to manipulate the economy by gyrating interest rates. The dollar wasn’t a plaything in foreign exchange. Both US inflation and interest rates were relatively low and stable – not so since.
Gold and Liberty illustrates how the commonly cited dollar-price of gold is really the dollar’s value (purchasing power) in terms of real money, such that a rising “gold price” reflects the dollar’s debasement by profligate politicians. When this occurs – due largely to perpetual expansion of the fundamentally unnatural, unaffordable, and unsustainable welfare-warfare state – public finance (spending, taxing, borrowing, money creation) becomes both political and capricious. At the base there’s an erosion of real liberty. From that comes money debasement, the trend since the US left the gold-exchange standard in 1971.
The value of a monopoly-issued (fiat) currency reflects the competence and quality of public governance no less than a stock price reflects the competence and governing quality of a private-sector company. The empirical record makes clear that the US dollar held its real value (in gold ounces) for most of the period from 1790 to 1913, when government spending was minimal and there was no federal income tax or central (government) bank. In contrast, since the US established its money monopolist (the Federal Reserve) in 1913, the dollar, whether measured as a basket of commodities or consumer goods, has lost roughly 99 percent of its real purchasing power, most of that since the abandonment of the gold-linked dollar in 1971.
Debasement doesn’t get much worse than 99 percent – unless the loss occurs quickly and catastrophically, as in a hyperinflation. That’s not impossible in America’s future.
Having re-read Gold and Liberty recently, I feel both pride and chagrin. I’m proud that it refutes many monetary myths, gets the analysis basically right, and is prescient. It’s got solid data, history, economics, and investment advice. But its main, most helpful purpose is to make clear that money, banking, and the economic activity they support remain sound only in a capitalistic setting. That is, when government sticks to protecting rights to life, liberty, and property, by providing the three necessary functions of police, courts, and national defense.
Measures of Gold and Freedom
Why was this not the path taken this century? Why has government been expanded so much that it now routinely violates rights and spreads chronic fiscal-monetary uncertainty? Where’s the case, made so well in the second half of the twentieth century, for a more classically liberal political economy? In short, where have all the pro-capitalists gone? They were once dominant – and influential. Given the foundation laid by “Reaganomics” (1980s), the end of the USSR and the Cold War (1990s), plus US budget surpluses four years running (1998-2001), the first quarter of the twenty-first century could have entailed a still-purer capitalist renaissance. Instead, vacuous voters and pandering politicians from everywhere along the ideological spectrum have preferred more welfare, more warfare, and more lawfare. Many youths in recent decades tell pollsters they prefer socialism to capitalism (whether from ignorance or malevolence isn’t clear). New York City now has an overtly socialist mayor. Compared to 1995, America now has a larger, but still-burgeoning, welfare-warfare state that necessitates massive borrowing and money printing, as tax avoidance and evasion tend to cap the state’s direct “take” (see Hauser’s Law).
Unfortunately, the gains of the last quarter of the last century seem to have been squandered in the first quarter of this century. Monetary myths persist. Some have proliferated and worsened. Statists push a capricious “modern monetary theory” in hopes of more easily funding a burgeoning welfare-warfare state with minimal resort to taxation. Influential Keynesians and policymakers still insist that inflation is caused by “greed” or by an economy that “overheats” and thus warrants a periodic recession. Central banks this century seem more reckless and resistant to rules compared to the 1990s, as they unabashedly fund profligate states by chronic debt monetization, and their supposed “independence” dissipates.
One metric not available for the 1995 book was an index of economic freedom by nation, globally. This was still in the early stages of development. Two main measures have been constructed by the Heritage Foundation in Washington (since 1995) and the Fraser Institute in Canada (with indexes in five-year intervals extending back to 1955). An account of long-term trends in both gold and liberty would be interesting.
Figure One plots the dollar-gold price and the index of economic freedom (a splice of the Heritage-Fraser measures) since 1975. If the gold-liberty thesis is plausible, we should see an inverse relationship, or negative correlation, between the variables: liberty up, gold down or instead liberty down, gold up. That’s just what we observe. Indeed, it’s a more inverse relationship in the latter half of the period (2000-25) compared to the first half (1975-2000). Since 2008, the gold price has ascended while US economic freedom has descended.
Figure Two plots the dollar-gold price and US economic freedom for this century only. The inverse relation between gold and liberty is even more noticeable.
A few years ago, only three countries were economically freer than the US in 2007, but by 2015 11 nations were freer (I documented this as “The Multiyear Decline in US Economic Freedom”). Today, 24 are freer than the US. I wrote then:
most people, including many professional economists and data analysts (who should know better) seem to cling to the impression that US economic freedom is high and stable, while China has become less free economically. The facts say otherwise, and the facts should shape our perceptions and theories. Human liberty also should matter; much of our lives are spent engaged in market activity, pursuing our livelihoods, not in political activity. Finally, as a rule (which is empirically supported) less economic freedom results in less prosperity. Neither major US political party today seems much bothered by the loss of economic freedom. They don’t talk about it.” I added that “without a reversal in the trend of declining economic freedom in the US, we’ll likely be suffering more from less liberty, less supply growth, and less prosperity.
Recently, the relative holdings of foreign central banks are shifting away from large portfolios of US debt securities to gold. In dollar value, the world’s central banks now hold more gold than US securities. But this is due mostly to gold’s price boom relative to the prices of US Treasury notes and bonds, not to any material rise in the banks’ physical gold holdings. In short, the shift is an effect, not the cause, of gold’s price rise. The latter is due to the Fed’s excessive issuance of dollars, which is due to the US Treasury’s excessive issuance of debt to be monetized, which is due to the US Congress’s excessive spending, which in turn reflects a government no longer limited by a constitution or a gold standard.
Central banks could have sold some gold in recent years to rebalance the composition of their reserve holdings, but they haven’t. Why not? Are they now “gold bugs?” One might hope that their refusal to diversify would make it easier to return to the gold standard, but that seems unlikely given the fiscal-monetary prodigality we’ve witnessed so far this century. Here’s how I explained it in the book, when I was more optimistic about a return to monetary integrity.
If there is ever a return to a gold standard, it will not be accomplished by convening government commissions, which do no real scholarship and are purely bureaucratic undertakings, which perpetuate existing policy. Nor will a gold standard ever be properly managed by central banking, which is inimical to gold. The return to gold will require a sustained intellectual effort from academic economists and monetary reformers who uphold free markets, the gold standard, and free banking. It will require a major shift away from the welfare state that central banks are enlisted to support. Above all, it will require a return to classical liberalism based on a sound philosophic footing of respect for individuals and their right to be as free as possible from coercive government.
Meanwhile, it is encouraging that gold increasingly is in the hands of market participants instead of central banks. Since 1971, investors all over the world have been buying gold in the form of coins, bullion, and gold mining shares, primarily to protect their savings against the ravages of unstable government money. Meanwhile, although central banks and national treasuries continue to sit atop most of the gold they last held as reserves under the Bretton Woods system, they have somewhat reduced their gold holdings via sales and, more significantly, greatly increased their holdings of government debt. Gold now is a far smaller proportion of official reserves than it was in 1971. If these trends persist, the world’s central banks will be known solely as repositories of government debt, not of gold. In 1913, central banks and government agencies held about 30 percent of the world stock of gold. This proportion reached a peak of 62 percent in 1945 before falling back to 30 percent today. Where is this percentage headed? Central banks and governments as a group tend not to accumulate gold anymore and occasionally they sell it. Meanwhile, the world’s gold stock grows 2 percent every year. So the portion of gold held by governments should continue falling, absent a policy shift. With less and less of the total world stock of gold held by central banks and national treasuries, a greater portion is held privately. This was the situation before the rise of central banking. With the legalization of gold ownership and gold clauses, one might envision a return to gold de facto.
Why Gold Has Won
In 2020, recognizing that a return to a gold standard was less likely with every passing year (and crisis), I advised a gold-based price rule the Fed could follow (“Real and Pseudo Gold Price Rules,” Cato Journal). It’s a practicable, efficient system, but the Fed doesn’t consider it – and I can guess why. Central banks can’t afford to listen to reason, given their powerful and needy clients: deficit-spending treasuries and legislatures. As I wrote:
Most central banks in contemporary times attempt monetary central planning without a clear or coherent plan, consulting an eclectic array of measures without focus. In effect, they rule without rules. Economists by now are reluctant to recommend rules that central banks are neither motivated nor required to adopt and would drop in haste in the heat of the next crisis. Much monetary policymaking now embodies the subjective preferences of policymakers and their clients: overleveraged states.
It’s as clear now as it was in 1995 that gold is an ideal monetary standard, even though sovereign powers at times (and for the entirety of this century) have refused to recognize or use gold for that crucial purpose. But consider just one important implication, pertaining to investments. Precisely because (and to the extent) sovereigns refuse to recognize gold, to be fiscally free (profligate), the result is nonetheless bullish for gold. By not making their money “as good as gold” and precluding a return to a gold standard, sovereigns make possible returns on gold that are very good indeed – often superior to those on the most popular alternative: equities. Table One illustrates how fiscal profligacy and monetary excess have favored returns on gold relative to those on the S&P 500. Not shown is that gold has outperformed the S&P 500 in nearly two-thirds of the years this century, by an average of +17 percentage points per year; it underperformed only one-third of the time by an average of -14 percentage points. Oddly, most investment advisors eschew gold and routinely recommend large portfolio shares in equities.
Friends of liberty and prosperity may feel chagrin, as do I, about this century’s innumerable, unnecessary financial debacles. But they can also feel consoled, satisfied, and even gleeful if they’ve trusted gold more than central bank alchemists. They’ve likely been mocked – by fans of fiat currency or cryptocurrency alike – for clinging to their “mystical metal,” “shiny rock,” or “barbaric relic.” But name-calling isn’t a good argument – nor good investment strategy.
The University of Virginia launched a hiring spree in 2020 as it pledged to become “a racial-equity-focused university.” A special initiative promised to recruit 30 postdoctoral fellows and “open the gateway” for them to fill tenure-track jobs. One current fellow’s specialties include “transfeminisms” and “genderqueer life writing.” Another researches how Filipino nurses resist “racial capitalism.”
The program owes its existence to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which funded it to the tune of $5 million. With a $7.7 billion endowment, the Mellon Foundation is the nation’s largest supporter of the arts and humanities. Its annual giving has long dwarfed that of the National Endowment for the Humanities. In recent years, it has been refashioned as a tool for advancing an identitarian vision of social justice. For academia, the consequences are far-reaching.
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Students who specialize in intersectional neologisms will be well prepared for Mellon-funded faculty jobs. In 2023, Ohio State put out a job ad for an “Assistant Professor of Black Sexualities,” noting a recent $2 million Mellon Foundation gift that funded 10 new faculty positions. Zalika Ibaorimi, the professor hired for the job, lists “Black Porn” and “Black Sexual Logics” among her areas of expertise.
Mellon has bankrolled many professors notorious for their activism. At the Socialism 2025 conference, Assistant Prof. Eman Abdelhadi referred to her employer, the University of Chicago, as “evil” and a “colonial landlord,” but conceded that working there was useful for political organizing. Ms. Abdelhadi came up through the University of Chicago’s Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, a longstanding Mellon-funded hiring program. A few months after the conference, she was arrested at an anti-ICE protest and charged with two counts of aggravated battery to a police officer. She has pleaded not guilty.
Mellon’s funding has amplified a bleak trajectory for the academy. Today, a young person drawn to traditional fields like military history or classics should think twice before entering academia. A young scholar who “advances an anti-capitalist, prison abolitionist agenda,” as one Ohio State professor puts it, can find abundant support, especially from the Mellon Foundation. Higher education reform will only succeed when this unfortunate trend is reversed.
Contrary to the popular narrative about the “globalist” Americans and Europeans, it has consistently been the U.S. and the EU that have opposed trade liberalization in agriculture, while Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South American countries have supported it.
The Trump administration has a problem when it comes to the Second Amendment. A large part of its base consists of people who firmly believe in the right to keep and bear arms. But that right, as protected by the Second Amendment, empowers the individual and stands as a challenge to the authority of the state.
This creates an awkward situation for a president and his coterie who don’t like being challenged or even criticized. That’s why we see administration officials arguing in favor of self-defense rights one moment while challenging the right to keep and bear arms at another.
Economist Jagdish Bhagwati has made fundamental contributions to the studies of international trade, tariffs and quotas, and of industrial development. One of his most important contributions on tariffs was to show that when markets suffer from distortions or government policies cause distortions in a domestic economy, tariffs are never the best solution; for any given distortion there is always a domestic policy that is more efficient than tariffs in correcting the distortion. Another important contribution was to show that tariffs and quotas on imports are equivalent only under restrictive assumptions. Bhagwati has written numerous thoughtful defenses of free trade and critiques of protectionist policies. He wrote the entry titled “Protectionism” for this Encyclopedia.
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Bhagwati often identified arguments for restricting trade that could be misused by advocates of protectionism. For instance, in discussing economist Laura Tyson’s claim that the U.S. government should protect industries that produced positive externalities, Bhagwati wrote, “But the problem with this is that it is very hard for policymakers, and very easy for lobbyists, to decide which industries have the externalities.” Bhagwati quoted Robert Solow’s statement that although he knew there many industries where there were four dollars’ worth of social output to one dollar’s worth of private output, he didn’t know which ones they were.
JOSHUA TREVIÑ0: England As It Really Is. “On the one hand, this is ordinary. England is under no obligation to meet an American standard. On the other hand it is deeply out of the ordinary, because the England we find is increasingly alien even to the English. . . . This does not strike the American as a cause for celebration, but perhaps we love England more than its academics do.”
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