As cultural artifacts, Internet memes are fascinating things. They are at once rich with meaning but when pressed to explain their humor, somehow suddenly mystifying. Their definition is difficult to put into words and anything but narrow. Simply put, Internet memes are just ideas memorialized. They exist in the form of images hijacked from television shows, from the unlucky (or lucky?) social media profiles of completely random people on the Internet, and even from medieval paintings.

Sometimes the memes are digitally altered, papered over with other images in a kind of rudimentary children’s activity of cut-and-paste. The unsophistication of it is perfectly intentional, however, a testament to the early Internet as unrefined and amateur. But memes don’t just show up in static image form: They also thrive in video format as well as plain text — for example, as tweets that gain a cult following and subsequently proliferate. …

Classical liberalism used to be something we could all agree on, conservatives and liberals alike. But the consensus on its sacredness appears to be slipping, yielding instead to increasing attempts to problematize its precepts.

“Classical liberalism”, as it is usually taken to mean, is a useful umbrella for the championing of civil liberties, individual rights, and free and open discourse. In a nutshell, it adopts a stance of first-amendment absolutism. Weirdly, it is this pillar of the American tradition that is presently cracking.

Such “first-amendment absolutism” is not accorded the widespread confidence and moral righteousness that it once did. More and more people find something suspiciously problematic about it. More and more people are willing to enact concessions on it, and are apt to believe such concessions are improvements rather than degradations. …

The Federal Reserve burst onto the scene in the year 1913, parading under the novel promise of “stability”. Its creation came on the heels of several banking failures which had rattled the nation, prompting a group of highly wealthy American businessmen to smell opportunity and collaborate on a solution. Their proposal? A centralized banking system.

Now, this was not the first time such an experiment had been attempted. American history at this point had already laid claim to two failed chapters of central banking, if the abandoned marble palaces lining the streets of Philadelphia were any indication.

And “stability” was an interesting thing to campaign on. Given that many Americans were suspicious of centralized control (perhaps haunted by the memory of controlling Great Britain), it was necessary for a newly proposed governmentally-entwined bank to be given a prettier face. …

In the land of the Federal Reserve, the long-range view is left cold and abandoned on the frontier of the future. Preference is given, instead, to the short-term view. The Fed does not gaze far enough into the future and this is a problem — a highly detrimental state of affairs, to be exact.

Lest you quirk an eyebrow over such grave language being applied to the boring technicality of — of all things — time ranges, allow me to explain.

Couched in the context of the Federal Reserve, the“long-term” and the “short-term” are not easily exchangeable outlooks differentiated merely by the mechanistic passage of time. …

Such an interesting creature the Federal Reserve is. Cleverly named absent the words “central bank” this century old American institution has, in some ways, flown under the radar, shielded from revision.

Though that’s not to say that the Fed hasn’t received plenty of flak from a handful of political niches over the years for its liberty-deteriorating exploits, most notably from the libertarians. That said, it is not uncommon for the radical call “End the Fed!” to be dismissed by others on the grounds of seeming ideological dramatics.

I would make the remark that citizen outrage from these political camps has eclipsed the worthwhile parallel effort to lay bare the Federal Reserve’s practical limitations, a perspective more quiet and more rare but nevertheless certainly needed. …

Anxiety is a parasite. (It is also a very popular parasite, afflicting millions.) It is a curious condition, which in most people can not really be said to be a disorder. For most, it waxes and wanes and sometimes disappears for days, weeks, months.

The ranks of those modernly burdened by free-floating anxiety are large and only expanding. There is, of course, no shortage of speculative commentary on what exactly has caused an increasingly anxious population. (And it’s interesting to note that we are also a society which peddles increasingly more education on how to manage anxiety than ever before.)

But what I’m interested in here is a detailed look into the nature of that permeating anxiety and what offenses could be mounted against it. After all, who says anxiety is a life sentence? Who says it must always linger, a calcified fixture of one’s identity? …

Financial bubbles have long afflicted the human race, their inflation and subsequent popping trailing emotional upheaval and monetary destruction down the hall of history. Only for the cycle to repeat and for the gauzy, distant memory of its predecessor to linger just far enough away to resist full consciousness.

Bubbles are funny creatures and prone to becoming the subjects of many an academic treatise. Like a troublesome child, however, they evade science, defy prediction, and prove obstinate when one attempts to outfit them in rationality.

As it is, bubbles are a nuisance to the discipline of orthodox economics which labors immensely to square them with the notion of efficient markets, only to find that in its attempt to create an airtight vessel of a bubble-analysis, it has instead slashed a bunch of holes and caused plenty of leaks to sprout. This is because the more you probe financial bubbles, the more questions you disturb and the more problems you rustle up. The fantastically frustrating nature of the financial bubble is to become more cryptic and more complex the harder you squint at it. …

The allusion to communism in the title may prompt an eye-roll from some, sure that they have encountered a classic case of conservative fear-mongering. For many, Marxism is an old, obscure philosophical doctrine that haunted the Soviet-era imagination but as far as they’re concerned, is presently a dead skeleton. To think that the politics of Marx could genuinely be on the rise in the United States? Please. But this is exactly the position that I will take.

The politics of Marx is on the rise, if you’re willing to dispense with the old iteration and look for the modern, updated one, that is. Outfitted with a new lexicon and escorted in under new disguises, Marxism is steadily winding its way into American society and challenging political hegemonies in the process. …