Happiness is frequently posited as the ultimate good, the summum bonum to which all humans aspire. The United Nations now measures the collective happiness of nations even to the third decimal point. But is individual contentment really the point of existence? And what happens to a society which believes the only goal of life is the pursuit of happiness? No people have pondered these questions more profoundly than the Russians, whose grim history has compelled a clear-eyed and honest appraisal of the human condition. Gary Saul Morson, writing in The Athenaeum Review, tells us how Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Solzhenitsyn captured the psychic impoverishment of those who neglect their soul and measure their lives merely by material comforts.
Javier Milei Makes Fools of the “Experts”
As it began looking like Javier Milei might actually be elected President of Argentina, more than 100 leading international economists warned that this “far-right” political “wrecking ball” would “cause ‘devastation,’ spike inflation, expand poverty, and unemployment.” But as David Harsanyi relates in the Washington Examiner, Milei has tamed inflation, balanced the budget, shrunk the bureaucracy, deregulated the economy, driven down poverty and repaid billions in U.S. loans. And now, Harsanyi notes, Argentina is starting to boom.
