Based Economics

A humorous and most likely satirical Minion meme went around a few years ago showing two images: the top one was a Minion appearing happy in front of an American flag with a gold cross over it and the caption was: “Your Child (age 6) before public education”. Below it was a depiction of a gruff-looking Minion, sporting a mustache, with a cigarette hanging out of its mouth, wearing a ushanka, with the Soviet Union’s flag in the background and the caption read: “Your Child (age 7) after 1 year of public education”. The joke here was clearly to poke fun at how religious zealots in America today, such as then Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, generally dislike public education because a religious education is not included as it would violate the First Amendment and the unions of public schools often donate money to the Democratic Party, so hyperbolic parents might therefore try to argue that they are thus teaching communism to children at said schools. While the meme was almost certainl...

  As in commonly taught in schools, the People’s Party, usually referred to today as the “Populists”, comprised a movement of indebted farmers who, among other things, wanted both an increase in the money supply by the coinage of silver and free trade. They wanted the former so that their debts could be more easily paid off due to the price inflation that increasing the amount of money in circulation would create and they wanted free trade so that the products they purchased for their agricultural work would be less expensive and not burdened by the sky-high tariffs that America had in place in this period. They were originally a third party, who won certain western states in the Electoral College in the 1892 election and they then managed to co-opt the Democratic Party in 1896 with their candidate, William Jennings Bryan. He lost this election, but the plight of the farmers eventually died down, due to the increase of gold in the world from mines in Alaska, Australia, and South Af...