Source: Underthrow
by Max Borders

“In 1992, the urbanist Jane Jacobs argued that civilization runs on two moral codes, which she calls syndromes. 1. Guardian Syndrome prizes loyalty, hierarchy, and force. 2. Commercial Syndrome prizes innovation, production, and trade. For centuries, these two codes split the world between the State and the Market. But remember, these exist only as aggregations of people—bureaucrats and businesspeople. Bureaucrats are supposed to bring order and solve societal problems. Businesspeople are supposed to produce and trade goods and services. But an uncomfortable truth lingers: As State and Market have long sought a negotiated political arrangement called the mixed economy, it has created various subspecies of fascism. … Today, that arrangement is breaking down. It’s breaking down because Guardian Syndrome and Commercial Syndrome are functionally incompatible.” (10/12/26)

https://underthrow.substack.com/p/what-comes-after-politics

Source: Liberal Currents
by Janet Bufton

“In 2017, Duke historian Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains argued that the libertarian movement had helped make overt racism in American politics mainstream and undermined liberal democracy. … but she missed the real story. Bizarrely, MacLean focused on Nobel laureate James Buchanan. The far better target would have been ‘Mr. Libertarian’ and co-founder of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, Murray Rothbard. Buchanan was an academic libertarian, while Rothbard spent his later career arguing that libertarianism should ally with the racist, nativist populism of the nationalist right. … The historian Quinn Slobodian takes up MacLean’s task (from a different angle) in his 2025 book, Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right. … Despite its limitations, it demonstrates that libertarians had the intellectual tools to resist the far right’s encroachment but, on the main, chose not to use them.” (10/12/26)

https://www.liberalcurrents.com/a-hard-look-at-libertarianism/

Source: Adam Smith Institute
by Madsen Pirie

“The case that Trump is a latterday mercantilist is surprisingly strong. Mercantilism was never a tidy theory. It was a set of habits that involves treating trade as a contest, counting the surplus as the score, and letting the state steer commerce toward national power. On each count, Trump’s record fits. The mercantilists believed one nation’s gain was another’s loss. Trump speaks in exactly these terms. A trade deficit with a country means America is ‘losing’ to it, and a surplus means winning. Mainstream economists see a bilateral deficit as a mostly meaningless accounting result of millions of voluntary exchanges. Trump sees it as a scorecard.” (10/12/26)

https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/trump-the-modern-mercantilist

Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by George Ford Smith

“Ask a young person whether he personally consented to everything the federal government has the legal authority to require of him. If he answers no, the conventional reply is that direct consent isn’t necessary: he is represented by elected officials. But representation is not agency in the ordinary sense. He has signed no contract with his representative, cannot direct his votes, and cannot terminate the relationship even if the representative breaks all his campaign promises. Furthermore, he is still subject to their legislation even if he didn’t vote or if the legislation was passed before he was eligible to vote. How many people alive today voted for legislation establishing a legal counterfeiting racket known as the federal reserve or the income tax and its associated hit squad, the IRS? Or the Selective Service Act of 1918?” (10/12/26)

https://mises.org/mises-wire/who-owns-your-life