Author: Thomas L. Knapp

Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Mihai Macovei

“Europe became prosperous through a burst of innovation and capital accumulation during the eighteenth-century industrial revolution that allowed individual freedom to replace feudalistic rents and privileges. A new industrial revolution based on digitalization, advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and automation is in the making, but the reputed analyst Wolfgang Münchau claims that Europe is about to miss it. In his view, Europe has forgotten how to innovate, because it may still have the aptitude, but it has lost the right attitude to foster creative destruction. Münchau and other analysts put down this failure on European government’s inability to pick winners like China or capitalize on military investment like the US, in order to promote cutting-edge technologies and research. In our view this is wrong – Europe does not need more and better targeted government intervention, but considerably less.” (12/05/25)

https://mises.org/mises-wire/europes-innovation-drowned-sea-government-intervention

Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Mark Nayler

“If there is a threat to democracy in Spain, it’s not from the ‘far right,’ that mysterious force to which Socialist prime minister Pedro Sánchez wants to attribute all the country’s problems. Recent developments have highlighted two issues that are causing much more damage to public trust in democratic institutions—namely, the politicization of the judiciary, or ‘lawfare,’ and financial corruption. Lawfare is alleged to be the reason for an unprecedented ruling against Spain’s former attorney general; while a massive fraud case centered on 95-year-old Jordi Pujol, president of Catalonia from 1980 to 2003, has tarnished the reputation of a once-revered politician.” (12/05/25)

https://fee.org/articles/spains-courtroom-politics/

Source: The Price of Liberty
by Nathan Barton

“Fifty-sixty years ago, no one had ever heard of home schooling here in the States. It wasn’t necessarily nonexistent, but incredibly rare. You might find the occasional rancher or forest ranger or other remote family teaching their own children, but truancy (mandatory attendance) laws, tradition, and above all, public perception looked upon such things as horrible and totally unacceptable. Even parochial (Catholic) and other private (religious or not) schools were seen by the mainstream and general public as tolerated but weird. And rare. Many State constitutions enshrined the idea of ‘free tuition’ – that is, public schools. Then came a combination of measures and events which started gradually to change that. Indeed, to create the modern-day homeschooling movement.” (12/05/25)

https://thepriceofliberty.org/2025/12/05/home-schooling-enemy-of-government/

Source: EconLog
by David Hebert

“If there’s one thing we can count on in America, it’s that our elected officials will see an affordability crisis and respond to it by stimulating the demand side of the market. Today, we’re seeing this in the case of the housing industry, with Administration officials floating both a new (and improved!) 50-year mortgage and a portable mortgage. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says that both of these will help break the ‘logjam’ of owners who are stuck with their 3% mortgages and are reluctant to move, which will help with the affordability ‘crisis’ in the American housing market. After all, if more houses come on the market for sale, won’t that push prices down? This statement belies a fundamental misunderstanding of the difference between supply and quantity supplied.” (12/05/25)

https://www.econlib.org/econlog/housing-supply-vs-quantity