“When New York’s new mayor vowed to replace rugged individualism with collectivism, he echoed an ideology history has already tested, and buried. Ayn Rand warned us what happens when societies punish excellence. In 2026, New York chose to learn the lesson anyway. On January 1, 2026, in his inaugural address as Mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani stated it plainly: ‘We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.’ This was not a flourish or a metaphor gone astray. It was a governing declaration, delivered from the seat of American commerce and offered as the philosophical blueprint for how the nation’s largest city would now be run … Socialist (cough, cough—Communist). History has heard this language before, and it has always ended the same way.” (01/05/25)
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Walter Block
“Ideally, there should be no such thing as the Federal Reserve System. The Fed should not have been created in 1913, and should be disbanded right now. End the Fed! This organization is nothing more and nothing less than a central planning bureau for interest rates, employment, and inflation (of late, it has expanded its mandate to include climate change and social equity issues as well). Evidently, we have not yet fully incorporated the lessons about central planning we should have learned as a society from the examples of East and West Germany, North and South Korea. These came as close to a controlled experiment as we are ever likely to find in all of economics, and yet we still continue our merry way in the direction of central planning.” (01/05/26)
“About a month ago, as America’s military presence in the Caribbean ramped up, The New York Times ran a feature on the figures that could imaginably step into the presidency in Nicolás Maduro’s absence. One heading was titled ‘The Moderate: Delcy Rodríguez, Vice President.’ … To Venezuelans who had spent over a decade seeing in her one of Nicolás Maduro’s most ardent and uncompromising acolytes, calling her a ‘moderate’ is an outrage. Here’s a woman who has held all of the most important offices of state — oil minister, minister of foreign affairs, president of the constituent assembly, vice president — and has never allowed any hint of sunlight to appear between her and Maduro.” (01/05/26)
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“It’s not just that they stole Venezuela’s president in order to steal its oil, it’s that they’re working to steal the whole damn country. To steal its sovereignty. Its right to conduct its own affairs on its own terms as an independent nation. Dopey right wingers who learned the phrase ‘Monroe Doctrine’ like ten seconds ago have been mindlessly parroting those words all day to defend Trump’s Venezuela assault, and what’s grating about it is they actually think they’re talking about a real thing. They’re like, ‘No no it was totally legit, see there’s this thing called the Monroe Doctrine which says we get to control everything that happens in the western hemisphere and treat half the planet like it’s our own personal property.'” (01/05/25)
“Actual street fights are, thankfully, rather rare in the world. Verbal street fights, sadly, are common. In most cases these fights spring out of an amoral need to preserve status. If you begin to question or diminish ideas which someone feels tied to – from which they gain standing in one way or another – they’re likely to dislike you and/or to verbally attack you. All of us with non-standard opinions have experienced this. So, since non-standard opinions are the path to progress, it’s important that we learn how to deal with these attacks. This will be the first of several posts on this subject, which I sometimes think of as Verbal Judo.” (01/05/26)
“The American capture of Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro as an alleged fugitive from U.S. justice – while an impressive military feat – has opened a vigorous, global debate about its legality. Is unilateral foreign intervention justified when a failing authoritarian state commits atrocities at home and exports drugs and migrants? Yet for millions of Venezuelans – joyful over a dictator’s exit – the question is less about international law than about their quest for the very basis of law: the freedom of sovereign individuals to choose their government and maintain a shared civic identity. ‘The time has come for popular sovereignty and national sovereignty to prevail in our country,’ Venezuelan opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate María Corina Machado declared in a weekend social media post.” (01/04/25)
“The Declaration of Independence has a special place in American public discourse. Its stirring rhetoric and ringing message inspire even the most cynical and make it a suitable primer on American political ideals. That said, for many decades, there has been significant, even acrimonious disagreement concerning the Declaration’s nature and role in shaping our public life. Radicals like those behind the 1619 Project dismiss all such documents as mere cover for race-, sex-, or class-based oppression. Those more well-disposed to our constitutional order still debate its basic meaning and influence. Matthew Spalding’s new book, The Making of the American Mind, provides an excellent and admirably disciplined entrée into continuing interpretive issues and the possibility for common ground on such fundamental issues.” (01/05/26)
“As 2026 begins, what a strange planet we find ourselves on. The two great empires of my youth, the Soviet Union (now Russia) and my own country, are clearly experiencing some version of imperial decline, even if Vladimir Putin is acting otherwise in Ukraine (as is Donald Trump in his own strange fashion in the Caribbean Sea and Venezuela). No less curiously, the country visibly on the rise, China, is distinctly not acting like a typical imperial power of history (at least the history I’ve known). In a world where the United States still has 750 or so military bases around the world, China, as far as I can tell, has at most just one (in Djibouti, Africa).” (01/05/25)
Source: The American Conservative
by Luke Nicastro
“When it comes to defense industrial policy, the Trump administration contains multitudes. On the one hand, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has embarked upon a crusade to remake the defense acquisition system (now rechristened the warfighting acquisition system) on more market-friendly lines. … But at the same time, the state’s role in defense production is massively expanding. … One way to interpret the administration’s Janus-faced posture is as simple incoherence, the result of different principals pursuing different policies with different aims. A deeper read, however, suggests an essential compatibility between these two tendencies. Consciously or not, the White House is executing an ambitious double movement, simultaneously blasting open an arena for market competition while anchoring strategically critical production against the vicissitudes of fortune.” (01/05/26)
“The ratifiers of the 14th Amendment could not have contemplated excluding the children of unlawful entrants, because the concept did not yet exist in 1868. There were no visas or standardized passports, or other official travel documents, and thus no defined legal categories of immigrants. The first general entry restriction — a blatantly racist law that applied only to Asians — was not enacted until 1882. There were, however, many temporary residents, the other group subject to Trump’s executive order. Naturally, some of them produced children. As Professor Amanda Frost and her student coauthor, Emily Eason, brilliantly determined, at least a dozen members of Congress in the years 1865 to 1871 may have been the American-born children of temporary residents, whose citizenship would therefore have been ‘suspect under President Trump’s interpretation’ of the 14th Amendment. And yet, there were no challenges to their qualifications to sit in Congress, for which citizenship is a constitutional requirement.” (01/05/26)
