“W.E.B. Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts (where AIER is now headquartered), in 1868. Today, this towering figure of the early civil rights movement is remembered as a groundbreaking sociologist, Pan-African socialist, and near-mythical hero to the intellectual left. … But there was once a W.E.B. Du Bois who was radical mainly in the scientific sense. Before drifting into the study of history and sociology, he was an economics student at Harvard. The marginal revolution had just remade the dismal science into a more mathematical and literally ‘edgy’ subject. And Du Bois made original contributions that leveraged insights from the free-market Austrian school and anticipated later developments in neoclassical economic thought, as Daniel Kuehn explains in a recent paper published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives.” (01/07/26)
“Before Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) became the first casualty of the burgeoning Minnesota day care fraud scandal, he was supposed to be the reason white men and working-class white people more generally might vote Democratic. Walz, who abandoned his gubernatorial reelection bid on Monday, was the Democratic nominee for vice president in 2024. He was billed as a dad’s dad, an affable football coach, a fixer of trucks who was not afraid to get his hands dirty under the hood. Instead, Walz was judged by many voters to be as ‘weird’ as he claimed Vice President JD Vance — then a freshman Ohio senator and junior partner on the 2024 Republican ticket — was. He, or at least his aides, bungled a basic football metaphor.” (01/07/25)
“A party run by people dumb and insular enough to nominate Kamala Harris is also a party dumb and insular enough to mistakenly believe that the way to connect with the rural voters who have rallied to the banner of Donald Trump is to push out an older dad type in a blaze orange vest and have him point a 12-gauge at some tasty birds. … To the extent that [Tim] Walz’s gun-toting made an impression at all, it was a poor one: Gun-rights voters did not seem him as a potential champion but as the worst thing you can be in those circles: a ‘Fudd,’ meaning an out-of-touch dork who believes that the Second Amendment is about hunting, as though the Founding Fathers took the time to write a hobby into the Bill of Rights.” (01/07/26)
“After a series of strikes in the last few days, and more than two decades of attempted coups (in 2002, 2019, and 2020), warfare, sanctions, and a ‘Maximum Pressure Campaign’, the United States has just toppled Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Maduro and his wife are standing trial for ‘narco-terrorism’ charges, a cover to extend the War on Terror without congressional authorization, in New York, with members of his security team, along with several civilians, dead. Far-right hardliner María Corina Machado, the leader of the opposition who has longstanding ties to the White House and even went on Donald Trump Jr.’s podcast to justify a coup based on oil wealth, was expected to be put in power. She promised to implement a vision of deep privatization under ‘Popular Capitalism’, modeled on Augusto Pinochet, Margaret Thatcher, and Ronald Reagan.” (01/07/25)
Source: Law & Liberty
by David D Corey & Dominic MM Saunders
“In ‘Contemporary Muses,’ Henry T. Edmondson III is gently critical of those who defend the value of pop music on political grounds. Political protest may be a mainstay of pop music, but ‘it would be disappointing,’ he writes, ‘if America’s … cultural commentators were unable to see past the politics.’ Instead, Edmondson proposes to defend (certain) pop music as something that approaches philosophy: ‘Some pop songs explore deep themes of moral philosophy’ or ‘meditate thoughtfully on the human condition.’ Edmondson’s approach bears fruit as he catalogues lyrics that echo major themes of Western moral philosophy. One might wonder, however, whether defending pop music as philosophy is much different from defending it as political protest.” (01/07/26)
“Trump’s war against Venezuela is just the latest manifestation of his abuse of presidential power. In the last 11 months, he has flouted domestic law by firing tens of thousands of federal employees without cause, firing 17 inspectors general, firing the head of the Office of Special Counsel and the director of the Office of Government Ethics, directing the Justice Department to prosecute his political opponents and tearing down the East Wing of the White House. … Trump also violated the War Powers Act of 1973, which limits a president’s ability to send troops into armed conflict without congressional approval. Like the rest of us, members of Congress only learned about the invasion of Venezuela and Maduro’s seizure after it happened. So what’s Congress going to do about it? Absolutely nothing, of course! And that’s the most disturbing news of all.” (01/07/26)
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Cláudia Ascensão Nunes
“It is a deeply rooted belief in the Western political tradition, from Thomas Hobbes to contemporary interventionist currents, that a successful political community requires a strong central authority capable of imposing rules and guaranteeing order. According to this view, in the absence of such authority, society would inevitably collapse into chaos. History, however, offers a particularly intriguing counterexample. For nearly seven centuries, the Couto Mixto, a small microterritory composed of the villages of Santiago de Rubiás, Rubiás, and Meaus, existed along the border between Portugal and Spain without a permanent sovereign or centralized governmental authority. Despite this absence of formal state power, it developed a stable social order grounded in voluntary self-government and an extensive regime of free trade.” (01/07/26)
“It’s time to evict Cea Weaver from her new gig. Less than a week after Mayor Zohran Mamdani appointed the radical-left tenant advocate to head up his Office to Protect Tenants, it’s clear that Weaver is not fit to work in city government. Besides being an avowed Communist and posting a social media call to ‘seize private property’ in 2018, the 37-year-old is also a woker-than-woke lady who clearly hates whitey — specifically, white men. According to Weaver, homeownership is a ‘weapon of white supremacy’. In a video from 2021 that’s making the rounds now, she says property should be transitioned ‘toward a model of shared equity’. She adds: ‘It will mean that families — especially white families, but some POC families — who are homeowners are, well, are gonna have a different relationship to property than the one we currently have.'” (01/07/25)
“Going downhill, like a Slinky on a staircase, the empire rolls down almost imperceptibly, until it reaches the floor and collapses in on itself. But the empire isn’t a Slinky. It is busy with class and imperial warfare, the few attacking the many in ways more numerous than a short essay can outline. Where is the resistance? Where are the unions? Even conservative Catholic, David Brooks, has called for a general strike and mass civil disobedience. It only makes sense.” (01/07/26)
“At 4:21 in the morning of January 3, U.S. President Donald Trump posted that ‘The United States of America has successfully carried out a large scale strike against Venezuela and its leader, President Nicolas Maduro, who has been, along with his wife, captured and flown out of the Country.’ No one had anticipated such a military operation prior to the announcement, and no one anticipated the comments Trump would make later that morning in his press conference. The press conference, and the comments that followed shortly after, contained several shocking statements.” (01/07/26)
