Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Andrzej Strojny
“To American observers, Poland can appear to be an example of successful political transformation. A country that threw off the yoke of communism in 1989, shifted towards a market system, and this year ranked 20th among the world’s largest economies. However, more than 30 years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, the demons of state tyranny are reawakening on the Vistula River. This time, the threat to freedom does not come from Moscow, but from local town halls. In selected cities, bans on the sale of alcohol by shops at night are being introduced. Under the guise of health concerns, regulations are being introduced that, in fact, restrict consumer freedom and harm small businesses.” (12/11/25)
“The confluence of two seemingly unrelated news events in recent days — the first one roiling Hollywood and media from coast to coast, the other playing out before the Supreme Court — was nothing short of uncanny. And disturbing. The first news was the one-two punch of Friday’s bombshell that Netflix planned to swallow up Warner Bros. Discovery’s studio and streaming business to create an entertainment industry behemoth, and then Monday’s competing hostile bid from jilted suitor Paramount Skydance for all of Warner. And in between, on Sunday, President Trump — tuxedoed and speaking on a red carpet, appropriately enough — proclaimed matter-of-factly ‘I’ll be involved’ in deciding the winner.” (12/11/25)
“I don’t know enough maritime law to tell you exactly why it’s wrong for America to be dropping troops onto tankers to seize them—just to say that, no matter what legalistic excuse the administration cooks up, it looks exactly like being a pirate. (It’s worth remembering that the US Navy was founded largely to take on piracy, and thanks to the Barbary corsairs, the early Americans had a lot to say about the subject. George Washington, for instance: Pirates are ‘enemies to mankind’.) But I can tell you this. In the ever-shrinking mind of our current president, the reason why it’s good to seize a tanker is because it carries oil, and oil is the source of all strength, his contemporary equivalent to pieces of his eight.” (12/11/25)
“The ‘calculation problem’ is not a computational problem. It’s an epistemic problem. It isn’t that it was too hard to gather the necessary data and do the required calculations in 1920 (when Ludwig von Mises published ‘Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth’) or 1945 (when F.A. Hayek wrote ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society’) or 1985 (when Don Lavoie published Rivalry and Central Planning: The socialist calculation debate reconsidered). … The problem is that the data don’t exist unless the means of production are bought and sold in free markets – which means that modern technosocialists enamored with generative AI as the technology that will finally solve the calculation problem are missing the point.” (12/11/25)
Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Nick Cleveland-Stout
“On November 15, as Russian forces were advancing on the outskirts of the town of Myrnohrad in eastern Ukraine, retail investors placed risky bets in real time on the battle using Polymarket …. If Russia took the city by nightfall — an event that seemed exceedingly unlikely to most observers — a handful of retail investors stood to earn a profit of as much as 33,000% on the battle from the comfort of their homes. When nightfall came, these longshot gamblers miraculously won big, though not because Russia took the town (as of writing, Ukraine is still fighting for Myrnohrad). Instead, it was because of an apparent intervention by a staffer at the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a D.C.-based think tank that produces daily interactive maps of the conflict in Ukraine that Polymarket often relies on to determine the outcome of bets placed on the war.” (12/11/25)
“Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan, recently said that he was refusing to make a contribution to Trump’s ballroom monstrosity because he was concerned how a post-Trump Justice Department might view it. This comment should be taken very seriously. JP Morgan is by far the largest bank in the country, which Dimon has run for two decades. Also, Mr. Dimon is an astute businessman who clearly puts business above politics. Early in 2024 he gave Trump a pseudo-endorsement when he famously said that he thought the economy would do fine regardless of whether Trump or Biden won. That he is now thinking of a world with a normal Justice Department is huge. It’s not just Dimon who is thinking about a world beyond Trump. A near record number of Republican members of Congress have announced their retirement.” (12/11/25)
“On December 21, 1989, Romania’s communist dictator, Nicolae Ceaușescu, strode onto the balcony of the presidential palace to address an enormous crowd. Many in the square below had been bused in to show their support, and surrounding buildings had been draped with propaganda posters hailing his brilliant leadership. As soon as he began to speak, however, some of the crowd started to boo and hiss, and the murmurs of dissent swelled into a crescendo that drowned him out. His advisers urged him inside, and the regime cut off the national broadcast. It was too late. In that instant, the entire nation saw that multitudes of their compatriots hated him, just as they did themselves, though until then only in private. Within days, Romanians were in open revolt, and Ceaușescu was executed on Christmas Day. The demonstration created public knowledge of what had previously been widely held private knowledge.” (12/11/25)
“One would think that running a profitable legal marijuana industry would be just about the easiest thing in the world, but don’t tell that to the Democrat leadership of Minnesota, which allowed wokeness and apparent corruption to grind their legalization rollout into dust. Wherever one lands on the benefits or increasingly evident harms of marijuana legalization, once a state decides to do it, it has a responsibility to do it in a way that most benefits all the citizens. Of course, Gov. Tim Walz and the Minnesota Democrats made it all about social equity.” (12/11/25)
“With support from Microsoft, Stripe, and Shopify, Running Tide billed itself as on the cutting edge of carbon removal. In the end, it resorted to dumping thousands of tons of wood chips in the sea.” (12/11/25)
“Let’s say the unlikely happens and Democrats take both houses in 2026. Surely that means nothing for removing people from office, right? You’ll never get two-thirds of the Senate no matter how big your majority. And if we get a majority at all, it is likely to be a slim one. No, that’s quitter talk. We can do this.” (12/11/25)
