“[W]e are less than two weeks into the new year, and what we have seen from a president and a Republican Party ostensibly put in control of the country to lower food prices and improve the lives of hardworking Americans is chaos and death. At his 2025 inauguration, Trump said: ‘Our power will stop all wars and bring a new spirit of unity to a world that has been angry, violent, and totally unpredictable.’ Bandying about like pirates snatching other nations’ oil and gunning down Americans in the streets doesn’t jibe with stopping wars or nurturing a new spirit of unity. … Even if you, for some reason, approve of a federal agent shooting multiple times into a vehicle while recording video on his cell phone, there should at least be some universal agreement that the Trump administration’s response to what happened in Minneapolis has been vile, inflammatory and sickeningly tribal.” (01/11/26)
“When government shoves its nose into markets, the supposed beneficiaries usually end up losing. Politically connected businesses pocket more money. Government bureaucrats enjoy more power. Everyone else pays through the nose. Politicians’ assertions of contrary motivation just add insult to injury.” (01/10/26)
“Mayor Mamdani promised New Yorkers Jan. 1 he would ‘replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.’ Luckily, psychiatrists have not yet classified ‘rugged individualism’ as a mental illness. But Mamdani’s vision of cozy collectivism is tricky to reconcile with what I saw in Communist Romania in November 1987. … In Romania, ‘warmth’ was an abstraction that existed primarily in propaganda campaigns exalting the supreme leader, Nicolae Ceaușescu. To save energy to fulfill the Five-Year Plan for factories, the government routinely cut off the electricity to hospitals, causing 1,000 deaths the previous winter. The infant mortality rate was so high, the government refused to register children as being born until they survived their first month. On the streets …. People stopped me and pleaded for packs of Kent cigarettes — the de facto second currency — they could use to bribe doctors to get health care for their sick children.” (01/10/26)
“From a purely tactical standpoint, the operation was a textbook display of American might: fast, overwhelming, and successful, with U.S. forces in and out of Venezuela before most of the world had even processed what was happening. But almost immediately, that show of force collided with a harder reality at home: Only 1 in 3 Americans say they support it, an unusually low level of approval at the very outset of a U.S. military operation. A Reuters/Ipsos poll taken January 4 to 5 found that just 33 percent approved of the U.S. removing Maduro, while 72 percent reported their concerns about the U.S. getting too involved in Venezuela. Support breaks sharply along party lines, with Republicans backing the operation at far higher rates than Democrats and independents. Historically, Americans have given new conflicts much more leeway. ” (01/10/26)
“‘[T]herefore you may rest assured that if the Nicaraguan activities were brought to light, they would furnish one of the largest scandals in the history of the country.’ Such was the concluding line of a letter from Marine Corps Sergeant Harry Boyle to Idaho Senator William Borah on April 23, 1930. Boyle’s warning was not merely an artifact of a bygone intervention, but a caution against imperial hubris — one newly relevant in the wake of ‘Operation Absolute Resolve’ in Venezuela. The Trump administration has amplified the afterglow of its tactical success with renewed assertions of hemispheric hegemony through a nostalgic and often ahistorical reading of the Monroe Doctrine. Despite the administration’s enthusiasm for old-fashioned hemispheric imperialism, the historical record ought to caution for restraint, not revisionism.” (01/09/26)
“Over the past year, several cities in the United States have erupted temporarily into war zones. Violence has broken out between immigration agents and those living in the country illegally [sic], or Americans hampering deportations. In recent days, a killing in Minneapolis and shootings in Oregon by federal agents have highlighted the potential for personal tragedy stemming from the Trump administration’s enforcement of immigration laws as well as the street tactics opposing such law enforcement. Agents of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have been connected to at least 14 shootings over the past 12 months. At the same time, the mental impact on these federal officers has also risen, perhaps causing many to be too quick to pull the trigger.” [editor’s note: ICE agents are free to give up the thug life and get real jobs if people’s natural reactions to murderous goons makes them feel unsafe – TLK] (01/09/25)
“Was the 2016 election a turning point for American democracy? Did political shenanigans and the election destroy so much credibility and legitimacy that the system will never fully recover? In 2016, ignorant voters were reviled like never before. However, the entire political-media system floundered badly. Never before had American voters been obliged to choose between two such widely despised candidates. A few months before the election, an Associated Press poll ‘found that 86 percent of Americans were angry or dissatisfied with the state of politics in the nation.’ Routine deceit by both candidates helped make ‘post-truth’ the Oxford English Dictionary’s word of the year for 2016.” (01/09/26)
“The claim that protectionism serves ‘higher ends’ rests on a confusion about both economics and the non-economic goals people actually value.” (01/09/26)
“On Wednesday, a woman named Renee Good was shot and killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis. There are a lot of things you could say about the shooting. … You could point out that it is extremely unclear why ICE officials were stopping her in the first place, or what legal authority they were exercising at that moment. You could point out how unnecessary the entire incident was, how eyewitness accounts emphasize that Good was not acting in a threatening manner …. But what’s most important to say is how utterly predictable Good’s death was. This was not an unforeseeable tragedy or a freak accident. It was the inevitable outcome of an immigration enforcement apparatus that has been poorly trained, sheltered from consequences, and empowered to behave recklessly.” (01/09/26)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Larsen Plyler
“It is taken, in many cases, to be fact that the reason the Constitutional Convention was called and that the Constitution was ratified was because of the failure of the Articles of Confederation system. The folks at Heritage have made their position clear: ‘The first plan the Framers tried after declaring independence was called the Articles of Confederation. The government that the Articles created failed because it was too weak to coordinate national policy among states with different priorities.’ Now, this is not particularly a criticism of the Constitution, though I believe there is room for that. But, I simply want to raise questions: What if the Articles were not failing? What if they were doing exactly what they were intended to do? What if the Articles were successful, but success was not in the agenda of powerful people?” (01/09/26)
