India recently witnessed one of the worst aviation disruptions in years. Thousands of passengers were stranded across airports, entire flight schedules collapsed, and social media was filled with videos of frustrated travelers sleeping on floors. The chaos was not just an operational failure, it was the outcome of a deeper conflict between the regulator and the airlines, triggered by the new DGCA guidelines, especially the rollout of FDTL Phase 2 for cabin crew scheduling.

2025 was another great year for scoffing at politicians and Washington. Here are some of the zestiest lines from articles I wrote last year.

Trump Returns

“Trump’s economic victory proclamations are akin to a bad magician whose tricks are so lame that his audience starts to heckle him.”

“Trump’s biggest handicap now is that he’s no longer running against ‘Sleepy Joe Biden.’ Instead, Trump is going up against reality.”

When US unemployment ticked up to 4.6 percent in November 2025, the Financial Times declared that the Federal Reserve should cut rates to rescue workers. From the Keynesian view, if jobs falter, you throw more money at the problem. Yet those policies create short‑term bubbles and long‑term pain. An Austrian assessment shows why cutting rates merely delays the needed adjustment and why the real cure is higher, market‑driven rates and fiscal restraint.

[Against the State: An Introduction to Anarchist Political Theory by Crispin Sartwell (SUNY Press, 2008; 123pp.)]

We often scoff at supposedly how cheap things cost in decades gone by. For example, my wife and I recently watched a stage play of Jean Shepherd’s A Christmas Story, set in 1940’s America. (The lead character, Ralphie, wanted a Daisy Red Ryder Air Rifle, but all the adults warned him “you’ll shoot your eye out”). In the stage play, Ralphie’s dad complains to the mother that he had to buy a new car battery at the outrageous price of $6 dollars. This low price got a big laugh, as was intended.

After the failures of socialism—economically, historically, and ethically—the Left-liberal intellectuals, not wanting to abandon socialism, employed several new strategies. It has been suggested that these several manifestations can be subsumed under one general category—postmodernism.