Over the past weekend, from February 12 until February 15, Polymarket—in conjunction with the Food Bank For NYC—organized a pop-up grocery store in NYC that offered groceries entirely free of charge. Although the event was a short-term promotional stunt by Polymarket, it drew public praise from Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has pitched similar interventionist ideas for grocery stores before.
Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming one of the most capital-intensive industries in history. Consider: Semiconductor fabrication plants cost tens of billions of dollars. Massive data centers consume extraordinary amounts of electricity, sending power bills soaring.
I am sorry to report that Roger W. Garrison passed away last month, at the age of 82. Roger was one of the foremost authorities on the Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle, culminating in his great book Time and Money: The Macroeconomics of Capital Structure (Routledge (2001). His interest in Austrian macroeconomics and its superiority to Keynesian macroeconomics first became apparent in a paper he wrote in 1973 on the topic. After he sent a copy to Murray Rothbard, Joey Rothbard called him and invited him to visit Murray in New York.
Murray Rothbard is well known as an opponent of warfare perpetrated by states. This includes acts of war by states against other states, as well as acts of war by states against non-state organizations and individuals. Consequently, Rothbard’s historical scholarship and his political commentary is characterized by consistent opposition to aggressive warfare and imperialism as practiced by states in general, and by the United States government in particular.
In the early 1950s, a remarkable group of young intellectuals formed what later became known as the Circle Bastiat—an informal but intense salon of free-market thinkers centered around the ideas of classical liberalism and Austrian economics. Named after the 19th-century French economist and liberal philosopher Frédéric Bastiat, the Circle was more than just a casual club: it became one of the important cradles of the modern American libertarian and Austrian School revival.
Here is a challenge for those who like solving mysteries—the case of the disappearing Marxists. You will have heard that Eric Foner is not a Marxist, and no academic historians admit to being Marxists. Neo-Marxists are not real Marxists, and cultural Marxism does not exist. Indeed, we are to believe, there are no Marxists in America today.
The Marxists have come a long way from a time when, not having any power, they mounted the barricades and insisted that everyone must recognize that they exist. Now that they run most institutions, they all deny being Marxists.
Donald Trump today, in a post on his social media platform Truth Social, stated that his goal for the current war with Iran is unconditional surrender. Specifically, he wrote: “There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!”
Moreover, Trump specified that the US will have final say on “the selection of a GREAT & ACCEPTABLE Leader(s).”
In stating all this, however, Trump is essentially announcing that the US will be at war for an extended period.
Back in the year 2000, before George W. Bush was even elected, Lew Rockwell already had the Republicans’ number. Having lived through numerous GOP presidents before, Lew knew what was coming. In a column titled “Dreading Republican Rule,” Lew wrote:
