An article posted by Rystad Energy on April 2, 2025, entitled, “State Control Returns to Mexican Energy Production” is a reminder that government intervention in the economy continues outside of the US. Rystad Energy is an independent energy consulting service and business intelligence provider.
Creating a hit movie series, television show, or video game is a phenomenon that not only strikes without warning, but can also strike in unexpected places—or fail to strike where it is intended. The creators of these works—despite Mises’s general disdain for what we now call popular or mass culture—can and often do fit his mold of the creative genius:
For the pioneering genius to create is the essence of life. To live means for him to create.
In their book Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery, Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engermen analyzed various elements of the slave economy including the role of slave traders from New England in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the profitability of slave labor, and material conditions on Southern plantations including the health, diet, and general lifestyle of slaves.
Ricardo Duchesne’s Greatness and Ruin is an ambitious, confrontational, and deeply contrarian work. Framed as a sweeping civilizational analysis, it seeks to explain the unprecedented intellectual, cultural, and technological achievements of the West alongside what Duchesne views as its current self-destructive liberal pluralism.
Until June 2025, Bolivia was once again facing an all-too-familiar crisis: endless gasoline lines stretching for hours across major cities, rationed diesel distribution, and black-market prices that soared well above the official rate. Government officials call it a “temporary shortage” caused by logistical delays. But Bolivians standing in line for three hours under the sun know better. This is not a crisis of transportation, it is a crisis of central planning.
[The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer by Daniel J. Flynn (Encounter Books, 2025; 562 pp.)]
