It is no secret that the demographic exodus from the Douro is widespread and will continue to plague the region, with declining birth rates and the lack of economic attractiveness for both workers and investors. It is little wonder, then, that people receive some of the lowest wages in the country. Port wine is the heart and soul of the nation’s wine sector, yet the laws regulating it end up harming, rather than benefiting, small wine producers, who are unable to compete with the large houses and estates that receive subsidies and other privileges from the central government.

“Justin was a loyal friend and brave man who bore his suffering with dignity and was indispensable to the cause of keeping our country out of these damnable wars,” Pat Buchanan wrote in 2019 at the news of Justin Raimondo’s passing. Raimondo was a veteran of the old paleoconservative-paleolibertarian John Randolph Club—the brain trust behind the Buchanan ’92 and ’96 campaigns.

With the fiat US dollar price of gold multiplied 2.6x since October of 2022 (as of October 20, 2025 when this was written) and rising exponentially (Figure 1), some people are deeply worried that something is seriously wrong with the dollar and with the global financial system generally. Is the soaring price of gold a sign of monetary instability? Or is it just a transitory “nothingburger”?

Figure 1: Gold spot price per troy ounce, most recent five years

There are a few reasons why the word equilibrium stirs up so much debate among economists. One reason is that it is obvious that we live in a world of constant change. Preferences, total stocks of goods, productivity, and known technologies change in unpredictable ways, disrupting markets in ways that make it impossible to observe and very difficult to conceive of anything resembling stability.

“...Holocaust education has begun backfiring, because it has been giving young people the wrong impression that genocide is always bad.” By Caitlin Johnstone.