One of the great ironies of anti-capitalist resentment is that the envy and contempt fueling opposition to the market does not arise from rigid hierarchies produced by liberty and voluntary exchange, but from a fundamental misunderstanding of the difference between liberty and statism.

In the days and weeks following the demise of the Berlin Wall near the end of 1989, West Germans saw a most curious sight: East German residents, finally able to travel a bit, flooded western streets and roads with Wartburgs and Trabants. Like so many vehicles built in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union during the days of communism, they were a throwback to earlier days of the post-war European automobile.

Bankers will be bankers, and AI can only add to their hubris. J.P. Morgan Chase, led by Jamie Dimon—reportedly the smartest banker of them all—announced last week it was taking a $170 million charge-off on the collapse of AI-powered sub-prime auto lender Tricolor Holdings.

In fundamental opposition to the principle of an organic economic order—where the individual actions of millions of free people, operating within frameworks of private property rights and rule of law, spontaneously coordinate to create wealth—Islamic Republic of Iran has constructed something entirely different: a deliberately engineered system of institutional predation. This is not a failing economy requiring technical adjustments, nor is it simply a case of corruption within an otherwise functional system.

When Murray Rothbard first met Frank Meyer in 1954, the two shared the bitter recent experience of their support for Robert Taft, the 1952 Republican presidential candidate thwarted by more moderate elements within the party. Never again did their political allegiances coincide in terms of presidential preferences.