On May 14, Mises Institute opened its doors to a brand-new program developed in honor of Murray Rothbard’s 100th birthday: Rothbard University. The objective was simple: to recreate the magic of our summer student program Mises University in a format specifically for professionals.

On Saturday, April 25, 2026, the Mises Institute met at the San Diego Mission Bay Resort for California’s Decline: A Warning to America. For much of its history, California stood out, not only as a land of remarkable natural beauty and extensive natural resources, but as a place with institutions that fueled extraordinary wealth creation.

That is what makes its decline so important to understand. The central question of the day was how a state with so much going for it has been driven into such serious dysfunction, and how the rest of the country can avoid following the same path.

There is a certain seductive logic to watching your rival gain advantage through state support and concluding that you should respond in kind. Across the American political spectrum, from think tanks like the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation to conservatives who once treated “picking winners” as a term of derision, industrial policy has staged a remarkable comeback.

It’s often seemingly hopeless to try to convince people that the Middle Ages was anything other than the caricature often found in popular culture and eighteenth-century commentary. As historian Ralph Raico has noted, other than the Industrial Revolution, there is probably no historical topic in which the general public is more propagandized and more generally wrong than the topic of the Middle Ages.

Abstract:

President Trump’s Iran deal has opened an explosive second front in MAGA’s civil war, waged by hawkish allies who view U.S. concessions as an existential betrayal of Israel.

[Published in the Wall Street Journal, June 17, 2026 - ed.]

Thanks in large part to the erratic and often-destructive policies coming from Donald Trump’s White House, the Democrats are favored to win both houses of Congress, as they hope to flip several Republican-held seats in the House and the Senate. One of the most closely-watched races is the Senate campaign in Maine, where upstart Democrat Graham Platner is favored to end Sen. Susan Collins’s long political career.