New York City, December 31, 2027: As the crowds gather in Times Square to celebrate the start of another new year, the city leadership settles in for an evening of celebration and reflection. Since taking office about two years ago, Zohran Mamdani has implemented a series of sweeping reforms. They would have worked, too, if only those damn capitalists hadn’t sabotaged everything once again. But a new year is dawning, and surely this time, we will get it right.

Thomas Hobbes is often regarded as one of the intellectual founders of the modern, secular nation-state in his 1651 book Leviathan. In Creveld’s The Rise and Decline of the State (p.

At the FOMC press conference, Powell admitted the Fed is deciding monetary policy with no official data. 

In my most recent Mises Wire column, I described how it is problematic that federal employees—and others who rely on federal tax dollars for their paychecks—are allowed to vote. After all, these are people whose personal financial interests align with the interests of the federal government. Giving a vote to a federal employee is similar to allowing a politician to vote on his own salary or to vote on whether the federal government will hire the politician’s family members. 

In the absence of the “official” BLS data, we turn to private jobs reports like the ADP report. This week, Revelio Labs released its monthly report on job creation, reporting “Non-farm employment measures the total employment in the US (public and private) leveraging individual level data collected from online professional profiles. The monthly change in this total employment is a proxy for number of jobs added in the economy during the month.

Disentangling the essence of a Hollywood film from its artistic appeal can illuminate the subtle intentions of motion picture producers and the enduring cultural paradigms they perpetuate. A striking example is Elysium, which blends stunning visuals and captivating effects with Hollywood’s recurring focus on class disparity, depicting a stark divide between the rich and the poor pushed to its most dramatic extreme.

This note serves as a rejoinder to Philipp Bagus’ recent response to my comment. I will not comment on all the issues raised in his response, but focus on the most important points.