Last week I wrote about Ludwig von Mises’s important letter to the New York Times in June 1942 about the Nazi economy. In the letter, Mises says that foreign trade poses a difficult problem for a socialist economy. Unlike the citizens of a country controlled by central planning, those in foreign countries don’t have to accept goods offered to them, and bureaucrats, who operate by fixed rules, cannot cope with this situation.

Everyone should start to wonder how the Fed and US Congress make decisions. CNBC wrote an article about the various blunders of our planners called: Fed influence, shaky forecasts, delayed decisions: How the Biden administration misread the inflation threat, illustrating some of the problems faced in our anti-capitalist society.

Last Friday, a reporter asked White House press secretary Jen Psaki to respond to the Johns Hopkins covid study showing lockdowns provided no real benefit in terms of disease prevention.

In response, Psaki dodged addressing the study directly, but then pivoted to claiming that the Biden administration had never pushed lockdowns. “We are not pushing lockdowns,” she insisted. “We’ve not been pro-lockdown—most of the lockdowns actually happened under the previous President.”

It seems obvious that wherever vaccine mandates, mask mandates, and lockdowns have been imposed in response to covid-19, progressive political and media elites have been the driving forces behind them. This is clear to those of us alive today, but it is worth considering whether future history books will attempt to erase progressives’ culpability for the disasters their covid policies have caused.

If there was one thing that predictably united the usually squabbling Roman elite, it was the emergence of a perceived threat to Rome’s Mediterranean and near-continental hegemony. To some degree, however difficult to calculate, it is impossible to deny that the dissolution of the Soviet Union has been responsible for the increasing polarization of American politics.

A little over one hundred years ago, the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises started arguing that a socialist economy is impossible. In the turbulent years following the 1917 Bolshevik coup in Russia, Vladimir Lenin tragically proved him right in real time.