2025 Archives

Friedrich August von Hayek studied at the knee of Mises during what Mises called his “private seminars” in the offices of the Vienna Chamber of Commerce on that city’s Ringstrasse (Grand Boulevard) between 1920 and 1934. Out of this developed both a lifelong friendship, the formation of the Mont Pelerin Society, and the new economic religion of neoliberalism. By 1940, the year Mises emigrated to the US, Hayek had also fled the Nazis, although he’d moved to London (he became a British citizen in 1938) which was then being regularly bombed by Hitler’s Luftwaffe. As the bombing campaign, the Blitz, became more aggressive that year Hayek began to seriously worry about the possibility a bomb could kill his children. This was a turning point for his family and he thought that America, daily becoming more egalitarian and leading the world out of the Republican Great Depression with FDR’s New Deal, would offer them the best opportunities.

The Pentagon's purge of its own legal advisers reveals how obedience is replacing principle, and why that's the hallmark of authoritarian capture… Is the U.S. military already in the early stages of a Trump-led coup against our Constitution? Inside the Pentagon, loyalty is being elevated above law as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth quietly removes senior military lawyers, the very officials meant to uphold legality and restraint, and replaces them with loyalists.

When federal agents turn weapons on citizens, it's not just a local scandal — it's a national reckoning. Yesterday, here in Chicago, where I am today, America caught a glimpse of its possible future, and it was terrifying. Federal agents, dressed like soldiers and armed with the weapons of war, rammed a civilian vehicle on 105th Street, using a maneuver outlawed by Chicago police, and then fired tear gas into a crowd of bystanders and local officers. The air filled with smoke and screams as parents fled with babies in their arms, teenagers were slammed to the pavement, and a young girl was struck in the head by a gas canister. One boy was detained for hours, denied his rights, his family left in the dark. This was not a foreign regime or some distant "law-and-order" fantasy. It was an American city, in broad daylight, and it looked more like a militarized crackdown in a third-world dictatorship than traditional American law enforcement. The question we have to ask is simple and chilling: Is this America that we are becoming, one where democracy dies behind clouds of tear gas?

Every raid, every body slammed to the pavement, is a public ritual meant to teach us obedience. The goal isn't enforcement — it's submission... For the Trump regime, the brutality is the point. It's the means to the end of a violent, single-party state that they're openly proclaiming, even though our media insists on turning away from it. Back in the 1980s, I lived with my family and worked in Germany for a bit short of two years. The international relief agency I worked for (and lived at the HQ of) jumped through all the necessary hoops to get me a work permit, but if I'd overstayed my permit/visa nobody would have kicked in my front door or invaded my home with flash-bangs and automatic weapons drawn. Nobody would have smashed in the windows of my car, or shot me with pepper balls or rubber-coated bullets, or snatched our three children and put them into a privatized "Christian" foster care system from which thousands of kids simply vanish.