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"Gold isn't inert, it just has bodyguards protecting it". (Via H.R.)
I recently talked about the need for a “Project 2027”—an agenda for a new Democratic majority to reclaim the power of Congress against a president who has systematically attempted to concentrate all power in himself.
I just spelled out that agenda in more detail in a new article at Liberal Currents.
This has to be a realistic agenda, so I set one big requirement:
That agenda should be based on what we can do with a simple majority—and with Trump still in the White House—which is the most likely outcome of the coming election. What can we do, with just the power of a congressional majority, to rein in Trump and reform the system?
And it turns out we can do a lot. Read the whole thing for more details, but the main headings are:
Declare a national emergency of national emergencies.
We should pass a law immediately suspending all emergency executive powers, requiring the president to submit such powers for review by Congress, one at a time, if he wants any of them reinstated by ordinary law.
Take away executive discretion.
Congress seems to only fitfully remember that it can just tell the executive what to do.
The one that is most relevant to my recent comments on Senator Warner:
Rediscover the power and purpose of impeachment.
[A]bove all, it brings public attention to this administration’s abuses of power—and it shows that Congress is actually serious about those abuses. The public won’t believe that what Trump is doing is unprecedented or an emergency or an attack on the foundations of the American system if we don’t act like it is. Impeachment is our way of saying that we really mean it, that these actions are beyond the bounds of legitimate power.
And finally:
Use the power of the purse.
The power of the purse is the big stick the Constitution gave us to keep the president in line. We don’t need to settle just for symbolic victories. We should make it clear that we can make the gears of the executive grind to a halt until the president makes real concessions. This is the leverage we can use to get everything else on this agenda.
But this one comes with a warning:
This will be the toughest piece of advice to convince the timid Democratic leadership to implement. But to assume ahead of time that Congress using the power of the purse won’t work and we shouldn’t even try would mean that we are preemptively abandoning the most fundamental and effective weapon Congress has. Democratic leadership needs to show that they are willing to use all the tools they have.
Using all the tools we have is the basic thread behind this agenda. Read the whole thing.
I’ve been saying that this is why I’m running. We need someone in Congress who has not just the desire but also the determination and the plan to restore the power of Congress and rein in an out-of-control president. This is the plan.
If you agree, vote for me in the Democratic primary on August 4—early voting is already open.
And support my campaign so we can bring this fight to the US Congress!
Save the credit card processing fees and mail a check to Tracinski for Congress, PO Box 6997, Charlottesville, VA 22906.
Donors must be US citizens and spending their own money. Campaign finance laws limit donations to $3500 per person per election.
One of the most remarkable feats in political history has been convincing millions that the free market has failed—even though few can point to a society that consistently practiced its defining principle.
Ask what a free market is and the answer is surprisingly simple: a system in which individuals are free to produce, trade, invest, compete, and keep the products of their labor under a government limited to protecting individual rights and then getting out of the way.
Notice what is absent from that definition: subsidies, bailouts, price controls, tariffs, industrial policy, central planning, corporate favoritism, or politicians deciding who wins and who loses. Yet when those interventions produce shortages, inflation, stagnation, or corruption, the verdict is announced with complete confidence: the free market failed.
Imagine judging aviation after replacing half the aircraft's controls with government committees, forcing the pilots to obey contradictory instructions, and then blaming flight itself when the plane crashes. That is remarkably similar to how capitalism is judged today.
The economies most often called "capitalist" are mixed economies. They combine voluntary exchange with taxation, regulation, subsidies, monetary intervention, licensing, trade restrictions, and political favoritism. Whenever the voluntary portion produces prosperity, politicians congratulate themselves. Whenever the interventionist portion produces problems, capitalism receives the blame.
It is a convenient arrangement. Success belongs to the government; failure belongs to the market.
The accusation is usually accompanied by another claim: that "the market" is merely a system rigged by billionaires. This confuses capitalism with political privilege. A market is not a boardroom conspiracy. It is simply millions of people making voluntary decisions every day about what to buy, sell, invest in, and produce. Billionaires cannot compel customers to buy from them. Politicians, however, can compel taxpayers to subsidize favored firms, restrict competitors, and shield failure from competition.
The irony is difficult to miss. Those who denounce a "rigged market" rarely advocate removing the political machinery that makes rigging possible. Instead, they ask for more of it. More regulations. More subsidies. More discretionary power. More authority to decide who deserves success and who does not. The complaint is not that the game is rigged; it is that someone else is benefiting from the rigging.
There is another curious habit. Every failure occurring inside a mixed economy is presented as proof that markets are defective, while every departure from market principles is quietly ignored. If housing becomes unaffordable after decades of zoning restrictions, permitting delays, subsidies, monetary expansion, and planning, capitalism is blamed. If healthcare becomes expensive after layers of mandates and political management, capitalism is blamed. If inflation follows years of monetary expansion and fiscal intervention, greed becomes the preferred explanation.
The free market occupies a unique place in political debate. It is blamed for almost everything, while seldom being allowed to operate according to its own principles.
This does not mean every problem disappears wherever markets are freer. No social system eliminates scarcity, mistakes, or poor decisions. What distinguishes a freer market is not perfection but accountability. Businesses succeed only by persuading customers. Failures lose resources. Success depends on creating value for others rather than obtaining political favor.
That is why critics so often attack an imaginary version of capitalism while defending policies that move society further away from it.
The free market has become history's favorite scapegoat precisely because it is rarely judged on its own terms. It is judged after its principles have been diluted, constrained, and replaced by intervention, then held responsible for the consequences.
You cannot fairly evaluate a system that protects individual rights by pointing to societies that repeatedly abandon those rights whenever politics demands it.
The real question is not whether intervention has failed to produce the promised results. History has answered that often enough.
The real question is why so many insist on blaming the principle that intervention displaced rather than the intervention itself.
Elon Musk has made plenty of enemies in recent years.
How? Let us count the ways.
- Musk bought Twitter, rebranded it as X and let conservatives have free speech again
- He threw his clout and cash behind President Donald Trump’s third and final presidential campaign
- His DOGE efforts shrunk the U.S. government, but not nearly as much as he wanted
All of the above made him a monster to the Left. They rage against him, cheer when radicals attack Tesla dealerships and turned an awkward hand gesture into proof of his Nazi nature.
Now, he’s getting the documentary treatment from a filmmaker whose politics clash with the tech titan.
That’s being kind.
Alex Gibney’s “Musk” will debut at the Venice Film Festival. Gibney previously raged against President Donald Trump (2020’s “Totally Under Control”) and leaned into the now-debunked Russian collusion narrative (“Agents of Chaos”).
Does anyone think he’ll do a fair and balanced look at Musk, one of the most controversial and consequential figures of the modern age?
RELATED: COULD MUSK CHANGE HOLLYWOOD AS WE KNOW IT?
Musk himself doesn’t think so. He called the Gibney film, sight unseen, a “hit piece.”
Gibney defended the film, but the person at the helm of the Venice Film Festival shared a bit too much about the documentary.
“[Gibney] traces the whole career — the contradictions, and the conditioning power that is centralized in the hands of a single man,” the festival chief added. “Consider a genius of capitalist entrepreneurship, but also a dangerous technocrat, with no moral scruples.”
In poker, that’s called a tell. And a bald one, at that.
More tea leaves to be read?
The director reportedly delivered a finished cut in early 2025 — only to return to the editing suite amid Musk’s vocal support and financial backing of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, followed by his stint next door to the Oval Office as the de facto head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Bleecker Street, the studio behind “Musk,” also gave away the film’s tone. The studio dubbed Musk “notorious.”
Musk, who is on the spectrum, isn’t the coziest fellow in the public eye. His DOGE chainsaw stunt may have made for some viral videos, but that wasn’t amusing to those who lost their jobs in the necessary downsizing.
He’s also fast and loose on X, sometimes sharing dubious news snippets to his massive following. (The Legacy Media does something similar, often without apology, regret or an ounce of shame).
Will Gibney’s film be biased but fair? A left-leaning look at the tech guru? An unabashed hit piece? We’ll have to wait and see.
The media has its knives out for Musk. So does the modern Left? Will Gibney maintain his dignity via “Musk,” or will he turn the four-hour project into an MS NOW affair?
We’ll hold our full judgment until the film’s official release date, which has yet to be determined.
The post Here Comes a Four-Hour Elon Musk Hit Piece? appeared first on Hollywood in Toto.
The Mises Institute used to have a very useful feature, the Mises Wiki (archive), but like many aspects of Mises.org since Jeff Tucker and Doug French left, it has fallen into desuetude.1
As noted in this Facebook post, David Veksler as revived it at his site, freecapitalists.org, as The Austrian Economics Wiki: “A free encyclopedia of Austrian economics and the libertarian tradition.” Heroic!
As David writes in his post:
The Mises Wiki was one of the best open references for Austrian economics anywhere.
You probably assumed it was dead. The original is still online, but login and editing have been broken since 2014 — after the Mises Institute rebuilt mises.org that year and dropped the wiki, the project we all built was left to rot.
This matters more than it did in 2014. Reference sites aren’t just read by people anymore — they’re training data. What the open web says about Austrian economics is what the next generation of AI models will say about it.
So I’ve restored it. The full February 2014 corpus — 1,400+ articles — is back and running independently at: https://wiki.freecapitalists.org/It runs on my own infrastructure, so no institution can take it down or let it decay again. Your contributions are all there, with full revision history, still attributed to you.
If you want back in, it takes one step: reset your password. Your old account is intact, and the reset link will reach you at the address this email was sent to: https://wiki.freecapitalists.org/wiki/Special:PasswordReset
Then fix the entry that always bugged you, or write the one that was never there.
It’s been a decade. Let’s make it worth reading again.
- See Kinsella, “My Years with the Mises Institute,” Property and Freedom Journal (May 2, 2026), the sections Pointless Name Changes, Website Changes, and Journal Confusion and Mises.org; Copyright and Open Publishing/Information.
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