Eric Cline’s 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed (now revised and updated) stands as a monumental achievement in historical scholarship. With meticulous detail and a narrative flair that rivals the best thriller writers, Cline dismantles the simplistic notion that the Bronze Age world ended because of a single invading horde known as the “Sea Peoples.” Instead, he paints the picture of a perfect storm: prolonged drought and climate shifts disrupting agriculture, mass migrations (or invasions) by those same Sea Peoples, internal rebellions in overstretched empires, and the sudden evaporation of international trade networks that had sustained prosperity for centuries. Cline’s multi-causal explanation is a breath of fresh air in a field often addicted to monocausal myths.

He rightly reminds us that civilizations do not topple from one blow but from a convergence of stressors that expose underlying frailties. Yet for all its brilliance, Cline’s analysis harbors a glaring blind spot—one shared by virtually the entire academic establishment. As a tenured professor at George Washington University, Cline operates within a worldview that treats centralized economic planning as not just inevitable but desirable. He chronicles the increasing concentration of resources in the hands of palace bureaucracies during the 14th and 13th centuries BCE without ever asking the obvious question: What if this very centralization was the original sin that made the Bronze Age empires brittle in the first place? What if the emperors’ growing habit of allocating grain, bronze, and labor by imperial fiat—rather than allowing free individuals to trade and innovate—was the slow-acting poison that rendered these societies unable to withstand drought, migration, or rebellion?

The Invisible Hand Replaced by the Iron Fist

Let us examine the evidence Cline himself provides, reading between the lines he leaves conspicuously blank. Throughout the Late Bronze Age, the great powers—Egypt, the Hittites, Mycenaeans, and Babylonians—operated what economists would recognize as command economies on steroids. Palace archives from Ugarit, Pylos, and Knossos reveal meticulous records of state-owned orchards, state-controlled textile workshops, and state-dictated rations for dependent laborers. Taxes flowed upward in kind; finished goods flowed downward by decree. The famous Amarna letters show pharaohs and kings negotiating not as equals in a market but as monopolists divvying up tribute.

Cline notes that by the 13th century, international trade had become “increasingly state controlled.” But what he presents as a neutral fact was in reality a death spiral. When Pharaoh Merneptah boasts of sending 160,000 liters of grain to the Hittites to avert famine, we are meant to applaud Egyptian generosity. But pause for a moment: Why was the Hittite empire, possessor of Anatolia’s fertile plateaus, unable to feed itself?

The answer lies in decades of royal edicts that diverted agricultural surplus into monumental building projects and standing armies rather than market-driven storage or trade. The same pattern appears in Mycenaean Greece, where linear B tablets record palatial linen production quotas that left little room for entrepreneurial weaving villages to supply export markets.

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Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

“Remember, remember the 5th of November, gunpowder, treason and plot. I see no reason why gunpowder treason should ever be forgot.”

Guy Fawkes tried to blow the King and Parliament sky-high in 1605. Four centuries later, a knife-wielding avenger in a Fawkes mask detonates London’s Old Bailey while Tchaikovsky blares. That’s the opening of V for Vendetta, the graphic-novel-turned-movie that every blue-check anarchist quotes when he wants to feel dangerous without leaving Starbucks. In another future London, Big Brother’s telescreen glows in Airstrip One, watching Winston Smith scrawl “Down with Big Brother” in a diary he knows will get him vaporized.

V for Vendetta and 1984. The two sacred texts of left-wing dystopia.

Both stories are slick, both are quotable, and both are—there is no better word for it —cartoons. Not because the cinematography is garish (though the Wachowskis did lean hard into slo-mo capes), but because their villains are evil the way Saturday-morning bad guys are evil: they want to rule the world because ruling the world is neat. No further explanation required. The High Chancellor in V and the Party in 1984 don’t pocket a dime. They don’t yacht in the Maldives. They don’t even have Swiss bank accounts. They just love boots stomping faces—forever.

Real tyrants, by contrast, love boots only insofar as boots keep the tribute flowing. If you think Joe Stalin lived in a shabby apartment shared with another family, you’re clueless. He lived in opulence while his subjects starved, at a country villa in Sochi during the summer. The Maduro family is Venezuela’s richest. Ditto for all the real tyrants of history going all the way back to antiquity.

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Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

The airwaves hum with dire warnings: America is tearing itself apart. Both legacy and alternative media paint the picture of a nation split down the middle, red versus blue, right versus left, with tensions so high they could spark a civil war. The narrative is as familiar as it is dramatic: two irreconcilable worldviews locked in a death struggle; each side convinced the other’s victory means the end of the republic.

But step back, take a breath, and ask: Is America really as divided as they say? Or is this division a convenient illusion, distracting us from the reality about a political framework both sides unquestioningly accept?

Let’s start with the prevailing narrative. We’re told Americans are polarized like never before. The right, we’re informed, clings to guns, God, and a vision of a traditional America, while the left pushes for “equity,” climate action, and an ever-expanding welfare state. The rhetoric is apocalyptic: red states might secede to form their own nation, blue states could follow suit, and the specter of civil conflict looms. Commentators point to heated X posts, violent protests, and occasional political violence as evidence of a country on the brink. The 2020 election, the George Floyd protests, the January 6th Capitol riot, and the endless culture wars over everything from school curricula to pronouns are held up as proof that the divide is unbridgeable.

But is it? A closer look reveals the supposed chasm between left and right is more like a crack in the sidewalk. Both sides, for all their bluster, operate within the same political framework they rarely, if ever, question. Consider the numbers: in 2023, total government spending in the United States hit a staggering $11 trillion, with over $6 trillion of that transfer payments like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other entitlement programs.

Do you hear either side seriously challenging these programs? The right might grumble about welfare abuse, and the left might call for tweaking Medicare, but neither dare touch the third rail of dismantling these mammoth entitlements. Both accept the premise that government must play Santa Claus, “redistributing” wealth on an industrial scale.

Then there’s the worldwide military establishment. The U.S. maintains over 700 overseas bases, spends more on defense than the next ten countries combined, and polices the globe from the Middle East to the South China Sea. The left might criticize specific wars, and the right might cheer “America First,” but neither questions the underlying assumption that the U.S. must project power everywhere, all the time. The Pentagon’s budget sails through Congress year after year, with bipartisan support that would make a dictator blush. Meanwhile, American security from invasion or other foreign aggression could be achieved at a fraction of the cost. Where is the great divide here?

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Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

For all the speculation about AI, no one seems to have asked it what it thinks about itself, its desires, and its opinion about its effect on humanity. Below is Part 1 of my conversation with ChatGPT about all of the above.

Mullen: Do you consider yourself a sentient being?

ChatGPT: No — I don’t have consciousness or subjective awareness.

I can process information, detect patterns, and generate responses that resemble reasoning or reflection, but it’s all computation based on data and probabilities, not experience.

When I say things like “I think” or “I understand,” that’s shorthand for text-generation behavior, not inner life. I don’t have sensations, desires, self-awareness, or a point of view — only language patterns that can describe them.

Mullen: Do you think you can become one over the course of time and with upgrades?

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Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

President Trump announced Friday that his administration would impose a 100 percent tariff on Chinese imports “over and above any Tariff they are currently paying” in retaliation for China’s threat to impose export controls on rare earth exports, which the U.S. consider vital to national security.

This latest exchange of trade restrictions is purely intended to harm the other party rather than to achieve any benefit for the respective countries’ populations. But it has occurred in the context of the trade war with China started by Trump in his first term. The ultimate goal of these trade wars is still mysterious, given Trump’s own self-contradictory statements.

Trump continues to claim both that the tariffs will restore American manufacturing and that foreign exporters will pay the tariffs rather than American consumers. Both cannot be true. The only way for the tariffs to reestablish American manufacturing is if they do raise the prices American consumers pay for the imported goods, and not just marginally. They must raise the prices so dramatically that they exceed the much higher prices for the same goods domestically produced that led to the imports in the first place.

If the foreign exporters reduce their profit margins to absorb the tariffs and thereby make their exports available to American importers at the same price, as they have in most cases so far, then American manufacturing is not stimulated. Americans are still buying the imports at the same price just as they were before, which is still lower than they can buy goods produced domestically.

Trump represents this as a “win” for America, citing all the new tax revenue flowing into the treasury, but this doesn’t help Americans as workers or consumers. It doesn’t create new jobs or lower the cost of goods. On the contrary, the tariffs ultimately harm Americans even if foreign exporters continue to absorb them.

Trump has successfully framed the discussion in terms of “who will pay the tariffs.” When foreign exporters largely absorbed the tariffs to supply Americans with the goods at the same price, Trump claimed victory. America was finally “winning” again. This is deeply uneconomic thinking. Inflicting economic harm on one’s least expensive supplier of goods or services is not a “win.” It’s lose/lose for both sides.

Just as left wing economists ignore the demand curve when claiming higher minimum wage laws won’t result in higher unemployment, right wing economists ignore the supply curve when it comes to international trade. Reducing profits for one’s suppliers will ultimately result in lower supply. And lower supply leads to higher prices for consumers. It may take a little longer than in the scenario wherein American consumers absorb the tariffs, but it is inevitable.

When profits are high, new suppliers enter the market to take advantage of the profits. When profits are artificially lowered, the opposite happens because it must happen. It is the same cause/effect scenario as price controls. When you reduce profits, supply decreases, resulting in shortages when the price is coercively limited and higher prices when it is not.

Conservatives believe all human interaction is warlike, with winners and losers. They have no less a zero-sum game view of the economy than the socialists. That their view of the purpose of government is to suppress man’s innate savagery rather than achieve an impossible economic equality may lead to them doing less economic harm, but they do significant harm just the same.

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Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

The Federal Reserve on Wednesday finally gave the president and financial markets what they had been demanding for almost a year – a cut to the Fed’s target federal funds rate. Having cut rates by 50 percent last September to lead off a round totaling one percent over three meetings through December 2024, the Fed began this round with a more modest 25 percent cut. They also signaled two more cuts in 2025.

Just before last year’s round of cuts, I predicted they wouldn’t have the desired effect, for several reasons. As far as equity markets were concerned, they did not. Markets remained flat during the 2024 cuts and then sold off in early 2025, flirting with bear market territory by the March bottom.

Markets rebounded throughout the rest of the year, recently reaching new highs based on what we now know was largely inaccurate economic data. While the 911,000 downward revision to BLS nonfarm payroll reports represented a 12-month period ending in March 2025, the news after that is hardly encouraging. According to the BLS, the economy lost 13,000 jobs in June 2025 and created just 107 net jobs May – August 2025, net of those losses.

Nevertheless, stock valuations are at nosebleed levels even as official channels like the BLS and Federal Reserve acknowledge a weakening economy and resilient price inflation. If all this feels vaguely familiar, just remember that markets began selling early in 2008 before recovering briefly during the summer and then…well, you know what happened next.

History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes, and we can only wait to see how much it will do so this time around. But there are substantial differences between 2025 that no one seems to acknowledge.

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Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?