I think we have just witnessed a rare instance in human history of a triple bunk shot carom. First, there was Donald Trump’s bunker buster carom that will be bouncing off the cushions for decades. Then there is Justice Elena Kagan caroming all over the table about nationwide injunctions. I suspect that this sort of bank shot does not end up with balls in pockets. Finally, there is the NYC son of a university professor caroming wildly against the Science of economics and prices. Not the best setup, pool sharks agree.

Today’s world is a strange and caroming world for you, dear liberal friends, and I understand how, like American philosopher Lina Lamont, you “cain’t stand it.”

I don’t know where the billiard balls will end up after President Trump’s Iran triple bunker shot, but I just have a feeling that the world will never be the same.

And I feel that the comfortable world of liberal righteousness will never be the same after Elena Kagan’s off-again on-again record on nationwide injunctions. It couldn’t be, could it, that she has no principles, no understanding of law beyond the demands of the moment in the poolroom of political power? But what does a nice liberal lady do now that she’s not a nice liberal lady anymore?

You see, dear liberal Supreme Court ladies, the reason we have law and precedent and human rights and all is that, down the ages, even hereditary monarchs have seen the advantages of limiting the power of government and building a solid, predictable legal system. Because when government power is unlimited you get Attila the Hun, Stalin the Commie, Mao the Monster, and Hitler the You-Know-What. When that happens, the lamentation of their women is the least of our problems.

But let us get to the real issue, the Mamdani Madness among the latte set in New York City.

Experts agree that the year 2026 is not just the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. It is also the 250th anniversary of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. Let us call Smith’s work the first serious effort to create a science of markets and the price system. Good for him. But it was back in 1685 that a certain Carew Reynell detected that something was stirring in the Brit economy on the manufactory front, and he wrote:

Though we are a nation already pretty substantial... yet it is easy for us to be ten times richer.

He was wrong. According to Deirdre McCloskey and her “Great Enrichment” books we are 50 times richer than back in the days when the Pilgrims began the settler colonization of North America and the Dutch colonized England in the Glorious Revolution and taught the Brits about central banking.

Adam Smith proposed a theory about prices, that they issue partly from “use value” and partly from “exchange value.” The useless son of a lawyer from Trier used this theory to come up with a “labor theory of value” a brief ten years before three economists declared that all prices were marginal in the Marginal Revolution of 1870. In other words, the price is the price is the price. The price is the price. That is all, barista baby.

Yet here we have the latte set in New York City, the latest science deniers:

They sit in coffee shops with laptops adorned with stickers proclaiming “Resist Capitalism” or “Support Socialism,” oblivious to the fact that everything they’re enjoying daily is a product not of socialism but capitalism.

And they vote for the son of a university professor who proposes that the government set up food stores and that rents should be controlled. Hey kids! Ain’t you ever took an economics class? I suppose that today’s professors are a little shy about pounding the table and bellowing: Socialism Does Not Work! Especially when their daily bread depends on the existential threat of climate change and the vital importance of making the world safe for democracy with USAID. Bless their hearts.

Then there’s the awful fact staring liberal university professors in the face that the aboriginal liberal culture of the last century may be about to be abolished by the settler colonialism of Trump the Terrible. There’s only one thing to do: let’s post a Land Acknowledgement, right now, in New York City:

YOU’RE ON LIBERAL LAND

Liberal America is the ancestral home of the Educated Liberal Peoples, including the Progressive, liberal, socialist, activist, postmodernist, professorial, and NGO tribes displaced by the conquest of the J6 armed insurrection. We honor their deep historic connections to the ancient faith of National Injunction America and acknowledge the enduring presence and sovereignty of liberal peoples in the Upper West Side, Park Slope and Brooklyn Heights. We celebrate their wisdom and ongoing stewardship of the café culture of this laptop land.

Hey, maybe in the end the aboriginal latte tribes will reclaim their ancestral lands from the far-right armed insurrectionist Trump settler colonialists. Or maybe not.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill blogs at The Commoner Manifesto and runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.

Image: AT via Magic Studio