2026: Power, Pricing, and My Latest at Blaze
This piece lands against a backdrop that already tells us a great deal about where the year is heading.
Hello everyone, and happy New Year.
This piece lands against a backdrop that already tells us a great deal about where the year is heading. Venezuela continues drifting into managed collapse. Maduro in custody, renewed pressure on Colombia. Iran potentially pressing outward, with the ayatollah reportedly exploring an exit to Moscow. And then there’s New York: a leftist political celebrity mayoral figure, Mamdani, calling all sorts of shots without holding the institutional power to back them up, reinforcing a pattern we’ve seen repeatedly: institutional weakness masked by narrative control.
The common thread isn’t chaos. It’s pricing power → who has it, who loses it, and what happens when long-protected structures finally face competition or constraint. That’s true in geopolitics, and it’s true in business. Venezuela is about far more than oil, but oil still matters (along with the oil supermajors, and Gulf Coast refining capacity in Texas). Colombia is about more than commodities, but commodities still anchor intensely. What we are watching is not just political change, but symbolic collapse: the dismantling of Chavez’s legacy in Latin America, and pressure building across the broader Islamic-Marxist axis. Iran, too, is half ideological and half material, tied to uranium, energy, and enforcement power.
This is why free markets and market-based economics remain so endlessly important to our lives, our society, and the things we actually care about preserving.
So, as a brief lead-in to my latest piece: this article looks at one narrow case (weight-loss drugs) but the message tracks. Prices didn’t fall because of a moral awakening or bureaucratic wisdom. They fell because the underlying power dynamics shifted. When competition appears, excuses evaporate.
Why weight-loss drug prices finally fell — and who deserves credit
https://www.theblaze.com/columns/opinion/why-weight-loss-drug-prices-finally-fell-and-who-deserves-credit