It was only just over a week ago — Halloween day, actually — that I had a post on the scariest houses in Greenwich Village.
As the scariest house of all, I picked the one at 80 Washington Place, which had recently been the alleged site of rigged poker games where wealthy marks had gotten fleeced out of millions of dollars.
Today, in a weekly column titled “Gimme Shelter,” the New York Post provides an update on that very house.
The first nine months of the President Trump’s second term have seen repeated instances of a Federal District Court judge temporarily enjoining some action of the administration, only to have the Supreme Court stay the injunction while the litigation proceeds. Examples of this pattern of events have occurred in cases involving such things as funding rescissions, staff lay-offs, and deportation procedures.
A recurring feature of this pattern has been dissents from the three liberal Supreme Court justices — Kagan, Sotomayor and Jackson — who would have left the temporary injunctions in place during the pendency of the litigation.
Justice Jackson, in addition to joining other two liberal justices, has also issued several individual dissents strongly criticizing her conservative colleagues for vacating temporary injunctions from District Courts.
The question of whether the administration gets enjoined while litigation proceeds, versus an injunction getting issued only at the conclusion of full litigation, is very consequential.
My sometimes co-poster and daughter Jane Menton has been absent from these pages, and from political commentary, for a couple of years. In her defense, she has three little kids on her hands.
However, this morning, just in time for today’s election, she had a piece published in the Daily Wire. The subject of the post is Zohran Mamdani’s position on our local electric heat mandate, known as New York City Local Law 97.
The Daily Wire has graciously agreed to allow me to repost the article. Here it is (with an introduction by the Daily Wire editors):
Even as New York City looks poised to try one more time to make socialism work, multiple countries that have gone down the socialist road are trying instead to turn off.
Notable examples include Argentina, where President Xavier Milei’s party just scored a notable victory over the Peronists in legislative elections; and Bolivia where, in the August 2025 first round of the presidential election, after nearly 20 years of explicitly socialist rule under the MAS Party, accompanied by economic stagnation, the MAS candidate for President got just 2% of the vote.
Can we add Vietnam to the list of countries moving away from socialism?
While other places compete for their over-the-top Christmas decorations, here in Greenwich Village the big holiday for house decoration is Halloween. I’ve put together a small collection of some of this year’s scariest houses.
However, one of them is not like the others.
What is the source of the wealth of a nation? That’s actually the question addressed by Adam Smith in “The Wealth of Nations.”
Smith doesn’t put it in these exact terms, but his answer lies in some combination of hard work of the people plus figuring out how to work more efficiently through specialization and exchange.
And then there’s the other theory that the wealth just appears somehow, by luck or magic (or maybe by oppression of marginalized peoples). Which theory you buy into has everything to do with what you might think are appropriate public policies.
