Source: Property and Environment Research Center
by staff
“A half-century after the ESA’s enactment, regulations have generated endless conflict but little species recovery, precisely because they infringe property rights, ignore the role of states, and prioritize red tape over voluntary recovery efforts. To date, the Service has recovered only 3 percent of listed species (and far fewer species than it expected). A new approach is necessary to change that.” (12/22/25)
“State regulation of AI is not, by itself, an ideal situation. We are indeed seeing 50 variations of concern, from the merely paternalistic to the openly fearful. Some states worry about algorithmic bias, others about deepfakes, still others about data privacy or labor displacement. Several are experimenting with rules requiring disclosure of training data, transparency of model decision-making, or permission requirements for models above certain compute thresholds. This is confusing. It is also federalism working as intended. The states are laboratories of democracy, not subordinate offices waiting for federal consolidation. The administration’s answer — federal preemption followed by federal regulation — is not a remedy. It is a cure worse than the disease.” (12/22/25)
“[W]hile Trump’s gaslighting on prices is a natural and appropriate target for critics, we shouldn’t forget that the main goal of his policy agenda wasn’t lower prices, it was job creation. Specifically, Trump and his economic advisers claimed — and may even have believed — that they would create lots of manly jobs for manly men. They would revive American manufacturing, they claimed, by unilaterally imposing huge tariffs and thereby breaking all our international agreements (and, whatever the Supreme Court may say, U.S. law). They would create mining and construction jobs, they claimed, by killing renewable energy and gutting environmental protection in order to promote fossil fuels. They would deport millions of undocumented workers which would result, they claimed, in a job boom for native-born workers. … even on its own absurd terms, the MAGA jobs strategy has been an abject failure — as abject as Trump’s failure to bring down prices.” (12/22/25)
“Earlier this month, the Trump administration announced the $12 billion bailout package that will include one-time Farmer Bridge Payments to American farmers. The relief is a ‘response to temporary trade market disruptions and increased production costs,’ according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) release. … But [Tryg] Koch and agriculture economists say the plan hardly represents a bailout and will have little impact on Montana farmers as they brace for potential losses in 2026. … Koch estimates the package will grant $30 per acre for row crop farmers who produce things like wheat, canola and pulses. ‘The $30 per acre will help, but it’s a far cry from what the actual losses are,’ Koch said. ‘We don’t need government bailouts – that doesn’t solve the problem and all it does is put a Band-Aid over it to keep up with inflation. We should be selling wheat for $8 or $9 per bushel.'” (12/22/25)
“Burdensome food labeling mandates were once the province of Democrats, who pushed for calorie count requirements on restaurant menus and insisted packaged food must feature warnings about genetically modified ingredients and trans fats. Now it’s Republicans leading the charge — with equally foolish results. … Seed oils have become a major target of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement, whose figurehead is Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ‘Seed oils are one of the driving causes of the obesity epidemic,’ according to Kennedy, who has accused fast-food restaurants that use seed oils of poisoning Americans. But among nutrition experts, opinions about seed oils and health are much more mixed, with plenty suggesting they’re fine in moderation, are better than alternatives, or are unwisely treated as a unit despite the fact that different seed oils have different properties and effects on health.” (12/22/25)
“Spotify says it has launched new protections against ‘anti-copyright attacks’ after the open-source library / pirate activist group Anna’s Archive announced it’s ripped 86 million songs from the platform that it plans to make available in torrents, as reported earlier by Billboard. According to the group, ‘We have archived around 86 million songs from Spotify, ordering by popularity descending. While this only represents 37 percent of songs, it represents around 99.6 percent of listens.’ The first torrent released says it contains metadata, such as album art, song title, and artist name, belonging to 99.9 percent of Spotify’s 256 million tracks. The group says it plans to make the 300TB worth of music files available at a later date.” (12/22/25)
“Recently, the New York Times relayed Tucker Carlson’s view that, ‘The most depressing thing about the United States in 2025 is that we’re led not just by bad people, but by unimpressive, dumb, totally noncreative people.’ This is unarguable — and the Times made no attempt to counter the point. Indeed, this judgement applies doubly to the team of grifters and double-digit IQ Machiavellians who staff upper echelons of the Trump administration. Yet, a fascinating new book by the scholars (and brothers) William and Philip Taubman shows that even smart and impressive peopple can, if they lack vision, character and empathy, lead the country to disaster.” (12/22/25)
“The government shutdown made the November jobs report especially hard to read. There was not just the problem of missing a month of jobs data for the first time in many decades, but also the difficulty in trying to determine how much impact the shutdown had on the data. In principle, the shutdown should have had little direct impact on either the household or the establishment survey. In the household survey, people who had been furloughed should have been back at work during the reference period and therefore answered that they were employed. With the establishment survey, government employees were always on the payroll, so should have been listed as employed. But there are indirect ways in which the shutdown could have affected the data.” (12/22/25)
