Author: Thomas L. Knapp

Source: Independent Institute
by Randy Simmons & Diana W Thomas

“In 1989 The Economist described a Soviet bus factory whose workers took sledgehammers to newly manufactured trucks. The bus factory needed only the truck chassis, but government rules required the truck factory to supply the whole vehicle, most of which the bus makers would destroy. Complying with the rules meant producing things only to smash them. The workers and managers understood the waste, but changing government standards was harder than dismantling trucks. Individually sensible responses to political directives produced collectively senseless results. Keep that factory in mind when considering Audi’s proposed $4-billion assembly plant in Georgia.” (11/06/26)

https://www.independent.org/article/2026/11/06/new-factory-isnt-necessarily-sign-of-growth/

Source: Law & Liberty
by Valerie Pavilonis

“Was there ever a ‘Social Reckoning?'” (11/06/26)

https://lawliberty.org/facebook-as-scapegoat/

Source: Brownstone Institute
by Jeffrey A Tucker

“One of the best nonfiction books to appear following the onset of the Great Depression was by the financial journalist Garet Garrett (1878–1954). It is called A Bubble That Broke the World (1931), and it was a bestseller. His analysis was exactly right. This was not a crisis of capitalism, he wrote, but of postwar credit expansions and imbalances. The economic downturn represented the coming due of the bill, and a cry for rebalancing production, consumption, savings, and interest rates in the US and all over the industrialized world. If Garrett is known at all today, it is by those who are captivated by the handful of intellectuals who wrote in opposition to the New Deal planning state and the regimentation of national life that it brought about. They were a rare breed, and largely forgotten. Aside from that, there is much more to Garrett than people know.” (11/06/26)

https://brownstone.org/articles/the-brilliant-but-neglected-novels-of-garet-garrett/

Source: The Daily Economy
by Paul Mueller

“France is the canary in Europe’s debt coal mine. Voters resist spending restraint even as the cost of postponing reform grows.” (11/06/26)

https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/the-french-revolt-against-fiscal-reality/

Source: The UnPopulist
by Gabriel Schoenfeld

“Numismatic egomania aside, the ballroom and the arch are exercises in grandiosity and vulgarity, monuments to Trump’s fragile ego, excrescences on the face of the nation’s capital city. Shubow professes to defend aesthetic standards—except, apparently, when the patron is Donald Trump. Trump may aspire to be a strongman, but he is no Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong Un, let alone a Hitler or a Stalin. He is an aged lame-duck president who, belying his pretensions to strength, frequently drifts off to sleep in front of television cameras. The new Democratic-controlled Congress should halt the bulldozers and cranes in their tracks and begin restoring what Trump has taken without the public’s consent.” (11/06/26)

https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/congress-can-now-put-a-stop-to-trumps

Source: Free Assocation
by Sheldon Richman

“No one needs reminding that populism is fashionable. That might sound good to opponents of elitist authoritarianism, but it is not good. That’s not to say the latter is attractive to liberty-loving individualists who cherish the pursuit of happiness through, among other voluntary institutions, the marketplace. Not a whit. Yale Professor William Graham Sumner (1840-1910) would agree. Yet the remarkable classical-liberal sociologist insisted that populism would provide no relief whatsoever from government oppression.” (11/06/26)

https://sheldonrichman.substack.com/p/tgif-sumner-against-populism