“The thing about American newspaper opinion sections is this: Their owners get final say. If the man who signs the checks — it’s almost always a man — really wants to see his cocker spaniel run City Hall, you’ll probably see OUR CHOICE: FLUFFERNUTTER FOR MAYOR atop the editorial page. For generations, this has been one of the overriding perks of media ownership. If Jeff Bezos wanted to turn The Washington Post’s opinion section over to an AI-powered version of Alexa, he’d be within his rights. So his announcement this morning — that Post Opinions would henceforth reorient ‘in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets’ — is, in a sense, nothing astonishing. But the scale of the hypocrisy on display here is eye-watering, and this decision can only make the Post a weaker institution.” (02/26/25)
There’s no question that billions of dollars in pandemic relief aid was stolen by fraudsters in 2020. Here’s a quick tally of the estimates of how many billions were stolen: * $400 billion in fraudulent unemployment benefits processed by the Department of Labor. * $200 billion in Economic Injury Disaster Loans and the Paycheck Protection Program administered by the Small Business Administration. * $138 billion in fraudulent tax credits processed by the IRS. Combined, that’s $738 billion in fraudulent payments made by U.S. government agencies to fraudsters. No matter how you slice it, that’s a very big number. Testifying before Congress on February 6, 2025, Haywood Talcove, the CEO of Lexis Nexis Risk Solution, puts the total amount of Covid relief lost to fraud much higher. According to Talcove, the total U.S. taxpayer loss to fraud is at least $1 trillion.” (02/27/25)
“The FBI has accused North Korean-linked hackers of conducting one of the largest thefts of cryptocurrency publicly known, seizing some $1.5 billion worth of ethereum from a Dubai-based firm. The theft earlier this month targeting Bybit, one of the world’s largest crypto exchanges, represents yet another involving a team of hackers identified by the U.S. government by the names TraderTraitor and the Lazarus Group. … Bybit co-founder and CEO, Ben Zhou, acknowledged the FBI’s announcement in a post on the social platform X by linking to a website offering $140 million in bounties for tracking the stolen crypto and getting it frozen by other exchanges.” (02/27/25)
“Donald Trump and Elon Musk claim they’re saving billions through the Department of Government Efficiency’s mass purge of federal bureaucracy, but government spending has actually gone up since Inauguration Day. According to an analysis published Wednesday by Reuters, the Trump administration spent $710 billion between January 21 and February 20, nearly a billion more than Joe Biden spent in a similar time period last year. The majority of that spending has gone to health and retirement programs, as well as interest payments, apparently more important investments than Medicare, global health, and air travel safety, all of which have faced or will face drastic cuts.” [editor’s note: IF there are any real net cuts (doubtful), it’s unlikely they’ll be visible in the daily spending flows yet – TLK] (02/26/25)
“President Donald Trump has canceled a sanction waiver for Chevron that has allowed the supermajor to return to the South American country and become instrumental for the increase of its oil production. Trump cited the lack of electoral reform in Venezuela, Reuters reported, along with insufficient action on migration. … Chevron has been exporting some 240,000 barrels of Venezuelan crude to the United States daily thanks to the waiver. The amount constitutes a quarter of the country’s total oil production and generates substantial revenues that stay in the Venezuelan economy, Bloomberg reported earlier this week, arguing Chevron’s presence was critical for that economy. These revenues are running at some $6 billion.” (02/27/25)
Source: David Friedman’s Substack
by David Friedman
“An Objectivist government, as Rand imagined it, provides some services, such as national defense, which cannot be funded on the usual market basis that an individual who does not pay for it does not get it. How are such activities to be paid for? Collecting taxes would be an initiation of force and so, as Rand recognized, inconsistent with Objectivist ethics. One solution she proposed was to charge for the service of enforcing contracts. Pay to register your contract with the court system and the government will enforce it and use the profits on that to fund national defense. Using force against someone who refuses to pay back a loan or to deliver the goods he has been paid for is retaliatory force, not initiation of force, so permitted by Objectivist ethics. The problem with this is not ethical but economic.” (02/26/25)
“Nullification is THE rightful remedy for all unconstitutional acts — usurpations of power. Understanding the five core principles that make up its foundation is essential to getting back on the path to the Constitution and liberty.” (02/26/25)
