“Kevin Warsh is scheduled to testify before the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday. The vote on his confirmation as Federal Reserve chairman may hinge on the Justice Department’s dropping its inquiry into whether the current chairman, Jerome Powell, testified inaccurately about cost overruns in renovating Fed headquarters. It would be a pity if we have to wait. The U.S. dollar would benefit from new thinking at the Fed. Lawmakers should be much more focused on the damage that Fed policies are inflicting on the soundness of America’s money. It’s also time that Congress, which is charged with ensuring a trustworthy currency, recognized that outsourcing this responsibility to the Fed is a big part of the problem.” (04/20/26)
Source: The Bleeding Heart Libertarian
by Matt Zwolinski
“If you had asked me in 2015 to describe the core commitments of American libertarianism, I could have done it in about a minute. Free markets, limited government, individual rights, skepticism of state power, free trade, open or liberal immigration, some version of non-interventionism abroad, a strong preference for constitutional constraints on executive authority. There would have been edge cases and internal disputes, sure, but the center of gravity was clear enough that you could gesture at it. Try to do the same today, ten years later, and you run into trouble almost immediately. In the public-facing, movement-adjacent side of libertarianism — the one that reaches audiences through podcasts, YouTube, X, and the tech-intellectual networks of the last few years — the center of gravity has shifted in ways that would have seemed inconceivable a decade ago.” (04/20/26)
“Private electricity grids could be key to opening the energy sector up to testing and innovation—something that is difficult on a ratepayer-supported grid. Due to mountains of regulation, public fear, and high costs, there has been little recent experience in constructing nuclear power plants, as only seven of the 94 operating reactors in the United States were built after 1990. While continued regulatory reforms are absolutely imperative, opening the sector to specialists to gain expertise would be significant.” (04/20/26)
“A senior Cuban diplomat on Monday confirmed recent talks in Havana with US officials, as the communist-led island faces a deep crisis over President Donald Trump’s pressure campaign. ‘I can confirm that a meeting between delegations from Cuba and the United States was recently held here in Cuba,’ Alejandro Garcia, the foreign ministry’s under-director of Cuba-US affairs, told the Communist Party newspaper Granma. Garcia said that the negotiators included assistant secretaries from the US State Department and Cuba’s deputy foreign minister.” (04/21/26)
“A reasonable rule is that once you begin making an argument ad Hitlerum — comparing some malevolent politician to Hitler or some malignant movement to the Nazis, or declaring a brutal (but non-eliminationist) war a genocide comparable to the Holocaust — you have lost the plot. The facile but extreme analogy is the first resort of the unimaginative alarmist. To this we should now add the argument ad Orbánum, namely, the view that the Trump administration is just like that of the creeping, well-nigh unstoppable, and irreversible corrupt authoritarian ruler Viktor Orbán.” (04/20/26)
Source: Electronic Frontier Foundation
by Cindy Cohn & Betty Gedlu
“For years, EFF has pushed technology companies to make real human rights commitments—and to live up to them. In response to growing evidence that Palantir’s tools help power abusive immigration enforcement by ICE, we sent the company a detailed letter asking how the promises in its own human rights framework extends to that work. This post explains what we asked, how Palantir responded, and why we believe those responses fall short.” (04/20/26)
