Author: Thomas L. Knapp

Source: Paul Krugman
by Paul Krugman

“There’s a longstanding tradition in American politics of what Richard Hofstadter famously called the paranoid style – a way of thinking that sees conspiracies lurking everywhere. MAGA-world is particularly riddled with conspiracy thinking – from George Soros and Jewish space lasers, QAnon and the Great Replacement Theory, to Italian satellites hacking into voting machines to deliver the 2020 election to Joe Biden. But these are far-fetched fantasies. The truth is far more banal and shocking. There are people in positions of great power in the U.S. government engaged in evil conspiracies against everything that is good and decent. Their conspiracies are far more extensive and damaging than almost anyone imagined. But there are no evil masterminds behind this. Only amoral, stupid grifters like Howard Lutnick.” (02/11/26)

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-banality-of-maga-evil

Source: Reason
by JD Tuccille

“Child care is expensive in New York City, and like the political snake-oil salesman that he is, Mayor Zohran Mamdani says he has a fix: The government will provide! We have yet to see a good explanation as to why child care should be the one service that government can offer cheaper and better than the marketplace, but Mamdani is a true-believing socialist who claims that everything is better when it’s run and portioned out by politicians. Inconveniently for him, researchers say the big barrier in New York to affordable care for kids is costly overregulation.” (02/11/26)

https://reason.com/2026/02/11/blame-overregulation-for-high-child-care-costs/

Source: Washington Post
by Ramesh Ponnuru

“The economy is growing. Unemployment is low. Wages, for most people, are rising faster than prices. Stocks are rising. Yet the public keeps giving the economy a thumbs-way-down. Gallup finds that only 21 percent of Americans give it an ‘excellent’ or ‘good’ rating. That’s roughly the same as the percentage that felt positively about the economy in April 2013, during the painfully slow recovery from the Great Recession, when the unemployment rate was 7.5 percent instead of the current 4.4. At first glance, the dissatisfaction looks disproportionate to the statistics.” (02/11/26)

https://archive.is/AXqqu

Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Alejandro A Tagliavini

“The advance of automation has accelerated the development of machines capable of performing repetitive and physically-demanding tasks, transforming processes that once took hours into actions that are now completed in minutes. For example, the robotic arm developed by Pickle Robot Company was specifically designed to handle packages in logistics environments. Its main function is to load and unload boxes from trucks with precision, a task that demands significant physical effort and poses risks to workers. In other words, technology increases productivity and quality of life by eliminating physical exertion, and workers can invest that saved time in other tasks, expanding and developing human knowledge. It goes without saying that politicians don’t like robots since they don’t pay personal taxes or contribute to state ‘social security’ funds that enrich bureaucrats and their cronies. But they don’t just hate robotics; they hate productivity in general.” (02/11/26)

https://mises.org/power-market/why-politicians-hate-productivity-and-robots

Source: Law & Liberty
by Jonathan Leaf

“Many in the Islamic world continue to believe that the answer to their struggles is the restoration of the old caliphate system. Hamas, for instance, called for this in its founding charter. This was also the impassioned dream of Osama bin Laden. Spurring these beliefs are a series of widely-held notions about the past. Given the powerful present-day interest, attraction, and obsession with the idea, we need to arrive at an accurate estimate of the caliphates.” (02/11/26)

https://lawliberty.org/demystifying-islams-golden-age/