Author: Thomas L. Knapp

Source: Independent Institute
by Scott Beyer

“Government regulations are sold to the public as protective measures put in place to safeguard consumer health and welfare. And sometimes they do. But as we’ve discussed in this column, they often protect incumbent business interests from competition by making it harder for new or smaller competitors to enter the market. Then there’s a less discussed third intention — one that reflects the incentives of the regulators themselves: growing the government for its own sake.” (12/05/25)

https://www.independent.org/article/2025/12/05/socialism-through-regulation/

Source: Common Sense
by Paul Jacob

“In 1994, Scott Pung won exemption from a school tax. He died in 2004. But years later, a local tax assessor contended that his widow, now also deceased, should have submitted new paperwork to retain the exemption. … The estate’s administrator, Mike Pung, got nowhere trying to explain things to the tax assessor. So he brought his case to the Michigan Tax Tribunal. The tribunal ruled in favor of the Pungs. Didn’t matter. When Mike paid the property taxes for 2012, the assessor called it an underpayment, since payment for the tax that the Pungs did not owe had not been included. Mike still refused to pay the school tax. So the county grabbed the home that it had assessed at $200,000 and auctioned it for $76,000 to recover the amount of that tax.” (12/05/25)

https://thisiscommonsense.org/2025/12/05/tax-assessor-house-nabber/

Source: Eunomia
by Daniel Larison

“Venezuela obviously poses no threat to the U.S. on its own. That is why interventionists have been going out of their way to hype the connections with great power rivals. The trouble for the fearmongers is that the connections are much more tenuous and much less significant than they have claimed. There has been increased military cooperation between some of these authoritarian states, but except for Russia and North Korea none of it comes close to a formal treaty alliance. Hawks want the public to believe that there is a grand anti-American coalition forming around the world to menace the U.S. to sell the same braindead aggressive policies they have always favored. Whenever the U.S. threatens or attacks one of these states, we see that there is no coalition.” (12/05/25)

https://daniellarison.substack.com/p/there-is-no-axis-of-authoritarianism

Source: David Friedman’s Substack
by David Friedman

“No single academic knows enough to base his conclusion solely on his own work and expertise. Each of them is relying on information produced by many others. … What happens if each of those experts feels entitled, even obligated, to lie just a little, to shade his conclusions to strengthen the support they provide for what he believes is the right conclusion? Each of them then interprets the work of all the others as providing more support for that conclusion than it really does. The result might be that they end up biasing their results in support of the wrong conclusion, which each of them believes is right on the basis of the lies of all the others.” (12/05/25)

https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/implications-of-academic-dishonesty-2e2

Source: The Weekly Dish
by Andrew Sullivan

“No president ever pardoned a soldier for war crimes before Donald Trump. Yes, there were broad Confederate amnesties that effectively forgave Civil War atrocities, but no pardons. Even Nixon merely lessened and commuted the sentence of the My Lai commander found guilty of civilian mass murder. But in his first term, Trump pardoned three men very credibly accused by their own troops of wantonly killing unarmed civilians — and one convicted of posing with a man he’d just murdered. Their chief lobbyist? [Pete] Hegseth. … Yes, murdering a few bad guys on a boat in cold blood may sound like a trivial thing. But the principles it violates are about as profound as you can get. This kind of murder is not a defense of the West. It’s an attack on it.” (12/05/25)

https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/the-military-as-a-murder-weapon-cbd