Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Kerry McDonald
“Thoreau College is one of several microcolleges that have opened in recent years, offering intentionally small, immersive programming and expanding the landscape of higher education possibilities. As the higher education sector struggles with declining public confidence, enrollment challenges and institutional closures, microcolleges emerge as a creative, collaborative model for post-secondary education.” (07/29/26)
“The idea of a ‘pink tax,’ that women commonly pay more for equivalent goods, has sparked public debate and inspired various policy proposals. This concept gained prominence after the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs released its 2015 report From Cradle to Cane: The Cost of Being a Female Consumer, describing many examples of women’s products costing more than nearly identical men’s products. While the report documented many cases of women paying more than men for similar products, the causes of these differences are more complicated than the notion of a straightforward tax. Understanding how prices emerge in a market economy offers another way to interpret these disparities.” (07/29/26)
“U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously called the states ‘laboratories of democracy.’ In those laboratories, Iowans shape Iowa’s laws, Missourians make Missouri’s laws, and New Yorkers establish New York’s laws. That is a core tenet of federalism — a structural part of our nation’s Constitution that allows for great variation and competition between the states. What a state can’t do, however, is lay claim to the entire country as its laboratory. That’s exactly what New York is trying to do. Its new greenhouse gas reporting rule requires ‘fuel suppliers’ throughout the nation to register with New York and report information related to greenhouse gas emissions. But the rule doesn’t just concern companies doing business in the Empire State. New York has made clear that its new regulation applies to any ethanol and biodiesel producers whose product may, after being blended or sold by others, eventually end up in New York.” (07/29/26)
“If the planning system is an inherited failure of land, the tax code contains an equally striking inherited failure of transactions, taxes that were reasonable revenue-raising devices in their moment and have become, in their present form, penalties on the specific behaviours a mobile, productive economy most needs. Stamp Duty Land Tax is the clearest case. It is a tax levied at the point of moving house, which means it is a tax on exactly the behaviour that lets people move to where the jobs are, that lets an ageing couple downsize and free up family-sized housing for the families who need it, that lets a growing firm’s employees relocate without a punitive toll standing between them and the move.” (07/29/26)
“Winston Churchill is still revered in Britain and by old-generation American conservatives and Make America Great Again (MAGA) patriots alike, as the epitome of an all-wise, brilliantly successful Warlord. The truth was the precise opposite, as the great Anglo-American biographer and historian Nigel Hamilton documents in his classic trilogy of books on President Franklin Roosevelt’s wartime leadership …. as the war drew to a close, Churchill was indeed a Lion in Winter. He was an old fool – and recognized as such by both FDR and Josef Stalin at the fateful Tehran Conference of October 1943. … Now the United States is similarly blessed with its own Lion in Winter.” (07/29/26)
“As he ascended the steps of St. Peter’s Basilica for his public introduction, the Chicago-born pope was already caught between constituencies that wanted to build on Francis’s transformations and those intent on turning back the clock. Archconservative elements of the church eager to take back the reins after a decade-plus of Francis were initially mollified by Leo’s ‘traditional’ presentation. Less of a public firebrand than his mentor, he cut a diplomatic figure that a friend memorably called ‘a dignified middle of the road.’ But the most hard-line traditionalists proved impossible to satisfy. The fringe, ultraconservative Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX), long a thorn in the Vatican’s side, forced a showdown earlier this month. Dignified, middle-of-the-road Leo responded by unilaterally excommunicating not only the leaders but potentially adherents of the order.” (07/29/26)
“In late September 2025, a San Diego firm called Show Faith by Works, LLC registered with the Justice Department as a foreign agent of the State of Israel. The filing it submitted under the Foreign Agents Registration Act laid out, in its own promotional language, the largest Christian Church Geofencing Campaign in U.S. history: a plan to draw digital perimeters around every major church in California, Arizona, Nevada and Colorado during worship hours, and around Christian colleges on weekdays, then to track attendees and hit their phones with ads. The contract ran to roughly $3.2 million, with a ceiling reported as high as $4.1 million. … The deepest libertarian objection here is not about Israel. It is about the individual conscience, and what it means to operate on it from the outside without its owner’s awareness.” (07/29/26)
“Nobody wants to be stuck defending white people who use the N-word at black people. Since the 1970s, if not further back than that, to do so indicates poor breeding, poor manners, and poor character. We should all know better. And in Rochester, Minnesota, last year, a woman named Shiloh Hendrix committed exactly that social transgression. … after a trial which — to be charitable — could have been better-run, Shiloh Hendrix was convicted on a misdemeanor count of disturbing the peace for having dropped an N-bomb on someone who was filming her. And now we’ve got people talking about Shiloh Hendrix and having a debate over the use of the N-word and just how unacceptable it is. Do we need this debate? Maybe a little more than we thought.” (07/28/26)
“As someone who has long profited from and appreciated Roger Pilon’s work, I must admit that I am gratified to see him reckon with my work—however critically—in his recent essay, ‘On the Importance of First Principles.’ I think the root of our disagreement is not that Pilon has first principles and I do not, needless to say, but that we order our principles differently. More precisely, we see principles ordered differently in our Constitution and the system of ordered liberty it instantiates. Pilon is a libertarian, and he thinks our Constitution is, too. … My view is that our constitutional order rests upon the default assumption that at the state level majorities can rule—indeed must rule—limited only by a partly undefined set of rights.” (07/29/26)
“If you want to help the western empire administer war propaganda, one of the best ways to do this is to pretend the violence of empire-targeted governments happens in a vacuum, completely divorced from western imperial agendas.” (07/29/26)
