“Last week ‘Secretary of War’ Pete Hegseth insulted Americans by claiming that a 50 percent increase in the US military budget – from an incomprehensible one trillion dollars to an impossible one and a half trillion – was a ‘fiscally responsible investment.’ ‘Thanks to President Trump’s $1.5 trillion defense budget, this War Department has moved from bureaucracy to business,’ he said last Thursday. In a way he was right, though. The huge increase is much more about ‘business’ than what is needed to protect the United States from potential invasion. But it isn’t the kind of ‘business’ that most supporters of free markets would applaud. On the contrary, this is the business of transferring massive amounts of wealth from the struggling middle and working classes to the well-connected Beltway elite based on lies and scare tactics.” (05/11/26)
“Senate Republicans, the Associated Press reports, plan to give the Secret Service $1 billion for ‘security upgrades’ to president Donald Trump’s (supposedly $400 million, supposedly donation-funded) White House ballroom project. After an assassination attempt outside the Washington Hilton ballroom hosting the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in April, Republicans began boosting the ballroom itself as a presidential safety solution. Every time the president ventures forth to environments inhabited or surrounded by the hoi polloi, they point out, the Secret Service has to create bespoke environments within otherwise open facilities to ensure that he’s not shot at, yelled at, glared at, or annoyed. Better to keep him in a facility that’s controlled 24/7 for his safety and convenience. That’s fair, and it occurs to me that, done rightly, adding a secure ballroom to the White House could benefit not just presidential security but public convenience.” (05/11/26)
Source: Politics, Philosophy & Economics
by Matt Zwolinski
“Are markets coercive? Contemporary debate is dominated by two answers. The first, longstanding among defenders of free markets, holds that voluntary exchange is non-coercive by definition: coercion enters the picture only when rights are violated. The second, revived from Robert Hale’s 1923 essay and embraced today by progressive legal scholars and post-liberal conservatives alike, holds that markets are pervasively coercive because property rights backed by state power constitute a system of mutual coercion. Both answers fail, but the Halean answer fails in the more interesting way.” (05/11/26)
“In the nearly two-and-a-half months since Donald Trump launched a war against Iran at the behest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the iron grip that Christian Zionism has on Washington has become too obvious to ignore. Briefly, Christian Zionism is a theo-political ideological construct that posits a Christian duty to support the state of Israel, come what may, owing to a divine mandate for its existence that is said to derive from the Old Testament. … Anyone tempted to blame American Jews (2.4 percent of the US population) for Washington’s long and puzzling romance with Israel should look elsewhere. … The perhaps overused term ‘Israel Lobby’ might more accurately be referred to as the Christian Zionist Lobby, given the sheer size of its leading organizations. Christians United for Israel has over 10 million members.” (05/11/26)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Laurence M Vance
“The Washington Post recently pointed out that ‘starting this year, the Social Security benefits formula gives the very-highest-income couples who retire at age 67 over $100,000’ per year. And the Post is very upset about it: ‘With the federal government $39 trillion in debt and running deficits larger than during the Great Depression, there’s no reason that the largest federal spending program should be sending six figures in annual benefits to rich people.’ But I thought that Social Security recipients were entitled to collect benefits because they paid into the system their whole working lives? Isn’t that what we are continually told?” (05/11/26)
“One gauge of a society’s level of interpersonal trust lies in how much the central government shares power – with local authorities, courts, private citizen groups, and others. For the last 16 years in Hungary, such trust has been evaporating. An increasingly authoritarian leader, Viktor Orbán, had been centralizing power and creating ‘us versus them’ polarization around often-fabricated issues. On Saturday, all that changed with the swearing-in of a new prime minister, Péter Magyar. His broad-tent Tisza party won big in elections a month ago. In his inaugural speech, Mr. Magyar pledged not to rule over Hungary but to ‘serve’ it – through reconciliation, inclusiveness, and democratic renewal. ‘We are going to remake the constitutional system so that such a concentration of power can never happen again,’ he declared.” (05/11/26)
“The Department of Justice’s case against the egregious former head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, James Comey, is as weak a case as he could hope. Comey had shared an image on social media — a photo of shells on a beach gathered together to markout ’86 47′ — and, when people interpreted it as a possible threat, he deleted it. … Don’t get me wrong. Was it a dumb thing for the disgraced former government official to share? Sure. But even outstandingly horrible former FBI heads have freedom of silly speech. This is not the first time Comey’s been prosecuted by the Trump DOJ. The last time it fizzled. And, considering the First Amendment, this one will fizzle.” (05/11/26)
“I’ve never had much time for social engineering. Not only is it usually an affront to freedom, but it usually comes with perverse unintended consequences. Still, one might make the case: If somebody’s gonna do it, it ought to be done better. While I would never want to offend the sensibilities of those who just want to be left alone by the authorities, I would like at least to imagine less poorly designed systems than the ones we currently suffer under.” (05/11/26)
“After British troops had beaten German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s tank forces at the Second Battle of El Alamein in Egypt on November 4, 1942, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill declared, ‘This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is perhaps the end of the beginning.’ The same might now be said about humanity’s struggle to defeat the dire threat of global climate change caused by our never-ending burning of fossil fuels. The illegal war of aggression on Iran, abruptly launched on February 28, 2026, by the governments of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Donald Trump, has indeed provoked a global energy crisis of a unique kind.” (05/12/26)
“Back in January 2023, Aimen Halim bought an order of ‘boneless wings’ at a Buffalo Wild Wings outlet in Mount Prospect, Illinois. At the time, he claims, he assumed the product was composed of deboned chicken wing meat. But to his horror, he discovered that it was in fact made from chicken breast meat. That revelation resulted in a federal lawsuit: Halim sued the restaurant chain two months later, alleging breach of express warranty, common law fraud, and unjust enrichment. When U.S. District Judge John J. Tharp Jr. dismissed that lawsuit in February 2026, he did not question Halim’s claim of confusion about the nature of boneless wings. But even if Halim honestly thought he was getting a deboned version of Buffalo Wild Wings’ ‘traditional’ wings, Tharp said, ‘his complaint has no meat on its bones,’ because ‘Halim does not plausibly allege that reasonable consumers are deceived by boneless wings.'” (05/11/26)
