“We’ve written a lot at the Show-Me Institute lately about A–F letter grades for public schools. The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) will soon begin assigning these grades to all schools and districts under an executive order from Governor Kehoe. Legislation to codify the order may follow, depending on how the 2026 session unfolds. A central component of these letter grades is student growth. Growth measures how much students learn over the course of a year, based on state assessments. … I’ve studied academic growth extensively and believe it is the most accurate indicator of school effectiveness we have. No other measure comes close.” (04/22/26)
“In policy debates, some see state action as the obvious solution; others say the same about civil society and/or markets. But listen closely, and you’ll often find that everyone’s gone negative: They have lots of bad things to say about the other side, and not much in favor of their own. That’s the ‘pretty pig’ problem: We can all see the downsides — many of them quite real — with one system, and so we conclude, a bit too quickly, that the other one must be better. As I’ve noted before, that approach leads to disagreement without engagement, as the advocates on both sides ignore the problems of their own preferred system: The state I can imagine is clearly a good solution to the real world commercial system I’m immersed in, but that state doesn’t exist, and its powers are not stable or reliable.” [editor’s note: Nietzsche offered a neat, concise, and true “theory of the state” … “Everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has it has stolen.” – TLK] (04/22/26)
Source: Rutherford Institute
by John & Nisha Whitehead
“The Trump administration has spent months demonizing immigrants — detaining them, deporting them, tearing apart families, and casting them as threats to national security. And yet, when it comes time to fill the ranks of its endless wars, those same individuals—green card holders, refugees, asylum seekers, even undocumented men—suddenly become expendable assets. Too dangerous to belong. Not too dangerous to die. Increasingly, the same could be said of all of us. We are all being viewed as potential threats by the government. … While the government is making it easier for Americans to be conscripted and killed in war, it is simultaneously working to make it harder for us to have any say in the decisions that send our young men and women to war in the first place.” (04/22/26)
“Taxation is theft. People are free to disagree because everyone is free to be wrong. You might debate what kind of theft it is; whether extortion, a ransom, or an armed robbery, but it’s theft. We used to know it. The story of Robin Hood has morphed into a socialist fairy tale of someone who ‘robbed from the rich and gave to the poor,’ but originally, he was a hero who recovered stolen property from tax collectors and returned it to their victims. Government and other socialists don’t want this story told, for obvious reasons. If you are taking someone’s property — their money — under threat, when they’d rather keep it to use as they see fit, you are a thief.” (04/22/26)
“Much about our current political era feels unprecedented, especially the sense that the government is targeting people for their political beliefs. In December, President Trump’s Department of Justice ordered the FBI to drastically escalate surveillance of leftist groups. News has also broken that the Biden administration collected data, without a warrant, on Republican senators’ phone calls as part of Jack Smith’s criminal investigation of Jan. 6, taking advantage of inadequate legal protections for data privacy. Republicans and Democrats alike routinely express concern about ‘lawfare,’ the use of unjustified investigations and prosecutions to harass whichever party is out of power. Americans hoping for a deescalation of lawfare should seek to recover the forgotten legacy of the Constitution’s Framers: the safeguards those patriots who knew what it was to be hunted designed for times like these.” (04/22/26)
“Millions of Americans were willing to ignore Trump’s destructive personality and growing authoritarianism when they thought his policies would make them rich. In the end, those policies did little more than pick their pockets while enriching Trump’s inner circle of family and friends. The voters who elected him are left to pick up the pieces of their derailed lives as they come to terms with the fact that they were the rubes all along. It’s no wonder his biggest supporters feel duped. … MAGA voters have long believed in taking Trump ‘seriously but not literally.’ This is just another way of saying Trump might lie to other people to advance his own interests, but he would never lie to the supporters who power his political movement. At least some of those faithful Trump supporters are finally ready to admit that they’ve been conned, and there’s no way back to believing the fairy tale.” (04/22/26)
“The United States was built on a distrust of concentrated power. It is this fundamental distrust of big government that shaped federalism, defined the separation of powers, and limited each branch to a distinct role. During periods of rapid social change, however, governmental restraint weakens. Reform movements (whether in civil rights, economic regulation, or cultural policy) have not only produced legislation but also expanded judicial authority. Social progressivism brings courts to no longer just interpret the law but also reshape it. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 addressed a clear injustice. It prohibited discrimination in employment and public accommodations based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Congress enacted the law through the democratic process, responding to a national failure to enforce equal protection. While many conservatives criticize the Act’s expansion of federal authority, it came through elected representatives.” (04/22/26)
Source: David Friedman’s Substack
by David Friedman
“One way of choosing among different forms of punishment is by how much it costs to impose a given cost on the criminal. Consider first execution. The cost to the criminal is one life. That is also, if we ignore the salary of the hangman or the electric bill for the electric chair, both trivial in comparison, the total cost, so the ratio of total cost to amount of deterrence is about one. The same would be true for a corporal punishment such as a flogging. Next consider imprisonment, one of the two common forms of criminal punishment in modern societies.” (04/22/26)
“The one-year anniversary of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) has renewed attention to the financial stability of rural hospitals. The sweeping legislation made significant changes to Medicaid funding and eligibility, effects of which are still coming into focus for rural facilities. But the OBBBA is only the latest chapter in a longer story. The structural forces most responsible for rural hospitals’ financial precarity predate the law by decades.” (04/22/26)
“For the first time since World War II, Japanese combat troops are participating in live-fire, land-and-sea military exercises in an Asian country that was once under the harsh rule of imperial Japan. On Monday, some 1,400 Japanese soldiers joined with the forces of a few other democracies around the Pacific to practice mock battles for 19 days in the northern Philippines – not far from China and the islands it forcibly claims in the South China Sea. … For Japan, this overseas training under real-world conditions marks a historic turning point for its postwar pacifist tradition and its heavy reliance on the United States for external defense. Yet, on a larger scale, it puts on display a long-term effort by many Asian democracies and their Western partners to define the meaning of shared security, preferably the kind that cannot be seen as ganging up on China.” (04/21/26)
