Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Cláudia Ascensão Nunes
“In 1985, inspired by Southwest Airlines, the first major low-cost airline in the world, and following the liberalization of European airspace, Ryanair brought the low-cost model to scale in Europe, revolutionizing air travel across the continent. It did so through an efficiency-driven model that enabled the sale of extremely low-cost tickets in a market previously dominated by expensive legacy carriers. … However, 41 years later, Ryanair is preparing to cut around 3 million seats, corresponding to an estimated 75 to 90 routes across Europe. A combination of aggressive green ideology from the European Union and state-protected airport monopolies lies at the root of this decision.” (04/12/26)
“Institutions like Underwriters Laboratory and the Better Business Bureau are titans in these sectors with no assistance from government. User ratings emerging in the digital era have a vast impact on sales success, as any Amazon seller can tell you. And in industries like sports, household construction, and driving skill, private insurers exercise a dominant influence through financial carrots and sticks, as directed by actuaries assessing risks. The very existence of the FDA has crowded out such elaborate and complex systems in the case of food and drugs, which is precisely why their safety and efficacy is the subject of such huge public controversy.” (04/12/26)
“Suppose you carefully, intentionally avoid AI and its product, for whatever reason. Maybe you distrust its output. Maybe you just prefer to do your own research, and reach your own conclusions, from primary human-created sources. But how can you know AI-generated content hasn’t previously ‘polluted’ the human-created sources with ‘facts’ that aren’t true? … People have always lied, and often those lies have persisted and spread, becoming ‘common knowledge’ despite being false. AI, linked to a mechanism of near-instantaneous global spread (the Internet), can produce and distribute lies far faster than humans once did by word of mouth or through print on paper.” (04/11/26)
“I have a message for parents: A four-year degree from a top-tier university does not guarantee career success or fulfillment. College is just one path. In a world where technology is rapidly changing our jobs and hiring managers question whether college graduates have the skills needed to succeed, parents and young people should examine the range of post-high school options. Employers certainly are, and they are embracing new pathways to address the workforce gaps they have experienced over decades.” (04/10/26)
“In The True Believer, a seminal book on mass movements by social philosopher Eric Hoffer, Hoffer writes: ‘Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.’ … An essential feature of socialism is to dehumanize others. Like millions in Pol Pot’s Cambodia or Mao’s China, millions of North Koreans have been taught to hate others. Millions in the ‘hostile class’ have been starved, brutalized, and murdered. Socialism will never produce a different outcome. How is it possible to insist that the next socialist regime will be different?” (04/11/26)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Wendy McElroy
“The continuing backlash against public schools, exemplified by the amazing rise of homeschooling, favors an easy abolition of the DOE. Nothing less than eliminating the agency will turn the tide of America’s culture war. An ideology masquerading as education aims at defining people’s thoughts and beliefs, which is the ultimate form of social control. In the foreword to his dystopian novel, Brave New World (1946 edition), Aldous Huxley commented, ‘A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.’ Public schools are both expressions of and a training ground for such an army. Ideally, all education should private, and society is moving in this direction.” (04/10/26)
Source: Center for a Stateless Society
by Kevin Carson
“From the 19th century utopian socialists on, Henri de Saint-Simon’s concept of replacing ‘legislation over persons’ with the ‘administration of things’ has been reiterated in various forms by one thinker after another. In General Idea of the Revolution in the XIX Century, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon described it as ‘dissolving the state in the social body.’ Marx and Engels referred to the same process as the state ‘withering away,’ and it clearly influenced Marx’s view of the Paris Commune as prefiguring the dictatorship of the proletariat. Since then, the same general principle has been restated by countless anarchists and libertarian socialists.” (04/10/26)
“For years, Wikipedia has been one of the informational backbones of the internet. With over seven million articles in the English version, Wikipedia is — by far — the largest repository of human knowledge ever collected. … Wikipedia has seen many challengers to its dominance, often motivated by its perceived inadequacies. … The reason Wikipedia’s challengers have been so feeble is that none of them have offered a new model that can accomplish Wikipedia’s purpose of delivering information to its users. All the competitors function the same way as Wikipedia: as a volunteer-driven community of users who update and expand the encyclopaedia through crowdsourcing. Without any major advantages in fulfilling the basic function of an encyclopaedia, editors and readers have little reason to defect from Wikipedia (or to stay if they do). Enter Grokipedia.” (04/11/26)
“Following decades of unprecedented expansion in security, detention, and surveillance, the United States government’s competence in militancy and punishment is now so dominant that it threatens to eclipse its other activities and ambitions. We are close to a point when, regardless of who is elected, the government will function like a hammer and every problem will look like a nail. As a result, at this critical juncture, opposition to the Trump administration will have to decide whether to offer a strategic vision for the direction of the American state, or cast their movement as an objection to just one person, a particular agency, or a certain issue viewed in isolation and presented as aberrational.” (04/11/26)
