“On May 11, a new law went into effect in Florida, ‘allowing’ businesses to round the amounts charged for cash purchases to the nearest nickel. Really? Nothing more important than this for our masters in Tallahassee to spend their time on? Don’t get me wrong. The practice in question makes sense …. But why on Earth would merchants need a law to ‘allow’ this? … Even when framed as ‘voluntary’ — as this one is — unnecessary laws ‘allowing’ behaviors already unquestionably ‘allowed’ (by common sense and conventional morality) tend to nudge the public toward an ‘everything not required is forbidden’ mindset in which we instinctively seek permission from our rulers for every action, trivial or momentous.” (05/14/26)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger
“The libertarian movement can be divided into two basic groups: libertarians who call for reforming welfare-warfare state programs and libertarians who call for dismantling welfare-warfare state programs. I fall within the latter group. Why? Because I want to be free. Reform doesn’t get me freedom. At best it gets me a better serfdom. That’s nice, but it’s not want I want for the rest of my life. I want to be free, and only by dismantling infringements on freedom can I attain genuine freedom.” (05/14/26)
“Last week, when the Pentagon resumed its attacks on small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific Ocean, the media barely noticed. The U.S. military has now destroyed 56 vessels and killed 190 persons. The killings began in September 2025 and have continued to this month. … Killing survivors is expressly prohibited by federal law as well as by the Uniform Code of Military Justice. And, of course, ordering the killing of innocents is always unlawful. So, the Pentagon made two changes. It produced more lethal strikes so as not to be burdened with the problem of survivors, and it either stopped killing survivors or stopped revealing that it killed them.” (05/14/26)
“The United States, like most other countries, use a method of double-entry accounting to track certain aggregate statistics known as National Income Accounting. One of the statistics tracked is the balance of trade. The balance of trade reports the difference between imports and exports. … The connotations of the words ‘surplus’ and ‘deficit’ (coupled with the accounting conventions of pluses and minus) give the impression to those who do not understand the balance of trade that deficits are bad while surpluses are good. But, digging a little into the accounting shows that 1) ‘deficits’ and ‘surpluses’ are value-free and 2) referring to these as ‘trade deficits/surpluses’ is something of a misnomer.” (05/14/26)
“Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez [D-NY] is fast becoming the greatest fabulist since Aesop. Recently, Ocasio-Cortez insisted that true billionaires are a capitalist myth since ‘you can’t earn a billion dollars.’ However, her greatest work of fiction may be her insistence that the Framers fought against billionaires and would have joined her and other socialists in seeking to eradicate them today. Bertrand Russell once noted that ‘there is something feeble and a little contemptible’ about those ‘who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths.’ The American left has long peddled such ‘comfortable myths’ as the wealthy ‘not paying their fair share’ of taxes. The top 1% of income earners pay over 40% of federal taxes, and that percentage goes up to 70% for the top 10%.” (05/14/26)
“John Chrastka of EveryLibrary, which fights for library budgets and against book bans, discusses libraries, their central role in our society, censorship — and those drag-queen story hours.” (05/14/26)
“Organizations often mistake measurable activity for meaningful achievement. AI productivity metrics confuse computation costs with added value.” (05/14/26)
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Mani Basharzad
“One of the first attempts by the second Trump administration to cut government waste was massive cuts and layoffs at USAID. Now, the same administration is pressuring the United Nations to adopt more trade-focused policies rather than aid-focused ones — the ‘trade not aid’ strategy. While it is not obvious how Trump’s tariffs are helping poor nations through trade, we still need to rethink foreign aid.” (05/14/26)
“Who of us has the right to live without fear? This is the question human rights lawyer Ruth Lopez has asked fearlessly in El Salvador — the country of my birth — for decades. It’s a question we all need to ask ourselves in the United States as well. For speaking boldly, Ruth is now in prison. She’s been held without trial since May 18, 2025 — now a year ago — when she was torn from her bed by police and arrested without any investigation or judicial warrant. Ruth has since had minimal contact with her family and lawyers. Ruth’s crime? She opposed corruption. When Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele signed a secret agreement with the Trump administration to accept $4.7 million for the illegal transfer of more than 200 U.S. deportees to El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison, Ruth spoke up to defend their basic rights.” (05/14/26)
