“It does not matter whether you live in a trailer park or a brick ranch house or something more grand and getting grander, it is all the same: Tornado bait is tornado bait. When the Trump administration announced that it was staging a UFC fight on the South Lawn of the White House, I knew what I was seeing. It is as familiar to me as the taste of canned Ranch Style Beans on cornbread …. I know my people. My people know what they like. And they will have what they like even if it harelips the pope — especially if it harelips the pope. It took 250 years, but you got here. All the way down here. From Greatest Generation to White Trash Nation in the space of one lifetime.” (05/29/26)
“As a long-time death penalty abolitionist, I’ve often compared the death penalty in America to a train with no brakes: Once the machinery starts moving, it becomes extraordinarily difficult to stop. But the real problem is that the train should never have been built. Today, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Arkansas are experimenting with nitrogen gas executions, a method officials claim is more humane. But from noose to needle to nitrogen, our constant search for a more acceptable way to kill is a story of failure, not moral progress. There’s no acceptable way to practice a form of state killing that, for Black Americans especially, has long been intertwined with terror. History should make us skeptical whenever governments begin searching for new technologies to make killing appear more acceptable.” (05/31/26)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Jorge Besada
“One of the reasons why we fall for the erroneous idea that patents are good for society is because we greatly overestimate the importance of the specific individual or company making a discovery while being unaware of how the market process — via its various mechanisms like prices, the profit motive, and economic competition — plays a key role in innovation.” (05/29/26)
“The economic and agricultural threat posed by Chinese-owned farmland is modest, but our fears may reflect broader anxieties about national power.” (05/29/26)
“Today’s technology sector does not represent the principles of anything like actual free-market competition; intensively subsidized by the public and deeply tied to the federal government, the major tech companies are a state-capital oligopoly that have benefited enormously from a variety of special subsidies and perks unavailable to ordinary companies and citizens. When we account for direct federal grants and subsidies, infrastructure support, and hardware manufacturing, public subsidies and allocations for AI have reached well into the hundreds of billions of dollars.” (05/29/26)
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Cláudia Ascensão Nunes
“When the Portuguese government decided to add a 10-cent deposit to the price of every plastic bottle under 3 liters (101 fl oz), a small family business in central Portugal did the math and launched a 3.1-liter (105 fl oz) bottle.” (05/29/26)
“To hear Democrats talk about black people is a mix of arrogance, racism and more condescension than could be crammed into the Grand Canyon. What do I mean by that? It’s pretty simple, really: the left simultaneously insists black people are perpetual victims with economic hardship thrust upon them by ‘systemic racism’ and the sole builders of everything good and superior to everyone else. None of it is true, but all of it is designed to manipulate. Democrats, even black Democrats, treat the average black American like they’re a child and special; neither is true. They’re just people, like everyone else.” (05/31/26)
“Ken Paxton is not the first criminal with a narcissistic personality to run for and hold office in this country. In the Trump era, such traits might not seem worth remarking on at all. But Paxton manages to exceed most of his peers in his perfidy and his cruelty. He’s a man who seems to know absolutely no decency, down to a molecular level. And, sadly, he also may be the future of this country.” (05/29/26)
“It took nearly a year for the public to learn that a DHS officer killed a Latino man and U.S. citizen — and that federal officers lied about how it happened.” (05/29/26)
“Liberalism — defined as the political philosophy that prioritizes individual freedom and human happiness — has always had an equivocal relationship with democracy. Democratic governments generally feature much greater liberty and happiness than other types of regimes. Liberals should resist the temptation to embrace authoritarianism. But there are also multiple ways in which democracy can often threaten liberty and human welfare. These dangers include the tyranny of the majority and widespread voter ignorance. Democracy can also be a threat to its own perpetuation, by bringing to power authoritarian political movements. These are all longstanding problems. But recent events demonstrate their continuing — and in some cases growing — significance.” (05/29/26)
