Source: Eastern New Mexico News
by Kent McManigal
“I don’t want or need to be governed, but I still want a few of the things people claim government does or provides. The difference is, I want these things provided voluntarily, without taxation or other forms of coercion. If something isn’t essential enough for people to chip in and fund, it needs to go away. Forever, or until enough people decide to pay for it without being forced.” (09/02/26)
Source: Liberalism.org
by Ilya Somin
“Property rights were central to the origins of the liberal political tradition. And, in our time especially, they should be central once again. In addition to their inherent value as a vital element of liberty and autonomy, bolstering them is essential to uplifting the poor and disadvantaged and boosting prosperity and innovation. The right to private property can also help protect a variety of other important rights.” (09/02/26)
https://www.liberalism.org/p/private-property-for-abundance-and-diversity
Source: Expression
by David Josef Volodzko
“In the summer of 1798, Congress gave the president the power to expel any foreigner he personally judged dangerous. Though the president never used the Alien Friends Act, and it expired two years later, it had its intended result. French printers, teachers, and booksellers sold their belongings and took ship out of Philadelphia, rather than wait to find out if the president had them in mind. Thomas Jefferson later argued that to put such power in the hands of one person is the very definition of despotism. Last Friday, a federal court in California reminded us of this in Stanford Daily v. Rubio, in which Judge Noël Wise held the government cannot deport people for their opinions.” (09/02/26)
Source: Caitlin Johnstone
by Caitlin Johnstone
“In a recent interview with Time Magazine, [Sam] Altman said he knows most people hate the technology that he and his fellow tech plutocrats are imposing upon our civilization. ‘Clearly, people hate data centers — right now, at least. People are pretty negative on AI,’ Altman said. Indeed, a recent survey conducted by CNBC‘s Generation Labs found that the public is very negative on AI in general and on its CEOs in particular. … They know we hate them and what they’re doing to us as a society. And yet they’re doing it anyway. They’re going to keep pushing this technology on us which is stealing our jobs, plunging our society further and further into a tech surveillance dystopia patrolled by militarized drones and police robots, and turning everyone into stupid, artless emotional infants who can’t do anything for ourselves.” (09/02/26)
Source: Adam Smith Institute
by Madsen Pirie
“Rome gave out free grain to its citizens. It began as emergency relief in a time of shortage. It ended as a permanent entitlement, defended by riot whenever a consul tried to touch it. By the late Republic nobody could remember why it existed. It simply had to continue, because it always had. Britain’s welfare state has followed the same arc. It began, in the years after the war, as a safety net for genuine hardship. It has become, for a growing number of claimants, a permanent address. … There is a different principle available, and it has been tested abroad for long enough now to draw conclusions. Help should be temporary by design. Not grudging, not punitive, but genuinely time-limited, aimed at restoring independence rather than administering it away.” (09/02/26)
https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/the-expiry-date-welfare-needs
Source: Bet On It
by Bryan Caplan
“I’ve been an economics professor for almost 30 years, but I don’t think I’ve ever before seen anything like the table below. I knew that claims that ‘58% of Americans can’t afford a $1,000 car repair’ were laughable clickbait. I knew that — measured by income — the middle class is disappearing… by becoming upper-middle class. But only recently did I start to fully appreciate the chasm between populist pessimism and actual data on Americans’ net worth.” (09/02/26)
Source: Foreign Policy In Focus
by Macela Carmo Dos Santos
“For nearly three years, foreign ministries in Washington, London, and Brussels have debated arms embargoes on Israel in committee rooms, largely without result. Meanwhile, a much less formal network of ordinary people has been trying to accomplish the same goal from the ground up—one factory gate, one shareholder register, and one pension fund at a time. Palestine Action, the direct-action network founded in the UK in 2020 by Huda Ammori and Richard Barnard, is built on a simple theory of change: If governments won’t stop arming Israel, activists will go after the companies that do it for them.” (09/02/26)
https://fpif.org/trying-to-choke-off-the-weapons-behind-gaza/
Source: Common Sense
by Paul Jacob
“‘It’s not every day that Michigan’s bureaucracy violates state and federal law while disenfranchising more than 700,000 Michigan voters,’ opens the legal brief filed in the Michigan Supreme Court last Thursday by Americans for Citizen Voting – Michigan. ‘But that’s exactly what happened [last] week.’ The group (which I chair) has worked for the last year to place the Citizen Only Voting Amendment on Michigan’s November ballot. It makes two basic reforms: requires the Secretary of State to check the voter rolls, identifying and removing noncitizens in a fair process, and requires photo identification to cast a ballot.” (09/02/26)
https://thisiscommonsense.org/2026/09/02/maddened-in-michigan/
Source: Town Hall
by EJ Antoni, Ph.D.
“In a January Townhall column, I argued that the Venezuela operation was a win for America and a loss for China and Canada. Friday’s announcement from the Trump administration of an oil deal with Venezuela confirms that assessment. The agreement gives the U.S. a majority control of more than 65 billion barrels of proven reserves through a joint venture built around 17 strategic fields, with an initial production target north of 1.5 million barrels per day over a 25-year framework. On paper, it creates the second-largest private holder of proven reserves on the planet, behind only Saudi Aramco. But Americans need to be realistic about their expectations: this won’t translate into lower gasoline or diesel prices anytime soon.” (09/02/26)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger
“If we are ever to get our country back on the right track, it is imperative that we never forget that the U.S. national-security state and its foreign policy of interventionism are responsible for the wars in Ukraine and Iran. Let’s start with Iran. It’s obviously tempting to simply blame President Trump for launching his undeclared war of aggression against Iran. But the root cause of what has become a tar baby for Trump goes back a lot further — to the CIA’s coup in Iran in 1953 — a coup that destroyed Iran’s experiment with democracy.” (09/02/26)
https://www.fff.org/2026/09/02/the-root-causes-of-the-wars-in-iran-and-ukraine/