“If Donald Trump’s goal is to strain the immigration system to such a point that it merely serves as an avenue for the fast-tracking of deportations, he is certainly making headway. The barriers have been piling up: ending bond hearings for undocumented immigrants who enter the U.S. illegally, kidnapping people at their immigration court hearings and places of work, entrapping new arrivals who fail to register with the government, and imposing significant penalties on those who do not comply with removal orders. In an added twist, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which unlocks unprecedented levels of funding for immigration enforcement and border security, creates a fiscal minefield of onerous processing fees and penalties. Most of these fees are new and cannot be waived, and the goal is not necessarily to mitigate the government’s giant budget deficit, but to price migrants out of entering or staying in the country, even legally.” (07/31/25)
“Every week, new laments from or about Gen Z seem to go viral, spewing desperate and desolate pronunciations about technology. The doom is pushed by some actual members of Gen Z and even more by the press and pundits eager to fret over kids these days and to moralize about technology. And the big idea undergirding it seems to be that young people are absolutely powerless to resist being lonely, degraded zombies — phone always in hand, unable to connect with fellow human beings, addicted to the dopamine hits they attain from social media likes and content slop. But who are we helping by shilling the Doomed Zoomer narrative? It’s certainly not young people who are being served by it.” (07/30/25)
“It’s been pretty clear for quite some time: Trumpworld loves crypto. Almost everywhere you look in the second Trump administration, there’s a crypto connection. The president, most notably, has his own memecoin, and his two eldest sons, Eric and Don Jr., are involved in a variety of crypto ventures, including World Liberty Financial and its stablecoin. Despite cryptocurrency being immensely profitable for the Trump family and vice versa, though, cracks are beginning to emerge in a key alliance that helped bring the president back to power. The dustup around stablecoin and market structure legislation could be the first preview of more fissures to come.” (07/30/25)
“The [US Supreme] Court’s reading of the Framers’ intentions suggests that the Framers wanted the president, acting unilaterally, to use his presidential powers as though he were a tribune of the people, not just as the official responsible for enforcing or executing the laws. But this idea cannot be found in the accounts of how the Constitutional Convention created the presidency. … compared to Congress, the president still had only the authority to execute the laws, to be the commander in chief in wartime, and to ‘take care that the laws be faithfully executed.’ Congress itself had eighteen specific powers, such as laying taxes, coining and borrowing money, declaring war, and raising and supporting armies.” (07/30/25)
“A few centuries ago, Europe was the beating heart of global innovation. From the Enlightenment’s embrace of reason to the Industrial Revolution’s transformative power, it was a hub of bold thinkers, inventors, and entrepreneurs pushing boundaries. Today, that spirit has faded. Europe no longer leads technological innovation — not due to a lack of talent or scientific exploration, but because of a deeper issue: an overly restrictive regulatory environment. While the US advances rapidly in AI, biotech, and space, and China heavily invests in deep tech, Europe remains tangled in bureaucracy, risk aversion, and a rigid application of the precautionary principle — prioritizing control over creativity and caution over progress.” (07/30/25)
“I’ve been told liberty isn’t as important as making money or raising a family. If someone doesn’t understand how critical liberty is to both of these tasks, and more, they might believe this. Without liberty, you, your family, the economy, and society will suffer. If you don’t have the liberty to negotiate with a potential employer, you may not get the job you want. When government intrudes into the negotiations, you both lose. This has happened to me. I once saw a business I wanted to work for; they needed an employee, but couldn’t afford to pay the government-mandated minimum wage. I was willing to work for less, for the experience, and to show the employer how I could help him. He wouldn’t risk doing something that would have benefited us both because of government rules. We were both worse off because government was protecting us from liberty.” (07/30/25)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger
“In every society, there are off-kilter people. In a healthy, functional society those off-kilter people don’t bother anyone. Everyone can see that they are off-kilter but most everyone displays tolerance, kindness, and consideration for them. ‘There but for the grace of God go I.’ But a healthy, functional society is obviously not the type of society in which we live. We live in a society where the government tightly controls, manages, regulates, and directs people’s lives and the use of their resources. In the process of doing that, the state, decade after decade, has engaged in a continuous process of tightening its screws on the American people. It is my contention that this tightening of the screws causes something to go haywire within the off-kilter people. That’s when they go off and engage in their irrational killing sprees.” (07/30/25)
“As you may recall, Matthew Adelstein uses r-K selection theory to argue that the average bug’s life is not worth living. Quick version: Humans have a few offspring, who typically receive immense parental investment. Bugs have enormous numbers of offspring, who typically receive near-zero parental investment. Due to these radically different evolutionary strategies, the average human has a long and tolerable life, while the average bug has a brief life that swiftly ends in abject misery. It is a clever observation, and not obviously wrong. But neither is it obviously right. Yes, the vast majority of bugs quickly die terrible deaths. But weighty factors cut the other way.” (07/30/25)
“At the core of The Atlantic’s unnecessarily long profile on loud Democrat Rep. Jasmine Crockett is the argument that ‘when the Republicans go low, the Democrats should meet them there.’ As Rachel Jeantel so famously put it, ‘That’s real retarded, sir.’ The notion that Democrats have for too long shown excessive restraint or pitched themselves to voters with a naive intellectualism while being punched in the mouth by brute Republicans is a hysterical myth, one that only persists because the media that helped create it continue to perpetuate it. Going back as far as 2015, you undoubtedly heard both Democrat leaders and prominent dorks in the Washington news media call President Trump a ‘bully.'” (07/30/25)
“In my first year of grad school, one of my professors had a long list of ‘forbidden words.’ These were terms that do more to confuse than enlighten when used in economic analysis. Terms like ‘need,’ ‘afford,’ ‘exploits,’ ‘vicious circle,’ etc. Today, I’ll argue that we might wish to add the term ‘must’ to that list.” (07/30/25)
