“In 2022, when John Fetterman had a stroke while he was running for his Senate seat, the Democrats and their media allies were insistent that to even question his fitness to serve was ableist and unacceptable. My, how times have changed. This week, New York magazine, as reliable a Democrat organ as there is, ran a scathing hit piece on Fetterman in which current and former staffers all but suggest that not only should he not be Pennsylvania’s senior senator, he belongs in an assisted living facility. The piece has no ‘gotcha’ moment that would make any fair person say that Fetterman needs to step aside — you know, the kind former President Biden provided daily. … why, one wonders, two years after waiving away similar behavior is a liberal news outlet suddenly parading the senator’s alleged diminished capacities? What changed?” (05/02/25)
“Four billion bucks: That’s what Los Angeles County has confirmed it will pay ‘to settle nearly 7,000 claims of ‘horrific’ child sexual abuse related to their juvenile facilities and foster care homes over a period of decades,’ according to a BBC report. ‘Survivors say they were abused and mistreated by staff in institutions meant to protect them — with many of the claims linked to MacLaren Children’s Center, a shelter that permanently closed in 2003.’ A lawyer for the plaintiffs offered the perfectly apt cliché, of foxes and hen house: ‘they were raping boys and raping girls.’ Meanwhile, something odd’s going on with the ‘children in cages’ issue.” (05/02/52)
“Can foreigners legally residing in the United States be tossed out of the country for engaging in controversial or even vile speech? Court cases suggest the answer is ‘no’ and uphold the idea that free speech is a right adhering not only to Americans but also to those just visiting. On Tuesday, a federal judge in Massachusetts allowed a lawsuit against the Trump administration’s deportation proceedings aimed at noncitizen anti-Israel college radicals to proceed on the grounds that the government is targeting protected speech in such a way that it chills the willingness of foreign university students and faculty at schools in this country to speak out about controversial issues.” (05/02/25)
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Andrea Martinez & Jesus Maria Alvarado Andrade
“We were born in Venezuela, so naturally, we like baseball. As Venezuelans, we share this passion with the United States. In addition to being Venezuelan, we are also husband and wife — one an economist, the other a lawyer. We often find ourselves in intense discussions on various topics—perhaps because one of us leans more libertarian and the other more conservative, in the American sense. Despite our disagreements, we’ve reached a fundamental point of consensus: baseball is the best sport to illustrate the political ideal of the Rule of Law — and, by extension, the principles of a free-market economy.” (05/02/25)
“UAW President Shawn Fain sure seems serious. As he wrote for In These Times in 2024: If we’re to ‘build enough collective power to win universal healthcare and the right to retire with dignity, then we need to spend the next four years getting prepared.’ Fain first announced the idea in fall 2023, after the UAW’s historic Stand-Up Strike won substantial gains from the Big Three automakers. The UAW has previously aligned their contracts with the Big Three to expire together, but this time, the UAW is also asking unions from sectors across the country to join and, as Fain put it, ’flex our collective muscles.’ The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), the American Postal Workers Union and other major unions have publicly supported the effort. Sounds difficult? Yep!” (05/01/25)
“Numerous records from law-enforcement agencies confirm that immigrants, both legal and illegal, are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans. … But demagogues need scapegoats, and Trump relentlessly, grossly vilified immigrants as invaders, criminals, and threats to national security. I remember grandmotherly ladies at the GOP convention holding signs demanding ‘Mass Deportation Now.’ It was a little shocking (even in this awful time). They wouldn’t have held those signs aloft with a clear conscience if they had not been deceived into believing that many if not most immigrants were rapists and murderers.” (05/02/25)
“Imposing taxes on consumers is a ‘hostile and political act.’ From a business point of view, it makes sense to let customers know who’s imposing these latest massive tax hikes. That way the customers know who to blame for — and who to hold accountable for — unnecessarily higher prices. Why should tariffs be treated any differently than sales taxes? They’re taxes. You’re paying them. Why are Amazon, Walmart, and likely other businesses running and hiding instead of telling you so? The only explanation that makes sense is fear.” (05/01/25)
“While clearly Trump has no issue with gratuitous cruelty and ignoring laws, the deportation drive actually stems from a basic problem created by his campaign. Trump repeatedly complained that Biden had allowed millions (sometimes it was tens of millions) of dangerous criminals into the country. A large share of his supporters actually believes this. … Trump has to be seen taking big steps to bring the problem under control. This is where Trump’s lie runs into problems with reality. There are relatively few serious criminals among the people who have come into the country in recent years — and insofar as any are identified, they were likely already in the deportation process under Biden. This leaves Trump desperate to drive up numbers and then trying to make the case after the fact that they have actually deported dangerous criminals.” (05/01/25)
“In 1958, Soviet intellectuals Alexander Yakovlev and Oleg Kalugin arrived at Columbia University as Fulbright scholars for a year of graduate studies. They weren’t defectors. They were loyal Party apparatchiks, sent to study how America’s ‘propaganda machine’ worked so they could better defend socialism back home. Instead, they encountered something far more dangerous to totalitarianism than propaganda: freedom. They saw professors challenging their government without fear. They saw students protesting wars and presidents without vanishing into gulags. They saw newspapers printing every side of every debate, and a system that wore criticism like a badge of honor. They didn’t defect. They went home quietly, outwardly loyal, and climbed the ranks of the Soviet system. … Years later, when Mikhail Gorbachev rose to power, Yakovlev became the architect of glasnost and perestroika, reforms that opened cracks in the Soviet system until the whole structure collapsed. Kalugin, too, was changed by his time in America.” (05/01/25)
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Andrew Bernstein
“Let’s start with a thought experiment. In late-19th-century France, the brilliant chemist, Louis Pasteur, originated the germ theory of disease. The idea that diseases powerful enough to kill large mammals were often caused by organisms too tiny to see was extremely controversial. Imagine that France was a dictatorship, rather than a generally free society, that the scientists who opposed Pasteur were favorites of the dictator, and that the regime then threatened Pasteur with incarceration or execution if he publicized his theory. Imagine they burned his notes, seized and destroyed his lab records, and intimidated his supporters into silence. … If the State or Church had suppressed Pasteur’s freedom of speech, for how many years or decades might the growth of medical knowledge have been held back?” (05/01/25)
