Source: Orange County Register
by the editorial board
“Justin Raimondo tried to warn us. The co-founder of Antiwar.com devoted his life to warning Americans and particularly the American right against the relentless pull of the military-industrial complex and the bipartisan-established warfare-welfare state. Raimondo would’ve turned 74 today. He passed away on June 27, 2019 in Sebastopol, California at the age of 67 after battling lung cancer. But his legacy lives on and his message is as necessary as ever.” (11/18/25)
“For the government to send out more than it’s raking in AND ‘begin paying down our ENORMOUS DEBT’ is mathematically impossible. … But more than the fiscal infeasibility of the proposal, I’m interested in Trump’s claim that those checks would constitute a ‘dividend.’ A dividend on what, precisely? Dividends are payments to shareholders in a business enterprise, distributed as a share of profits. As a ‘business enterprise,’ the last time the US government turned a “profit” by spending less than it received in tax payments was 2001. More importantly, none of us are shareholders in the US government.” (11/18/25)
“In recent decades, and especially since the release of OpenAI’s large language model ChatGPT in 2022, artificial intelligence use has rapidly spread into almost every industry. And as AI proliferates, so do fears that a wave of mass unemployment will follow. Concerns are widespread that AI will be deployed to accomplish an ever-greater share of the labor needed throughout the economy, leaving fewer and fewer jobs available for human workers. This fear led Dario Amodei, one of the world’s leading AI technologists, to sound the alarm earlier this year about an impending ‘white-collar bloodbath.’ The Anthropic CEO told Axios that one very possible scenario within the next one to five years is that, ‘Cancer is cured, the economy grows at 10 percent a year, the budget is balanced — and 20 percent of people don’t have jobs.'” (11/18/25)
“In recent weeks, the Trump administration has ordered members of the military and the National Guard onto the streets of American cities, including Los Angeles, Portland, and Chicago. The purported reasons for these decisions have been to protect federal agents and federal property, but the threat of using the troops for general domestic law enforcement looms large, with President Trump repeatedly threatening to do just that. … Under American law, when members of the military violate citizens’ rights in law enforcement, it is much harder, if not impossible, for those victims to receive monetary compensation for the harms they suffer than it is when they suffer wrongs by state or local police — though it’s already hard enough in those cases. Indeed, using the military in domestic law is entirely incompatible with our nation’s current remedial legal architecture.” (11/18/25)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Diyar Kasymov
“Is building more homes not enough? Recently, there have been more and more Gen-Z memes about boomers selling their overvalued houses to Blackrock instead of to young couples, and then the corporation rents the house to the couple for 2x the price. The housing crisis is not a false alarm. The median rent price went up 25 percent in just 6 years. This is a serious economic problem for America. Many young people are already being radicalized by this, as they are willing to elect socialist Zohran Mamdani — who called for abolition of private property once — as the mayor of New York City. But what can we do? Are rent controls now relevant, as globalization and financialization changed the rules of the game? Can European-style social-democrats like Mamdani, Bernie, and AOC control the markets elegantly enough to maximize supply?” (11/18/25)
“For at least a century, American businesses have been using charm pricing to fool us into thinking that a $9.99 meal is much cheaper than $10. One study says the practice increases sales by 24%.” (11/18/25)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger
“Many years ago, when I was practicing law in Texas, I learned that there were, generally speaking, two types of lawyers …. The first type of lawyer would carefully research the issue and give his honest, independent-minded opinion as to the legality of the proposed action, even if it wasn’t what the client wanted to hear. … The second type of lawyer would instead come up with whatever legal reasoning was necessary to please the client …. When it comes to President Trump’s and the Pentagon’s extra-judicial drug-war killings in the Caribbean, there is little or no doubt that the Office of Legal Counsel in the U.S. Department of Justice falls into the second category.” (11/18/25)
“Last spring, as I was ending my time at the U.S. Treasury as an oversight official monitoring the IRS’s IT modernization efforts, one initiative by the Trump administration gave me hope that progress would be made after I left: trimming federal contracts with large consulting firms. … after decades of dependence on outside firms to do their work for them, many government agencies can no longer even function without them. They are suffering from something called ‘vendor capture,’ and it’s one of the most underexamined barriers to meaningful change in federal operations.” (11/18/25)
“When I began TomDispatch in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and the invasion of Afghanistan, believe me, the world did not look good. But I guarantee you one thing: if you had told me then that, almost a quarter of a century later, the president of the United States would be Donald J. Trump (and had explained to me just who he was), I would have thought you an idiot first class or totally mad! Donald J. Trump as president of the United States, not just once, but twice? In what century? On what planet? You must be kidding! (And what a dreadful joke at that!) Now, of course, I would have to put all of that in the past tense (and probably add yet more exclamation points)!!” (11/18/25)
“Cooperation is both the most fragile and the most necessary condition of political life. It is fragile because individuals and groups often pursue short-term gains at others’ expense, yet it is essential because no political community endures without mutual accommodation and understanding. Politics, as Aristotle taught, is the art of living together — not the sum of private interests but the shared effort to sustain a common life. The enduring question is how cooperation survives amid constant temptations to betray, deceive, or act unilaterally. One answer lies in reciprocity.” (11/18/25)
