Source: Garrison Center
by Thomas L Knapp
“By virtually any metric, Trump is devoted to central economic planning and government control of American industry. To, that is, socialism. What separates him from other, actually admitted, socialists like [US Senator Bernie] Sanders and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani isn’t that they’re any more or less committed to ‘socialism,’ it’s the specific TYPE of socialism.” (06/07/26)
Source: Reason
by Lloyd Botway
“After a trip to Japan, tourists often return dazzled by the beauty of the land, the politeness of the people, the safety of the cities, the world-class transportation systems, and the delicious food. Many also come away with the impression that Japan enjoys a high degree of economic and personal freedom. Construction flourishes. Businesses thrive. Goods from all over the world are available, and shopping seems to be a national pastime. Homeless people are nowhere to be seen. People travel freely throughout the country. But behind Japan’s economic success lies a government and a legal system that clearly prioritize social stability and group harmony over individual rights.” (06/07/26)
https://reason.com/2026/06/07/is-japan-a-libertarian-paradise-not-quite/
Source: The American Conservative
by Ted Galen Carpenter
“Last month’s summit meeting between Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping — during which the leaders signed over 40 cooperation agreements and deepened their nations’ strategic partnership — provides just the latest sign that diplomatic, economic, and military cooperation between Russia and China is robust and continues to rise. That trend is profoundly distressing to political and media elites in the United States, most of whom are fervent defenders of America’s fading global hegemony. But they can hardly claim that Russian–Chinese cooperation was unforeseeable, considering Washington’s own clumsy and inept policies have been its chief cause, as many warned would be the case. Hostile measures that successive, post-Cold War U.S. administrations pursued toward Moscow virtually drove Russia into Beijing’s arms.” (06/07/26)
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-russia-china-partnership-was-made-in-america/
Source: Agorist Nexus
by TechLibre
“The noose tightens. Not with a bang, but with a thousand small cuts—social credit scores, ISP blacklists, library book bans, and the quiet revocation of property rights on devices you thought you owned. The technocratic state doesn’t need to kick down your door. It just needs you to keep renting your knowledge, your books, and your attention from its approved vendors. That’s where these reviews come in. I’ve tested two open source tools that let you opt out of the surveillance economy and build your own infrastructure. One is a terabyte-sized fire hose of offline knowledg — Wikipedia, Khan Academy, medical references, maps, and optional local AI. The other is a quiet, essential tool for anyone who remembers when buying a book actually meant owning it. Neither requires a subscription. Neither phones home. Neither asks permission.” (06/07/26)
https://www.agoristnexus.com/two-open-source-solutions-for-technocratic-control/
Source: Libertarian Institute
by Thomas Karat
“There is a line in the Fourth Amendment that was supposed to settle this. The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated, and no warrant shall issue but upon probable cause. It is not a suggestion. It does not contain an exception for emergencies, for terrorism, for immigration, or for your own good. It was written by men who had watched a government treat a population as a thing to be catalogued, and who meant to draw a line that no administration could cross no matter how frightened the public could be made to feel. That line is being erased right now, not by a vote and not by an amendment, but by a software contract. And the man holding the pen spent his academic career studying exactly how this happens.” (06/05/26)
https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/the-surveillance-state-found-its-philosopher
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“Israel’s +972 Magazine reports that the Israeli military establishment has launched a training program designed to ‘influence public consciousness’ around the world, with courses aimed at training hundreds of operatives per year in strategies for ‘actively disrupting or manipulating the beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors of target audiences.’ … It’s such a trip how Zionists just take it as a given that the only way to improve public perception of Israel is to ramp up efforts to manipulate the thoughts people think about it. They never give serious attention to the possibility that Israel would have a lot more public approval if it stopped fucking murdering innocent civilians all the time and fucking torturing people and raping captives with trained rape dogs. Israel can’t possibly be wrong; only our thoughts about Israel can be wrong.” (06/06/26)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Vladyslav Manzyuk
“A state works when its formal institutions align with and reinforce the informal order beneath it. It fails when it overrides that order. Yugoslavia assembled populations whose informal institutions — Austro-Hungarian civil law in Slovenia and Croatia, historically distinct legal traditions further east, shaped by Ottoman frameworks, distinct religious frameworks governing commercial obligation — had long created high transaction costs across the same lines the state tried to erase. Iraq assembled three distinct Ottoman administrative provinces. Borders do not erase gradients. These are not failures of tolerance or political will — and it is worth noting that no amount of well-intentioned, constitution-drafting has ever repealed an institutional gradient. They are the predictable outcome of a constructed order imposed on an incompatible spontaneous one, which pushes back through informal markets, parallel institutions, and eventually political fragmentation.” (06/06/26)
https://mises.org/mises-wire/civilizations-are-transaction-costs
Source: Washington Post
by Matthew Lynn
“The price that the U.S. government has to pay to borrow money for 30 years has already punched through 5 percent a year, its highest level since the financial crisis of 2007. For 10-year money, the annual price is 4.6 percent and climbing. Amid all the noise about the rise of artificial intelligence and the booming space economy, something far more significant is happening in the financial markets. The cost of borrowing is being reset. And that raises some intriguing questions. Could the politics of deficit reduction stage a comeback? And are voters in any mood to pay attention if it does?” (06/05/26)
Source: Christian Science Monitor
by staff
“As schools across the United States let out for summer vacation, more parents and policymakers are trying to make sure kids can get out there and just be kids – by stepping away from screens, playing in the open air, or biking to a friend’s house or the local store. And, they say, kids should be allowed to do all of this without a parent hovering over them – or that parent being held liable for not doing so. In May, the U.S. House introduced a bipartisan bill to promote ‘childhood independence and protect parents who allow their children to play outside unsupervised, get off screens, and develop social skills.’ Earlier this year, Indiana became the 13th state to pass a measure shielding parents from child neglect allegations for certain unsupervised activities.” (06/05/26)
https://www.csmonitor.com/Editorials/the-monitors-view/2026/0605/Child-s-play-is-more-than-just-that
Source: The UnPopulist
by Michal G Holzman
“Progress and technological development brought the atom bomb and death camps, too. To some extent the mid-century crisis led to an expansion of liberalism under the umbrella of U.S. global hegemony. The question of the 1940s Civil Rights Movement — ‘How can we fight for human equality overseas and then return home to Jim Crow?’ — became the philosophical underpinning for massively expanded access to the liberal project. The universal message of human dignity was on the march, literally and figuratively. It extended its reach across lines of race, religion, sex, and sexuality in ways that would have been practically unimaginable a generation before. But even as liberalism expanded it was being undercut. In response to both the perverted turn of modernity and the creeping spread of a postmodern nihilism, traditionalism grew, and people began to give up on progress and retreat into pre-modern bubbles of ritual, isolated community, and centralized authority.” (06/05/26)
https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/ais-facelessness-risks-soullessnessand