“American farmers rely on imports for many of their most critical inputs—fertilizer, chemicals, machinery—and rely on exports to large overseas markets such as China for a big part of their profits, and, as such, conducting a series of trade wars fought with tariffs is just about the worst possible economic policy for them as a group. Naturally, American farmers and farming communities keep voting roughly two-to-one for trade wars—a vote for Donald Trump, the guy who insists that ‘trade wars are good and easy to win,’ is a vote for trade wars. Farmers voted for trade wars, and trade wars they got. And—surprise!—agriculture is in something like a full-blown recession, with farm incomes projected to decline by a whopping 5.5 percent in real terms this year. Farm bankruptcies are up 46 percent since 2024, and some 15,000 farming operations went dark last year.” (09/25/26)
“Racism plagues American health care: reverse racism. The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division just brought another case against a top medical school for blatant discrimination against white and Asian applicants: Blacks applying to the University of California at San Francisco’s med school get admitted at almost 13 times the rate of similarly qualified white applicants. Black and Hispanic students the school admitted from 2023 to ’25 averaged lower test scores and undergraduate grades than the average white and Asian applicant the school rejected. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon’s letter blasting UCSF follows similar ones to UCLA, UCSD and Yale; virtually every other US med school is likely as bad, but she’s building the evidence before she strikes. The University of Pennsylvania offers a path for students at eight other colleges to enter medical school without taking the MCAT at all — and five of the eight are historically black colleges.” (09/26/26)
“Did you know that the U.S. government has an agency called the ‘Office of Remigration’? In case you’re unfamiliar with the term ‘remigration,’ it’s typically used by white nationalists to describe the mass expulsion of nonwhite immigrants, done in the quest to ethnically cleanse ‘Western’ countries. It’s mostly a European term, but Trump himself employed the phrase ‘reverse migration’ last year, mainstreaming ‘remigration’ on the American right—and true to its name, the office now helps facilitate mass removals in some very dark and sordid ways. So let’s lay down a marker: If Democrats take over the House and/or the Senate, they should make it their business next year to ensure that this agency faces truly withering scrutiny. As many Americans as possible should know what their government is doing in their name.” (09/25/26)
“America’s government has become a masterclass in deliberate, costly failure. You can order dinner, hail a car, transfer money across the country, trash a pundit, praise a friend, and run a business from your phone in seconds. The private sector figured this out years ago. Yet the second you deal with your own government, you step into a dysfunctional time machine: endless paperwork, overloaded websites that crash, multi-hour hold times, lines that stretch for blocks, and approvals that crawl at the speed of 1985. … The private sector rebuilds itself constantly. Yet government clings to legacy processes written for a slower century. Why? Because broken systems protect power.” (09/25/26)
“Changing polling places always occurs, every election year, and the biggest changes in this regard have been in the eight states (and D.C.) that have established mail-in only voting. Talk about a change of polling places! And then there is the purging of voter rolls of non-citizen, non-resident, and non-existent voters! Who could complain about that? Only unserious people. Like Democrats. Like Kamala Harris. And those who seek to game elections.” (09/25/26)
“The Project 1619 journalist said parents should stick with struggling, segregated schools. Her daughter isn’t the only one who was cheated by that ideological choice.” (09/25/26)
“President Donald Trump is in trouble and he knows it: He promised ‘no more foreign wars’, but started a war with Iran that he has lost. He promised to tame inflation, but tariffs and his war of choice have made it worse. He promised to deport only the ‘worst of the worst’ illegal immigrants. But Immigration and Customs Enforcement has terrorized American cities as agents sometimes arrested, detained, wounded, or killed US citizens. He promised to make the United States the most respected country in the world, but he has destroyed America’s reputation and alienated its allies. He calls himself the best president in history, but his approval rating has dropped to the mid-30s — his lowest ever and approaching President Richard Nixon’s final approval rating of 24% shortly before his resignation in 1974.” (09/26/26)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Joshua Mawhorter
“Before a good can be considered money, it must first serve as a medium of exchange and become so through a market process of production, subjective value, and exchange. This necessarily also provides the basis for money to be a meaningful unit of account and a ‘store of value’ (though the term is not fully appropriate). The Mengerian theory of money, refined by Mises and Rothbard, has been extrapolated more fully elsewhere; however, in brief, it posits that money emerges spontaneously from barter as market participants increasingly prefer more marketable goods as media of exchange, eventually producing a generally-accepted medium of exchange. These goods tended to have certain characteristics—scarcity, divisibility, portability, durability, recognizability, fungibility, high value per weight, etc.” (09/25/26)
