“President Donald Trump has a good story to tell on the economy; he should be telling it, because it’s a sure bet the liberal media will not. Consider the big picture: unemployment is low, real wages are rising, the stock market is high, investment is booming and inflation, though above the Federal Reserve’s target, came down last month, and will recede again once oil prices stabilize. (Inflation, most recently at 3.5%, and at 2.6% excluding volatile food and energy, is also significantly below the 4.95% recorded on average under President Joe Biden.) … Sure, we have challenges, as always, and especially with the cost of living being too high and housing too expensive for many Americans. But, overall, the economy is in pretty good shape. That’s not what most people think.” (07/21/26)
“William James called her ‘the bitch-goddess, Success.’ He meant it as a complaint about America’s worship of her, but the phrase catches something true. She is a goddess because we deify whatever she touches, crediting it with foresight and merit it never had. She is a bitch because she hands out her favours with no regard for desert at all. What I want to call contingency is just her proper name – the rather distinguished term by which we dress up and disguise mere chance.” (07/21/26)
“One of the dumbest popular narratives you see today is the idea that Zionists persuaded a reluctant Trump to start a war with Iran after he was re-elected, like they were chasing him around going ‘Would you like to bomb Iran? like the guy from Green Eggs and Ham while he yelled ‘Not in a box! Not with a fox!’ until he eventually caved in. It is now abundantly clear that this war was planned a long time ago. Not in 2026, not in 2025, not in 2024, and not even during the Biden administration. This was planned before Trump was ever elected president.” (07/21/26)
“Washington at last seems to have hit upon a revenue idea that both Republicans and Democrats like: taxing artificial intelligence to help the American worker. Too bad it would do the opposite. On the right, President Donald Trump wants AI companies to give ‘something back to the public,’ while Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) has expressed openness to taxation to make sure AI companies ‘are actually working for the public good.’ On the left, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) wants the public to own half of the biggest AI companies, and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-California) has called for a tax on AI tokens, the basic data unit processed by large language models. The various tax proposals rely on different mechanisms, but the same story motivates them. It’s a story based on a zero-sum assumption — that gains for capital automatically means losses for labor.” (07/21/26)
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Stefan Bartl
“From De Beers’s 1940s slogan ‘A Diamond Is Forever,’ to ‘Every Kiss Begins with Kay’ and ‘He Went to Jared,’ the diamond industry had already done its most important work before anyone chose a ring. It had written the rules of romance: what love looked like, what it cost, and what it said about someone who spent less. Those rules were not ancient traditions. The industry manufactured not diamonds, but desire. Even in popular culture, Rihanna gave us the song ‘Diamonds.’ The more interesting economic story, however, is not the diamonds in the sky, but the diamonds in the lab. Desire has not gone anywhere. For the first time, it has a better offer.” (07/21/26)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Wanjiru Njoya
“In his book The Vision of the Anointed, Thomas Sowell argues that most people’s political opinions are shaped by ‘a particular set of underlying assumptions about the world—a certain vision of reality.’ By vision, he means an instinctive sense of the correct way of understanding the world and making sense of what we see or hear. The same insight applies to people’s understanding of political labels like libertarian or conservative. We assume we know what a libertarian means by reference to his ideology, or that we know what it means to describe a position as conservative. But often these assumptions owe more to our own vision of the world than they do to the speaker’s intention.” (07/21/26)
“The U.S.-Israel relationship will change after Donald Trump. It may become more transactional, and the U.S. does benefit enormously from its friendship with Israel. Every high-tech company has a research office here, and the U.S. gets all of Israel’s military tech and knowledge. The world is not collapsing, but the relationship may well be changing.” (07/21/26)
“President Donald Trump told a prime-time national audience, last week, that the Department of Homeland Security found 278,000 noncitizens on state voter rolls after checking roughly half the states. ‘It’s a number,’ as my old boss says. The Washington Post called it ‘an exaggerated claim that noncitizens are registering to vote en masse.’ No, noncitizens are not really registering to vote so much as being registered — without their knowledge or understanding through deliberate government policy that pretends it’s pro-democracy to throw folks on the voter list who are not legally entitled to vote.” (07/21/26)
“The senator from purple Georgia is leading in polls and fundraising without picking a fight with party progressives. Maybe there’s a lesson there.” (07/21/26)
“An image of Iran as a regional bête noire has long served Israel’s objective of drawing international attention away from Israeli conduct. This is a major reason Israel has promoted unending confrontation with Iran, including the starting and continuation of the current war. This also helps explain why Israel opposes and often seeks to sabotage diplomacy with Tehran. Netanyahu’s government is using the current preoccupation with a rekindled U.S.-Iranian war to intensify its violent subjugation of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. While President Donald Trump has said little about Gaza in recent weeks, Israel’s actions there are undermining the president’s 20-point peace plan for Gaza, which he proposed last October.” (07/21/26)
