“Leading up to our Independence Day party, my wife asked whether she should buy us T-shirts celebrating America’s 250th anniversary or stick with what we already have. We went with our existing garments. When the red, white, and blue string lights are up and the Gadsden flag is flying out front, my son will don his free speech shirt, my wife will wear one with USA printed across it, and my shirt will show an image of George Washington crossing the Delaware and text reading: ‘Americans. Willing to cross a frozen river to kill you. In your sleep. On Christmas. Not kidding, we’ve done it.’ It will be festive. But not everybody shares our enthusiasm for celebrating the nation’s birthday and the liberty at the core of its founding philosophy.” (06/26/26)
‘Most of us tend to think that the people controlling billions, or even hundreds of billions of dollars, at major corporations have a pretty good idea of what they are doing with their companies’ money. But that clearly is not always the case.” (06/26/26)
“‘I will now sketch,’ English classical liberal, ‘voluntaryist,’ Auberon Herbert wrote in ‘The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State’ (1885), ‘the practical measures by which, as it seems to me, we could give the best effect to a system of the widest possible liberty; our great object being to secure the limitation of services undertaken by the government.’ Herbert was one of the most earnest defenders of individualism in late Victorian England. He remains an inspiration today; seeing how he thought liberty should be protected ought to be instructive.” (06/26/26)
“During an April Senate hearing dominated by debate over the Iran war, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth batted down criticisms from skeptical members of Congress, saying ‘I believe we do have the support of the American people’ in this conflict. Hegseth, it turns out, was wrong. Two months later, we can now confidently say that the Iran conflict is the most unpopular war in U.S. history. When I compared public opinion on the Iran War to previous major U.S. conflicts in May, it hadn’t quite reached the Vietnam War’s level of unpopularity. But polling from June shows that the Iran War has now sunk to negative 32% net support — below the negative 31% recorded in the final poll during Vietnam.” (06/26/26)
“‘I urge you guys to freeze the rent, because we want our students to succeed.’ That was the appeal Alyssa Wright made to the nine members of New York City’s Rent Guidelines Board (RGB) earlier this month, a little more than halfway through a packed, four-hour hearing in the Bronx on whether to freeze rents in the city’s some 1 million rent-stabilized apartments. Wright serves as a campus supervisor for a pilot program connecting City University of New York (CUNY) students with housing, healthcare and food resources. It’s a challenging role: Just that week, Wright said in her testimony, she had counseled five students facing eviction. Some 38% of CUNY’s 240,000 students experience housing insecurity, a condition that makes them twice as likely to withdraw or be placed on academic probation, according to a 2025 study based on a representative sample of students.” (06/26/26)
“Since its inception, the government of the United States has inexorably exceeded its powers under the Constitution. All three branches have been complicit in a consistent pattern of constitutional indifference. … that behavior is nowhere as manifest and harmful as war.” (06/26/26)
“My solution has three parts. Part one: Drain the pool. Part two: Zone the pool ‘commercial.’ Part three: Auction the pool off to a new, private sector, owner. I mean, it’s prime commercial real estate, right? Smack in the middle of a busy tourist area, lots of people walking around all day long with money in their pockets. And have you ever noticed what that tourist area’s called? ‘The National Mall.’ But good luck finding a Nordstrom or Bath & Body Works there. It’s mostly just museums and statues of, or for, dead people.” (06/25/26)
“In the long history of the world, the nation-state is anomalous. In 1900, only 25 percent of the global population lived in a nation-state; today it is close to 100 percent. Nearly 50 percent of today’s states were founded in the thirty years after WWII. … After Nations tells a great historical story, yet plebian uprisings against oligarchy are one of our oldest political tales. Resentment seems as likely a part of our digital future as emancipation. [Rana] Dasgupta thinks, maybe correctly, that oligarchy can jettison the creaking state.” (06/25/26)
“Those in political power always seem to be in a hurry. It is not surprising that their time horizons for ‘action’ never extend more than a few years ahead of them, though for different reasons. If it is a dictatorship, the tyrant in power can never be sure when an assassin’s bullet might cut his life short, or if some of his ‘loyal’ followers may be conspiring to overthrow him …. Little by little, however, some began to make the case that of course liberty is essential and property rights are important, but there are some particular needs or problems for which, surely, there can be an exception. … So why is it the case that in America today (and in most other modern democratic countries), those who hold political office seem so much in a hurry with short-term horizons guiding their actions, in their own way similar to dictatorships?” (06/25/26)
