“Walk onto any construction site in America, and you’ll hear the same story: We can’t find enough skilled workers. Electricians, welders, HVAC technicians, plumbers and heavy-equipment operators are in dangerously short supply, and the gap is widening. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently warned that building America’s artificial intelligence infrastructure will require an army of electricians. The demand for data centers (both cloud and AI) is expected to double year over year. Mike Rowe has been sounding the alarm for years: The most ‘essential’ jobs are the ones our culture stopped celebrating. Here’s the truth: Without skilled tradesmen, America grinds to a halt. … Yet we keep pushing young people toward four-year degrees, often leaving them with six-figure debt, while treating the trades as a second-class option.” (10/11/25)
“Christopher Scalia’s 13 Novels Conservatives Will Love (but Probably Haven’t Read) is a book about books that also functions as an extended book list. It is a collection of essay-length chapters that discuss and recommend some of his favorite novels. And it is a reliable guide to younger readers, suspicious and wearied of politicized works of culture, exhorting them to reclaim their patrimony by making great literature central to their intellectual formation.” (10/10/25)
Source: Cato Institute
by Ryan Bourne & Nathan Miller
“President Trump first mused about a U.S. Sovereign Wealth Fund during his 2024 presidential campaign. Shortly after he took office, he signed an executive order instructing his Treasury and Commerce Secretaries to design such a fund. Those plans would ultimately stall, but as we summarized in August, what we’ve seen instead is a wave of ad hoc stakes and revenue shares wrested from U.S. companies like U.S. Steel, Nvidia and AMD, and most famously Intel. Trump advisers pledged to continue their interventionist tear, and just this week Trump announced the country will take a 10% stake in the Canadian mining company Trilogy Metals and fast-track permit approval for an Alaskan mining road the company stands to benefit from. A survey of top finance economists by the Kent Clark survey groups warns this strategy tends to backfire, even for the individual firm.” (10/10/25)
Source: The American Conservative
by W James Antle III
“There are at least two layers to the government shutdown now about to enter its second week. One is the standard fight between the two major parties, which has defined most government shutdowns since Bill Clinton was forced to share power with a Republican-controlled Congress in 1995. The second is a battle within the Democratic Party, with disenchanted progressives simultaneously pressuring and revolting against an ossified leadership class they perceive as constantly losing to President Donald Trump. If the latter sounds familiar, simply swap out progressives for disenchanted conservatives, Democratic leaders for the Republican establishment, and Trump for the former President Barack Obama under the Tea Party more than a decade ago — really until that rebellion was more or less brought to heel by Trump.” (10/10/25)
“Attorney General Pam Bondi’s meager attempt at insult comedy in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing this week is the kind of thing that many political observers call ‘dramatic’, when in reality it was boring deflection and obfuscation punctuated by lazy scandalmongering. But there was something interesting going on in that hearing on the other side of the panel. Four different senators asked Bondi about the antitrust division and its slide into pay-to-play corruption. Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Mazie Hirono (D-HI), Cory Booker (D-NJ), and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) posed questions about how Bondi’s team overruled her antitrust enforcers to approve the Hewlett Packard Enterprise-Juniper Networks merger after pressure from MAGA lobbyists, how Live Nation has hired the same lobbyists to try to get a monopolization case thrown out, and how top antitrust deputies were fired for resisting lobbyist-infused deals.” (10/10/25)
“Donald and Melania Trump are eating breakfast together …. Donald Trump to Melania: ‘How much did our family spend last year on food, clothing, furniture, and other stuff for Mar-a-Lago?’ Melania: ‘About two million dollars.’ Donald: ‘How much stuff – tangible stuff, stuff with mass, stuff you can touch – did our family sell?’ Melania: ‘Well, we sold only that used golf cart for $5,000.’ Donald: ‘This is bad. Very bad. It’s a family emergency. The people we trade with are taking advantage of our kindness. I’m so disappointed in them. They let me down. It ends now!’ Melania: ‘What do you mean?’ Donald: ‘Simple. From now on, we won’t buy any stuff – no food, no clothes, no golf carts, no anything – from anyone who doesn’t buy at least an equal amount of stuff from us. I’m tired of being ripped off!’” (10/10/25)
Source: Libertarian Institute
by Joseph Solis-Mullen
“When the late Justin Raimondo, co-founder and longtime editorial director of Antiwar.com, wrote in 2011 that the anti-interventionist movement needed a ‘big picture’ framework, he was attempting to distill decades of polemic into a theory of international relations. In his essay ‘Looking at the ‘Big Picture,’’ he dubbed this framework ‘Libertarian Realism.’ Though Raimondo never set down a book-length treatise, his insights remain an invitation for libertarians to articulate a systematic foreign policy rooted in their own intellectual traditions. At its core, libertarian realism rests on two pillars: public choice theory and the non-aggression principle (NAP).” (10/09/25)
“‘Rather than letting gabillionaires like Elon Musk put practically none of their massive incomes into’ Social Security, Jim Hightower writes at CounterPunch, ‘make them pay Social Security taxes exactly like regular workers do.’ … Elon Musk DOES pay Social Security exactly like regular workers do. Regular workers pay 12.4% — half directly and half theoretically from their employers, but thereby reducing the money available for wages — in Social Security tax on every dollar of income they earn up to $176,000. Elon Musk (and other ‘gabillionaires’) also pay 12.4% in Social Security tax on every dollar of income they earn up to $176,000. … The best thing to do with Social Security, if ‘decent retirements’ is the goal — and, more importantly, if individual freedom and choice are the criteria — is eliminate it.” (10/09/25)
“If you were a libertarian during [the immediate post-9/11] era, do you remember saying something like, ‘Our interventions create terrorists. When our military invades a country and kills innocents, it is only logical that the rational people living there will fight back?’ That same feedback loop is forming here, and it will reach our cities if we let it. So while I applaud Trump’s efforts to bring peace to the Middle East, we have to be honest that he is not a peace president. We cannot ignore that he gave ICE a budget larger than the Marines, that his administration used Palantir to build an AI-powered surveillance state, and that our government is conditioning us to accept tanks in the streets as if we are under siege when one block in one city has only fifty protestors acting like fools.” (10/09/25)
“Saying one thing when you believe another is bad for your happiness. As researchers have long shown, this dissonance can induce psychological discomfort when it cannot be resolved. No surprise, then, that such dissonance is a common side effect of social anxiety and also associated with symptoms of depression. It creates a sense of dishonesty and inauthenticity: a gap between collective illusion and individual disillusion, you might say. This is what George Orwell’s concept of ‘doublethink’ identified in his novel 1984 …. The way out of the collective-illusion catch-22 is to conquer the fear of rejection from stating your true opinion. The best guide to this that I have encountered comes from the philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, a co-founder of this magazine who helped formulate its motto, ‘Of no party or clique.'” (10/09/25)
