“For laissez-faire liberal Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), political trouble began with ‘the unhesitating belief … that evils of all kinds should be dealt with by the State.’ The fatal first step is a government promise to rescue people from their own bad choices, such as their preference for indolence and other irresponsibility. That was a mistake because, as Spencer wrote elsewhere, ‘The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools.’ Shielding people from their folly is not only bad in itself, but it also sets in motion a perverse political dynamic that, if allowed to persist, would doom freedom itself.” (10/02/26)
“The warriors who defend this country must have their votes counted. That requires two things. The first is access. They need the time, the training, and the assistance to register and cast a ballot from wherever the country sends them. The second is protection. Their votes must not be diluted by overseas civilian ballots cast under rules Congress never wrote. The Pentagon has failed on both counts. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is correcting that. Start with access. In 2010 and 2011 I served as an infantry rifle platoon leader in Afghanistan. We operated from a remote combat outpost on the Pakistani border, fighting the Taliban and the Haqqani terror network. Those were the deadliest years of the war. I also ran the Federal Voting Assistance Program for my unit.” (10/03/26)
“We here at the Prospect like to point out the ways in which economic power routinely converts into political power. We saw a particularly gruesome example of that this week. Tech executives converged on D.C. for a lunch with Donald Trump that eventually led to a toothless, completely voluntary AI safety agreement. Public Citizen did the service of tallying up all the money that these executives, their families, or the corporations they lead have given to Trump’s campaign, his super PAC MAGA Inc., his inauguration fund, legal settlements that personally enriched the president, or various vanity projects like the White House ballroom. The total came out to $227 million. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, who accounts for $23 million of that total, substantially devised the ‘morally binding’ self-regulatory compact to police AI models that came out of the meeting, and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang (a mere $1 million) was his key lieutenant.” (10/02/26)
“The headline news is good for a change: Energy flows through the Strait of Hormuz are picking up. As of Monday, a seven-day average of 13.5 million barrels of crude oil were transiting the waterway, roughly matching pre-war levels. Two questions arise out of this happy circumstance: First, what has changed operationally? Second, why aren’t markets more jubilant? The second question is easier to answer. A week of good flows does not erase six months of supply disruption.” (10/02/26)
“What October 7 opened is visible on the ground before it is visible anywhere else. By the reckoning of an Israeli newspaper, Israel has seized more territory from its neighbors since that day than in any comparable span in decades. The war did not stay in Gaza. It moved outward on every front where a border could be pushed. … A war that produces this much cannot be allowed to end, and it has not been.” (10/01/26)
“Daniel McCarthy — Distinguished Fellow in Conservative Thought at the Heritage Foundation — recently penned in the pages of American Spectator, an obituary of sorts for libertarianism. His essay is just the latest contribution to what has become a torrent of triumphalist declarations by pundits on the left and right that we Americans, having gorged ourselves on this junk-food philosophy, are now turning to a healthier diet of statism. Yet McCarthy’s eulogy, like the others, is marred by mistakes. Here are three.” (10/01/26)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger
“The U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq is not as ignominious as the withdrawal from Afghanistan after some 20 years of occupation, nor does it resemble the humiliating U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam but it can be — and should be — an opportunity for Americans to engage in some serious soul-searching about the concept of foreign interventionism that has become a normal and permanent way of life for the American people. This is especially true given the ongoing fiasco of President Trump’s unconstitutional war on Iran, which has wreaked untold death, destruction, suffering, injuries, and impoverishment on the Iranian people, just like U.S. interventionism did to the people of Iraq under the rubric of bringing them ‘freedom.'” (10/01/26)
“A major consequence of the American Revolution was the preservation of the free-market realities engendered by the long tradition of salutary neglect, threatened by the remnants of England’s monarchical leviathan. The American colonists proved to be an exception to English constitutionalism, having no direct representation in Parliament and being at the whim of royal prerogative as a colonial venture under the executive authority of foreign policy. The colonies ended up being outside English polity and thus subject to the whims of mercantilism rather than allowed to continue prospering under the spontaneous capitalism of the mother country. And so, the people revolted.” (10/01/26)
“Forbes recently dropped its 2026 Forbes 400 list: The 400 richest Americans today are worth a combined $8 trillion. Elon Musk, at the tip-top of the list, is worth an estimated $908 billion. If you spend your life thinking about taxes, as I do, a list like this naturally raises the wealth-tax question. One might think such a list would make an argument in favor of wealth taxation. If you think hard about the numbers, however, it actually shows how bad some arguments are in its favor.” (10/01/26)
