“Economics has a small stock of principles that a first-year student can recite and a Cabinet minister can forget within the hour. Incentives matter; Taxes change behaviour; Prices are signals. These are not obscure theorems. They are closer to proverbs, the kind of thing an intelligent teenager grasps within an afternoon. Yet politicians who could tell you the exact yield on a ten-year gilt will propose a policy that assumes people respond to subsidies but not to taxes, or that a price can be fixed by decree without anyone noticing. The puzzle is not that people are stupid. Despite obvious counter-examples, few politicians are. The puzzle is that intelligence and economic literacy are almost unrelated skills, and the political process actively selects against the second.” (08/04/26)
“After a stinging but widely expected loss at the U.S. Supreme Court, President Trump pressed his enablers to search, once again, for some law he could use to justify imposing new tariff rates on dozens of countries, both friends and foes alike. Yet no Trump policy has been a bigger economic and political failure than his tariffs, alienating other countries, harming U.S. businesses and, most importantly, enraging American voters.” (08/04/26)
“COVID-19 was a traumatic experience for our families, small businesses, schools, and country. Understandably, people don’t like thinking or talking about it. But we must. We now know, thanks to Sen. Rand Paul’s doggedness and Anthony Fauci’s supreme arrogance, which he freely expresses in his diary, that almost every decision made by the medical-industrial complex was exactly the wrong thing to do. Fauci has blown himself up, and almost overnight he has gone from hero to antihero. Politicians and the media didn’t take note of the fact that Fauci had a track record of hysterical and erroneous predictions about viruses before — he was, for example, the public health official peddling the nonsense about heterosexual AIDS. Instead, when Fauci went on TV in front of tens of millions of Americans preaching Armageddon and contradicting everything Trump was saying, he became a saint. No wonder Fauci developed a god complex.” (08/04/26)
“The ideological tolerance gap on campus is shrinking, but not because students are becoming more open-minded. Rather, it appears they are becoming less tolerant across the board.” (08/05/26)
“The so-called “anti-weaponization fund” established as part of a purported settlement between President Trump and the IRS isn’t dead, it’s just sleeping. Don’t be fooled by the weasel-worded statements that Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche posted on the Department of Justice website and tweeted out late Sunday night. They are clearly intended to give a false impression that a stake has finally been driven into the fund’s heart. It hasn’t. Blanche posted two written statements on Sunday night, one that he calls an ‘order’ and one that he calls an ‘update.’ Let’s look at each of them in turn.” (08/04/26)
“Ask an Iranian in Tehran these days how the war is going and you might get this response: Which war? The on-again, off-again war on Iran by U.S. President Donald Trump? Or the war inside Iran by a regime whose new fear campaign against its people appears to be backfiring? Since January, when Iran saw the largest unrest since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, executions of political dissenters have surged. In late July, the regime escalated its intimidation tactics by holding the first public executions since 2022 – but not before a large crowd tried to stop the construction of gallows in a public square. Videos on social media show security forces in the central city of Isfahan chasing protesters before two young men were hanged.” (08/03/26)
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Mark Nayler
“In the run-up to the UK’s referendum on EU membership in June 2016, extravagant claims were made by both the Remain and Leave campaigns. Leaving the EU, the so-called Remainers warned, would propel the UK into recession and mass unemployment. Brexiteers, as they were dubbed, countered with promises of enhanced sovereignty, tighter borders, and liberation from Brussels’s stifling bureaucracy. The latter won the Brexit vote (as it came to be known) by 52% to 48%. But just over a decade on from that historic decision—and six and a half years since the UK officially left the bloc—it’s less clear whether they also won the argument.” (08/04/26)
“Opposite every outrageous pronouncement from HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the long shadow of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the formerly canonized COVID-era hero who has already been stripped of his sainthood. The lifelong liberal conspiracy theorist who endorsed President Donald Trump to secure a job in his administration sat down with CNN’s Dana Bash for an explosive interview on Sunday, just a few days after Fauci spent the entirety of a Senate Homeland Security Committee meeting pleading the Fifth Amendment. Yin and yang, but both incompetent and ruinous. Fauci’s sins are both too grave to exaggerate and too many to enumerate in full. The ex-NIAID director and chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden sought to undermine the lab leak theory of Covid’s origins publicly even as he contemplated it privately.” (08/03/26)
“What America saw in the Senate hearing of Anthony Fauci on Wednesday is the end state of the toxic paternalism of an incompetent bureaucracy. The numerous discrepancies between Fauci’s diary entries and his public pronouncements over the Covid-19 pandemic were not just self-protection coverup of his earlier disastrous decisions. They reflect the standard model of public health administration: we know better than you how to manage a pandemic, and in fact we know it so well that we refuse to discuss any of it and instead use censorship and smear of contrary expertise and coercion rather than persuasion to effect our policies.” (08/04/26)
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“The BBC recently interviewed an Israeli settler who said that all the Palestinians in four surrounding villages should be exterminated to avenge an Israeli who was killed while terrorizing a Palestinian village last month, adding that just a single Jewish life is worth ten million Palestinian lives. ‘I think now after they kill one Israeli people, we need to kill all the people in Tal and Sarra, even Jit and Farata,’ lawyer Yehuda Shimon told the BBC. ‘It sounds like you’re saying one Jewish life is worth hundreds or thousands of Palestinian lives,’ replied the BBC’s Lucy Williamson in the interview. ‘Million,’ Shimon corrected her. ‘One Jewish life, it’s ten million, okay?’ ‘That just sounds racist,’ Williamson responded, to which Shimon replied, ‘Yes, I know, I know. But this is the truth.'” (08/04/26)
