“Perhaps the largest barrier to housing availability and affordability in places like California are permitting rules, land use restrictions, and construction codes that make it absurdly expensive, or even outright impossible, to construct new single or multi-family housing. Part of this is a conspiracy of current homeowners to protect and increase the value of their property … Another part of this is ‘everything bagel liberalism’ where every program has to achieve every Leftish goal — eg we want new housing but it has to have solar and appliances with a minimum SEER and use recycled materials and have a certain number of units set aside for protected groups and create a conservation easement on part of the land, etc …. But another barrier to housing availability and affordability that is less talked-about is the combination of rent control and tenant protections for existing housing stock.” (12/02/25)
“For all their reliance on corporate welfare, according to [Paulina] Borsook, ‘technolibertarians typically can’t be bothered to engage in conventional political maneuvers.’ The 2001 paperback edition [of Cyberselfish] envisioned such an ideology dominating the computer industry ‘long after high tech has retreated to being just one industrial sector among many.’ If the year 2025’s nationalist, protectionist industrial policy differs markedly from the road ahead suggested in Cyberselfish, perhaps it wasn’t all that perceptive about the twentieth century. Crediting heavy state funding with virtually all economic progress and social stability, and conflating the government with social cooperation, it’s hundreds of pages with all the depth of the bumper sticker proclaiming ‘IF YOU HATE SOCIALISM GET OFF MY PUBLIC ROAD.'” (12/02/25)
“Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth seems to be a war criminal. Without a war. An interesting achievement. In 1967, novelist Gwyn Griffin published a World War II novel, ‘An Operational Necessity,’ that 58 years later is again pertinent. According to the laws of war, survivors of a sunk ship cannot be attacked. But a German submarine captain, after sinking a French ship, orders the machine-gunning of the ship’s crew, lest their survival endanger his men by revealing where his boat is operating. In the book’s dramatic climax, a postwar tribunal examines the German commander’s moral calculus. No operational necessity justified Hegseth’s de facto order to kill two survivors clinging to the wreckage of one of the supposed drug boats obliterated by U.S. forces near Venezuela. … The killing of the survivors by this moral slum of an administration should nauseate Americans. A nation incapable of shame is dangerous, not least to itself.” (12/02/25)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger
“Last month, the United States Conference of Bishops issued a remarkable ‘Special Message’ condemning the grave mistreatment of immigrants at the hands of the U.S. government. According to the conference’s Office of Public Affairs, ‘It marked the first time in twelve years the USCCB invoked this particularly urgent way of speaking as a body of bishops.’ To their everlasting credit, the bishops made it clear that there is no way to reconcile what the U.S. government is doing to immigrants with God’s laws. … But the bishops and the mainstream-press commentators are wrong. There is no ‘comprehensive immigration reform’ that can ever make America’s immigration-control system work in a gentile, kind, benevolent, and Christian-like manner. The mistreatment and abuse of immigrants that the Catholic bishops condemn is an inherent part of the immigration-control system that exists to ‘secure the border.’ They are inseparable.” (12/02/25)
“Ten years ago, Pakistani-born terrorist Tashfeen Malik and her U.S.-born husband Syed Farook murdered 14 people in an Islamist terrorist attack in San Bernardino, California. It was the deadliest foreign-born terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11 and inspired then-candidate Donald J. Trump to call for ‘a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.’ We figured it out a long time ago: Very little was going on. Donald Trump won the 2016 election with a victory almost unimaginable without the threat of terrorism that he and his supporters inflated at every opportunity. But terrorism was a small threat then and is even smaller today.” (12/02/25)
“Too many Americans who say they believe in free speech mean only their speech. Adopting progressive dogma, the Biden administration claimed that free speech had limits, and broadly suppressed dissenting views. On his first day in office, President Trump issued an executive order to restore traditional (and constitutionally mandated) protections, but his administration’s adherence to that order has been situational.” (12/02/25)
“Polls show that the age group of Americans most worried about ‘affordability’ are the 20- and 30-somethings. That’s young millennials and Gen Z. Why are they so financially stressed out? One reason things seem so unaffordable to young people is that too many aren’t working hard — they are hardly working. The latest Labor Department data indicate that fewer and fewer males between the ages of 16 and 24 are in the labor force. It used to be that more than 70% had a job; now, less than 60% do. Labor force participation for men, even into their 30s, is at or near an all-time low. Men without jobs are a prescription for social chaos. I would argue this is the MOST important age for a man to be hard at work, honing his job skills and on the way to a career that makes him a suitable marriage partner.” (12/02/25)
“The pandemic saw a new breed of people who had become experts overnight but knew very little about the issues. They constantly appeared on TV with sinister messages about the need for lockdowns and many other interventions …. State epidemiologist Anders Tegnell stood his ground and advised that Sweden should not change its policy, which was to keep the society open and not mandate face masks, which were rarely seen in Sweden. Sweden was a lone star in the darkness. I think it was the only country that didn’t panic and did the right things, and it had the lowest excess mortality in the whole Western world during the pandemic (excess mortality is the increase in all-cause mortality during the pandemic compared with prepandemic levels).” (12/02/25)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Michael S Milano
“Each day we are reminded of this legal imposition by the familiar phrase stamped on every US dollar bill: ‘This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private.’ Innocuous on the surface, but these words conceal a profound immorality that strikes at the heart of voluntary exchange. If a man of sound mind agrees to settle a contract in X, then he should be obligated to pay X. Forcing him to accept anything other than X as payment is an egregious violation of contractual and property rights.” (12/02/25)
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Peter Fenwick
“Two generations before Charlie Kirk there was Leonard Read. He too travelled the country debating with students and telling them how to build a good society. The essence of Read’s philosophy comprises individual liberty, the free market, private property, and government limited to securing these rights equally for all. Everyone is free to do as they please provided they do not infringe on the equal right and opportunity of everyone else to do so too. Everyone can pursue their ambitions; associate with whomever they please; worship God in their own way; choose their own job or profession; run a business; and keep their honestly acquired property and savings or dispose of it as they wish. The society prospers because it uses the creative talents and resources of all its citizens, not just an elite few.” (12/02/25)
