Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Louis Rouanet
“On January 9, President Donald Trump called for a 10% cap on credit card interest rates — a drop from the 2025 average of 19.7%. This reflects growing political support within the fringes of both the Republican and Democratic Parties for such anti-market policies. In February 2025, Senators Bernie Sanders and Josh Hawley also introduced legislation mirroring Trump’s proposal. Supporters of price controls like to blame ‘greedy’ corporations. Trump told reporters that credit card companies ‘really abused the public.’ Unfortunately, his proposal treats symptoms while ignoring the disease, and that will ultimately harm the very consumers it claims to protect.” (01/25/26)
Source: The Dispatch
by Michael Reneau & Kevin Brown
“Disagreement is seldom about the presenting argument. Beneath our disputes lie animating commitments, values, and a mental map of the world. Arguments cannot be separated from belief, and belief, at its core, is a matter of faith. In recent years, stories of fractured discourse and division have dominated the headlines, but the problem of pluralism — people with different visions of the good life living among each other—has bedeviled the Western landscape for centuries.” (01/25/26)
“For decades, Washington’s economic war on Cuba has weakened a government that has arguably been our most reliable security partner in the Caribbean. Instead of increasing America’s leverage, tougher sanctions have made Cuba less stable—and the United States less secure—by destabilizing the island’s economy, accelerating unprecedented migration to the U.S. border, undermining counternarcotics efforts, hurting U.S. companies, and incentivizing closer relations with Russia and China. A truly failed Cuban state just 90 miles from our coast would probably generate even greater blowback. Current Cuba policy is rooted not in our core national interests, but in Cold War nostalgia and Florida politics.” (01/25/26)
“After a year of gutting the United States government, deploying armed jackboots to American cities, and bombing at least seven countries, the Trump administration kicked off 2026 by invading Venezuela and kidnapping its president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Flores. In the wake of that assault, President Trump doubled down on his abandonment of the isolationist positions he once supposedly held, threatening military action against Colombia, Cuba, Iran, and Mexico. He then vowed that the U.S. would come to “own” Greenland either ‘the easy way’ or ‘the hard way.’ In truth, American imperialism defines much of this country’s history, but the latest escalation comes at a time when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have also been deployed around the nation to grab immigrants off the streets and whisk them to detention centers.” (01/26/26)
“Has the past few weeks’ dispute between the United States and its (former?) European allies over Greenland now been settled by the 21 January ‘Davos deal,’ rapidly agreed after President Trump’s unhinged speech earlier that day? And does this mean that NATO is still alive, if not exactly hale and hearty? And by retreating on the threat to seize Greenland by force and forgoing additional tariffs on Europe, has Trump backed down — TACOed again, as many of Trump’s opponents are now gloating? Or is a more patient assessment in order?” (01/25/26)
“Who are you gonna believe: Kristi Noem in a bomber jacket or your own lyin’ eyes? In the wake of the second killing this month of a U.S. citizen in the streets of Minneapolis, what’s become completely clear is the extent to which statements by federal agencies are unmoored from any sort of reality as glimpsed by eyewitness cell phone footage.” (01/25/26)
“This week, Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes warned that her state’s Stand Your Ground law makes confrontations between Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and the public potentially dangerous. Mayes, a Democrat, thinks she’s scoring points against the self-defense law while raising a caution to ICE agents, but she’s really underlining a feature of America’s political culture. It’s not Stand Your Ground that puts masked government agents in peril, but this country’s noble history of resistance to overbearing government and the Second Amendment in which that tradition is embodied. … Mayes told 12 News’s Brahm Resnik ‘… we have a Stand Your Ground law that says if you reasonably believe that your life in in danger, and you’re in your house, or your car, or on your property, that you can defend yourself with lethal force.'” (01/23/26)
“On February 19, 1926, Ayn Rand arrived in the United States from the Soviet Union on a six-month visa to visit her Chicago relatives. She had every intention of remaining in the US permanently. But she knew that US immigration law was highly restrictive. She told officials that she fully intended to return to Russia to marry a man to whom she was engaged. This was a lie. However, given the restrictive immigration laws of the time, Rand’s entrance into the US would have been refused had she not lied about an imminent return to her native country.” (01/23/26)
“We’ve already watched Trump knock down billions in new wealth as president, billing taxpayers for use of his own properties and tapping family and friends as proxies for everything from corporate takeovers to insider trading to cryptocurrency scams. Now he’s setting himself up as all-powerful chairman for life of an organization that will handle — and hand out contracts disposing of — untold additional billions in Gaza aid. Guess who will get those contracts? Oh, for the good old days of the Biden family’s mere ‘10% for the Big Guy.'” (01/24/26)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by John W Whitehead
“We are living through a period of open lawlessness at the highest levels of government. Executive orders are issued to sidestep Congress. Federal law enforcement is deployed as a tool of retaliation. Protest is criminalized. Surveillance expands. Due process becomes optional. Courts are packed, ignored, or bypassed. Entire communities are terrorized under the guise of ‘law and order.’ None of this is accidental. And none of it is temporary. … A president is not a monarch, a CEO, or a landlord over the republic. He is an employee — hired by ‘we the people,’ bound by a written contract called the Constitution, and subject to limits he did not write and cannot rewrite. When that employee ignores his limits, only one check remains: the people themselves.” (01/23/26)
