“In 2003, singer Barbra Streisand tried to remove aerial photos of her home from the internet. But her efforts to take down the images only drove more people to seek them out. Two decades later, the Streisand effect has become a kind of internet maxim: Trying to bury something often ends up amplifying it. Working with colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University and George Mason University, I wanted to explore how this phenomenon plays out – and whether it’s simply internet folk wisdom or something that can be backed up with data.” (10/08/26)
“A reviled ‘boligarch’ and his right-wing adversaries are engaged in a low-level war, but the only people who will feel the impact are the Venezuelan people.” (10/08/26)
“Billionaires haven’t done anything wrong merely by earning great wealth. Typically, they’ve done something right. They’ve been industrious and entrepreneurial and helped people improve their lives. Typically, they earn their billions; which, incidentally, they don’t stuff under a giant mattress but invest further. This doesn’t stop the [proposed California wealth] tax’s demagogic proponents, like Ro Khanna, from claiming that the interests of the ‘donor class’ are inherently opposed to those of the ‘working class.’ Khanna wants government to privilege one ‘class’ over the other. But as Dmitri Bolt points out, neither should get a government-enforced advantage.” (10/08/26)
“Benjamin Netanyahu likes to translate Israel’s grief into American. At the United Nations last month, he took the dead of October 7 and multiplied them by the ratio of America’s population to Israel’s. The 1,200 Israelis killed that day, he said, were ‘equal to 40,000 innocent Americans slaughtered in less than 24 hours. That’s 16 times 9/11.’ Per-capita comparisons are a perfectly legitimate tool. A small country feels a massacre more than a large one, and Americans should understand what October 7 meant to Israelis. But a method is only honest if you’re willing to apply it to everyone. So let’s apply Netanyahu’s method to the people his army has been killing for three years.” (10/08/26)
“You can draw a direct line from the price at the pumps to President Donald Trump, who started a wholly unnecessary war with Iran, and the congressional Republicans who have done nothing to stop it.” (10/08/26)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by William L Anderson
“As any follower of Austrian economics knows, lawmakers—in any form—are usually the enemies of free markets and the prosperity that they bring. However, there are times when legislators manage to outdo themselves and pass laws that are absolutely destructive, and the Jones Act is one of them. A number of people have explained that, with most government programs, ‘the benefits are concentrated and the costs are diffused,’ and probably no legislation better reflects that truism than the Jones Act, which benefits a small number of people but lays costs upon the vast number of Americans that must pay for this legislation.” (10/08/26)
‘Congress rejected constitutional alternatives in favor of remaking a nation. Abroad, as at home, lawmakers cannot manufacture preferred social outcomes simply by spending more money.” (10/08/26)
Source: David Friedman’s Substack
by David Friedman
“Legal rules affect behavior on many margins. They affect incentives to commit offenses, incentives to prosecute them, incentives to prevent them. For some offenses tort law may provide better incentives than criminal law on one of those margins and worse on another. If so, the question of what ought to be a tort and what ought to be a crime will be ambiguous, at least until we develop a theory good enough to predict not only the sign but also the size of such effects. In this post I will argue that, judged by the incentive for potential victims to prevent offenses, our rules are backwards. Things we treat as crimes, such as burglary, ought to be torts; things we treat as torts, such as auto accidents, ought to be crimes.” (10/08/26)
“This week, Judge Mark Cohen’s long, checkered judicial career came to an ignoble end. The Supreme Court denied his petition for certiorari to challenge the 2024 ruling by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court that he was properly suspended over a litany of partisan social media posts while a sitting judge. Cohen is a former Democratic politician who ran unsuccessfully for Congress, but served for many years in the state House until defeated in 2016. In 2018, Cohen successfully ran for the Court of Common Pleas. After receiving a ‘Not Recommended’ rating from the Philadelphia Bar Association, he barely won the seat with the second-lowest vote total among the victors. During this time on the bench, Cohen continued to maintain his political public persona with social media posts that many found injudicious and unethical. In October 2024, the Pennsylvania Court of Judicial Discipline took the rare step of ejecting him from the bench and suspending him without pay over his Facebook posts.” (10/08/26)
“Over the summer, the Supreme Court gave the Trump administration free rein to terminate Temporary Protected Status for Haitian and Syrian immigrants, along with hundreds of thousands of TPS holders from other countries, limiting the accountability any administration will have for making determinations about TPS for the foreseeable future. Last month, a young pre-med college student named Pierre Damas Bel from Springfield, Ohio was found dead, by an apparent suicide. He was suffering depression brought on by the termination of TPS and being forced to wear an Immigration and Custom Enforcement-issued ankle bracelet. What happened to Damas Bel represents the real human cost of these inhumane policies. But sadly, I don’t believe we have reached the nadir of this administration’s cruelty.” (10/08/26)
