Source: Antiwar.com
by Ted Galen Carpenter
“Donald Trump has quit numerous international organizations. Many of his choices are good and long overdue. A few others, though, present real dangers to peace.” (01/21/26)
Source: Popular Information
by Judd Legum, Rebeccas Crosby, & Noel Sims
“In 2025, 32 people died in the custody of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). That figure was the largest in more than two decades and tied for the highest number of deaths among ICE’s detainee population ever. 2026 is only three weeks old, and it’s already shaping up to be much worse. In just 21 days, at least six people have died in ICE custody.” (01/21/26)
Source: Isonomia Quarterly
by Peter Boettke
“F. A. Hayek is perhaps best known as the author of The Road to Serfdom (1944), a prophetic work issuing a warning about the totalitarian tendencies of socialist economic planning. Socialism, Hayek argued, was both incompatible with liberal democracy and material progress and well-being. A critical step in his argument was that socialism could not replace the market economy not only in its efficient use of resources, but in stimulating creative innovation and technological change that enhanced the human condition. To economists, however, Hayek is most appreciated for his article further explaining the argument in the critical step published a year later – ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society.'” (01/21/26)
Source: The Dispatch
by Jonah Goldberg
“Imagine you inherit a thriving department store chain. Rather than listen to experts on consumer trends, supply-chain logistics, human resources, etc., you instead opt to go with your gut. Rather than follow market research or anything like that, you prefer to just hire your friends and do business with vendors who flatter you or sell stuff you think is cool. Under such a ‘system’ you might make some good business decisions, but odds are very strong that you’ll more often make bad ones. The rep from the Pet Rock supplier who gives you a ‘World’s Greatest Businessman’ award gets his products in the store window. I chose a department store for this analogy because that’s precisely how President Donald Trump thinks about international trade, and the American economy in general.” (01/21/26)
Source: Electronic Frontier Foundation
by Katherine Trendacosta
“At its core, copyright is a monopoly right on creative output and expression. It’s intended to allow people who make things to make a living through those things, to incentivize creativity. To square the circle that is ‘exclusive control over expression’ and ‘free speech,’ we have fair use. However, we aren’t just seeing artists having a time-limited ability to make money off of their creations. We are also seeing large corporations turn into megacorporations and consolidating huge stores of copyrights under one umbrella. When the monopoly right granted by copyright is compounded by the speed and scale of media company mergers, we end up with a crisis in creativity.” (01/21/26)
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/01/copyright-should-not-enable-monopoly
Source: spiked
by Ella Whelan
“Discussions about children’s online experiences and the dangers they might face are nothing new. But in recent months, officialdom seems to have become increasingly concerned about protecting children’s ‘wellbeing,’ rather than protecting them from ‘harm.’ So instead of concerns about children seeing extreme content or writing nasty things about each other, the current focus is on the amount of time kids spend on social media. … This focus on the duration of kids’ social-media use is revealing. It shows the extent to which calls for a ban are rooted in a lack of confidence in parental authority – a lack of confidence, that is, in parents’ capacity to control their kids’ behaviour and limit the amount of time they spend on social media.” (01/21/26)
Source: The American Prospect
by David Dayen
“I get why Congress could be a good gig for a social climber or a rich dude looking for flattery and prestige and stock tips. As an entity for managing the country and meeting its challenges, today’s Congress is rather inert, especially when the biggest challenges come from within. Since the beginning of Trump’s term one year ago, I have been studying the tools available to Congress to assert itself as the primary institution of American government, expressed in Article I of the Constitution. Sadly, most of those tools have not found their way out of committee. Democrats shut down the government last October, for instance, but did not demand that they would only agree to pass appropriations if they were guaranteed to be spent.” (01/21/25)
https://prospect.org/2026/01/21/so-cute-how-you-write-laws-congress-appropriations-ice/
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Wendy McElroy
“C. Hartley Grattan (1902–1980) was a journalist, author, and polymath who many view as the foremost American scholar on Australia and the Pacific Southwest. To libertarians, however, Grattan should be important as a revisionist historian who was respected by decades of antiwar activists from H.L. Mencken to Murray N. Rothbard. Although Grattan is still occasionally discussed by anti-interventionists, such as the historian Justus D. Doenecke, Grattan has become largely a footnote. Indeed, I learned of him through three intriguing footnotes in Rothbard’s book The Betrayal of the American Right.” (01/21/26)
https://www.fff.org/explore-freedom/article/reviving-a-revisionist-clinton-hartley-grattan-part-1/
Source: Reason
by Jacob Sullum
“The antiquated statute arguably allows the president to deploy the military in response to nearly any form of domestic disorder.” (01/21/26)
Source: The Daily Economy
by Antón Chamberlin
“Many debates on economic topics hinge on a set of familiar words: production, prices, costs, value. These terms appear constantly in political speeches, news articles, and policy discussions. Yet they are rarely used with much precision (at least where academic economists are concerned). As a result, people often talk past one another while believing they are in agreement — or disagreement — about the same thing. Confusing colloquial meanings with technical definitions can lead to deeply flawed conclusions about how markets work and what governments can realistically accomplish.” (01/21/26)
https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/when-production-isnt-production-and-prices-arent-prices/