“With all of President Donald Trump’s wars – Iran, Yemen, Ukraine, Nigeria, Somalia, Venezuela, and cartels – it’s easy to lose track of what is happening on the Korean Peninsula. However, since Trump returned to the White House, a series of developments on the Korean Peninsula have increased the risk that a relatively minor border incident could escalate into a much larger conflict. The first, and potentially most important, was a policy shift by Pyongyang that began before Trump returned to the White House. North Korea abandoned its longstanding goal of reunification with South Korea, moving toward treating the Military Demarcation Line (MDL) as an international border.” (11/02/26)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by George Ford Smith
“The future’s inherent uncertainty is an absolute we face every moment of our lives, but how people deal with it varies as widely as the weather. No one can guarantee tomorrow but we all have to decide what to do today. It is from this condition that entrepreneurship arises.” (11/02/26)
Source: Common Dreams
by Chris Melody Fields Figueredo
“Heading into Tuesday’s midterm elections, the ballot measure landscape reveals a struggle over whether government will respond to people’s needs—and whether communities will retain the power to act through direct democracy when it does not. Economic anxiety, contested rights, and efforts to restrict direct democracy are converging around questions that reach beyond any individual proposal: Who benefits from policy change? Whose priorities will guide government? And what happens when elected officials advance an agenda their constituents reject? Recent elections suggest that voters are responding to more than a disconnect between their priorities and those of elected officials: they reveal a willingness to take power into their own hands when government fails to deliver.” (11/02/26)
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Jonathan Small
“Voter concerns about affordability have been a major theme in political races, and understandably so. However, what is often unsaid is that many government policies are to blame for continued high prices. A panel of experts recently made that painfully clear to Oklahoma state lawmakers.” (11/02/26)
Source: The American Conservative
by Peter Van Buren
“People have become hysterical, and this hysteria clouds their judgment even as it fills their wallets. Politics today can sound like a thriller novel in which institutions collapse spectacularly on page one to set the story in motion. Every headline not supporting your own beliefs becomes evidence ‘democracy is dying.’ It is a helluva lead-in to the midterms. So are they right? Is it 1930s Germany out there? No.” (11/02/26)
“Solid red South Carolina hasn’t elected a Democratic senator this century. But in the race between Republican. Darline Graham and her Democratic challenger, it’s now a draw. The New York Times called the race a toss-up on Wednesday, with Graham, the sister of the late Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, and Democrat Annie Andrews both receiving 48% in their latest poll. Fox News made the same call on Thursday. Democratic Senate candidates in the state don’t tie Republicans. But against the backdrop of Donald Trump’s war and escalating energy and food prices, all bets appear to be off.” (11/02/26)
“In June 2022, the price of gasoline topped $5 a gallon and stayed around $4 a gallon through October, on the eve of the midterms. It is currently about $4.30. The inflation rate in 2022 hit a 40-year high of 9.1 percent, and would average 5.1 percent over Joe Biden’s four-year tenure. The 2026 inflation rate is estimated to be about 3.5 percent and, over the first two years of the second Trump administration, will likely average around 3 percent. GDP for the third quarter of 2026 is higher than it was in the same quarter of 2022. The poverty rate is now lower and the annual family income higher than in November 2022. Yet we are told that gas prices and inflation are at record levels and will doom the Republicans, even though similar economic data did not harm Democrats all that much in the 2022 midterms.” (11/02/26)
“While a unified Democratic government has tended to see the fastest growth in government spending since World War II, government grows faster overall under Republican presidents than Democratic ones. And the only real decreases in the size of government spending happened during those six years where there were Democratic presidents and Republican majorities in Congress, first with the post-war build-down under Harry Truman (1947-48), and next after modest cut-backs from the bloated spending of the financial and COVID crises under Barack Obama (2009-10) and Donald Trump (2020), respectively.” (11/02/26)
