Source: Independent Institute
by Christopher J Calton
“It is that time of year when the United States counts its homeless population. Every January, local governments conduct a point-in-time (PIT) count, which provides a snapshot of the homeless population on a given day. Since 2007, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has published this data to track changes in the homelessness population at the national level. The PIT count is useful. Because data is collected annually using a standard method, we can compare the effects of competing policies across time and place. Critics often complain that the PIT fails to capture everybody who briefly experiences homelessness throughout the year, but this does not undermine the data’s analytical value as long as the counts take place under uniform conditions. For the most part, this is the case.” (01/30/26)
“Whether Don Lemon broke federal law in his role in an attack on a Minnesota church will be up to a jury, but we can already say he deserves the max for his crime against journalism. At issue, both in the criminal case and the one in the court of journalistic ethics: Was the former CNN anchor present at the disruption of the church service in St. Paul to document the event or was he participating in it? It was quite clearly the latter. In the moments prior to the harebrained ‘protest’ in the house of worship that left children in tears, Lemon can be seen outside, on video he took himself, telling his viewers the ‘operation is a secret,’ adding, ‘I can’t tell you what’s going to happen, but you’re going to watch it live.'” [editor’s note: Is a journalist embedded with a military unit betraying his profession if he doesn’t broadcast classified attack plans in advance? – TLK} (01/31/25)
“Donald Trump has often threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act as a tool for using the military against his domestic opponents. Many observers believe this became more likely after the Supreme Court ruled against his efforts to federalize state National Guard units and use them for domestic law enforcement under a different statute. The conventional wisdom on the Insurrection Act is that the president is entitled to broad judicial deference if he invokes it. In an important new article, Prof. Josh Braver (University of Wisconsin) argues that the conventional wisdom is wrong.” (01/30/26)
“A foundational element of our legal system is that our courts recognize, as Chief Justice John Marshall wrote in Marbury v. Madison, that ‘where there is a legal right, there is also a legal remedy … whenever that right is invaded.’ This legal principle was supposed to ensure, among other things, that individuals could fight back, receive compensation, and discourage government abuses whenever a government agent or agency had violated their rights. As profound as Marshall’s words sound on paper, today they ring hollow for victims of constitutional abuses and other wrongdoing by employees of the federal government.” (01/30/26)
“As the Supreme Court prepares a landmark ruling about the scope of presidential power, the current president is acting more unleashed than any predecessor. He is demonstrating that a president not self-restrained by his or her constitutional conscience is almost unrestrainable. The court case concerns whether presidents have the power to remove, for any reason, all principal officers of executive agencies exercising significant executive power. The ruling will emphatically bolster or substantially quarantine the ‘unitary executive theory.'” (01/30/26)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Patrick Frise
“The scale of fraud uncovered in recent years has exposed how government transfer programs function, even as meaningful public or legislative reckoning remains largely absent. What began as a series of pandemic-related scandals has revealed something broader and more troubling: large-scale fraud is not an anomaly within the modern welfare state. The federal government, taxpayers, lose between $233 billion and $521 billion annually to fraud, based on data from 2018 to 2022. It is a predictable outcome of systems that distribute vast sums of money without market discipline, rely on third-party payment structures, and diffuse responsibility across layers of bureaucracy.” (01/30/26)
“If people individually own themselves and have a right to be free of aggressive force, then they have a right to change their location in ways consistent with other people’s rights. Whether you call this moving around relocating, emigrating, or immigrating, doesn’t much matter. The default position is that each individual may rightfully move to somewhere else permanently or temporarily. Inside the United States, nobody questions this. People freely move from state to state, etc., sometimes temporarily, sometimes permanently. They need no one’s permission. Why should things be different when we talk about countries rather than smaller jurisdictions and when the individuals who do the moving are not recognized as citizens of the destination country?” (01/30/26)
“A few weeks ago, Germany, France, the Netherlands, and a host of other European nations sent troops to Greenland to protect the Danish territory against … the United States. Even a year ago, as Donald Trump took office for the second time, it would have been hard to imagine such a turn of events. But the realization that an old political order is breaking apart, and that we are unlikely to return to the relative calm of the postwar years anytime soon, has slowly been dawning on political leaders desperate to keep living in the past. That practically forces the question of whether Europe should break up with the United States. But natural though it may be to ask that question at this moment, it betrays naivety about the sorry state of the continent — and risks pushing it in the wrong direction.” (01/30/26)
“‘How’s the Democratic Party’s ground game in Pennsylvania?’ I asked a friend several weeks before the 2024 presidential election. He replied optimistically that there were far more door knockers this year than in 2022. It turned out these door knockers were just urging a vote for the Democrats without putting forth a compelling agenda attached to candidate commitments on issues that mean something to people where they live, work, and raise their families. There was no Democratic Party ‘Compact for the American People’. Then-President Joe Biden visited Pennsylvania, which went Republican, many times, with his most memorable message being that he grew up in Scranton. Once again, the vacuous, feeble Democratic Party is relying on the Republicans and the cruel, lawless dictator Donald Trump to beat themselves to gain control of the Senate and the House.” (01/31/25)
