Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by George Ford Smith
“In 1901, on far-away Balangiga — a village in Eastern Samar of the Philippines — an American general gave an order that stripped away any notion of ‘civilizing’ or ‘Christianizing’ a foreign people: ‘Make it a howling wilderness.’ General Jacob H. Smith’s command — accompanied by the instruction to ‘kill everyone over ten’ — was not an aberration. It was consistent with a decision made only a few years earlier about America becoming one of the ‘great’ nations. The government would abandon its anti-imperial tradition and join the ranks of empire.” (05/04/26)
“When one provider goes offline, others should step in. Mississippi’s experience shows how certificate-of-need laws prevent that — and why reform matters for public health.” (05/04/26)
“Unlike earlier oil crises, which strengthened Western unity, the current situation is fragmenting it. It has become clear that the United States and Israel are not able to protect the Gulf from Iran’s attacks. Horizontal agreements are accordingly being negotiated everywhere one looks: Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates with Ukraine, Canada with China, and European powers with independent countries in the region. The United States faces particular challenges. Under President Donald Trump, the country has tired out its erstwhile allies, who are looking elsewhere for more reliable trade partners.” (05/04/26)
“The Nexstar-Tegna transaction is exactly the kind of pro-growth, common-sense deal Washington should applaud, not bury under a mountain of legal briefs, bureaucratic nostrums and political posturing. These two companies are major owners of local television stations. For years, America’s local broadcasters have been battered by forces far larger than any single station group: Big Tech, streaming behemoths, social-media platforms, cord-cutting, cable fragmentation and the steady siphoning of advertising dollars away from local outlets. The old world of three networks, a handful of hometown stations and a captive evening-news audience has long gone the way of the dinosaurs. Local television today is not operating in a sheltered village. It is competing in a global, fiercely competitive marketplace. That is why the Nexstar-Tegna deal matters.” (05/04/26)
“For every successful dream of a new military technology that ends up working as advertised, there are 100 nightmares into which U.S. taxpayers are forced to pour money with little to show for it. The challenge, of course, is to pluck the winners from the losers before the billions have been spent.” (05/04/26)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Angelo Monaco
“There are many negative ways to describe the United States Postal Service, but I never considered my mail-delivery person to be an instrument of government oppression. That changed when I retrieved my mail recently and discovered a summons from my home county demanding that I appear for ‘Jury Duty.’” (05/04/26)
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Deborah Palma
“In a complex economy with an advanced division of labor, individuals cannot rely solely on their own direct knowledge to decide how to allocate resources among many possible combinations. They require a common denominator that allows for the comparison of costs and benefits. This denominator is the price, which emerges from voluntary exchanges in the market. Prices are not arbitrary numbers; they are determined by exchange values arising from the competitive interaction between consumers and producers. Price reflects the relative scarcity of a good in relation to all other possible uses of the same factors of production. … Attempts to treat the economy as a system of simultaneous equations, in which equilibrium can be mathematically determined, ignore the dynamic nature of reality. The market is a continuous process of discovery, not a static state of rest.” (05/04/26)
“The verbal barbs between Japan and China have been a distraction; the real story is Japan’s deepening military integration with the Philippines. As the U.S. and its allies move to seal the Luzon Strait, Japan is shedding its pacifist skin to serve as the regional arsenal, providing the hardware and the boots on the ground necessary to turn the Front Door of the South China Sea into a strategic bottleneck. It is the tactical manifestation of a new cold war focused on maritime choke points and the kinetic kneecapping of China’s Belt and Road Initiative.” (05/04/26)
“George Wallace was sworn in as Governor of Alabama in 1963 and famously declared in his inauguration speech (written by a Ku Klux Klan leader) ‘segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.’ Two years later, Alabama state troopers violently broke up a nighttime voting rights march during which a police officer shot and killed young African American protester and Baptist deacon Jimmie Lee Jackson who was unarmed and protecting his mother. In response, civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King and John Lewis, organized a mass march from Selma to Montgomery over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in an attempt to deliver a civil rights and voting rights message to Gov. Wallace. It became known as ‘Bloody Sunday’ as state troopers gassed and beat the protestors, including fracturing Lewis’ skull and sending 57 others to the hospital.” [editor’s note: The delulu continues from these race-baiting “progressive” pundits – SAT] (05/04/26)
