“As a recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal reports, high-tax states continue to bleed residents and income. Between 2022 and 2023, California lost a net $11.9 billion in adjusted gross income (AGI), New York $9.9 billion, and Illinois $6 billion. Higher earners with income over $200,000 drove much of this exodus. In Massachusetts, they accounted for 70% of outflows, doubling the 2019 share. Meanwhile, no-income-tax states saw the largest gains. Florida added $20.6 billion in AGI, Texas $5.5 billion, and Tennessee $2.8 billion. Even non-income tax states with more frigid climes saw significant inflows, including Wyoming and South Dakota. In short, states without income taxes dominated the top destinations for both people and wealth. Missouri, with its current 4.7% top individual income tax rate, sits in the middle of the pack.” (05/11/26)
Source: Property and Environment Research
by Dylan Soares
“Restoring flows to California’s rivers is a worthy goal. But in a water-scarce state, lasting conservation requires incentive-driven, voluntary efforts, not litigation that upends centuries of water law. It involves careful balancing among fish, wetlands, farms, cities, and using tools that bring people together to solve hard water conflicts. That principle is at the center of PERC’s amicus brief in Bring Back the Kern v. City of Bakersfield, now before the California Supreme Court.” (05/11/26)
Source: Aaron Ross Powell’s Blog
by Aaron Ross Powell
“To harm someone is to inflict suffering on them and to do so out of greed, hatred, or delusion — the three roots Pali Buddhism calls unwholesome. The suffering itself and the mental state and motivations of the person causing it go together in the analysis. The upshot is that, even toward enemies, it’s wrong and, well, harmful to cause harm. What we actually want is for our enemies to be less harmful, which means released from the unwholesome states that drive their harm-doing in the first place, and so less likely to inflict suffering on others, including on us.” (05/11/26)
“There are many things which are part of ‘The Price of Liberty’ that lovers of liberty must pay. It is not just our ‘lives, fortunes, and sacred honor’ that are sacrificed for freedom. One of those offerings on the altar of liberty is giving up cherished beliefs and ‘facts’ that were taught us by our parents and grandparents, or even by others whom we love and respect, or schools from kindergarten to graduate school.” (05/11/26)
“Ridglan Farms was forced to release thousands of beagles from hideous experiments because activists formed a trans-ideological coalition. AOC-style liberals would never dirty themselves in that way.” (05/11/26)
Source: The American Prospect
by Dylan Gyauch-Lewis
“With right-wing courts tearing up American democracy, the Strait of Hormuz blocked for two months and counting, and the price of oil heading toward $150 per barrel, the centrist political think tank Third Way is laser-focused on the most important political issue in the country: the leftist Twitch streamer Hasan Piker. Specifically, they are incensed that Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed has been campaigning with Piker. The attacks center on Piker’s anti-Israel positions and what Third Way characterizes as antisemitism. Third Way’s president Jonathan Cowan began the campaign with an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, and the group sent a questionnaire to El-Sayed asking for specific, enumerated instances of agreement and disagreement with Piker. One could imagine a good-faith debate about whether Piker has crossed the line on occasion. He spends hours a day streaming, and that profession tends to select for people with inflammatory positions.” (05/12/26)
Source: Independent Institute
by Phillip W Magness
“Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee’s In Covid’s Wake amply documents the consequences of pandemic-era policy and its destructive implications for public health.” (05/11/26)
Source: Chris’s Substack
by Chris Matthew Sciabarra
“[O]ne implication of [Matt] Zwolinski’s work is that there is no single, coherent libertarian project to speak of, that libertarianism is a Big Tent, which includes many, sometimes conflicting projects offering substantially different interpretations of the world and starkly different proposals on how to identify and resolve the social problems they encounter. How adjacent these proposals are to libertarianism is a key issue here because when the definition or even description of a term becomes so fluid that it encompasses virtually everything, it ultimately signifies nothing. This isn’t about asking those in libertarian and adjacent spaces to hand in their club cards. It’s a question of how ‘adjacency’ can morph into ideological complicity and outright support for the very power structures that most libertarians have sought to dismantle.” (05/11/26)
“Social Desirability Bias aside, ‘Low-skilled workers are terrible’ is absolute lunacy. Most obviously, we’d starve without low-skilled workers, because they grow almost all of our food. The vast majority of construction and infrastructure workers lack college degrees, and without them, we’d be living in tents. If we’re lucky, because tents are made by low-skilled workers, too. … if the economy had to lose either Jeff Bezos or his driver, we’d be better off with Bezos. But the economy is, fortunately, not a Trolley Problem. We almost never choose between Bezos and his driver, or between any high-skilled worker and any low-skilled worker.” (05/11/26)
