Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Diogo Costa
“Tom Stoppard died on Saturday, November 29th, at 88. Some would call him a scholar’s playwright, due to his allusions and philosophical meditations. When my friend Pedro Sette-Câmara introduced me to his work, I was pursuing graduate studies in New York. The Coast of Utopia was premiering at Lincoln Center, and I couldn’t find an affordable ticket to see it. Instead, I read his trilogy in book format. Partially because of my studies in political philosophy at the time, I started to see in his work the themes related to human freedom and human knowledge, as well as the forces that threaten them.” (12/02/25)
“Having lived through what they call a ‘meltdown,’ a massive service failure in 1999 that actually continued into the year 2000. I think they didn’t get this mess cleaned up for probably about 18 months. Our main line looked like a parking lot and the Norfolk Southern takeover of our portion of Conrail was an unmitigated disaster. This is not good for railroad workers. We worked endlessly, largely 12 hours every time we went to work. It’s a complete chaotic environment. This is not a safe environment. Workers are demoralized. It’s a state of confusion, and we are all constantly fatigued. And we’re pretty upset that we’ve seen our railroad turned upside down and largely destroyed by a corporate takeover. So I would postulate that this kind of meltdown is certainly not in our interest, and there’s very good reason to believe that a UP and NS merger would result in this.” (12/03/25)
“Perhaps the largest barrier to housing availability and affordability in places like California are permitting rules, land use restrictions, and construction codes that make it absurdly expensive, or even outright impossible, to construct new single or multi-family housing. Part of this is a conspiracy of current homeowners to protect and increase the value of their property … Another part of this is ‘everything bagel liberalism’ where every program has to achieve every Leftish goal — eg we want new housing but it has to have solar and appliances with a minimum SEER and use recycled materials and have a certain number of units set aside for protected groups and create a conservation easement on part of the land, etc …. But another barrier to housing availability and affordability that is less talked-about is the combination of rent control and tenant protections for existing housing stock.” (12/02/25)
“For all their reliance on corporate welfare, according to [Paulina] Borsook, ‘technolibertarians typically can’t be bothered to engage in conventional political maneuvers.’ The 2001 paperback edition [of Cyberselfish] envisioned such an ideology dominating the computer industry ‘long after high tech has retreated to being just one industrial sector among many.’ If the year 2025’s nationalist, protectionist industrial policy differs markedly from the road ahead suggested in Cyberselfish, perhaps it wasn’t all that perceptive about the twentieth century. Crediting heavy state funding with virtually all economic progress and social stability, and conflating the government with social cooperation, it’s hundreds of pages with all the depth of the bumper sticker proclaiming ‘IF YOU HATE SOCIALISM GET OFF MY PUBLIC ROAD.'” (12/02/25)
“Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth seems to be a war criminal. Without a war. An interesting achievement. In 1967, novelist Gwyn Griffin published a World War II novel, ‘An Operational Necessity,’ that 58 years later is again pertinent. According to the laws of war, survivors of a sunk ship cannot be attacked. But a German submarine captain, after sinking a French ship, orders the machine-gunning of the ship’s crew, lest their survival endanger his men by revealing where his boat is operating. In the book’s dramatic climax, a postwar tribunal examines the German commander’s moral calculus. No operational necessity justified Hegseth’s de facto order to kill two survivors clinging to the wreckage of one of the supposed drug boats obliterated by U.S. forces near Venezuela. … The killing of the survivors by this moral slum of an administration should nauseate Americans. A nation incapable of shame is dangerous, not least to itself.” (12/02/25)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger
“Last month, the United States Conference of Bishops issued a remarkable ‘Special Message’ condemning the grave mistreatment of immigrants at the hands of the U.S. government. According to the conference’s Office of Public Affairs, ‘It marked the first time in twelve years the USCCB invoked this particularly urgent way of speaking as a body of bishops.’ To their everlasting credit, the bishops made it clear that there is no way to reconcile what the U.S. government is doing to immigrants with God’s laws. … But the bishops and the mainstream-press commentators are wrong. There is no ‘comprehensive immigration reform’ that can ever make America’s immigration-control system work in a gentile, kind, benevolent, and Christian-like manner. The mistreatment and abuse of immigrants that the Catholic bishops condemn is an inherent part of the immigration-control system that exists to ‘secure the border.’ They are inseparable.” (12/02/25)
“Ten years ago, Pakistani-born terrorist Tashfeen Malik and her U.S.-born husband Syed Farook murdered 14 people in an Islamist terrorist attack in San Bernardino, California. It was the deadliest foreign-born terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11 and inspired then-candidate Donald J. Trump to call for ‘a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.’ We figured it out a long time ago: Very little was going on. Donald Trump won the 2016 election with a victory almost unimaginable without the threat of terrorism that he and his supporters inflated at every opportunity. But terrorism was a small threat then and is even smaller today.” (12/02/25)
“Too many Americans who say they believe in free speech mean only their speech. Adopting progressive dogma, the Biden administration claimed that free speech had limits, and broadly suppressed dissenting views. On his first day in office, President Trump issued an executive order to restore traditional (and constitutionally mandated) protections, but his administration’s adherence to that order has been situational.” (12/02/25)
“Polls show that the age group of Americans most worried about ‘affordability’ are the 20- and 30-somethings. That’s young millennials and Gen Z. Why are they so financially stressed out? One reason things seem so unaffordable to young people is that too many aren’t working hard — they are hardly working. The latest Labor Department data indicate that fewer and fewer males between the ages of 16 and 24 are in the labor force. It used to be that more than 70% had a job; now, less than 60% do. Labor force participation for men, even into their 30s, is at or near an all-time low. Men without jobs are a prescription for social chaos. I would argue this is the MOST important age for a man to be hard at work, honing his job skills and on the way to a career that makes him a suitable marriage partner.” (12/02/25)
“The pandemic saw a new breed of people who had become experts overnight but knew very little about the issues. They constantly appeared on TV with sinister messages about the need for lockdowns and many other interventions …. State epidemiologist Anders Tegnell stood his ground and advised that Sweden should not change its policy, which was to keep the society open and not mandate face masks, which were rarely seen in Sweden. Sweden was a lone star in the darkness. I think it was the only country that didn’t panic and did the right things, and it had the lowest excess mortality in the whole Western world during the pandemic (excess mortality is the increase in all-cause mortality during the pandemic compared with prepandemic levels).” (12/02/25)
