“I’ve been told liberty isn’t as important as making money or raising a family. If someone doesn’t understand how critical liberty is to both of these tasks, and more, they might believe this. Without liberty, you, your family, the economy, and society will suffer. If you don’t have the liberty to negotiate with a potential employer, you may not get the job you want. When government intrudes into the negotiations, you both lose. This has happened to me. I once saw a business I wanted to work for; they needed an employee, but couldn’t afford to pay the government-mandated minimum wage. I was willing to work for less, for the experience, and to show the employer how I could help him. He wouldn’t risk doing something that would have benefited us both because of government rules. We were both worse off because government was protecting us from liberty.” (07/30/25)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger
“In every society, there are off-kilter people. In a healthy, functional society those off-kilter people don’t bother anyone. Everyone can see that they are off-kilter but most everyone displays tolerance, kindness, and consideration for them. ‘There but for the grace of God go I.’ But a healthy, functional society is obviously not the type of society in which we live. We live in a society where the government tightly controls, manages, regulates, and directs people’s lives and the use of their resources. In the process of doing that, the state, decade after decade, has engaged in a continuous process of tightening its screws on the American people. It is my contention that this tightening of the screws causes something to go haywire within the off-kilter people. That’s when they go off and engage in their irrational killing sprees.” (07/30/25)
“As you may recall, Matthew Adelstein uses r-K selection theory to argue that the average bug’s life is not worth living. Quick version: Humans have a few offspring, who typically receive immense parental investment. Bugs have enormous numbers of offspring, who typically receive near-zero parental investment. Due to these radically different evolutionary strategies, the average human has a long and tolerable life, while the average bug has a brief life that swiftly ends in abject misery. It is a clever observation, and not obviously wrong. But neither is it obviously right. Yes, the vast majority of bugs quickly die terrible deaths. But weighty factors cut the other way.” (07/30/25)
“At the core of The Atlantic’s unnecessarily long profile on loud Democrat Rep. Jasmine Crockett is the argument that ‘when the Republicans go low, the Democrats should meet them there.’ As Rachel Jeantel so famously put it, ‘That’s real retarded, sir.’ The notion that Democrats have for too long shown excessive restraint or pitched themselves to voters with a naive intellectualism while being punched in the mouth by brute Republicans is a hysterical myth, one that only persists because the media that helped create it continue to perpetuate it. Going back as far as 2015, you undoubtedly heard both Democrat leaders and prominent dorks in the Washington news media call President Trump a ‘bully.'” (07/30/25)
“In my first year of grad school, one of my professors had a long list of ‘forbidden words.’ These were terms that do more to confuse than enlighten when used in economic analysis. Terms like ‘need,’ ‘afford,’ ‘exploits,’ ‘vicious circle,’ etc. Today, I’ll argue that we might wish to add the term ‘must’ to that list.” (07/30/25)
“Ozzy Osbourne, whose funeral cortège will add some color as it processes through Birmingham today, once summarized a big chunk of his life thus: ‘I behaved f—ing badly.’ No doubt: Getting arrested for public urination is one thing, and Ozzy got arrested for public urination at the Alamo, right there on the Cenotaph. There was the infamous business with orally decapitating that bat. The sex and the drugs. The various Luciferian fixations. Helping to make reality television a thing. But the self-proclaimed Prince of Darkness’s last public act was helping to raise some $190 million for three charities, including a children’s hospital and a children’s hospice headquartered in his hometown of Birmingham. After that, he promptly went to his eternal reward. I imagine that the initial conversation with St. Peter was an interesting one.” (07/30/25)
“With a new academic year due to start in the United States, states and districts are seeking to manage students’ cellphone use during the school day. Proposals range from developing usage guidelines to implementing outright bans. Amid the discussion over what adults – educators, parents, policymakers – should do, students are signaling their ability to exercise individual agency. And they want nuanced and flexible approaches to help balance use and manage screen time. In a 2025 Pew survey in the U.S., 44% of teens reported cutting back on both social media and smartphone use. In 2023, that share was 39% (social media) and 36% (smartphones). A wider survey of 20,000 children ages 12 to 15 and parents across 18 countries found 40% of students taking deliberate breaks from their screens, up 18 percentage points from 2022. (07/29/25)
“The most recent Wall Street Journal political poll shows that Democrats have swerved into a deep ditch. Only three of 10 voters have a positive opinion of the Democratic Party, and that is the lowest this number has been for Democrats since Bill Clinton’s first term in office. Republicans aren’t very popular either — but they have a big lead over the donkeys. I’m not a cheerleader for the Republicans, and it’s clear the GOP is not the solution to all our nation’s problems. Republicans have been coconspirators in the runaway spending and debt crisis in Washington. What is concerning is that the Democrats have become what might be called a donut party: They have no middle. (07/30/25)
“There has been debate among economic historians about the point at which average real wages actually began to rise in England during the 19th century (even some discussion on this blog) but there can be no doubt that the industrial revolution was the beginning of a golden age of material well-being. Why does the myth [that the industrial revolution caused a great deal of misery] persist?” (07/30/25)
