“At least President Trump didn’t ‘kill all the lawyers’ first, literally following Shakespeare’s words in ‘Henry VI, Part 2’ on evading the rule of law. Instead, just a month into his second term in February, he and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth simply fired the top lawyers at the Army, Navy and Air Force, known as judge advocates general, or JAGs. ‘It’s what you do when you’re planning to break the law: You get rid of any lawyers who might try to slow you down,’ Georgetown Law professor Rosa Brooks said at the time, according to the New York Times. She wasn’t alone in her fear, or her prescience.” (12/04/25)
“Between the War on Drugs and the War on Terror, the US government has a long history of waging bloody and unsuccessful wars against broad concepts that can not be meaningfully defeated. What makes the government’s latest ‘armed conflict’ unique is not just its combination of these two failures, but also that its target (‘narco-terrorism’) is largely a myth. Under the title “Operation Southern Spear,” the Trump administration has launched a campaign intended to target the drug cartels that it designated as terrorist organizations earlier this year. So far, this has involved at least 21 airstrikes, killing upwards of 83 people on small boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific; a military buildup involving 15,000 troops; and covert operations by the CIA in Venezuela. Though President Donald Trump lacks the legal authority for these activities, the Senate’s latest attempt to restrain military action failed in a narrow vote of 49-51.” (12/04/25)
“Modular housing is gaining prominence as a proposed way to increase the housing supply. This is an approach where the majority of home building is done off-site. Factories will construct entire rooms of a house, including all the wiring and plumbing connections built in. At the final construction site, the actual building process consists of the final step of connecting the rooms, plumbing, and so forth, to complete the build. Building in this way is faster and less expensive than traditional home building. … People might think that these companies increase the housing supply by, well, building more housing. But building more housing isn’t an increase in supply, it’s an increase in quantity supplied. An increase in supply means an increase in the capacity to produce something.” (12/04/25)
“As part of his promise to restore American manufacturing and the fortunes of the working class, President Donald Trump pledged to expand trade apprenticeships. In an April executive order, Trump directed the Department of Labor to deliver within 120 days a plan ‘to reach and surpass 1 million new active apprentices.’ That deadline has passed, with no evidence of progress or even a plan to reach the one-million apprenticeship milestone. Instead, drastic layoffs, funding cuts, and a purge of ‘DEI’-related initiatives have sabotaged the emerging apprenticeship movement. Growth in apprenticeships is at its slowest in years, far more sluggish than during Joe Biden’s administration or even the president’s first term.” (12/04/25)
“Mother Shipton predicted the dissolution of the Catholic Church under Henry VIII. She predicted the fall of Cardinal Wolsey, and the ascent of Queen Elizabeth. She forecast television and radio, ships made of iron, and arguably the California gold rush. But probably her most notorious prediction was that ‘The world to an end shall come, In eighteen hundred and eighty one.’ She was clearly off a bit on that one. Given the self-evident inaccuracy of forecasts of the end of days, their popularity does seem somewhat bewildering. … For as long as we’ve been working in the capital markets, there have also been sceptics warning of the demise of the biggest bond and credit bubble in history. Like the boy who cried wolf, they have all been discounted, and (rightly) ignored. This time, however, they could finally be justified.” (12/04/25)
“‘Member DOGE? ‘Member the excitement that the year started out with? There was Elon with a buzzsaw. There was a righteous effort to shed $1 trillion—or maybe it was $2 trillion?—from the federal budget. If that strikes only a distant chord, maybe it’s because it’s been lost in all the other swirling promises with which Trump started his second term. There was going to be the annexation of Greenland …. And then the Panama Canal was going to be taken ‘back,’ as Trump vowed in his inaugural address, and then Canada was going to be the 51st state. These things do stick in one’s memory. What leaves less of an impression is the denouement—is the inglorious end of DOGE …” (12/05/25)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Gregory Bresiger
“It’s a weekend in Pittsburgh and lots of people here and elsewhere around the country are waiting for a money-losing service called government transit. The system here, the same as many others throughout the nation, has two speeds—slow and slower. People search on their cellphones for when the buses are coming. Yet the system’s updates are often misleading. Buses never seem to come in the predicted time. Sometimes a promised bus—say one supposedly coming in ten minutes or less—will disappear from your cellphone. … I am not criticizing Pittsburg’s polite bus drivers who seem to suffer under the same problems as the riders: Their interaction with the incompetence of government reminds me of other government enterprises in other cities.” (12/04/25)
“Nearly four years after Russia’s full-scale invasion, one can perhaps be forgiven for a bit of wishful thinking when another peace proposal is introduced to end the war in Ukraine. Even if ‘tough concessions’ are demanded from the Ukrainians—isn’t it worth paying a high price to end the war? Perhaps, this time, we are finally on the brink of peace? That wishful thinking quickly comes to an end once you realise that the latest Russian ‘peace proposal’ is not a peace proposal at all. It is a set of demands designed to enable a complete Russian takeover of Ukraine, which would otherwise be impossible to achieve.” (12/04/25)
“‘As U.S. debt soars and foreign central banks stockpile gold,’ asserts a new article, ‘a U.S. senator today introduced a bill to require the first comprehensive audit of America’s gold reserves in decades.’ Reading the Mises Institute piece, I got a sense of déjà vu. … A ‘Gold Reserve Transparency Act’ has been introduced four times in the House since 2011, always by Republican sponsors aligned with sound-money advocates. But it has also never passed the House, let alone advanced to the Senate or become law.” (12/04/25)
