“My town, located just outside of Chicago, has been crawling with ICE agents or soldiers (the terms deserve to be used interchangeably) for weeks now. Recently, two moms, in the cold with their whistles, helped guard a crew working on a roof that was damaged by hail in a recent storm. The ICE agents/soldiers, dressed in full military kit, carrying semi-automatic weapons, and wearing ski masks to hide their identity, are patrolling in unmarked trucks — I think we all know how to spot them at this point. These people remind me of the soldiers I patrolled with in Afghanistan, only the average ICE agent has less training than the average soldier. It seems like every neighborhood in the U.S. is now subject to an armed and potentially violent confrontation with federal troops. The U.S. occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan has come full circle.” (11/14/25)
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Sascha Hannig
“Communist candidate Jeanette Jara is currently leading in all polls for Chile’s upcoming Presidential election. Scheduled for November 16, 2025, Jara, former labor minister and candidate for President Gabriel Boric’s coalition, looks likely to win, having secured about 30% of the national vote. … Even so, far from turning red, Chile appears more likely to swing right. Three conservative contenders are each vying for dominance, and one of them will almost certainly capture the presidency in a runoff and secure the remaining 60% of national support …. In a vacuum of leadership and alternatives, Jara seems to have been the unifying compromise. In other words, she is the left’s survival candidate.” (11/14/25)
“With annual deficits approaching $2 trillion even with the economy humming, and with defense spending down to around 3 percent of GDP (above 13 percent during the Korean War; above 9 percent during peak Vietnam), what can cause sustained economic growth of at least 5 percent to cope with the debt’s growth? Artificial intelligence? A risky reliance. Revenue from the president’s perhaps unconstitutional tariffs? A net drag on the economy. A nation that used to borrow for emergencies now is mired in a perpetual emergency because it is borrowing — $2.6 trillion annually projected by 2034 — to fund current consumption of government goods and services.” (11/14/25)
“The media wants America to panic over another government shutdown, as if life stops when Washington is not spending money. But let us be clear from the start: the shutdown is not the crisis; Congress is the crisis. The true emergency facing this nation is not a temporary pause in government operations; it is a federal government that refuses to stop mortgaging the future of our children and grandchildren. America now owes more than $ 37 trillion, and Congress is adding roughly $ 25 billion to the debt every single day. We now pay over 1 trillion dollars a year in interest alone, more than our entire national defense budget. That is not normal. That is not sustainable. That is national betrayal. This financial disaster was not built by one political party alone.” (11/15/25)
“[E]very once in a while, someone builds a theoretical model of a violation of the law of demand. Sometimes, they even include an investigation of one such good that seems to break the law of demand. But, upon further investigation, such examples break down, and the law of demand holds true. Strong evidence is needed for strong claims. I think of this exam question whenever I read some economic commentator claiming that international trade has weakened America. Such an outcome would be unprecedented. Millennia of experience and evidence suggest trade strengthens nations and that turning away from it weakens them.” (11/14/25)
“In the ancien régime, people were famously divided into three classes: those who fight, those who pray, and those who work. That world was dissolved in a bubbling brew of revolution and Enlightenment ideals, which may be for the best, because I can’t say that serfdom particularly appeals to me. But sometimes it’s helpful to look back and consider which aspects of older societies are worth recovering. … Today, our elites work while the middle class fights. This subversion of the old system reflects both military and economic changes, along with a broader shift that prioritizes cognitive excellence over most others. Privileged young men today are likelier to find themselves leading a seminar or strategy session than a platoon. What do we lose, though, when we stop asking our most privileged classes to cultivate courage?” (11/14/25)
Source: Cato Institute
by Ryan Bourne & Nathan Miller
“During the 2010s, there was a raft of … shall we say, speculative research on the ills wrought by high levels of economic inequality. Concern about income disparities was the defining zeitgeist. Former President Barack Obama described inequality as the ‘defining challenge of our time’ and Pope Francis tweeted that ‘inequality is the root of social evil.’ Wide outcomes between rich and poor were not just deemed consequences of unjust economic trends, which is why Nobel Laureate Angus Deaton said we might worry about inequality. No, a raft of books and papers argued that income inequality itself could be a cause of other downstream social or economic ills.” (11/14/25)
“Israel’s allies worldwide are desperately scrambling to help Tel Aviv reestablish a convincing narrative, not only concerning the Gaza genocide, but the entire legacy of Israeli colonialism in Palestine and the Middle East. The perfect little story, built on myths and outright fabrications (that of a small nation fighting for survival amid ‘hordes of Arabs and Muslims’) is rapidly collapsing. It was a lie from the start, but the Gaza genocide has made it utterly indefensible. The harrowing details of the Israeli genocide in Gaza were more than enough for people globally to fundamentally question the Zionist narrative, particularly the racist Western trope of ‘the ‘villa in the Jungle’ used by Israel to describe its existence among the colonized population.” (11/15/25)
“We are at that strange stage in the adoption curve of a revolutionary technology at which two seemingly contradictory things are true at the same time: It has become clear that artificial intelligence will transform the world. And the technology’s immediate impact is still sufficiently small that it just about remains possible to pretend that this won’t be the case. Nowhere is that more clear than on college campuses. The vast majority of assignments that were traditionally used to assess—and, more importantly, challenge — students can now easily be outsourced to ChatGPT. … For the most part, professors have responded to this problem by ignoring it.” (11/14/25)
“Self-love, that is, concern with one’s interests, is part of our humanity. No conflict exists between making the most of the one life one lives and goodwill toward others. We are engaged in a common challenge — living — and empathy naturally flows from that fact. It is a pernicious doctrine, indeed, that holds otherwise. Clearly, a merchant or manufacturer prospers by attending to his customers’ preferences. Real liberals have always emphasized the fundamental harmony of interests in the market.” (11/14/25)
