“The idea that people have an unalienable right to pursue their own happiness is a very radical idea. Prior to the eighteenth century, almost no one in the world believed it. Even today, only a small sliver of humankind agrees with it. Equally radical is the idea that the only purpose of government is to protect that right. We can quibble about some of the details, but the central idea is unequivocal. If you and I both have the right to pursue our own happiness, it would be wrong for a government to impose burdens on you just to make me happier. Critics of this political philosophy invariably note that some of the authors of the Declaration of Independence owned slaves. But remember, just about everyone else in the world at the time thought that there was no such thing as an individual right.” (08/01/25)
Source: David Friedman’s Substack
by David Friedman
“I conclude that the correct way of doing economics combines a priori theory with evidence. You form plausible conjectures on the basis of theory and evidence, where part of forming them is deciding what simplifications, what unrealistic features of the model, assume away inessential complications while retaining the essential features of what you are trying to understand. You find out how good a job you have done by using the conjectures to make predictions and testing them. An added benefit of that process, as I discovered in the course of revising what became my first published journal article in economics in response to an initial rejection, is that finding real world predictions of your model may force you to think through the model itself more carefully. That is the Chicago School methodology as I understand and practice it.” (08/01/25)
“Dahud Ortiz is a post-traumatic Marine Corps veteran who traveled to Madrid to kill an attorney who’d been chatting with his wife and ended up killing an associate and two clients instead, setting fire to the office to cover his tracks. Vladimir Antonio Arevalo Chavez is a high-ranking MS-13 official who allegedly forged alliances with major Mexican drug organizations that ultimately cartelized the theretofore fragmented ‘coyote’ business of migrating to the United States, putting poor border-crossers in debt to organized crime figures. … Eric Adams allegedly took millions of dollars in direct bribes and illegal campaign contributions and is accused by a former police chief of transforming the New York Police Department into a ‘criminal enterprise’ for enriching allies and illegally arresting and launching tabloid smear campaigns against political enemies.” (08/01/25)
“The most recent estimate suggests that basic research endowments will fall by US$15 billion in 2026. In a recent Quillette essay, Lawrence Krauss writes that these cuts threaten ‘the economic health and security of the US’ and ‘the future of scientific research and innovation at the country’s universities and scientific institutions.’ … These claims are worth examining in more detail. For a start, the best available evidence does not demonstrate that federal science funding predicts economic growth. This claim has been evaluated multiple times, sometimes decades apart. In 1989, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) audited R&D investments and determined that federally financed research was having no significant effect on the economy.” (08/01/25)
“If the deal struck by Paramount and President Donald Trump sickens you, your intuitions and perhaps your principles are in good working order. Make no mistake about what’s at the root of such things: ominipotent government. You need its permission for all kinds of things — so much for individual rights. As the NPR story states, the headline termination of The Late Show (which I’ve never watched) came ‘amid a flurry of steps taken by Paramount and Skydance Media — which has been seeking to acquire the media conglomerate — to appease the Trump administration. On Thursday, federal regulators announced they had voted to approve the deal valued at $8 billion.’ … In a market economy, two companies are free to combine if that’s what their owners want.” (08/01/25)
“Australia, in keeping with its penal history, has a long record of paranoid officialdom and paternalistic wowsers. Be it perceived threats to morality, the tendency of the populace to be corrupted, and a general, gnawing fear about what knowledge might do, Australia’s governing authorities have prized censorship. This recent trend is most conspicuous in an ongoing regulatory war being waged against the Internet and the corporate citizens that inhabit it. Terrified that Australia’s tender children will suffer ruination at the hand of online platforms, the entire population of the country will be subjected to age verification checks. Preparations are already underway in the country to impose a social media ban for users under the age of 16, ostensibly to protect the mental health and wellbeing of children.” (08/01/25)
“Many of my friends and former neighbors in New York — where I lived for 27 years — are anxious about the city’s future if it elects as mayor a self-proclaimed Muslim socialist. Another great world capital already offers a glimpse of what might lie ahead: London, under its far-left mayor, Sadiq Khan. I recently returned to my native London for the first time in more than two decades. What I found wasn’t the inclusive, cosmopolitan capital I had known and loved but a city so altered in tone and appearance that I scarcely recognized it. Over the course of a fortnight in June, neighborhood after neighborhood left me feeling not just like a visitor, but like a stranger in my own birthplace.” (08/02/25)
“For a long period during the 2000s, when the Democratic Party establishment seemed largely to have lost the ability to connect to swing voters, it was more or less Comedy Central that acted as the real locus of the Democratic Party — it was very difficult to watch Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert and not end up feeling that Republicans were humorless fanatics and that the Dems, if absurd in their own way, were at least roughly on the side of sanity and good governance. But what has happened, with a change-over in the structure of informational flows over the past decade, is that Democrats have lost that advantage — and still somehow haven’t processed the change or how catastrophic it is for their party’s prospects.” (08/01/25)
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Cláudia Ascensão Nunes
“In a world where global power is measured by military strength, technological innovation, or cultural influence, it is striking that the European Union, without housing major tech giants or centers of disruptive innovation, has turned bureaucracy into a tool of global power. It shapes the behavior of global companies, including American big tech firms, which adapt their products to comply with European norms. This phenomenon is known as the ‘Brussels Effect’ and has positioned the EU as the world’s regulatory superpower, fueling growing tensions, particularly with the United States following the re-election of Donald Trump.” (08/01/25)
“In Great Britain, you can get police to show up at your door just by posting an unauthorized opinion on social media. Things are about to get worse. By talking about it online, Britons who think that the country has an immigration problem could draw the attention of a new police unit, National Internet Intelligence Investigations. Saying ‘we’ve got to protest about this’ will probably cause the sirens to go off.” (08/01/25)
