Source: The Watch
by Radley Balko
“Garry Tan, the CEO of venture capital firm Y Combinator, accused me of unethical reporting. This is my response.” (05/15/26)
https://radleybalko.substack.com/p/truth-power-and-honest-journalism
Source: Reason
by Luke Wake
“The ruling is a victory not just for one Texas title company, but for the principle that agencies like FinCEN can only do what Congress actually authorized.” (05/15/26)
Source: EconLog
by Valentin Boboc
“Much of the panic around AI rests on pointing out absolute advantages. LLMs can write clearly and convincingly. They summarise large documents quickly. They generate passable Python scripts in seconds. In these discrete tasks, AI is a direct competitor. If a job is merely a collection of such tasks, the human worker is in trouble. The Ricardian challenge, however, is to identify where AI has a comparative advantage and whether this manifests itself at the job level. Comparative advantage is determined by opportunity costs. For humans, the binding constraint is time. For AI, the constraint is compute. These are very different constraints, and they are different enough to keep humans in the picture.” (05/15/26)
https://www.econlib.org/econlog/ai-and-comparative-advantage
Source: The American Prospect
by Robert Kuttner
“President Trump’s much-heralded trip to Beijing, the first summit in Beijing since 2017, yielded nothing of value. The only good thing about it was that Trump evidently did not give away the store on Taiwan or on exports of sensitive technology. One concrete thing that President Xi Jinping might have done didn’t happen. Xi could have agreed to put pressure on China’s ally, Iran, to split the difference with Trump and end the war. But neither the official communiqué nor White House leaks said anything about progress on Iran. The real work, if any, will continue behind the scenes. There have been leaks that China agreed to buy more U.S. oil, agricultural products, and Boeing planes, but that has not been confirmed by the Chinese side.” (05/16/26)
https://prospect.org/2026/05/15/trumps-nothingburger-banquet-beijing-iran-taiwan-xi/
Source: Antiwar.com
by Greg Pence
“The central question is no longer whether the United States can inflict damage on Iran. The real question is whether such pressure is actually capable of producing Washington’s desired political outcome.An increasing number of Western analyses now suggest the answer is no. The United States and its allies are gradually realizing that they are confronting a country capable of enduring pressure, reproducing internal control, managing crises, and exporting the costs of war beyond its borders. This reality has drawn Washington into what may be called ‘the trap of Iranian resilience’ – a situation in which continued pressure no longer changes Tehran’s behavior but instead exponentially raises the costs for America itself.” (05/15/26)
Source: Reason
by Stephanie Slade
“Listening to two prominent progressives highlight the cronyism and inefficiencies of government bureaucracy that libertarians have been shouting about for decades was equal parts refreshing and infuriating. But if you were tempted to hope those realizations would bring them around to genuinely libertarian conclusions, you would be disappointed. Ultimately, as the second half of the podcast made clear, [Ezra] Klein and his allies support streamlining government because they hope to make it easier for government to do big, ambitious things: nationwide high-speed rail, federal housing projects, Medicare for All. They are not trying to get government out of the way so people can thrive; they want government itself to thrive. That distinction is the main problem with the hypothesis that Democrats will soon be the party of free markets and limited government.” (05/14/26)
https://reason.com/2026/05/14/are-democrats-now-the-party-of-free-markets-dont-bet-on-it/
Source: Garrison Center
by Thomas L Knapp
“On May 11, a new law went into effect in Florida, ‘allowing’ businesses to round the amounts charged for cash purchases to the nearest nickel. Really? Nothing more important than this for our masters in Tallahassee to spend their time on? Don’t get me wrong. The practice in question makes sense …. But why on Earth would merchants need a law to ‘allow’ this? … Even when framed as ‘voluntary’ — as this one is — unnecessary laws ‘allowing’ behaviors already unquestionably ‘allowed’ (by common sense and conventional morality) tend to nudge the public toward an ‘everything not required is forbidden’ mindset in which we instinctively seek permission from our rulers for every action, trivial or momentous.” (05/14/26)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger
“The libertarian movement can be divided into two basic groups: libertarians who call for reforming welfare-warfare state programs and libertarians who call for dismantling welfare-warfare state programs. I fall within the latter group. Why? Because I want to be free. Reform doesn’t get me freedom. At best it gets me a better serfdom. That’s nice, but it’s not want I want for the rest of my life. I want to be free, and only by dismantling infringements on freedom can I attain genuine freedom.” (05/14/26)
https://www.fff.org/2026/05/14/welfare-warfare-state-reform-is-not-freedom/
Source: Antiwar.com
by Andrew P Napolitano
“Last week, when the Pentagon resumed its attacks on small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific Ocean, the media barely noticed. The U.S. military has now destroyed 56 vessels and killed 190 persons. The killings began in September 2025 and have continued to this month. … Killing survivors is expressly prohibited by federal law as well as by the Uniform Code of Military Justice. And, of course, ordering the killing of innocents is always unlawful. So, the Pentagon made two changes. It produced more lethal strikes so as not to be burdened with the problem of survivors, and it either stopped killing survivors or stopped revealing that it killed them.” (05/14/26)
https://original.antiwar.com/andrew-p-napolitano/2026/05/13/when-killing-becomes-commonplace/
Source: EconLog
by Jon Murphy
“The United States, like most other countries, use a method of double-entry accounting to track certain aggregate statistics known as National Income Accounting. One of the statistics tracked is the balance of trade. The balance of trade reports the difference between imports and exports. … The connotations of the words ‘surplus’ and ‘deficit’ (coupled with the accounting conventions of pluses and minus) give the impression to those who do not understand the balance of trade that deficits are bad while surpluses are good. But, digging a little into the accounting shows that 1) ‘deficits’ and ‘surpluses’ are value-free and 2) referring to these as ‘trade deficits/surpluses’ is something of a misnomer.” (05/14/26)
https://www.econlib.org/econlog/the-trade-deficit-is-a-misnomer