“Anthropic signed a contract with the Pentagon last summer. It originally said the Pentagon had to follow Anthropic’s Usage Policy like everyone else. In January, the Pentagon attempted to renegotiate, asking to ditch the Usage Policy and instead have Anthropic’s AIs available for ‘all lawful purposes.’ Anthropic demurred, asking for a guarantee that their AIs would not be used for mass surveillance of American citizens or no-human-in-the-loop killbots. The Pentagon refused the guarantees, demanding that Anthropic accept the renegotiation unconditionally and threatening ‘consequences’ if they refused. … The idea of declaring a US company to be a foreign adversary, potentially destroying it, just because it’s not allowing the Pentagon to unilaterally renegotiate its contract is not normal practice. It’s insane Third World bullshit that nobody would have considered within the Overton Window a week ago.” (02/25/26)
“There are three things to remember if the U.S. goes to war with Iran: It was never about nuclear weapons, it was never about helping the Iranian people, and Iran was genuinely negotiating a diplomatic solution.” (02/26/26)
“During President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address on Tuesday, he claimed to be working to improve affordability for U.S. families. But Trump didn’t talk about the root cause of these affordability problems: the long-running rise in inequality. And he didn’t call for the single most-effective way to reverse this inequality: raising taxes significantly on the ultra-rich families and corporations. In a new Economic Policy Institute report, I highlight how we got here and offer meaningful solutions to tackle growing inequality through wealth taxation. The link between inequality and affordability is clear: Affordability improves when incomes (mostly wages and public benefits for typical families) grow faster than prices. Rising inequality means that the economy’s average growth rate is buoyed by stratospheric growth at the top and hence no longer maps onto what is available to typical families to help them afford a secure and decent life.” (02/25/26)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Ryan McMaken
“Toward the end of my recent lecture at the Oklahoma City Mises Circle, I mentioned that one peculiar aspect of small businesses, as a group, is that they are very bad at lobbying the government for special favors. We can contrast this, for example, with the financial sector and commercial airlines, or with large manufacturers in areas like steel, aerospace, and automobiles. All of these industries have received major bailouts or subsidies in recent decades, or have been direct recipients of government spending and protectionist policy.” (02/25/26)
“Free immigration would appear to be in a different category from other policy decisions, in that its consequences permanently and radically alter the very composition of the democratic political body that makes those decisions. In fact, the liberal order, where and to the degree that it exists, is the product of a highly complex cultural development. One wonders, for instance, what would become of the liberal society of Switzerland under a regime of ‘open borders.’ Mises’s embrace of the economic benefits offered by free migration … is offset according to Raico by the political threat that migrants supposedly pose due to the illiberal cultures of their countries of origin. … Mises makes a crucially important point that Raico failed to acknowledge, namely that immigrants are not mindless puppets of the culture of their country of origin.” (02/25/26)
“Plenty of reputable people have asked the question of what the effective tariff rate is, who actually pays the tariffs, and how many jobs will be created or lost. This is important to the work of gathering (further) evidence of the destructive effects of tariffs. But the decades of empirical, historical, and theoretical work on this front fail to capture the real cost of tariffs. It won’t show up in any BLS report, BEA release, or any other economic report one can imagine. The real cost is the destruction of trust on the world stage.” (02/25/26)
“It feels like the world, and America specifically, is becoming an authoritarian dystopia. More rules, harsher punishment, more surveillance; all leading to less liberty. What disturbs me the most is how many people seem to think this is fine. Or actively demand it because they fear or hate other people or what other people might do. Government is always willing to violate your rights and will oblige when asked to do so. Too many people will trade liberty for a false promise of safety — a hope for something government power can never provide. As long as they believe ‘other people’ are getting it worse than they are, they’re fine with the police state being built around them. They seem genuinely shocked when it is inevitably used against them and their rights.” (02/25/26)
“The old Soviet Union strictly controlled photocopiers, because they empowered individuals to share ideas that challenged state control. The restrictions ultimately broke down under the weight of mass defiance as people took advantage of every opportunity to distribute that which was forbidden by the government. Now, politicians in several states are channeling totalitarian policies of the past, this time with their eyes on 3D printers that can manufacture gun parts. Their intrusive rules are likely to suffer the same humiliating fate.” (02/25/26)
“he Venezuelan dictatorship’s release of some political prisoners and its passage of what it calls a general amnesty law no doubt represent moves in the right direction. But the amnesty is only partial, leaving in place the Chavistas’ entire apparatus of repression and showing, contrary to President Trump’s claims, that the regime remains very much in control of the country.” (02/25/26)
