Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Patrick Carroll
“National borders have become deeply ingrained in many parts of the modern world. While some borders do change from time to time, many others — such as the Canada/US border — have been the same for decades and have come to be taken for granted. … But with Trump’s recent moves, people are waking up to the fact that we don’t need to accept the longstanding status quo borders that we’ve inherited. If everyone is on board, we can just change the map if we feel like it. The people who drew the existing lines aren’t in charge anymore; we are, and we have every right to draw different lines if we so choose. The question then arises: What kind of political borders should we want? What’s the ideal size of a country, and, conversely, how many countries should there be?” (03/16/25)
“If you’re not familiar with The Democratic party, this is a gang of increasingly superannuated fuddy-duddies whose response to a rampaging fascist nightmare led by a couple of billionairist tyrants (I won’t go through the usual litany but my god) is to protect at all costs the norms and rules that have already been burned to the ground, while making no effort to protect the Constitution or the hundreds of millions of human beings it safeguards, promising that what they’ve done is realistic and strategic, then napping over a long weekend. Some days some of them sell us out, other days others of them sell us out. There always appear to be just enough sellout votes to make sure that out is how we get sold.” (03/16/25)
“White supremacy remains a very potent weapon for the powerful in this country and I don’t think that the far left should stand alone in confronting it. Many of my more libertarian readers tend to cringe at such notions and I can’t completely blame them. Sadly, there are a good number of self-proclaimed leftists who use combatting white supremacy as an excuse for building up the state, but this doesn’t change the fact that traditionally white supremacy has been a far more lethal excuse to do the exact same thing, and it still is. It’s not even that the powerful in this country are necessarily racist, many are but for the most part bigotry is just an easy way to manipulate poor people into forfeiting their agency to authoritarian structures in the name of combatting other poor people.” (03/16/25)
“Even as Joe Biden’s subsidies for electric-vehicle factories created new jobs for autoworkers, and even as his joining a UAW picket line when the union was striking the Big Three was the kind of pro-union commitment that no previous president had ever made, Trump delivered what seemed to many autoworkers, even UAW members, to be a firmer guarantee of their continuing ability to make a living. He pledged, repeatedly, that he’d oppose the production of electric cars — because, he said over and over again, it required fewer workers to make them than the number required to make fuel-powered vehicles. … The old order, in which men were men and cars were gas-guzzlers, would regain its rightful place in America’s socioeconomic order. But for Elon Musk.” (03/17/25)
“Why has consumer sentiment suddenly taken a dive? It’s odd because there is a paucity of evidence for a sudden shift, unless tariffs are to blame, which seems doubtful (to me). One possible theory: the public has a form of economic post-traumatic stress disorder, a clinical name for what was once called battle fatigue and shell shock. It is what happens to the human spirit in the face of something unexpected, terrible, and ultimately traumatizing. There are stages of recovery that move from denial, anger, bargaining, and depression, with acceptance as the last stage. That might be where we are.” (03/16/25)
“The Democrats objecting to Schumer’s surrender don’t, for the most part, offer any attractive alternative to the GOP program. Like the Republicans, they’re fine with insane levels of government spending, continuing deficits, increasing debt, and onerous taxation. The whole thing is half Off-Off Broadway theater and half what Freud called ‘the narcissism of small differences,’ wherein similar people with similar ideas lose their minds over trivial disagreements. For those of us who aren’t in the tank for either party, it’s less complicated. First, if a government function is ‘non-essential,’ why is government doing it in the first place? Second, if we’re going to bother putting ourselves through the recurring ritual of electing supposed representatives to guard whatever we perceive as our interests, shouldn’t we expect those representatives to actually fight for those interests?” (03/15/25)
Source: US News & World Report
by David J Bier & Ilya Somin
“During his campaign for president, Donald Trump said he’d only be a dictator on ‘Day One,’ when he would ‘close the border’ to nearly all immigrants. True to his word, when Trump entered office, he signed executive orders that sought to rewrite the Constitution and explicitly override the law to restrict immigration. But those executive orders didn’t expire on Day Two. The president is still exercising dictatorial powers on immigration, and it isn’t yet clear that anyone will stop him. Several court decisions have sought to rein him in, and the Supreme Court should also intervene, if necessary. Whatever one thinks of immigration, any limits must be imposed lawfully.” [editor’s note: Absent a constitutional amendment, all such limits are unlawful – TLK] (03/14/25)
“The Trump administration’s tariffs are a disaster for both the Canadian and U.S. economies. As of writing this, the administration has flipped-flopped on implementing them. However, the outcome is nearly as detrimental as imposing tariffs due to the uncertainty that has emerged in our long-standing alliance with America’s neighbor. Canadian businesses have pulled American products off their shelves en masse and American businesses are unable to plan for the long term if they don’t know which inputs they’re able to buy abroad. The silver lining, however, is that this may be the push Canada needs to make long-awaited reforms on internal trade barriers. Discussions of removing internal trade barriers have surged in the last few months since Trump won the election and subsequently took office. Former Prime Minister Trudeau recently announced that Canada’s Premiers have agreed to further remove internal trade barriers by June 1, 2025. ” (03/14/25)
“Mises’s opposition to totalitarian socialism of the right (Naziism) and totalitarian socialism of the left (communism) was so complete that he ended up being the subject of a 1998 issue of The Batman Chronicles titled ‘The Berlin Batman.’ It features a short story asking, ‘What if Bruce Wayne had actually been a Jewish artist named ‘Baruch Wane’ in 1930s Berlin?’ When Baruch Wane heard that the Nazi Kommisar had to meet a train because they had seized the books and library of Ludwig von Mises, he worked to stop them (perhaps he delayed them and did not stop them). Still, it correctly explained that Mises was anti-Nazi and correctly portrayed Mises’s Human Action as a volume that repudiated totalitarian doctrines and embraced liberty.” (03/15/25)
“Collectively, they spent 155 years in prison. Now they counsel other people facing their own long sentences. A conversation with five ‘peer advocates’ at the New Orleans public defender’s office.” (03/15/25)
