“Smith shows himself a great reader, not just of his great favorite Jonathan Swift, but of the other great English authors like Addison and Johnson. He recommended reading the novelist Samuel Richardson as well as Racine and Voltaire. Smith was a truly rounded humanist, a man who knew enough of life and books to write not just a great treatise but a work of significant pleasure.” (03/27/26)
“The Trump administration’s suspension of the Jones Act is well-reasoned; the Jones Act has kept oil prices in America higher than they would otherwise have been by increasing the cost of transporting oil. The Jones Act forces domestic shippers to use expensive ships with expensive crews, which drives up shipping costs beyond what a free market would bear. However, paying more for domestic shipping could easily be worth the cost if it made America more secure. Unfortunately, the Jones Act is a hindrance to American security.” (03/27/26)
“Our civil justice institutions are about 100 years old, dating back to the progressive era and the adoption of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. But the world has changed a lot since then. In particular, the number of transactions in society has exploded, as population growth, economic growth, and technological change have exponentially increased the activity in society that leads to disputes. Separately, alongside the rise in civil disputes, the cost of the time and attention of legally trained experts has skyrocketed, rising faster than inflation for generations.” (03/27/26)
Source: The Daily Economy
by Anthony Storer, James Hop, Patrick O’Keefe, & Timothy G Nash
“The forces propelling gold higher today extend beyond its safe-haven status. A mix of technological change and geopolitical restructuring is reshaping how investors view gold. The result is a powerful combination of structural demand and constrained supply. These conditions help explain gold’s strong performance and why many believe its appeal is far from over. Below are thirteen major forces shaping the modern gold market.” (03/27/26)
“[W]e require no heroic assumptions to understand that free immigration is good. New people and different ways of doing and seeing things mix with the existing cultural elements to produce, on the whole, innovation and immense general benefits. (See the work of Julian Simon and Matt Ridley.) All we need is freedom, an expectation of self-responsibility, and no government interference. In those conditions, reality and capitalism teach and reward virtue.” (03/27/26)
“What should the American people, especially the hundreds of millions of their voters, expect Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden to do against the vicious, serial law-violating, violent, corrupt, agency-dismantling Donald Trump and the crony Trumpsters who are wrecking our government and our economy? These former presidents should mobilize the citizenry from the grassroots to the Capitol and take on the unpopular Tyrant Trump. Having sworn to uphold the Constitution and ‘… take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,’ they should strongly uphold their patriotic duty to resist tyranny and save our Republic and our besieged democratic institutions, and stop the assault on our civil liberties and civil rights. Our former presidents all get along with each other. … [T]hey are living luxurious lives and are largely AWOL from connecting with the existing but overwhelmed civic opposition to Trump.” (03/28/26)
“Whether it’s reopening the strait or funding DHS, Trump’s goalposts keep moving, and as a result, Democrats are largely insulated from the public’s blame for the airport mess. Democrats can’t be expected to end this impasse because Trump can’t even settle on a set of demands to which they could agree. This is Trump’s M.O. with Iran as well. His stated objectives have cycled through a full and complete surrender, regime change, deterrence, de-escalation, boots on the ground, blowing up power plants in 48 hours, and then backing off based on ‘productive conversations.’ (Not to mention that Trump ran for office promising to end ‘forever wars,’ not start new ones.) Trump — whose underlying belief is that pressure always produces capitulation — assumes he can bluster and bully his opponents into submission. But that only works if the other side agrees to play by those rules.” (03/27/26)
“Last month, on my way home from Kyiv, I passed through Germany to visit one of the world’s largest weapons manufacturers. My hope was to see its response to the rise of drone warfare. … I thought I would find the leaders of Rheinmetall seized by the threat of this revolution in military technology. I found no such thing. … The gruesome images of tanks blown apart by drones in Ukraine did not dissuade anyone from purchasing these systems. Nearly all of the tanks that Russia had at the start of the invasion were destroyed by spring of last year, according to U.S. military estimates. … Still, purchases of new tanks and armored vehicles keep swelling the deal book at Rheinmetall, as well as the company’s stock price, which has risen more than 15-fold since the Russian invasion of Ukraine.” (03/27/26)
