“In 2015, Amy Finkelstein, Nathaniel Hendren, and Erzo Luttmer released an NBER working paper called ‘The Value of Medicaid: Interpreting Results from the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment.’ The paper’s results were a slap in the face of Social Desirability Bias — and the authors boldly advertised them right in the abstract: ‘Our baseline estimates of Medicaid’s welfare benefit to recipients per dollar of government spending range from about $0.2 to $0.4, depending on the framework, with at least two-fifths – and as much as four-fifths – of the value of Medicaid coming from a transfer component, as opposed to its ability to move resources across states of the world. ‘Translation: Medicaid drastically fails a cost-benefit test by giving extremely expensive health care to recipients who barely appreciate it. Using standard economic logic, the poor themselves would be far better-off if the government cut the Medicaid budget in half, then handed current recipients the remaining money.” (08/27/25)
“Just as a bank is a target for robbers, power and money make the government a target for bureaucracies, corporations, and national parties. These interest groups seek politicians who will bend to their will, giving them access to that power and to funds. So politicians willing to give them what they desire are the most secure in their position. … Like giving drug addicts their fix, we hand power over to those who crave it most. Similar to the negative consequences of drug use, both the power user and the taxpayers they abuse, suffer from it.” (08/27/25)
“I didn’t set out to study nonviolence. Like many, I stumbled upon it in fragments, quotes that refused to leave me, the persistent sense that some ancient wisdom was trying to cut through the noise of our modern world. Over time, through teaching, crisis counseling, community organizing, and meditation, I’ve come to a radical realization: Nonviolence is not merely a political tactic or a personal ethic. It is a global resistance movement against the fusion of religion and empire. It is how we reclaim God from the powers that abuse the sacred to justify violence. Together, we can defend the truth when it’s under siege.” (08/27/25)
“Liberty isn’t a gift handed to you by benevolent rulers; it’s your birthright to either exercise or lose. It won’t be preserved by hoping someone else will do it for you — it’s everyone’s job, every day, to defend it. No exceptions and no excuses. The greatest threat to liberty isn’t necessarily a tyrant’s jackboot or a lawmaker’s pen; it’s apathy.” (08/27/25)
“In the advertising world, there is an old adage that there are times when you take a pitch and ‘run it up the flagpole to see who salutes.’ That expression came to mind Wednesday when President Donald Trump signed an order to punish flag burning. The president may be hoping the Supreme Court might salute and reverse long-standing precedent declaring flag burning to be protected speech under the First Amendment. If so, he is likely to be disappointed. The proposed prosecutions would be unconstitutional and, absent an unlikely major reversal of prior precedent by the court, flag burning will remain a protected form of free speech. The Supreme Court has repeatedly, and correctly, declared flag desecration to be protected speech in such cases as Texas v. Johnson (1989) and United States v. Eichman (1990).” (08/26/25)
“Liberty is not merely about what one is permitted to do, but about the character one chooses to embody within a free society. Liberty is not sustainable without a populace capable of widespread self-governance, cultivated through an internalized moral framework. Understanding Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments is essential for preserving liberty because it helps us see the fundamental connection between individual character, collective societal culture, and the environment in which humanity can truly flourish.” (08/27/25)
“Israel’s justification for the mass slaughter of Gaza’s people and their starvation – now officially confirmed as a famine engineered by Israel – was built on a parade of easily discredited lies from the start: of beheaded infants, of babies in ovens, of mass rape. It should surprise no one that Israel continued advancing similarly outrageous lies as it set about – as all genocidal regimes must do – dismantling the most basic infrastructure of survival for Gaza’s population. … The western press corps, which barely raised a peep about its exclusion for most of the past 22 months of genocide, collectively shrugged its shoulders as its colleagues in Gaza were slowly exterminated. Nothing to see here. That was until this month, when Israel celebrated an air strike that killed six Palestinian journalists, including the entire five-person team covering Gaza City for Al Jazeera.” (08/27/25)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Connor O’Keeffe
“Last Friday, Trump triumphantly announced the deal — celebrating the fact that the US government would come to own a share of the company. The reaction on the right was mixed. Plenty of Trump’s acolytes dutifully hopped on board and echoed Trump’s framing that the federal government is ‘us,’ and so any deal that moves money or financial assets into federal accounts is equivalent to transferring that money to all of us Americans. Others were not convinced. Plenty pointed out, correctly, that the government embedding and allying itself with nominally private companies is the literal definition of economic fascism. Establishment critics, who are not put off by economic fascism as long as they get to call it something else, thought the move was a bit strategically misguided.” (08/27/25)
“The Democratic National Committee is holding its summer meeting in Minneapolis. There is a lot to talk about. The party, of course, is suffering through a major slide in popularity. A Wall Street Journal poll a few weeks ago found that voters’ approval of the party is its lowest in 35 years. A New York Times report this month found that, ‘Of the 30 states that track voter registration by political party, Democrats lost ground to Republicans in every single one between the 2020 and 2024 elections — and often by a lot.’ Democrats have also shown a knack for getting on the unpopular side of a number of issues, like the border and crime. They’re also deeply divided on Israel and Gaza. And they’re in a terrible money crunch …” (08/27/25)
“Since Donald Trump took office in January, his administration has deployed 8,500 active-duty military to the U.S.-Mexico border, turned vast areas of the border into restricted military zones known as National Defense Areas, deployed Stryker combat vehicles to the NDAs, and built large detention camps on military bases like Fort Bliss in El Paso. This is only the last eight months, but it follows three decades of persistent border militarization executed by multiple administrations, both Democratic and Republican. Over these decades, the U.S.-Mexico land border has become one of the most militarized and deadly places on the planet. In other words, it is time to retire the term border security. It is inaccurate. What we are witnessing on the border is an act of war.” (08/27/25)
