“When Altman and other AI leaders ask for government intervention, the possibility of regulatory capture cannot be dismissed. The companies calling most loudly for AI regulation are also among those best equipped to comply with it. Licensing regimes, mandatory audits, reporting requirements, and expensive safety standards impose fixed costs that established firms such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google can absorb more easily than smaller competitors. Altman has urged Congress to consider licensing or registration requirements. That does not mean industry warnings about AI risk are disingenuous, but advocating for regulation does allow these executives to present themselves as responsible stewards of a dangerous technology while also supporting rules that could simultaneously raise barriers to entry and entrench their position in the market.” (09/24/26)
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Alan Hibben
“Britain’s political class loves to talk about ‘reforming welfare,’ but everyone knows the limits of that ambition. Voter Welfare—the £333.7 billion the state is forecast to transfer from taxpayers to households in 2025–26—is politically untouchable. A population brought up on free cake is unlikely to vote for the plate being removed, at least until it stares a debt tragedy square in the face. But there is another kind of welfare that receives far less attention and may actually be fixable: Rent-Seeking Welfare, or what is more bluntly called corporate welfare elsewhere. Unlike pensioners, corporations don’t vote—and British households don’t own many shares directly. In theory, this should make reform easier. In practice, the obstacle is not ideology but something more basic: the Government cannot see what it is trying to reform.” (09/24/26)
“I feel like I need to apologize for a column a couple of months ago when I compared the current president of the United States to Caligula, the possibly mad Roman emperor who is said to have nominated his trusted horse for high office. I need to apologize to Caligula. From pitching his triumphal D.C. arch as a storage shed for deadly snipers’ bullets to banning reporters from the White House in a narcissistic rage, Donald Trump is losing his grip on reality. This is unsustainable. Worried about AI killing humans? Bad news: It already is. Which is it? Are the robots of AI, or artificial intelligence, so smart that they’re on the verge of holding a secret meetup in the darkest corner of the dark web and developing a plot to kill all humans through germ warfare, to make sure we don’t kill them first by pulling the plug?” (09/24/26)
“Does a human being have a right to kill themselves? Yes, they do: we believe at TPOL that this is inherent in free will as we were created by God. (It does not make it good (right) to kill yourself, any more than many other things we have the power to do are not good or right. The entire idea of ‘assisted suicide’ is both a gray area and seems to often lead into euthanasia.” (09/24/26)
“Chief Justice John Roberts famously identified violence, intimidation, disinformation, and defying lawfully entered judgements as four areas encroaching on the independence of judges. Now there’s a fifth: calculated infiltration of the judicial system to influence case outcomes.” (09/24/26)
“It appears that nothing says ‘saving Democracy’ like a good old-fashioned military coup. A new survey from the Center for Strategic Politics found that 59 percent of Democrats would favor a military coup to remove President Donald Trump from office. All it took was four years out of power for these Democratic voters to embrace a coup d’état to negate the results of the last election. What is particularly chilling is that many of these voters still portray themselves as defending democracy by calling for a military takeover. It is akin to supporting drive-by shootings to combat gun violence. That is not the only shocker in this survey. According to the Center, roughly six in 10 (59%) Democrats polled said they would feel ‘very positive’ or ‘somewhat positive’ if the US military removed Trump and seized control of the American government.” (09/24/26)
“Chinese ruler Xi Jinping landed in Washington, DC, yesterday, to meet with President Donald Trump.
‘If you know the enemy and know yourself,’ Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War, ‘you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.’ I pray President Trump understands this foe: Mr. Xi, and more generally, the Chinese Communist Party … enemies to all freedom-loving people across the globe. China is engaged in the largest military build-up since World War II, if not of all time. It is a threat on the march.” (09/24/26)
“In a highly aggressive 40-minute speech to the United Nations General Assembly on September 22, President Donald Trump once again issued ominous threats to Iran, saying: ‘I have a very big decision to make. Will a deal be made with Iran that lets them rebuild and create a far greater country than it ever was before, maybe one of the greatest in the Middle East or even the world? Or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill or destroy people or countries again? Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations?’ He implied that his ‘very big decision’ would come after the midterms, suggesting that Iran is waiting to make a deal until then and, if one isn’t forthcoming, then he would choose annihilation.” (09/24/26)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Oluwaseun Adeoye Oyebamiji
“The most accessible measure of inflation in most African states, especially in Nigeria, is not a bulletin but a chalkboard. In markets across the country, sellers write prices in chalk rather than paint, because paint assumes tomorrow will resemble today. A trader repricing her stock weekly is not being opportunistic. She is doing arithmetic the currency forces on her. Inflation is usually discussed here as a cost-of-living problem, which it is, and rarely as an information problem, which it also is. A price is how an economy signals what is scarce. When the general price level moves quickly and unevenly, that signal becomes unreadable. A manufacturer cannot tell whether his input costs rose because the material became scarcer, in which case he should substitute, or because money lost value, in which case he should not.” (09/24/26)
