“The Gilded Age was convicted by its name before its history was ever written. Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner coined that appellation in their political satire by the same name. Their point was clear—the American era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was the opposite of a golden age. Instead, it was a time when a thin layer of glitter concealed corruption, useless speculation, and harmful self-interest. The name stuck, permitting Twain’s summary judgment to masquerade as neutral historical judgment. … It is a relief then to have Julian Fellowes’s series, The Gilded Age …. [it] shows that the era produced many public benefits and that the rich were substantially responsible for the dynamism that led not only to economic prosperity but also to broader social inclusion, even if they were hardly always innocent or admirable.” (08/27/26)
“After US-Canada trade talks collapsed Friday, the United States imposed a 50% tariff on a long list of Canadian goods via the never-used Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930. US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer went on TV first thing Monday in an attempt to calm financial markets with some basic tariff math. He said the new action hits a small percentage of Canadian imports into the US and an even smaller share of consumption, so there’s ‘no possible way it can really affect US well-being.’Greer is basically right on the issue of the tariffs’ direct effects. The problem for both America’s chief trade negotiator and the US economy is that the new levies raise other issues that are much more important – and troubling. … First, the spat injects significant new uncertainty into both the trillion-dollar bilateral relationship and the broader global economy.” (08/27/26)
“In the face of massive public resistance and anger, tech bros need to start thinking like Andrew Carnegie and the ‘robber barons’ of the Gilded Age — or even like Xi Jinping. The tech world is in bad odor these days. Social media’s addictive qualities have parents in such an uproar that Meta just agreed to pay out an $18 billion settlement, and data-center projects are facing rejection across the country. Yet for decades America’s tech industry was cherished as a center of innovation, a world in which hard-working entrepreneurs started businesses in garages and produced things that made everyone’s lives better. Because it was constantly innovating, it stayed ahead of government’s ability to regulate it, resulting in ‘permissionless innovation’ — change that didn’t have to ask first.” (08/26/26)
Source: Karl Dickey’s Freedom Vanguard
by Karl Dickey
“In his 6,000-word essay, Gates proposes three direct state interventions. First, he proposes a payroll-style tax on artificial intelligence and robots to penalize companies that automate labor. Second, he proposes legal mandates that reserve specific job categories for humans only. Third, he advocates for global government coordination to slow down artificial intelligence development. As we see so often, government interventions cause more problems than they propose to solve, often having the opposite effect of their stated goals — so government intervention is a terrible idea to solve problems that have not yet happened. After all, adding a tax on automation will negate the increased profits the automation will bring. His ‘solutions’ will bring higher consumer prices; they would protect inefficient monopolies while reducing productivity. Negating the whole point of AI.” (08/27/26)
“The US Army, Fox Business reports, plans to build nuclear ‘microreactors’ at five of its bases — Fort Bragg, Fort Campbell, Fort Hood, Fort Benning, and Fort Drum — over the next two years, with at least 15 more to follow later. Why? To, the report says, ‘strengthen the military’s energy security and reduce its reliance on potentially vulnerable power grids.’ The idea certainly makes sense for a military base, but it makes sense for everyone, everywhere else, too. The biggest security and reliability worry with electricity isn’t that an enemy missile or bomb will take out a power plant. It’s that an attack or accident somewhere along the 650,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines and 6.3 million miles of distribution lines criss-crossing the US will stop that power from getting delivered.” (08/27/26)
“In Asia Times, Noah Smith just wrote that standard economic measures can’t really explain why Americans are growing less happy with their lives over time. The problem is that what makes for a happy, meaningful life is much harder to measure than GDP or median income. I agree that standard economic measures alone won’t do the trick. But it’s not because it’s so hard to measure what predicts a happy, meaningful life. That’s actually pretty easy. Connecting economic realities to those measures is also fairly straightforward. What Smith is missing is that relationships predict happiness. And, increasingly, economic conditions predict relationships.” (08/27/26)
“News about the wars in Iran and Gaza has lately eclipsed that of a more consequential war: the one in Ukraine, now in its fifth year. Yet that conflict could soon take a turn against the aggressor, Russia – less on the battlefront and more on the homefront. By various reports, young Russians are showing more bravery through subtle opposition to the war, while young men have become less brave about joining the military – actively avoiding coercive new ways of recruiting them to replace the vast number of soldiers lost on the front lines. The contrast with Ukraine could not be more stark.” (08/26/26)
“You have to have something to recycle. Which, if you’re building Civilisation 1.0, you don’t. It’s only when you’re building Civ 2.0, or 3.0, when you tear down the previous one and now have a pile of something that can be recycled to build the next version. The currently rich nations – US, UK, say – require very little virgin steel and actually export considerable amounts of scrap steel from those previous versions now being torn down. We’ve not checked the numbers but would certainly be willing to believe that demand for primary copper in both places is pretty minimal given the abundance of secondary. It’s places building out an urban environment for the first time – recently China, likely soon India, say – that require vast amounts of the new stuff.” (08/27/26)
Source: Libertarian Institute
by Joseph Solis-Mullen
“While the tenor of U.S.-China relations cooled somewhat from the hysteria of Donald Trump’s first term and the Joe Biden years, recent events have made clear how thin that veneer of stability remains. President Trump’s May 2026 state visit to Beijing and the planned September 24 White House meeting with Xi Jinping briefly suggested a shift toward ‘strategic stability.’ Reciprocal visits returned to the agenda, and open talk of full decoupling subsided. That moment already looks precarious.” (08/27/26)
