Source: The American Prospect
by Whitney Curry Wimbish
“Although the government has abandoned plans to repurpose warehouses into immigration prisons, it is still in pursuit of greater physical capacity for immigration detention, including overseas. Recent solicitation requests show that federal officials are seeking facilities with room to hold up to 6,000 people across Colorado, Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Washington state, as well as thousands more in camps in Guatemala and elsewhere around the world. ” (07/28/26)
“Court-packing has once again become a major focus of political contention, with many on the political left advocating it in response to what they believe are badly flawed and illegitimate decisions by the Supreme Court. In a recent article for The UnPopulist, Andy Craig provides reluctant support for court-packing, but with a twist he argues will minimize the danger: combining court-packing with a constitutional amendment imposing term limits on Supreme Court justices that would—if enacted—reverse the packing. The term-limit system would give every president two appointments per term, thereby potentially producing more ideological balance on the bench. Craig’s proposal is clever and a cut above more conventional defenses of court-packing. But I remain unpersuaded.” (07/27/26)
“When American politicians or intellectuals promise Nordic welfare states, most people imagine this happening automatically or by taxing the rich, and everybody benefits. That’s not the case. The real Nordic model taxes earners more (45 percent in Denmark, 40 in Norway, 41 in Sweden, compared to 25 percent in the United States) and charging flat value added tax (VAT). Broad welfare states require broad tax bases; Nordic welfare states are financed not by billionaires but by ordinary workers.” (07/27/26)
“A whistleblower is an employee or a former employee who reveals information about wrongdoing inside an organization. As my coauthors and I have written, whistleblowers have played a critical role in exposing government abuses in democratic societies. Ideally, government officials act only to benefit the public. Should they act opportunistically or against the public interest, they would be punished through mechanisms like the voting booth, prosecution, or impeachment. Literature on the economics of politics, or ‘public choice,’ however, illustrates that real democratic institutions deviate from this ideal as a result of information asymmetries, in which some actors have more or better information than others, voter ignorance, and the organizational structures of politics. These imperfections are amplified in the national security state.” (07/27/26)
“One of the defining failures of modern American government has been the steady erosion of Congress’s constitutional authority over war. The Constitution grants Congress — not the president — the power to declare war. Congress decides to go to war. The president wages it. Over the past several decades, presidents of both major parties have increasingly treated military intervention as an executive prerogative rather than a congressional requirement. The last six presidents have not reflected distinct foreign policy doctrines but a uniparty continuum of executive overreach.” (07/27/26)
“People like working from home. It lets us avoid commutes. It lets us live closer to family. It seems especially good for the parents of young children, and it could even boost birth rates. This seems like an indisputable tech success story. Thanks to a plethora of modern technologies and applications—the internet, smartphones, VPNs, video calls, instant messaging platforms like Slack, cloud-based software and documents, and so on—remote work has become a possibility for more people than ever, and that’s a good thing. But are we all kidding ourselves about the benefits of remote work? Are we suffering from false consciousness? Do we only think we like it while it’s actually making us miserable somehow?” (07/27/26)
Source: David Friedman’s Substack
by David Friedman
“It seems obvious that, if one’s concern is status rather than real income, we are in a zero sum game, that if my status increases relative to yours, yours must have decreased relative to mine. That point of view seems to support the approach to politics that sees it mainly as a question of who gets to benefit at the expense of whom, of which side who is on. Like many things that seem obvious, this one is false. It is true that my status is relative to yours. It does not, oddly enough, follow that if my status is higher than yours, yours must be lower than mine, or that if my status increases someone else’s must decrease. Status is not, in fact, a zero sum game.” (07/27/26)
“City Council Speaker Julie Menin says she’s far more responsible than Mayor Zohran Mamdani; here’s his chance to prove her wrong on at least one front: the council’s obscene bid to shower $10,000 bonuses on public-school teaching assistants. United Federation of Teachers boss Mike Mulgrew threatens ‘all-out war’ if the mayor vetoes the bill to award the cash, but the mayor owes the UFT nothing — and it’s his duty to the general public to say no. No city union should ever get a raise outside the collective-bargaining process: Since City Hall can’t cut union pay in other ways, it’s robbing the taxpayers if it doesn’t make labor negotiate for any hike.” (07/27/26)
Source: Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression
by Sarah McLaughlin
“Vakho Sanaia, a journalist with Formula TV, wrote a Facebook post in June sarcastically encouraging others not to call [Georgian] Parliamentary Speaker Shalva Papuashvili and Member of Parliament Lado Bozhadze ‘dicks.’ On July 10, the Tbilisi City Court fined Sanaia around $2,300 for the post. Sanaia responded to the ruling with two more comments: ‘I wrote a post, saying ‘don’t call Papuashvili and Bozhadze d*cks’ [sic] and they fined me ₾6,000. Well, go ahead and call them that, then,’ and a joke that the decision meant the court was therefore declaring Papuashvili and Bozhadze ‘dicks.’ Sanaia soon learned the Division for Combating Hate Speech was pursuing an investigation of these two new posts, and last week he was sentenced to 14 days in prison on top of his original fine.” (07/27/26)
“We talk about the housing crisis as if it is a national problem, but housing costs vary widely between states, and California tops the list. As of March 2026, the median sale price of a California home reached a staggering $854,000, roughly double the national average. This has forced many Californians to pack their bags and search for a better—or, at least, more affordable—life elsewhere. The California exodus is a harsh reminder that there are two ways to solve the housing crisis: the state can either facilitate housing construction, or it can say goodbye to its residents. If California cannot bring prices down by adding to the supply, population flight will eventually lower prices on the demand side.” (07/27/26)
