Source: The Daily Economy
by Stefan Bartl
“President Nixon abandoned the gold standard. The deeper problem was a monetary system dependent on political judgment.” (08/14/26)
https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/the-lesson-of-1971-was-never-about-gold/
Source: Persuasion
by Teresa M Bejan
“Of course, understanding who Locke was, or what he actually believed, has always been more difficult than proclaiming what he represents. Despite his qualms about Catholics—and atheists, too, as we shall see—Locke is still commonly celebrated as the inventor of the modern liberal approach to tolerance, understood as a commitment to separating church and state and protecting individual rights.” (08/14/26)
https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-long-history-of-the-liberal-establishment
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Joshua Mawhorter
“On March 7, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell was granted US Patent No. 174,565 for the speaking telegraph or telephone. Three weeks earlier, on February 14, both Bell and another inventor, Elisha Gray, submitted their respective ideas to the US Patent Office. On March 10, Bell used a liquid transmitter (an early microphone) to call his assistant, Thomas Watson, with the words, ‘Mr. Watson—Come here—I want to see you.’ This is commonly regarded as the first intelligible voice transmission over an electrical wire. With that in mind, this year not only marks 250 years since the Declaration of Independence, the 100th year of Murray Rothbard, and 40 years of Mises University, but also 150 years since the official invention of the telephone. This provides an opportunity to review the history of how telephone invention, innovation, and entrepreneurship—combined with cronyism, patents, regulations, and monopoly—shaped the landscape of the telephone industry for generations.” (08/14/26)
https://mises.org/mises-wire/ahoy-ahoy-telephone-entrepreneurship-and-cronyism
Source: Common Dreams
by Judy Albert, Claire M Cohen, Ed Grystar, Ana Malinow, Julie Noh-Smith, & Kay Tillow
“On July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass addressed the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society with an oration called, ‘What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?’ In 1852, the United States was a young country, only 76 years old, and given its youth, Douglass held out hope for the country that put him and 3 million Black men, women, and children in chains. He called Congress and judges ‘inhuman, disgraceful, and scandalous’. He accused the church of being the ‘bulwark of American slavery, and the shield of American slave-hunters’. Still, he held out hope.” [editor’s note: SIX co-writers? I know all too well how song cowriting by committee turns out, most of the time – SAT] (08/15/26)
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/free-us-from-medical-industrial-complex
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Rachel Chiu
“As Jimmy Lai’s imprisonment shows, a country’s economic prosperity means very little if it fails to preserve civil liberties. … Lai, a self-made entrepreneur and billionaire, had the opportunity to flee before his arrest, but chose to stay to encourage millions of Hong Kongers to keep fighting for the freedom and autonomy that the region has had for decades. His plight resonates strongly with me because of my family’s experiences during the Chinese Communist Revolution, but it should be just as meaningful for every American who believes in the virtues of economic and social freedoms.” (08/14/26)
Source: Show-Me Institute
by Patrick Tuohey
“Between April 2021 and February 2026, the small city of Sedalia paid a single law firm, Lauber Municipal Law, just shy of $2 million—nearly one invoice per business day, according to reporting by Genevieve Smith and Annie Goldman of the Columbia Missourian. Sedalia’s population is a little over 20,000. Out of its $35 million budget for fiscal year 2026, the city set aside $500,000 for legal fees. Residents are asking why. The answer, at least in part, is Missouri’s Sunshine Law.” (08/14/26)
Source: Law & Liberty
by James R Rogers
“Christopher Nolan wants to tell a fundamentally different story than Homer told.” (08/14/26)
Source: Law & Liberty
by George Hawley
‘There may have been costs to uniting the right around a hatred of mainstream media.” (08/14/26)
https://lawliberty.org/book-review/the-last-conservative-consensus/
Source: Common Sense
by Paul Jacob
“In the 1960s, MIT introduced a ‘Pass or No Record’ system for the first semester of freshman year. The idea? Help students adjust to greater workloads and ‘variations in academic preparation and teaching methods.’ You’d think that letter grades themselves would help students adjust by providing information about how well they are learning and adjusting — assuming that the grades are at least a roughly objective indication of mastery not yet rendered useless by grade inflation. Some universities let first-semester freshmen convert a poor letter grade into a pass/no credit ‘grade.’ Only a few have sweepingly replaced letter grades with the pass/no credit system in the first semester. Now University of Michigan has joined those few. One reason: to ‘curb the mental health crisis unfolding.'” (08/14/26)
https://thisiscommonsense.org/2026/08/14/grades-versus-feelings/
Source: American Greatness
by Thaddeus G. McCotter
“At first blush, it may appear the nation’s two preeminent populist movements, the Right’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) and the Left’s Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), have nothing in common. And it is true, of course, there exist numerous differences in the political views and aims of these movements. (These will be looked at in depth in Part Two of this series.) Yet, while rarely if ever recognized, let alone mentioned, by each movement’s members, there exist similarities between MAGA and the DSA. Naturally, the fundamental basis of any populist movement has spurred the creation of both organizations: namely, the members believe a powerful, unaccountable entity or entities are unfairly exploiting them and obstructing their personal pursuit of happiness. Further, they believe their exploitation is facilitated and exacerbated by collusion between the powerful entities and similarly powerful organizations.” (08/15/26)