Source: Common Sense
by Paul Jacob
“Working from home is a very old idea, becoming new again during this Age of the Internet. COVID made telework something of a mania. But there’s been some withdrawal of support for the arrangement from major corporations, and one of the main results of Elon Musk’s DOGE effort in government was to bring government workers back into the office. Well, sort of.” (03/11/26)
Source: Eastern New Mexico News
by Kent McManigal
“The U.S. government, with its state and local affiliates, is a much greater threat to your life, liberty, and property than any foreign power in the past century. This includes the old Soviet Union. Which one takes a large percentage of your money before you even see it? Which one then takes more of your money every time you buy something, or demands it in ransom so you’re allowed to keep what you already own? Which one makes and enforces arbitrary rules about the way you’re allowed to live? I’ll give you a hint: it’s not Iran’s evil government. Right now, I’m not extorted to prop up an Iranian government, but if the U.S. government wins this fight, I will be.” (03/11/26)
Source: Free Association
by Sheldon Richman
“The popular telling of the histories of Iran, Venezuela, and other countries, and their relevance to current U.S. policy, requires that we get something straight. While natural resources exist in such places, those resources do not naturally belong to the said country, people, or government. That would be collectivism and, thus, nonsensical. The proper owners of land and subsurface resources are those who discover and develop them, no matter where they were born or live. They are the Lockean owners (per John Locke’s homesteading principle). This means that someone from outside the territory could be the legitimate owner in a given case. Indigenous persons who had no role in the discovery and development have no natural claim based merely on their birth. That’s no achievement. The foregoing does not mean that outside entrepreneurs may morally disregard the Lockean property rights of indigenous individuals.” (03/11/26)
https://sheldonrichman.substack.com/p/the-myth-of-national-resources
Source: The Dispatch
by Jonah Goldberg
“Let’s state the obvious: We’re at war with Iran. My evidence? Turn on your TV. U.S. forces, working with Israel, killed the supreme leader of Iran and many of his top aides. We sank Iran’s navy and destroyed most of its air force. We bombed thousands of military sites across the region. President Donald Trump, the commander in chief, has demanded ‘unconditional surrender’ from Iran. He routinely refers to this as a ‘war.’ Pete Hegseth, who calls himself the secretary of war, also describes this as a war daily, such as last week when he said, ‘We set the terms of this war.’ The truth that we are at war is so simple that only politicians and lawyers could make it seem complicated. Indeed, a slew of Republican legislators insist we’re not actually at war.” (03/11/26)
https://thedispatch.com/article/iran-war-congressional-republicans-declaration/
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger
“Who cares about the 175 Iranian girls, who were students at the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school in the town of Minab, Iran, when a U.S. Tomahawk missile slammed into them, killing them all? U.S. national-security state officials? Don’t make me laugh. Despite any public displays of remorse they might express, the truth is that they couldn’t care less about the deaths of those little girls. After all, let’s not forget the obvious: U.S. officials for decades have been targeting those little girls and the rest of the Iranian people with death by starvation and illness through their enforcement of their brutal, vicious, and evil system of economic sanctions.” (03/11/26)
https://www.fff.org/2026/03/11/who-cares-about-those-175-dead-little-iranian-girls/
Source: Semafor
by David Weigel
“Every Democrat agrees that the next election will hinge on which party is better at lowering the cost of living. They’re starting to disagree about how to make their case. For Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., it means a new tax cut that would double the standard deduction and push millions of people off the income tax rolls. Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., is preparing to outdo Booker and propose an even larger income tax cut, nearly doubling the number of people who could ignore the IRS. … Critics of Booker and Van Hollen’s plans, including older-line progressives at the Center for American Progress and newer post-Biden players on the left, argue that the party’s mission depends on doing good things with public funds — not pitching taxes as a pox that people need ‘relief’ from.” (03/11/26)
Source: Town Hall
by Gregory Lyakhov
“Few constitutional rights generate more debate in American politics than the right to free speech. The First Amendment protects both freedom of speech and freedom of the press, principles often described as absolute pillars of a democratic society. In reality, the Supreme Court has consistently recognized that these freedoms have limits. Courts have long permitted restrictions based on time, place, and manner, and American law has also recognized boundaries when speech collides with competing interests such as national security, defamation, or public safety. The same principle applies to freedom of the press. Newspapers and journalists enjoy broad constitutional protections, but those protections were never intended to create a system in which the press operates without legal accountability. From the earliest days of the republic, American law recognized that publishers could be held responsible for false statements that damage a person’s reputation.” (03/11/26)
Source: Reason
by Jacob Sullum
“President Donald Trump’s original plan for addressing the purported threat posed by the longstanding U.S. trade deficit, which the Supreme Court rejected in February, involved declaring an imaginary emergency to justify tariffs under a statute that does not authorize them. His backup plan, which he revealed immediately after that decision, avoids the second difficulty but not the first one.” (03/11/26)
https://reason.com/2026/03/11/trumps-new-tariff-plan-still-asserts-a-crisis-that-does-not-exist/
Source: TomDispatch
by Mattea Kramer
“All the way back in 2023, the surgeon general diagnosed Americans as suffering from an epidemic of loneliness. More recently, amid the rise of American fascism, I started to notice that people were not only lonely but had also begun referring to the world as simply ‘the news.’ Perceived that way — as a phenomenon pre-packaged via our devices — our bond with the world was distilled into just two options: consume the news or don’t. A sense of powerlessness is baked into such a perception. By contrast, I remembered once reading an interview with billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs, who described the world as atoms constantly shifting and moving. With intention and focus, she pointed out, you can move those atoms yourself, and so move the world. Baked into that worldview was a sense of interconnectedness, not to mention power. Was such a perspective a luxury of the billionaire class? In fact, no.” (03/10/26)
Source: Independent Institute
by Phillip W Magness
“In his latest bid to salvage his protectionist trade agenda, President Donald Trump imposed a new 10% tariff on all imports to the United States. To justify this move, Trump cited the existence of a trade deficit and invoked an obscure clause of the Trade Act of 1974, called Section 122. This clause allows the president to impose tariffs for up to 150 days; however, its provisions only apply in the presence of a ‘large and serious United States balance-of-payments deficits.’ Trump’s use of Section 122 is illegal because the United States does not currently have a balance-of-payments deficit. … He is the first president to attempt to use this clause for a reason. Previous administrations have examined its text in detail and come to the conclusion that Section 122 simply does not apply to common trade deficits.” (03/11/26)
https://www.independent.org/article/2026/03/11/reagan-rejected-trumps-tariff/