“Want to make banker money without stepping foot on Wall Street? Try plumbing for the New York City Housing Authority. From July 2024 through June 2025, NYCHA plumber supervisor Jakub Markowski earned $465,000, including $332,000 for nearly 2,600 hours in overtime — more than the mayor and City Council speaker make combined. While he collected these checks, Markowski also operated two private plumbing companies. The Buildings Department is now investigating him. As the city’s ascendant socialist left pushes for more housing in public or nonprofit hands, NYCHA’s history presents a sordid tale of dysfunction and corruption, with Markowski the latest apparent example.” (07/14/26)
“[L]ockdowns and the associated mask mandates, vaccine passports, and school closures continued in some places for several years. The ramifications of those wretched policies will be quite literally endless. It’s not an exaggeration to say that lockdowns, our policies, and responses have quite literally changed the course of world history. One would think that there would definitely be a concerted effort to understand whether such policies were effective or not. Whether approaching respiratory viruses with authoritarian crackdowns on businesses and schools was necessary to save lives. Yet six years later, there’s unfortunately very little interest in examining those questions. And when you understand the data from Sweden, you will see exactly why.” (07/14/26)
“Being a Trump supporter in 2026 is like staying best friends with a man who stole your wife. He’s deceived and betrayed you at every turn and you’re still swinging from his nuts? That’s cucky, humiliating behavior.” (07/14/26)
“According to the latest detailed annual survey (2026) of global freedom produced in New York by Freedom House, only 21% of the world’s population live in ‘free countries’ and global freedom has declined for the 20th consecutive year. Add to these grim statistics the huge potential threat to personal privacy and liberty posed by current advances in surveillance technology, and the desire of governments to use them, and no room for complacency should remain in anyone’s mind about the fragility of the world’s few genuinely free societies.” (07/14/26)
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Ninos P Malek
“Is it the legitimate role of government to pressure or threaten private businesses over the prices they voluntarily charge for their own property? Most economists would begin with the basic function of prices. Market prices are not arbitrary numbers; they communicate information about scarcity, demand, costs, and alternatives. When prices are allowed to adjust freely, they coordinate millions of decisions made by consumers, producers, wholesalers, and retailers. That is why virtually every textbook on the principles of economics warns that government-imposed price controls—whether they are ceilings intended to ‘protect consumers’ or floors designed to guarantee sellers a ‘fair price’—produce unintended consequences.” (07/14/26)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Kevin Van Elswyk
“Pikachu is a yellow mouse and the internationally-recognized mascot of the Pokémon Franchise. Pokémon’s beginning was a game and disconnected (‘Pocket Monsters’) playing cards decades ago. Over time, it has spawned a TV series, a monopoly game, and a worldwide card collection fever. The tangible cards are now an ersatz currency to reward chore completion, trade for other cards, cash, and bitcoin. Bartering lives, and the card collection fever illustrates Austrian economics.” (07/14/26)
“Democrats are lying to voters, claiming to be the party that can deliver ‘affordability.’ Nothing could be farther from the truth. … Democrat-run cities and states are, with few exceptions, the most expensive in the nation. The reasons include pro-labor rules that drive up wages and costs, regulatory overreach that creates hurdles and delays, energy policies that inflate electricity and gasoline bills, and reckless spending, which leads to high taxes. High taxes, another Democrat specialty, inflate the price of everything as they are passed along to the consumer.” (07/14/26)
“Burnham’s Manchester model is a game of bait and switch. It uses funds obtained from the Public Works Loan Board, an arm of the Treasury, which explicitly declines to look at the uses to which its money is put. Manchester loans these funds on to local projects, also free of arm’s-length scrutiny, in effect using the national credit rating for local projects. This brings to mind other public borrowers who believed that big Daddy would keep them out of trouble (bankers call malarkey of this kind ‘moral hazard’) leading to, eg, Argentine defaults, where provincial profligacy hides behind central guarantees. The Manchester model is not yet a big thing in the UK, but Burnham gives the impression that he believes he’s found the secret sauce.” (07/14/26)
“Less than four years after ChatGPT’s debut, we are nowhere near understanding the role AI will play in our lives. Will it be as transformative as the internet? Will it cause mass unemployment? Will the next generation forfeit its capacity to think to AI models? Will we all soon be using AI agents to book our hotels and flights? How to scythe through the bramble? Cory Doctorow, a science fiction novelist and one of our keenest observers of technology, is out with The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence—Before It’s Too Late, a companionable guide to the subject.” (07/14/26)
“Starting this month, a working adult in their mid-30s seeking to upgrade their skills will have access to the same source of federal financial aid that is available to a high school graduate heading off to a four-year degree institution in the fall. Workforce Pell grants, which went into effect July 1, have the potential to widen the pathway to greater education and economic opportunity for tens of thousands of Americans not able or not ready to pursue a traditional college degree. Until now, these individuals have been limited to their own savings, employer-supported training, or costly loans when seeking to incrementally build their skills and earning prospects. ‘For students who need to be able to access short-term training … [Workforce Pell] really helps open the door for access to higher education, at that bite-size level,’ as Sarah Carrico, an administrator at Saint Paul College in Minnesota, explained to NPR recently.” (07/13/26)
