“President Donald Trump’s decision to allow Nvidia to sell chips to China has produced a flood of national security concerns, but that’s not all. His demand that the government also get a cut of the proceeds is raising a whole other set of questions, including: Did he just raise taxes? His demand that Nvidia and other semiconductor companies pay 25 percent on their China sales looks to some a lot like a tax increase, and it comes in the face of Republicans’ long-standing opposition to tax hikes and the fact that tax policy is supposed to be set by Congress, not the White House.” (12/21/25)
“The problem on the mainstream left today is almost identical to the problem on the right. They are both run by old white cis het men for old white cis het men. The only difference is that the right admits it while the left just uses minorities like human shields while they kill Muslims with drones and organize the global bourgeoisie beneath decaying relics of progressive internationalism like the EU and the UN. Well, no more. No more Weimar allies buttering us up with petty privileges while the Nazis gather their guns. We need our own goddamn guns, our own clinics, our own schools, our own parties and organizations run from the bottom up by our own people.” (12/21/25)
“People like [Alejandro] Flores-Muñoz — and other immigrants, legally present or not — are an important entrepreneurial force in the United States. They start businesses at a higher rate than native-born Americans, creating jobs and enriching communities in the process. Now they’re getting swept up in Trump’s mass deportation efforts. As entrepreneurial immigrants are detained and deported, it won’t just be newcomers and their families who suffer. The American workers, customers, and communities they support will suffer too.” (for publication 01/26)
“On the night Zohran Mamdani won New York City’s mayoral election, he delivered a rousing victory speech that made explicit the connection between his economic agenda and the national fight against authoritarianism. Calling out President Donald Trump, Mamdani declared, ‘If there is any way to terrify a despot, it is by dismantling the very conditions that allowed him to accumulate power.’ Several weeks later — after that despot had threatened to besiege New York City with immigration raids and strip its federal funding, should Mamdani win—the mayor-elect stood beside Trump during a surreal White House press briefing. When a reporter pressed Mamdani on whether he still considered the president a fascist, the jovial, clearly charmed Trump interjected, ’You can just say yes. … It’s easier than explaining it’. The response was disarmingly nonchalant, coming from the head of an administration that has gone to great lengths to crush opposition to fascism elsewhere.” (12/22/25)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Richard M Ebeling
“President Trump and the current Federal Reserve Board of Governors differ as to what interest-rate changes should be focusing on and how the accompanying monetary changes should be applied to facilitate the achievement of the chosen shorter- or longer-term targets. But what is missed in most of the discussions, debates, and rhetorical exchanges is that both share a common institutional and policy premise: a government agency having the capacity to undertake monetary central planning.” (12/22/25)
“Since the federal government entered the highway business early last century, it has largely paid for roads by taxing gasoline purchases. The federal gas tax accounts for roughly 70 percent of Highway Trust Fund revenue, and every state has its own gas tax as well. But today people don’t buy as much gas, and these funds face shortfalls. According to the Pew Research Center, the collective road maintenance backlog of 24 states has grown to over $86 billion since 2015. The tax was never a particularly good way to fund roads, and new solutions are overdue. Fortunately, there may be an opportunity to take advantage of skyrocketing demand for warehouses and data centers to help pay for roads, by selling state and federal land near highways.” (12/21/25)
“On December 17, surrounded by festive holiday decorations, US president Donald Trump delivered an upbeat — one might even say manic — address to the nation …. While many expected something weighty (perhaps announcement of further military escalation versus Venezuela), what they got was laundry list of Trump’s ‘accomplishments’ since his inauguration in January. Most of those ‘accomplishments’ — ruinous tariffs on American consumers, immoral and economically damaging immigration raids, etc. — were things we already knew about from watching our bank balances draw inexorably down. One, however, stood out to me as the most risible. ‘For the first time in 3,000 years,’ Trump said, he’s brought ‘peace to the Middle East.’ He said that, with as close to a straight face as he ever shows, hours after saluting the flag-draped caskets of two US National Guard members and a civilian interpreter killed in Syria the previous week.” (12/20/25)
“Cicero offered a useful piece of advice: Esse quam videri — ‘be rather than seem,’ that the important thing is to be virtuous or good or successful or courageous rather than merely to appear to be. Trump has spent his life turning that on its head: He was a middling businessman who was in bankruptcy court a lot more often than he was at the top of the game, so he spent years playing a successful businessman on television. He cannot write an ordinary good English sentence, but he paid someone to write a book and put his name on it. His imaginary friend John Barron would call writers at the New York Post and other outlets to tell them silly lies about everything from Trump’s business successes to his dating life. And, of course, he emblazons his name on things — most recently, the Kennedy Center.” (12/19/25)
