Source: Isonomia Quarterly
by George Agbesi & Joshua D Ammons
“At one point, Gordon Tullock thought taxi medallions were inefficient but intractable institutions, a classic example of what he called the transitional gains trap. The medallion system persisted not because it served the public, but because the rents it generated were capitalized into medallion prices, making any reform politically impossible. Then came Uber, and within a matter of years this supposedly permanent institution crumbled. What if a similar technology shock could do the same for societies lacking the rule of law?” (03/27/26)
“Far from being a sign of resurgent faith, Christian identity politics is a symptom of religious decline. As one observer has noted, the fact that Americans are growing more secular and less religiously literate has made religion more salient as a marker of political difference, even as invocations of it become less informed.” (03/27/26)
“A bad idea doesn’t get better with age. Bad ideas aren’t wine, jeans, or your high school memories. The tax subsidies for the Post-Dispatch building redevelopment in downtown St. Louis were a bad idea back in 2019 when the development was proposed, and they are a bad idea now. Using tax subsidies for economic development rarely benefits the public. Instead, it lowers the risk and increases the returns for private investors.” (03/27/26)
“You host a website. Users can say whatever they want on this site. Next thing you know, a UK regulatory agency is sending you, an American organization based in the United States, a letter announcing a trillion-dollar fine for failure to comply with UK censorship demands. How much do you panic? If you’re 4chan, not much.” (03/27/26)
“The main theme in much writing on contemporary politics is how ideologically polarized Democrats and Republicans have become. But the truly consequential change is that Republicans have broken with their own past. Under Donald Trump, the party hasn’t just reversed its positions on specific policies. It has routinely betrayed basic tenets of the conservative philosophy that Republicans have long claimed was the bedrock of their party. No one is shocked by Trump’s betrayals. What is more surprising is that most Republicans haven’t seemed to care. I’ve been thinking about the Republican betrayal of the party’s own tradition because of a comment about my work by Glenn Loury, the conservative Black economist. When I was on The Glenn Show in December, he criticized my new book American Contradiction because of my ‘apparent disregard for the positive contributions of conservative thought and policy to American life.'” (03/27/26)
“The central risk of AI is not that machines will become malevolent. It is that human incentive structures, amplified by scalable technology, outrun our ability to govern them.” (03/27/26)
“As analysts have emphasized, Tehran ‘gets a vote’ as to when this war ends, and it doesn’t plan to stop until the U.S. and Israel learn that attacking Iran comes with high costs and shouldn’t be repeated in the future. The U.S., unable to hammer out an agreement, has been hammering Iran to coerce it to the negotiating table. … The Trump administration misunderstands the nature of the problem. To end the war, it needs to get tough not with America’s adversary, but with its cobelligerent: Israel.” (03/27/26)
“MySpace kicked off an era in which nearly two out of three humans on the planet use social media platforms to connect with others, share opinions and content, and, yes, sometimes scroll obsessively through everything on offer. You or I may or may not like social media. You or I may or may not use social media. And, even though it’s pretty much the unique distinguishing development of the 21st century (everything else, including perpetual war, is just variation on eternal themes), you and I don’t HAVE to use social media. Nor was K.G.M. forced to use social media. But on March 25, a California jury awarded her $6 million in ‘damages’ — half ‘compensatory’ and half punitive — from Google (which owns YouTube) and Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram), because she allegedly suffers from anxiety and depression and blames social media for those problems.” (03/26/26)
“Here’s a good rule of thumb, both for understanding foreign policy and also for life in general: When someone offers a bunch of rapid-fire and mutually irreconcilable justifications for a controversial decision, they’re not telling you the whole story. William Shakespeare might have invoked letting slip the dogs of war to describe the unleashing of violence, but these days we just ‘wag the dog.’ Popularized by Our American Cousin — the play being performed at Ford’s Theatre when President Abraham Lincoln was shot — the phrase took on an explicitly political meaning after the ripped-from-the-headlines 1997 film Wag the Dog. In that otherwise pretty awful movie, a fabricated military conflict was used to distract voters from a presidential sex scandal. Since then, the term has become shorthand for the idea that leaders sometimes use military action to divert attention from problems at home.” (03/26/26)
