“During the 2024 campaign Donald Trump promised to cut energy prices in half. He has, instead, presided over soaring prices at the pump, which have played an important role in his collapse in the polls. Some might attribute this disaster to Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran, ignoring what appear to have been near-unanimous warnings by experienced military and intelligence officials that such a war would, in addition to disrupting oil supplies, overstretch the U.S. military and dangerously deplete stocks of munitions — which is exactly what happened. But Scott Bessent, Trump’s Treasury secretary, has found someone else to blame: Ukraine.” (09/03/26)
“Mismatching students and institutions can hurt the very students such policies intend to help — while squandering scarce faculty talent on remedial math.” (09/02/26)
“President Trump and his national security team are heading back to the future in Vietnam. No, we do not mean April 29, 1975, when the U.S. chaotically evacuated Saigon. Nor are we referring to the quagmire the Vietnam war had become by then. Rather, we refer to Operation Rolling Thunder, which began in March 1965 and ended just after Halloween in 1968. The U.S. military’s limited aerial campaign was intended to coerce the North Vietnamese to the negotiating table. Instead, over time, it began planting the seeds that resulted in Hanoi’s victory over South Vietnam ten years later. Today, Team Trump is attempting to wield a similar failed strategy in Iran.” (09/03/26)
“Dr. [Dianne] Woodward noted that, earlier this month, the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and representatives of the Board of Peace established under Donald Trump to, ostensibly, oversee a new Palestinian-led administration in Gaza, ‘agreed to set up a working group on sanitation and public health affecting both Israel and Gaza’, although its ‘membership and detailed operating structure’ have not been made public. … Dr. Woodward also noted how, ironically, while trying to erase evidence of its genocide, Israel was importing from Gaza, ‘into undisclosed locations inside Israel and the West Bank’, some of ‘the estimated 60 million tonnes of rubble from Gaza’, without seeming to be aware that, in doing so, it is ‘potentially transferring the pollutants in that rubble directly to disposal or storage sites’ that will also affect the public health of Israelis.” (09/03/26)
“‘Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government.’ That was James Madison, explaining that the modern federal welfare state is not authorized by the Constitution. Despite that, politicians today still insist that these programs aren’t just authorized, they’re also absolutely necessary to help people. But they ignore the fatal trap that Benjamin Franklin uncovered over 250 years ago: his long-forgotten warning that government welfare makes things worse.” (09/02/26)
“As a social science, economics is meant to be apolitical. Research is meant to find out truths about the world we live in, particularly when it comes to markets. Government organizations such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), Census Bureau, and Federal Reserve all play a role in collecting, organizing, and analyzing data on the country’s economic well-being. The Trump administration seems determined to chip away at their independence and weigh in on their analysis. Last year, President Trump fired Dr. Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the BLS, because he was displeased with a routine correction to a jobs number estimate. He has also tried to limit the Federal Reserve’s independence through executive orders, threatened to fire former Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, and repeatedly attempted to remove Dr. Lisa Cook as a Federal Reserve board member.” (09/02/26)
“At first glance, the current American-Canadian trade ‘war’ is absurd. We are neighbors with a long history of close friendship, speak the same language (for the most part), and spring from the same British civilization. Nearly one million Canadians reside in the United States. Given the two countries’ natural affinities, Canadians are nearly indistinguishable from Americans. Both sides have reasonable grievances over trade policy. Americans don’t like Canada’s perennial trade surpluses of more than $50 billion in a supposedly free-trade zone. They resent the fact that non-free-market China exports subsidized cheap steel and aluminum through Canada, giving Canadian auto and truck exports a price advantage. The United States also objects to Canada imposing a surcharge on American digital media companies to subsidize Canadian Indigenous and French-language content.” (09/03/26)
“For months, Democrats running in competitive races have taken note of the widespread and growing public backlash to data centers and have begun elevating their opposition to them in campaign settings. Given the public perception that data centers are responsible for rising utility costs, Democrats have tied the proliferation of those facilities to the party’s overarching midterm theme of affordability, and they’ve blamed Republican incumbents for courting them. … in the past few weeks, Republican officials have seemingly started to wake up to the fact that their party is on the wrong political side of the issue. … All that, however, was before Trump’s Truth Social post Monday morning.” (09/02/26)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Hamoon Soleimani
“For most of the twentieth century, the trouble with libertarianism was never its ideas, it was its posture. Theorists stood outside the arena with folded arms, waiting for voters to reason their way to liberty, treating political philosophy as a kind of religion of non-participation. That turned one of the sharpest critiques of state power into a seminar-room parlor trick. While purists argued over who would pave the roads without a transportation ministry, the people who actually wanted power simply took it, grabbing the money, locking down capital, and dictating the granular details of everyday life. Surviving runaway state intervention means dropping the fantasy of keeping your hands clean, and giving up on a mass awakening that is never going to arrive.” (09/02/26)
“No one in their right mind wants to actually kill someone. But sometimes, that is the only sane choice. A choice to take lethal action, defensively, to end the ability of the shooter to harm (more) people. Some would claim that this is a ‘civic duty’ or negatively, ‘taking justice into your own hands.’ That is often labeled as being a vigilante. We at TPOL believe it to be an act of love.” (09/02/26)
