Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Karthik Sankaran
“The president accused Caracas of ‘stealing’ the commodity and vows to take it back. First, we don’t need it, second, invading for it would be a blunder.” (12/17/25)
Source: Foreign Policy
by Max Yoeli
“Across advanced economies, a new axis of politics is emerging: scarcity versus abundance. Rising prices, stalled infrastructure, and eroding industrial competitiveness reflect constraints on building and innovation. Trade disruptions and inadequate state capacity compound the challenge. In response, a cross-partisan abundance movement offers a path to expand the supply of vital goods and services—infrastructure, energy, health care, and housing—while responding to voters’ growing affordability concerns. Abundance is both a goal and a lens for overcoming the regulatory and capacity barriers that constrain supply. Yet the debate has focused mainly on domestic issues, such as zoning and permitting, even though its success depends on international flows of goods, capital, knowledge, and energy.” (12/17/25)
Source: The Volokh Conspiracy
by Ilya Somin
“The Trump Administration’s effort to deport Chinese dissident Guan Heng has rightly drawn widespread outrage and condemnation. Guan is a hero for his exposure of the Chinese government’s oppression and persecution of the Uyghur minority, and he faces near-certain imprisonment or death if he is deported to China, or to Uganda (a Chinese-aligned state to which the Trump administration may be trying to send him). Legally, he has an rock-solid case for asylum. Sadly, the effort to deport Guan is part of a broader pattern of Trump administration efforts to deport dissidents and victims of persecution back to the regimes that oppress them.” (12/17/25)
Source: Orange County Register
by Rafael Perez
“At some point in the future, AI and robotics will be advanced enough to perform nearly all of the jobs currently performed by humans. Such a future will require that we radically change the relationship that we have with the economy and the means of production. Corporations will be forced to share their revenues as a universal basic income if they want to exist at all. However, before we achieve complete automation, there will be a period of gradually increasing AI adoption that will present unique challenges that cannot be so straightforwardly remediated (relatively speaking) as a world with full automation. So, what does a world look like where artificial intelligence has led directly to an unemployment rate comparable to or exceeding that of the Great Depression (25%)?” (12/17/25)
Source: Persuasion
by Michael Kranz
“Zelenskyy has made the concessions he can, but that may not be enough.” (12/18/25)
https://www.persuasion.community/p/ukraines-impossible-dilemma
Source: New York Post
by staff
“Blockading Venezuela’s oil shipments finally gives teeth to a sanctions regime that dictator Nicolas Maduro has only scoffed at, offering real hope for a peaceful transition of power. The criminal gang ruling from Caracas has operated under a variety of sanctions for two decades, yet the Chavez-Maduro regime is still firmly in control. Targeted and political sanctions — mostly aimed at high-ranking individuals — did little to moderate political repression, subversion of neighboring nations or plotting with the gangs that rule Cuba and Iran. In the Biden years, Washington pursued a feckless policy of sanctions relief, allowing Caracas to trade oil and gold. But hopes that Venezuela would rejoin the international order as a respectable partner were dashed in 2024 when Maduro declared himself the victor of (yet another) openly corrupt presidential election.” (12/17/25)
https://nypost.com/2025/12/17/opinion/venezuela-blockade-finally-putting-us-navy-where-its-mouth-is/
Source: The Atlantic
by Tom Nichols
“The president of the United States just barged into America’s living rooms like an angry, confused grandfather to tell us all that we are ungrateful whelps. When a president asks for network time, it’s usually to announce something important. But tonight, Donald Trump did not give anything like a normal speech or address. He was clearly working from a prepared text, but it sounded like one he’d written—or dictated angrily—himself, because it was full of bizarre howlers that even Trump’s second-rate speech-writing shop would probably have avoided …. We could take apart Trump’s fake facts, as checkers and pundits will do in the next few days. But perhaps more important than false statements—which for Trump are par for the course—was his demeanor. Americans saw a president drenched in panic as he tried to bully an entire nation into admitting he’s doing a great job.” (12/17/25)
Source: Association of Mature American Citizens
by Shane Harris
“Discriminatory ‘Diversity, Equity and Inclusion’ (DEI) policies have been enshrined in virtually every major American institution for more than a decade now. While conservatives have made some laudatory progress in turning the cultural tide against DEI, the fallout on the American economy and, even more devastatingly, the American family, is only just beginning. This week, Compact Magazine published what may be the most important long-form essay of the year. ‘The Lost Generation’, authored by aspiring screenwriter and odd-jobs aficionado Jacob Savage, describes in specific, heartbreaking detail the economic carnage that DEI has wrought on young men, and young white men in particular. Savage provides staggering statistics on the race and gender-based overhaul of hiring practices in journalism and academia to highlight how DEI has fundamentally transformed the American workplace.” (12/17/25)
https://amac.us/newsline/politics/how-dei-is-destroying-the-american-family/
Source: Reason
by Jack Nicastro
“Americans purchasing their robot vacuum cleaners from China is not a national security threat, nor does it mean that the market will be flooded with shoddy imports—Picea will compete with Roborock, Ecovacs, Dreame, Xiaomi, and other manufacturers to deliver increasingly inexpensive and high-quality products to consumers around the world, just as Amazon would have. However, thanks to the American government, a once American firm is now Chinese.” (12/17/25)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Vincent Cook
“The fundamental problem with fractional reserve bank credit is that it funds greater investment spending without the corresponding thrift. Bank credit expansions drive down interest rates artificially, causing too many labor and natural resources inputs to be diverted towards the more interest-sensitive parts of the economy with too few invested in the less interest-sensitive sectors—these inputs are malinvested in unsustainable boom sectors. Such booms can’t be sustained because demand for inputs in the short-term, lower-risk sectors isn’t slackened sufficiently by thrift to match the higher bank credit-fueled demand for inputs from the boom sectors. Input prices increase relative to output prices, eventually squeezing business operating margins to the point where losses begin to appear, particularly in the boom sectors.” (12/17/25)
https://mises.org/mises-wire/next-economic-downturn-will-be-here-soon-enough