“‘Who Gets to Tell the Story?’ That question was supposed to be the theme of a ‘press freedom’ event this week at Columbia University, home to one of the world’s leading journalism schools. However, as first reported by the Columbia Spectator, the event was canceled after student journalists had the audacity of offering their own views on the coverage of the alleged Cornell rape case. After the independent student newspaper The Sundial ran a column by deputy editor Nikos Mohammadi and writer Christina Ma criticizing the one-sided coverage of the allegations, the Columbia students went into a familiar groupthink, cancel mode. The students were shocked that Mohammadi and Ma took the invitation to ‘tell the story’ literally by offering a different perspective on the still developing case.” (10/17/26)
“[A]t the heart of the new Progressive foreign policy is a very old and very tired idea indeed, and one that is shared with equal fervor by corporate Democrats such as Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Jake Sullivan, and the legacy media: That the post-World War II global order must be defended against all comers. Progressives like Sanders and AOC are able to separate themselves from corporatists like Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer by camouflaging their principal concern—the preservation of American global ‘leadership’—through repeated references to their own parochial social concerns. In other words, the foreign policy alternative politicians like Sanders and his proteges within certain precincts of what I call Restraint, Inc. (including the Center for International Policy, the Institute for Policy Studies, and most (but not all) of the researchers and scholars at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft) is no alternative at all.” (10/16/26)
“I have come to believe that James Talarico, the Democrats’ Senate candidate in Texas, is generally sincere in his beliefs. I trust he won’t take that as a compliment. Like most admirers of Donald Trump, like teachers who believe they are underpaid, like people who believe that the sun is a fiery chariot driven by Apollo, etc., Talarico sincerely believes things that are not true.” (10/16/26)
“Nobel laureates helped explain how expectations shape spending decisions, inflation, and the effectiveness of economic policy. Yes, that feels obvious.” (10/16/26)
“An intelligent, attractive former student commits a ghastly murder, reasoning that he is doing society a favor by ridding the world of a greedy capitalist. He is eventually taken into custody by authorities, jailed, and tried. This scenario does not describe Luigi Mangione, the affluent 28-year-old who recently admitted to killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in 2024 in an apparent message to the health-insurance industry. The tale is far older: it describes Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, the protagonist of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s nineteenth-century masterpiece Crime and Punishment.” (10/16/26)
“On Wednesday, the Consumer Price Index for September came in hotter than expected. Inflation was up at an annual rate of 3.7 percent. Gasoline prices rose 34 percent over the past year, and home heating oil is up a staggering 74 percent. Combined with other factors, this news spooked the stock market. The tech-heavy Nasdaq fell by 2.7 percent. Then on Thursday, the Producer Price Index (PPI) report clocked a wholesale price rise of 1.3 percent just in September, an increase of 6.3 percent over the past year, and the largest 12-month increase since December 2022. The other factors signaling deep trouble include a bond market that keeps bidding up rates on long-term Treasury securities, now the highest since 2002, reflecting expectations of more inflation, and increasing interest costs throughout the economy. This in turn adds to consumer and small-business pain and increases borrowing costs for the heavily leveraged tech sector.” (10/16/26)
Source: Independent Institute
by Alex Tokarev & Kristin Tokarev
“Everyone knows the math is getting worse. Americans are living longer. Birth rates are falling. Fewer workers are supporting more retirees. The Social Security trustees project the program’s trust funds will be depleted in the early 2030s, leaving payroll taxes insufficient to pay all scheduled benefits unless Congress acts. Yet every election brings the same warning: Don’t touch my Social Security! That’s why President Donald Trump’s reported interest in Australia’s retirement system matters. Not because Australia has discovered the silver bullet for that fiscal monster. Because someone in Washington is finally asking whether a retirement system designed during the Great Depression is still the best America can do in the 21st century.” (10/16/26)
“So, what good are the rich? Sumner had the good common sense to understand what so many do not understand today: ‘The great gains of a great capitalist in a modern state must be put under the head of wages of superintendence. Any one who believes that any great enterprise of an industrial character can be started without labor must have little experience of life.'” (10/16/26)
“I have not blogged for a while but recently I have allowed all the election advertising to get under my skin. The solution sets being discussed — to the extent any solutions are discussed rather than just promoting fear of the other team –are so divorced from any sensible analysis of cause and effect that it is almost intolerable to even listen. For this article, I have taken real things people have expressed concern about in this election cycle and I have proposed six meta issues that are closer to the true causes of people’s concerns. Of course, none of this is being discussed by anyone on either side in this election.” (10/16/26)
