“Americans say they want to bring back industry. President Donald Trump ran on reindustrialization and won. But when it comes to actual building, mining, and developing, people too often shut it down. Build, they say, just not in my backyard. Peter Thiel put his finger on this pathology over a decade ago. ‘We wanted flying cars,’ he wrote, ‘instead we got 140 characters.’ His point wasn’t merely about venture capital timidity. It was about a society that stopped building physical things, retreating into digital abstraction while factories closed, supply chains migrated to China, and infrastructure crumbled. Now, we are making the same mistake again, in real time, with higher stakes.” [editor’s note: Actually, the US builds more “physical things” than it ever has before — it just doesn’t use as much human labor to do so – TLK] (06/17/26)
Source: Niskanen Center
by Lawson Mansell & David Schwartzman
“At more than $21 billion annually, Medicare’s Graduate Medical Education (GME) payments are the federal government’s single largest investment in physician training, but the nearly 40-year-old formula for determining payments has not been meaningfully adjusted to address the growing mismatch between where doctors are needed and where they practice.” (06/17/26)
“When Trump launched a war against Iran in late February, his MAGA movement suddenly became nearly indistinguishable from the neoconservative foreign policy Trump once abhorred. For nearly four months, Washington hawks like Senator Lindsey Graham and radio jock Mark Levin were riding high. But over time it became clearer that the president was looking for a way out and now the president has reportedly reached a memorandum of understanding with Iran to end the fighting, open the Strait of Hormuz, and to keep talking. Trump’s friends, who were hoping for Iranian capitulation and regime change, even if that meant indefinite bombing and blockading, aren’t very happy today.” (06/17/26)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Connor O’Keeffe
“The eye-catching dollar amounts reported as the net worths of the richest people in the world, like Elon Musk, are not large piles of cash sitting around in bank accounts gathering dust. They are mostly the present value of the companies they own. It is not even possible to tax or confiscate these assets without destroying most or all of the initial value. Figures like Warren and Newsom know this. But the implication that the rich are simply ‘hoarding’ trillions of dollars of wealth is useful to them. It feeds the impression that all of our economic problems are, in essence, problems with the distribution of final consumable wealth.” (06/17/26)
Source: Independent Institute
by Stephen P Halbrook
“United States v. DeBorba, decided on June 3, is the latest Ninth Circuit decision that seeks to exclude firearm parts from protection in the reference to the ‘arms’ that the people have a right to keep and bear. The court held that ‘‘optional accessories’ to firearms — such as gun slings, scopes, and, importantly, silencers — fall outside of the Second Amendment’s plain text because they are ‘accoutrements’ and not arms.’ The test for whether an object is included in ‘arms’ is supposedly based on whether it ‘is necessary to the ordinary operation of the weapon.’ ‘Ordinary’ means anything you want it to mean.” (06/17/26)
“Iran was consistently and demonstrably in compliance with all their commitments under the agreement. It was Trump who broke faith, betrayed Iran and unilaterally and illegally pulled the United States out of the agreement. When, despite this history of nuclear negotiations with Trump, Iran returned to the negotiating table, the U.S. three times bombed Iran while negotiating. … Other negotiations with the U.S. have also taught Iran distrust.” (06/17/26)
Source: The American Prospect
by Whitney Curry Wimbish
“To the casual observer, the two candidates vying for the Democratic nomination in New York’s Seventh Congressional District to replace retiring 16-term stalwart Nydia Velázquez may look indistinguishable. New York Assemblymember Claire Valdez and Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso are both Democrats, and both intend to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), fund affordable housing, institute health care for all, and end Israel’s war on Palestine, which they agree is a genocide. Both candidates have substantial endorsements from powerful figures and organizations. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani backs Valdez, a fellow Democratic Socialists of America member, as do DSA-NYC and Justice Democrats; Rep. Velázquez, the New York Working Families Party, and state Attorney General Letitia James back Reynoso.” (06/17/26)
“The JAWBONE act would prohibit federal agencies from coercing or threatening online and other services into changing content and would give victims the right to seek damages. Now, you might be thinking, doesn’t the Constitution already prohibit the federal government from censoring us? Well, yes. It provides no exemption for government censorship implemented via plausibly (or implausibly) deniable delegation of the task. But we have had many legitimate debates about constitutional meaning. Further, we have also always had many illegitimate ones, in which people — including Supreme Court justices — seek to circumvent even the plainest and most unmistakable import of constitutional provisions.” (06/17/26)
“Last week’s SpaceX IPO made Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire, despite the fact that the company has lost tens of billions of dollars since it was founded almost 25 years ago. Shares of the company climbed steadily after markets closed on Friday, pushing its market cap to $2.2 trillion. The public conversation about Musk’s vast wealth often obscures the fact that he is actually a very fancy welfare recipient, having taken billions of dollars from the public coffers by even the most conservative measures.” (06/17/26)
