“Earlier this month, Kentucky Republican State Representative Candy Massaroni introduced House Bill 752, which would give patients the right to receive blood transfusions from a donor they choose — including their own previously donated blood—while restricting hospitals and blood banks from refusing such directed donations and requiring insurers to cover them. At first blush, one would think this bill strikes a blow for patient autonomy. The core idea, allowing patients to choose their own blood donor, including banking their own blood for later use, fits with the core principles of individual autonomy and voluntary exchange. But a deeper dive into the bill’s specifics reveals its medical autonomy comes with a heavy dose of government compulsion.” (03/19/26)
Source: Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression
by Sarah McLaughlin
“The political sphere, and the world more broadly, would probably be a better place if we did away with the practice of lying. Most of us would sleep more soundly at night if we didn’t feel the need to treat political campaigning with similar skepticism we’d give to days-old gas station sushi. But that doesn’t mean we’ll improve the world by giving government officials more power to punish dishonesty.” (03/19/26)
Source: Isonomia Quarterly
by Martin George Holmes
“The concept of classical liberal policing (henceforth ‘liberal policing’) has taken a beating in recent years, nowhere more so than in Britain and its former dominions. When Sir Robert Peel established the London Metropolitan Police in 1829, the flagship of Britain’s modern police forces, he envisioned it as a people’s police. Officers would defend British liberties on behalf of the public, not because the common people were incapable, but because it was more efficient to delegate the task to full-time professionals. To reduce undue political influence, officers swore an oath of allegiance to the Crown and to the law, not to the government of the day.” (03/19/26)
Source: Brownstone Institute
by Christopher Dreisbach
“Since the nationwide rollout of the Covid-19 vaccines, federal health officials have repeatedly downplayed concerns about severe adverse events as ‘one in a million.’ Time and again, they reassured the public that if any true safety signals existed, their own monitoring systems, chiefly VAERS, would detect them. Yet when the vaccine-injured pointed to those very same VAERS statistics, often far above established signal thresholds, their concerns were abruptly dismissed because VAERS was deemed ‘unreliable.’ … the FDA now touts AEMS as a unified, intuitive platform that will draw vaccine, drug, and device reports into one place. Superficially, this represents a stark departure from the current Kafkaesque status quo of scattered databases and fragmented reporting pathways. But the fundamental problem has never been just fragmentation on the front end. It has been silence on the back end.” (03/19/26)
“I try to be fair to people I disagree with. Emmanuel Saez (the famous UC Berkeley economist who’s considered an architect of California’s proposed billionaire wealth tax) is someone I read carefully, even when I find his income-inequality work unconvincing. So, when I say that his arguments for the wealth tax are not just biased or misleading but egregiously wrong, I’m not being careless. I mean it. In a recent debate at Stanford University, Saez offered his central justification (apart from, you know, ‘billionaires are unfairly rich’): California’s hospitals need it because the federal government cut Medicaid through last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill. As Economic Policy Innovation Center researchers have repeatedly documented, under the Biden administration, Medicaid spending expanded by almost 60 percent, going from roughly $409 billion before the pandemic to $656 billion by 2025.” (03/19/26)
“Everywhere I turn, I hear university leaders saying we need more conservatives in academia. There is little doubt anymore that they are right: scholars need skeptics to point out research weaknesses; students need provocateurs to help them engage with unfamiliar ideas; we all need balanced academic studies to help us make good public policy. But what I do not hear from many of these leaders is how they are going to do it. I have been thinking about this for many years, and I have some bad news: it is going to be difficult. I canvass the possibilities below and propose massive external pressure as the most promising course. But, first, it may be illuminating to break the problem down into its components: supply and demand.” (03/19/26)
“Yascha Mounk’s essay ‘The Bourgeoisie Has Switched Sides’ is as insightful as his phrase ‘the Brooklynization of the bourgeoisie’ is memorable. His analysis could be elaborated by acknowledging that there is more than one bourgeoisie in the contemporary West.” (03/19/26)
“John Rawls was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on February 21, 1921. Not John Rawls the famous liberal philosopher (or, rather, John Rawls the famous liberal philosopher was also born in Baltimore, Maryland on February 21, 1921, but he is not the subject of our story). This is John Rawls the alcoholic. John Rawls the alcoholic was twelve when they lifted Prohibition. He partook immediately, and dropped out of school the following year, supporting himself through a combination of odd jobs, petty crime, and handouts. … as he entered his early fifties, the handouts started to dry up. … he ran into a man he’d once seen volunteering at Salvation Army, and asked him what had happened. ‘You haven’t heard?’ asked the volunteer. ‘None of the rich people donate to us anymore. They’re all giving to this group called the John Rawls Foundation.'” (03/19/26)
“Israel has been a junior partner of the US empire’s Middle East policy since its military success in the 1967 Six Day War. While there are instances of Israel pushing the US into conflict, most directly in the US-Israel war against Iran in June 2025, the current war in Iran was driven by the US empire’s perceived interests plus the Trump factor. Israel has long been pressuring the US to fight Iran, but the empire did not find it worthwhile to initiate a full-scale war against the country. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to the US Congress during the Obama era warned of an impending Iranian nuclear weapon. But, instead, President Barack Obama continued the diplomatic route through establishing the Iran Deal, ensuring Iran would not develop nuclear arms.” (03/19/26)
