“This is a fund with no congressional oversight resolving grievances outside the normal judicial process. Everyone involved in its creation ultimately works for Trump, either in his capacity as president or as a private citizen. Despite the Justice Department’s claims otherwise, it is difficult to imagine this becoming anything other than a partisan mess. Even if Trump or members of his family never directly receive money from the fund, it is impossible to separate his interests from the arrangement.” (05/21/26)
“For more than three years, public debate about the risk-benefit balance around artificial intelligence has been dysfunctional bordering on ridiculous, hostage to a binary so crude it would embarrass a freshman seminar. On one side are the ‘doomers,’ who are portrayed as insisting that frontier AI is an existential threat requiring immediate radical constraint. On the other are the ‘boomers,’ who treat any suggestion of oversight as a sci-fi-coded slowdown that would hand American technological supremacy to China. Each camp has its prophets, forums, think tanks, and a remarkable capacity to mistake assertion for argument. But the world just changed, and that dialogue is ready to end. That’s good news for amplifying the upside potential of AI.” (05/21/26)
Source: Libertarian Institute
by Joseph Solis-Mullen
“President Donald Trump’s recent two-day summit in Beijing with Chinese President Xi Jinping concluded much as anticipated. In an article written ahead of the trip, I noted that expectations for substantive breakthroughs in the fraught Sino-American relationship were likely to be disappointed. The events of the visit bore this out. While the tone was notably, and welcomely, warmer than in recent years and both sides touted ‘fantastic trade deals,’ the core structural tensions — trade imbalances, technology restrictions, Taiwan, and regional security — remain largely unaddressed.” (05/21/26)
“After the Supreme Court gutted voting rights in Louisiana v. Callais, it was all over but the shouting. This week in South Carolina, state lawmakers are proceeding with the Great Erasure of African American voters without the legal hindrances of the Voting Rights Act, that now timeworn relic of the late Great Society. Their goal? To create a congressional dream team of seven GOP House members by zeroing out Rep. James Clyburn, a longtimer with 33 years in Congress, and the only Black Democrat to represent South Carolina in the House in state history. Indeed, Clyburn is the ninth Black person to represent the state in Congress; the first eight were all Republicans elected during Reconstruction in the late 19th century, before Jim Crow ended Black voting in the South, and when the parties had opposite views on civil rights compared to today.” (05/21/26)
‘As we all wait for reality, and/or China, to catch up with the Silicon Valley AI boys, it might be a good time to go back in time a bit and see what it looked like in the past when our bubbles burst, specifically the tech bubble in 2001 and the housing bubble in 2008. Fortunately, it is easy to find the key data.” (05/21/26)
“The US has a choice between managing what is a shift away from US backed currency using military and economic restraint, or accelerating it.” (05/21/26)
Source: EconLog
by Alex MacDonald & Tammy McCutchen
“Nowadays, it’s hard to read anything about workplace policy without running into ‘“algorithmic management.’ Companies, we’re told, are increasingly controlling workers through an array of digital ‘tricks.’ These companies record our keystrokes, track our locations, and even watch us through our webcams. We hear this same story in academic journals, government reports, and the popular press. In fact, the story has even made its way into federal regulations — specifically, in the U.S. Department of Labor’s current rule about independent contractors. Like the more popular accounts, this rule assumes that algorithmic management is pervasive. And it treats the practice as a form of ‘control.’ There’s only one problem: algorithmic management isn’t a real thing.” (05/21/26)
Source: Rutherford Institute
by John & Nisha Whitehead
“One way or another, the American taxpayers always get screwed by politicians eager to spend our hard-earned dollars on programs and projects that do little to improve our lives, safeguard our freedoms, or secure our future. Donald Trump — the billionaire trust-fund baby/reality TV showman who transformed himself into a populist champion of working-class Americans — has proven to be no different, and in many ways worse, than the politicians who came before him. Trump has given new meaning to government corruption, graft, grift, profiteering, self-dealing and pay-to-play politics.” (05/20/26)
