Category: Opinion

Source: Law & Liberty
by Hans Zeiger

“Independence Hall is one of the great historic buildings because of what happened inside its walls.” (10/02/26)

https://lawliberty.org/book-review/the-parthenon-of-the-republic/

Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Shahid Islam

“Introductory economics textbooks devote considerable attention to market failure: monopoly power, externalities, public goods and asymmetric information. However, government failure deserves the same scrutiny. Markets are made up of imperfect human beings and so are governments. Legislators, regulators, and civil servants possess limited knowledge, imperfect foresight and incentives of their own. Evidence of market failure is not evidence that government intervention will improve the outcome. The relevant comparison is between feasible alternatives.” (10/02/26)

https://mises.org/power-market/government-failure-still-failure

Source: Asia Times
by Altaf Moti

“The war between the United States and Iran is no longer just a confrontation between Washington and Tehran. A second contest is taking shape alongside and behind it. China is not fighting the United States directly, but its economic, technological and diplomatic links to Iran are complicating Washington’s strategy and ability to win the conflict.” (10/02/26)

https://asiatimes.com/2026/10/the-china-factor-behind-the-iran-war/

Source: Free Association
by Sheldon Richman

“For laissez-faire liberal Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), political trouble began with ‘the unhesitating belief … that evils of all kinds should be dealt with by the State.’ The fatal first step is a government promise to rescue people from their own bad choices, such as their preference for indolence and other irresponsibility. That was a mistake because, as Spencer wrote elsewhere, ‘The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools.’ Shielding people from their folly is not only bad in itself, but it also sets in motion a perverse political dynamic that, if allowed to persist, would doom freedom itself.” (10/02/26)

https://sheldonrichman.substack.com/p/tgif-spencer-foresaw-the-coming-slavery

Source: Town Hall
by Mark Lucas

“The warriors who defend this country must have their votes counted. That requires two things. The first is access. They need the time, the training, and the assistance to register and cast a ballot from wherever the country sends them. The second is protection. Their votes must not be diluted by overseas civilian ballots cast under rules Congress never wrote. The Pentagon has failed on both counts. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is correcting that. Start with access. In 2010 and 2011 I served as an infantry rifle platoon leader in Afghanistan. We operated from a remote combat outpost on the Pakistani border, fighting the Taliban and the Haqqani terror network. Those were the deadliest years of the war. I also ran the Federal Voting Assistance Program for my unit.” (10/03/26)

https://townhall.com/columnists/mark-lucas/2026/10/03/the-pentagon-neglected-its-own-voters-hegseth-is-correcting-it-n2684041

Source: The American Prospect
by David Dayen

“We here at the Prospect like to point out the ways in which economic power routinely converts into political power. We saw a particularly gruesome example of that this week. Tech executives converged on D.C. for a lunch with Donald Trump that eventually led to a toothless, completely voluntary AI safety agreement. Public Citizen did the service of tallying up all the money that these executives, their families, or the corporations they lead have given to Trump’s campaign, his super PAC MAGA Inc., his inauguration fund, legal settlements that personally enriched the president, or various vanity projects like the White House ballroom. The total came out to $227 million. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, who accounts for $23 million of that total, substantially devised the ‘morally binding’ self-regulatory compact to police AI models that came out of the meeting, and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang (a mere $1 million) was his key lieutenant.” (10/02/26)

https://prospect.org/2026/10/02/ai-spending-trump-openai-greg-brockman-has-become-punching-bag/

Source: Liberal Currents
by Alan Elrod

“Our attention economy incentivizes the profane degradations of fame-seeking and celebrity culture.” (10/02/26)

https://www.liberalcurrents.com/portraits-of-an-american-dopamine-eater/

Source: The American Conservative
by Jude Russo

“The headline news is good for a change: Energy flows through the Strait of Hormuz are picking up. As of Monday, a seven-day average of 13.5 million barrels of crude oil were transiting the waterway, roughly matching pre-war levels. Two questions arise out of this happy circumstance: First, what has changed operationally? Second, why aren’t markets more jubilant? The second question is easier to answer. A week of good flows does not erase six months of supply disruption.” (10/02/26)

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/glimmers-of-hope-in-the-hormuz/

Source: Antiwar.com
by Thomas S Karat

“What October 7 opened is visible on the ground before it is visible anywhere else. By the reckoning of an Israeli newspaper, Israel has seized more territory from its neighbors since that day than in any comparable span in decades. The war did not stay in Gaza. It moved outward on every front where a border could be pushed. … A war that produces this much cannot be allowed to end, and it has not been.” (10/01/26)

https://original.antiwar.com/thomas_karat/2026/09/30/the-usefulness-of-a-massacre

Source: The Daily Economy
by Donald J Boudreaux

“Daniel McCarthy — Distinguished Fellow in Conservative Thought at the Heritage Foundation — recently penned in the pages of American Spectator, an obituary of sorts for libertarianism. His essay is just the latest contribution to what has become a torrent of triumphalist declarations by pundits on the left and right that we Americans, having gorged ourselves on this junk-food philosophy, are now turning to a healthier diet of statism. Yet McCarthy’s eulogy, like the others, is marred by mistakes. Here are three.” (10/01/26)

https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/libertarianisms-critics-bury-another-a-straw-man/