“There is something almost admirable about the Canadian government’s ability to respond to an American provocation with precisely the right number of carefully selected adjectives. Washington imposes tariffs. Ottawa expresses deep disappointment. Washington threatens Canadian sovereignty. Ottawa says the relationship is changing. Washington escalates again. Ottawa announces that Canada is entering a new era. Then everyone goes home. The problem is no longer simply that Canada’s foreign policy is too cautious. It increasingly appears to have no direction at all.” (10/07/26)
“Britain has a productivity problem, and it is one of our own making. Before the financial crash of 2008, output per hour grew by roughly 2 per cent a year. Since then it has crawled along at about half that rate, sometimes less. The gap with America, France and Germany has widened year after year. That matters more than almost anything else in economics. Productivity pays for higher wages, better public services and a comfortable retirement. A country that stops growing more productive stops growing richer. Its politics turn sour, because every gain for one group must come out of another’s pocket. The comforting story is that some deep mystery is at work, a curse visited on Britain by forces beyond anyone’s control. This is nonsense. Britain made it hard to build, costly to power and unrewarding to invest. The results were entirely predictable.” (10/07/26)
“In Jefferson City, legislative debates over school choice often turn into battles between special interest groups, union lobbyists, and trade associations. Lost in the technical jargon of funding formulas and accreditation benchmarks is the actual student sitting in a classroom where they are not learning. [Nikole] Hannah-Jones’s daughter saw clearly what many policymakers ignore. Adult political battles should never be waged at the expense of vulnerable children. When people demand that families stay put to support a district’s balance sheet, they are asking children to bear the burden of systemic dysfunction.” (10/06/26)
“Democrats love double talk. They claim to defend affordable health care while taxpayers finance fraudulent enrollments that harm the very consumers Obamacare was supposed to protect. Right on cue, they turned the Trump administration’s fraud crackdown into cruelty. Chuck Schumer claims the administration is kicking hundreds of thousands of people off their plans, while former Speaker Nancy Pelosi calls fraud enforcement a ‘false pretext’ for stripping away coverage. Before Democrats declare 760,000 people victims of Republican cruelty, they should explain why taxpayers were financing policies that some consumers never requested, used and know existed. The Trump administration recently announced that CMS canceled approximately 315,000 unauthorized Obamacare enrollments covering more than 760,000 people and expected to recover approximately $2.2 billion in taxpayer-funded subsidies. An additional 419,000 enrollments are undergoing eligibility verification. Every taxpayer and every family struggling to afford health insurance should be alarmed.” (10/07/26)
“In California, the political script is passé. Every statewide election is the same story. The Democrat candidate gets around 60 percent of all votes, and the Republican gets 40 percent. The script is so predictable that voters have stopped paying attention. Even now, in this polarized, politicized era, if you ask a random person on the street who the two candidates are this year to become California’s next governor, they won’t know. In California, the average low-information voter doesn’t vote for a candidate; they vote for a party. That’s the milieu into which Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton has thrown what in football is termed a ‘Hail Mary’, a long ball hurled toward an end zone receiver, thrown in the game’s closing seconds by a team that’s behind.'” (10/07/26)
“Tobias Straumann’s new book explains how economic freedoms and currency reform helped West Germany outstrip not just the Soviet Socialist East, but many other nations, on its way to economic recovery.” (10/07/26)
“Republicans and Democrats tend to claim a mandate from voters whenever they’re handed a majority. Apparently, winning enough seats to organize a chamber means voters have signed off on the party’s entire agenda. That’s a convenient way to read an election, especially when the majority is narrow, and voters may simply be fed up with the other party. A voter who wants someone to put a leash on Trump hasn’t necessarily endorsed a bigger federal government, higher taxes, or every idea circulating through Democratic congressional offices.” (10/06/26)
“In his preface to the twenty-fifth-anniversary edition of God and Man at Yale, William F. Buckley offered this self-assessment of his first book: ‘Some of the predictions made in it have already been realized. Some of the questions are still open. Some of the arguments appear antiquarian; others fresh, even urgent.’ Fifty years later, that assessment still holds up.” (10/07/26)
