Source: Reason
by Daniel DePetris
“A brash bid to reassert U.S. dominance is delivering short-term wins. But a region tired of being pushed around may not stay compliant for long.” (03/30/26)
Source: Bet On It
by Bryan Caplan
“Once you admit the notable prevalence and grave danger of crypto-Communist politicians during a particular era, there is a clear-cut contemporary implication: A notable share of current and would-be leaders who say they aren’t Communists are probably lying. If you’re living through this era, this raises a thorny question: ‘How do we identify the crypto-Communists before it’s too late?’ Needless to say, you can’t just publicly ask them, because they’ll lie. You could do a thorough background check, but the people who know the most are usually fellow Communists eager to protect their own. So you’re usually left with three admittedly imperfect heuristics.” (03/30/26)
Source: Law & Liberty
by Adam J MacLeod
“Unfortunately, not everyone today thinks that natural property rights are obvious. Especially in the faculty lounges of law schools and political science departments, it is now taken for granted that rights are products of sovereign power alone. Property rights in particular are assumed to be entirely conventional. Without positive laws, there is no property. And without politics, there are no positive laws. This simplistic creed has motivated a corrosive skepticism of natural property rights, which scholars and teachers have expressed in books, articles, and classrooms for more than a century.” (03/30/26)
https://lawliberty.org/book-review/defending-private-property/
Source: Independent Institute
by Benjamin Powell
“The congressional fight over funding the Department of Homeland Security has caused massive security lines at many large airports around the country. Privatizing airport security could avoid this problem in the future, but a more radical reform — abolishing the Transportation Security Administration and its monopoly on security procedures — would be a better solution.” (03/30/26)
https://www.independent.org/article/2026/03/30/its-time-to-abolish-the-tsa/
Source: CounterPunch
by Dean Baker
“A weather person who told us to bundle up for the cold weather, but also be sure to drink plenty of fluids to protect against the heat, would not be taken very seriously. That is roughly the state of economics when it comes to basic demographic questions. On alternate days the economy seems to be suffering from too many people and too few people. Yet people somehow still take economists seriously on this issue.” (03/30/26)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by George Ford Smith
“Nock was persuaded by Franz Oppenheimer’s theory that people acquire wealth in one of two ways: either through work and exchange or theft. The first, Oppenheimer called the economic means, the second, the political means. States are the manifestation of the political means, the embodiment of a predatory class that coercively feeds off and controls its productive captives. Within the American state the occupants change periodically, and many people believe the troubles we’re experiencing are due to voting the wrong people into office. Better people would produce better government. There are several shortcomings to this idea.” (03/30/26)
https://mises.org/mises-wire/once-again-crisis-raises-question-why-does-state-exist
Source: New York Post
by Miranda Devine
“There is nothing more infuriating to a frustrated air traveler delayed for hours by the Democrat shutdown than to see senators strolling smugly by with VIP escorts. The worst offender last week was Senate Majority Leader John Thune, who hightailed it out of DC on Friday morning, hours after stitching up a duplicitous 2 a.m. deal to end the shutdown by caving to Democrat demands to defund ICE and border enforcement, at least for the time being. Elements of the Department of Homeland Security were funded in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act last year, but Thune’s deal freezes out immigration enforcement and border security functions that are all-important as we go to war against the world’s largest sponsor of Islamic terrorism.” (03/29/26)
https://nypost.com/2026/03/29/opinion/miranda-devine-cowardly-gop-senators-run-home/
Source: Foreign Policy
by Reza H Akbari
“For much of the 20th and 21st centuries, calls for an enemy’s total capitulation have carried enormous symbolic power in U.S. political culture. ‘Unconditional surrender’ seems to promise a total and morally unambiguous victory. Crucially, the power of the narrative does not end with surrender. In its most compelling form, it extends into a transformative vision of defeated societies not only accepting their losses but being liberated and remade in the American image, emerging as stable, prosperous democracies. In practice, however, even the most decisive military victories seldom translate into anything resembling the absolute defeat of a country’s body politic, its bureaucratic institutions, or its underlying ideological foundations, all of which tend instead to endure, adapt, and reconstitute themselves in ways that complicate the finality promised by the language of unconditional surrender.” (03/30/26)
Source: Antiwar.com
by Ramzy Baroud & Romana Rubeo
“Dimona is not an ordinary town. It lies adjacent to the Negev Nuclear Research Center, widely understood to be central to Israel’s nuclear weapons program. Located deep in the Naqab desert, the facility has long been treated as one of Israel’s most sensitive strategic sites, associated with plutonium production and long-term weapons capability. That context gives the strike its meaning. The Iranian attack on Dimona came hours after a renewed US-Israeli strike on Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility earlier the same day. … The sequence is not incidental. Natanz was struck in the morning; Dimona was hit later the same day. Even without an exact hour-by-hour timeline, the proximity establishes a clear operational logic: a nuclear facility in Iran is answered with a nuclear-adjacent site in Israel within hours.” (03/30/26)
Source: Paul Krugman
by Paul Krugman
“The ties that bind Hungary, Russia, European neo-Nazis – and MAGA.” (03/30/26)
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/trumps-america-and-the-axis-of-autocracy