“Congress shouldn’t need a lecture on why putting Russ Vought’s deputy in charge of its watchdog is a terrible idea. Well, here we are. The White House is considering Eric Ueland as comptroller general, head of the Government Accountability Office (GAO). Ueland serves as deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget, under Vought. The administration whose conduct GAO has repeatedly found unlawful now wants one of its senior officials to run the institution that scrutinizes that conduct. This is a terrible idea.” (10/12/260
“First, let me say that this prize is long overdue. In 2009, I asked my PhD advisor, Miles Kimball, who was the greatest living macroeconomist. Without hesitation, he answered ‘Bob Hall’, and said he would be very surprised if Hall didn’t win the Nobel at some point. Hall’s work is breathtakingly broad; if you want good summaries, I recommend Alex Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen (as usual). As for Michael Woodford, everyone I know assumed that if New Keynesian macro ever did get the prize, Woodford would be included, as he literally wrote the book on it. But anyway, let’s talk about New Keynesian economics — what it is, how it came about, why it’s important, and why it didn’t get a Nobel until now.” (10/13/26)
“[M]ost of Flock’s network and its competitors’ cameras remain in place. And fans of the technology want to keep it that way; they argue that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy on roads, and that a network of cameras that logs every passing vehicle is a vital tool for catching criminals. Most surveillance boosters don’t deny that serious abuses have happened or wholly dismiss privacy concerns. Instead, they urge the use of safeguards and the passage of regulations to address them. But this technology is already ubiquitous. States and localities should not permit its dangers to persist in the hope that one day, our often passive legislators will act. Instead, Americans should work to ban mass surveillance of public roads in every jurisdiction where they can secure support from elected officials until strong protections are in place.” (10/12/26)
“Last week, I published a piece on a private company called ID.me, which has over a billion dollars in contracts with federal and state agencies to provide secure identification when citizens do digital transactions with government agencies. Because this company is a dot-me rather than a dot-com, several readers wrote me to say that they had just assumed it was part of the government. Over 150 million Americans now have ID.me accounts, which are required to access several government agencies. ID.me has a policy of never selling data. But that’s not the problem. The problem is that allowing citizens to access government agencies is a necessary government function. As I wrote, contracting out that function deprives the government of core competence, and the dependence on for-profit vendors grows over time.” [editor’s not4e: I added the “?” to make this a discussion, instead of the assertion of the socialist pundit – SAT] (10/13/26)
“It’s not unusual for victims or their families to be present when death sentences are carried out. After courts rejected a media outlet’s request to publicly broadcast the Oklahoma City bomber’s lethal injection, survivors were allowed to watch Timothy McVeigh’s execution remotely via closed-circuit television. We already have established, appropriate ways to give accountability and closure to those harmed by the criminals sentenced to death. But for the rest of us, no matter how heinous the crime was, a public execution isn’t something we should look forward to with ghoulish glee. A televised one will give us no extra measure of justice that a normally conducted one would not.” (10/13/26)
“Governments have spent decades issuing dietary guidelines, sponsoring public health campaigns, and encouraging consumers to cut back on sugary, salty, and fatty foods. Now they’re moving beyond persuasion and adopting more aggressive measures to influence what people eat. In an October 8 article titled ‘Nagging People to Eat Healthily Does Not Work,’ The Economist describes a growing international movement to tax unhealthy foods, restrict advertising, require warning labels, and regulate how supermarkets display and promote their products. Such measures are needed, officials argue, because the earlier approach failed to curb rising obesity rates. … The government has a poor track record in providing nutritional advice.” (10/12/26)
“In 1992, the urbanist Jane Jacobs argued that civilization runs on two moral codes, which she calls syndromes. 1. Guardian Syndrome prizes loyalty, hierarchy, and force. 2. Commercial Syndrome prizes innovation, production, and trade. For centuries, these two codes split the world between the State and the Market. But remember, these exist only as aggregations of people—bureaucrats and businesspeople. Bureaucrats are supposed to bring order and solve societal problems. Businesspeople are supposed to produce and trade goods and services. But an uncomfortable truth lingers: As State and Market have long sought a negotiated political arrangement called the mixed economy, it has created various subspecies of fascism. … Today, that arrangement is breaking down. It’s breaking down because Guardian Syndrome and Commercial Syndrome are functionally incompatible.” (10/12/26)
“In 2017, Duke historian Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains argued that the libertarian movement had helped make overt racism in American politics mainstream and undermined liberal democracy. … but she missed the real story. Bizarrely, MacLean focused on Nobel laureate James Buchanan. The far better target would have been ‘Mr. Libertarian’ and co-founder of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, Murray Rothbard. Buchanan was an academic libertarian, while Rothbard spent his later career arguing that libertarianism should ally with the racist, nativist populism of the nationalist right. … The historian Quinn Slobodian takes up MacLean’s task (from a different angle) in his 2025 book, Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right. … Despite its limitations, it demonstrates that libertarians had the intellectual tools to resist the far right’s encroachment but, on the main, chose not to use them.” (10/12/26)
“The case that Trump is a latterday mercantilist is surprisingly strong. Mercantilism was never a tidy theory. It was a set of habits that involves treating trade as a contest, counting the surplus as the score, and letting the state steer commerce toward national power. On each count, Trump’s record fits. The mercantilists believed one nation’s gain was another’s loss. Trump speaks in exactly these terms. A trade deficit with a country means America is ‘losing’ to it, and a surplus means winning. Mainstream economists see a bilateral deficit as a mostly meaningless accounting result of millions of voluntary exchanges. Trump sees it as a scorecard.” (10/12/26)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by George Ford Smith
“Ask a young person whether he personally consented to everything the federal government has the legal authority to require of him. If he answers no, the conventional reply is that direct consent isn’t necessary: he is represented by elected officials. But representation is not agency in the ordinary sense. He has signed no contract with his representative, cannot direct his votes, and cannot terminate the relationship even if the representative breaks all his campaign promises. Furthermore, he is still subject to their legislation even if he didn’t vote or if the legislation was passed before he was eligible to vote. How many people alive today voted for legislation establishing a legal counterfeiting racket known as the federal reserve or the income tax and its associated hit squad, the IRS? Or the Selective Service Act of 1918?” (10/12/26)
