“Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) greeted the news that Elon Musk had become a trillionaire by — what else? — touting a plan to raise federal spending and taxes. Musk ‘pays the same amount into Social Security as someone making $184,500,’ Sanders tweeted. He said his bill would ‘end that absurdity,’ eliminate the program’s shortfall for 75 years and pay for an expansion of Social Security benefits. … Sanders’s idea is terrible. It would be a much larger and more harmful tax increase than its supporters let on and would further warp the federal government’s already perverse spending priorities. … The tax cap is there to keep benefits related to contributions. Musk won’t pay any more than someone making $184,500, but he also won’t get a bigger check than that person.” (06/17/26)
Source: Karl Dickey’s Freedom Vanguard
by Karl Dickey
“Not many people paid attention, but the 2026 Florida legislative session took an unusual turn with regard to AI regulation. The main issue isn’t whether AI should be regulated, but whether that should happen at the state or national level, or not at all. In Florida, lawmakers rejected Governor DeSantis’[s] ‘AI Bill of Rights.’ The Florida Senate supported DeSantis, but the House did not. When it comes to the Internet, how can a state control how its citizens use certain websites, especially when people can easily circumvent the rules? And I would posit that, even if one were in favor of regulating AI, we do not even know which regulation would be most prudent without inhibiting its positive impact on society. So far, it seems most regulatory proposals I have seen around the country, including in Florida, have been alarmist, reactionary, and driven by emotion rather than objective reasoning.” (06/17/26)
“Frustration with high costs has made younger generations more receptive to claims that wealth requires exploitation. But envy-driven attacks only limit our future opportunities.” (06/17/26)
“Last week, Dr. Steven Quay published recommendations to improve the integrity of the nation’s biosecurity research following the Covid-19 crisis. Dr. Quay is a prominent figure in the resistance to the Covid-19 origins coverup in addition to his medical and academic pedigrees. His recommendations complement those of James Erdman, an Office of the Director of National Intelligence and CIA professional, who articulated before Congress in April that the government’s biosecurity apparatus is convoluted, clumsy, and unaccountable. I echoed similar comments in a prior piece from my perspective as a military officer also involved in countering the coverup. In the vein of Dr. Quay and Mr. Erdman’s recommendations, I offer further comments towards America’s Covid-19 post-mortem.” (06/17/26)
“Americans say they want to bring back industry. President Donald Trump ran on reindustrialization and won. But when it comes to actual building, mining, and developing, people too often shut it down. Build, they say, just not in my backyard. Peter Thiel put his finger on this pathology over a decade ago. ‘We wanted flying cars,’ he wrote, ‘instead we got 140 characters.’ His point wasn’t merely about venture capital timidity. It was about a society that stopped building physical things, retreating into digital abstraction while factories closed, supply chains migrated to China, and infrastructure crumbled. Now, we are making the same mistake again, in real time, with higher stakes.” [editor’s note: Actually, the US builds more “physical things” than it ever has before — it just doesn’t use as much human labor to do so – TLK] (06/17/26)
Source: Niskanen Center
by Lawson Mansell & David Schwartzman
“At more than $21 billion annually, Medicare’s Graduate Medical Education (GME) payments are the federal government’s single largest investment in physician training, but the nearly 40-year-old formula for determining payments has not been meaningfully adjusted to address the growing mismatch between where doctors are needed and where they practice.” (06/17/26)
“When Trump launched a war against Iran in late February, his MAGA movement suddenly became nearly indistinguishable from the neoconservative foreign policy Trump once abhorred. For nearly four months, Washington hawks like Senator Lindsey Graham and radio jock Mark Levin were riding high. But over time it became clearer that the president was looking for a way out and now the president has reportedly reached a memorandum of understanding with Iran to end the fighting, open the Strait of Hormuz, and to keep talking. Trump’s friends, who were hoping for Iranian capitulation and regime change, even if that meant indefinite bombing and blockading, aren’t very happy today.” (06/17/26)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Connor O’Keeffe
“The eye-catching dollar amounts reported as the net worths of the richest people in the world, like Elon Musk, are not large piles of cash sitting around in bank accounts gathering dust. They are mostly the present value of the companies they own. It is not even possible to tax or confiscate these assets without destroying most or all of the initial value. Figures like Warren and Newsom know this. But the implication that the rich are simply ‘hoarding’ trillions of dollars of wealth is useful to them. It feeds the impression that all of our economic problems are, in essence, problems with the distribution of final consumable wealth.” (06/17/26)
Source: Independent Institute
by Stephen P Halbrook
“United States v. DeBorba, decided on June 3, is the latest Ninth Circuit decision that seeks to exclude firearm parts from protection in the reference to the ‘arms’ that the people have a right to keep and bear. The court held that ‘‘optional accessories’ to firearms — such as gun slings, scopes, and, importantly, silencers — fall outside of the Second Amendment’s plain text because they are ‘accoutrements’ and not arms.’ The test for whether an object is included in ‘arms’ is supposedly based on whether it ‘is necessary to the ordinary operation of the weapon.’ ‘Ordinary’ means anything you want it to mean.” (06/17/26)
