“It’s official. Mayor Freddie O’Connell is running again. His decision breaks the ten-year streak of mayors who have ducked out of a second term, whether of their own volition or due to criminal negligence. ‘The next four years are about turning progress into permanence,’ O’Connell said. For decades, Nashville steeped in the cultural ferment of the country without drawing too much attention outside the Southeast. That all changed as Nashville’s explosive growth coincided with the cultural ascendancy of country music. Nashville is understood in the wider culture as a Red City. Country music, the horses out in Franklin, and lake culture all intertwine to give the area a distinctly Republican appeal – not to mention the makeup of the state government.” (05/06/26)
“Legislators and the Kentucky Board of Education should act to restore proper oversight, ensure compliance with state law, and preserve the ability to accurately measure student performance over time.” (05/06/26)
“Tax season is a useful reminder that how we organize financial information matters just as much as the numbers themselves. Taxpayers file returns, but the underlying numbers come from employers, who report wages directly to the government. Without that upstream reporting, the total simply would be error-prone. That’s true, too, of carbon accounting: There are several ways to measure emissions, each targeting a different node in the supply chain.” (05/06/26)
“The notion that artificial intelligence at full bloom might eliminate the need for money reflects a deep confusion about what money is and does. Money is not merely a barter-avoiding convenience layered onto an otherwise frictionless world. It is a solution to fundamental problems of exchange, profound difficulties in coordination, and comparison of alternatives under scarcity. Even in a hypothetical future defined by extraordinary productivity gains and broadly collapsing prices, those underlying problems do not disappear. Instead they change form, and for as long as scarcity, tradeoffs, and uncertainty persist in any domain, so too will the need for money.” (05/06/26)
“Is Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) going to switch parties? That’s the scuttlebutt in Washington, D.C., according to Politico. He has been one of Trump’s loudest supporters among congressional Democrats, and with the GOP looking down the barrel of a catastrophic loss in the upcoming midterms, they are hoping to buy themselves a Senate seat—literally. It seems Sens. Dave McCormick (R-PA) and Katie Britt (R-AL) have been assiduously working on Fetterman. Donald Trump as usual cut to the chase and offered a huge sack of cash by way of a message delivered through Fox News contributor Sean Hannity: ‘Your job is to tell him,’ as Hannity recalled the conversation, ‘‘He’s gonna run as a Republican, he’s gonna have our full support, more money than he ever dreamed of, and he’s gonna win big.’'” (05/06/26)
“I think Trump realizes that both the U.S. economy and the world economy will be greatly damaged and possibly go in to a major recession if the war is not ended very soon. JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said it ‘will be worse than people think.’ The President seems to be trying very hard to reach an agreement, but he knows Israel wants to go in the other direction and escalate the war even further. And he knows the Israel Lobby has almost total control of the Congress and will go along with Netanyahu no matter what.” (05/06/26)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by David Gordon & Roger E. Bissell
“Libertarianism has no ‘fixed philosophical essence,’ [Matt] Zwolinski says, or you wouldn’t have seen the drastic swings in how the term was applied between Déjacque’s anarcho-communism of the 1850s and Leonard Read’s free markets and limited government of the 1950s, let alone the present-day. There simply has never been a permanent, stable paradigm of liberty. Yes, an apparent consensus was arrived at in the 1970s in the ‘rights-based free-market’ views of Robert Nozick, Ayn Rand, and Murray Rothbard — which Zwolinski also tellingly labels as rationalist and absolutist. (Code-word alert: he means unempirical and dogmatic, which are bad things, unlike the empirical and flexible approach he favors.) But this was more of a historical accident, or perhaps a breathing spell, before society in general and libertarian theory in particular began a steady unraveling and loss of cohesion.” (05/05/26)
