“For the past couple of years, American politicians on the left and right have competed to define a political buzzword: affordability. Does it mean increasing individual resources to meet everyday costs? Or raising the output of goods and services to lower prices? Or both? On Tuesday, Congress did the country a favor by passing a bill – in a rare case of broad bipartisanship – that helps give common meaning to the word. The measure puts a stamp of approval on an often unescapable law: that supply will rise to meet demand when free to do so. The bill, which still awaits the president’s approval, mandates a range of initiatives aimed mainly at raising the nation’s housing stock. It would reduce production bottlenecks rather than raise subsidies for home purchases. The number of parts in the legislation itself reflects how much lawmakers endorse a supply-positive approach.” (06/24/26)
“In recent posts on Trump and dictatorship, people have asked me – how do you know you’re not suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome? I take this seriously; we’ve all lost loved ones to this condition. The best check on my reasoning would be an objective measure of the health of American democracy. There are several ‘democracy indices’ that purport to do this, but they have a mixed reputation. … The newest entrant in this space – Metaculus Democracy Threat Index – works differently, and deserves a closer look.” (06/25/26)
“Facebook in 2011 was already a centralized platform owned by a single company. What changed was that the underlying incentives of that centralized architecture had time to work. Centralized systems create chokepoints. Chokepoints, once they exist, attract everyone with an interest in squeezing them: companies looking to extract more value from users, governments looking to extract compliance from companies, and political movements looking to extract influence from both. In 2011, Facebook hadn’t yet figured out how lucrative those chokepoints would be, or how much leverage they offered to the powerful. By 2025, everyone had figured it out.” (06/25/26)
“There is an aesthetic and romantic tradition, a very old strand of thought predating socialism, and going back through Ruskin and Morris to Romantic-era reactions against industrialization. It simply finds modernity ugly, hurried, and spiritually depleting. Smallholding, craft, and seasonal eating have a genuine appeal to people who feel that modern life has lost something. This is not quite an argument, it is a sensibility which should not be dismissed. There are real questions about meaning and community in industrial modernity, but it tends to romanticize pre-industrial poverty selectively. Institutional capture has boosted the degrowth movement because much of its language now comes from NGOs, international bodies, and academic departments that have strong incentives to find crises requiring their management.” (06/25/26)
“There’s vastly too much hand-wringing over President Trump’s diplomacy and potential dealmaking with Iran, and it’s coming from friends and foes alike. I think it has more to do with America’s crumbling political infrastructure, than it does regarding the merits of Mr. Trump’s efforts. First of all, the so-called memorandum of understanding is a nonbinding political document which simply outlines topics to be covered in the months ahead for some kind of final deal. Some people are taking parts of this MOU completely out of context for their own political gain. Let’s step back for a moment.” [editor’s note: Yes, let’s step back and watch Larry Kudlow try to explain away the loss of an illegal and entirely optional war – TLK] (06/25/26)
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Sergio Martínez
“A central bank wields a peculiar kind of power. It holds a monopoly over money, and money runs through nearly every transaction we make. Because of that reach, a monetary mistake travels through credit markets, housing, banks, pension funds, and the budgets of millions of people who never had a say in the policy. That is the right place to begin a reflection on Alan Greenspan, who died on June 22, 2026, at the age of 100. His was a mixed legacy. Here was a man who understood the power of markets, and who nonetheless turned on those markets when they soured, blaming private excess for a crisis his own institution had helped make possible.” (06/25/26)
“Clarence Thomas went more than 10 years without asking a single substantive question from the bench. His silence between 2006 and 2016 prompted commentators to call his courtroom quietude embarrassing, a sign of fatigue and a lack of intellectual candlepower. Even earlier in his career, he had earned the nickname of ‘Scalia’s Puppet’ for his habit of joining majority opinions written by Justice Antonin Scalia, the outspoken and reactionary ‘originalist’ who shared the dais with him until his death in 2016. But the characterization of Thomas as an inattentive echo of Scalia is wrong. Thomas has always been more extreme and dangerous than Scalia, and his influence has never been greater.” (06/25/26)
“Most of the calumnies against Elon Musk come from people who are either envious or completely unaware of the basic principles of economics. Or both. That being said, not everyone ‘in my camp’ admires or defends the South African-American tech magnate.” (06/25/26)
“When Congress passed the Controlled Substances Act in 1970, marijuana’s placement in Schedule I was explicitly provisional, a placeholder pending review by a presidential commission. The Shafer Commission, chaired by a Republican governor and composed largely of President Richard Nixon’s appointees, concluded in 1972 that marijuana did not meet the criteria for Schedule I and recommended decriminalizing personal possession. Nixon ignored the report and escalated the war on drugs. The provisional classification became permanent by default. Since 1965, an estimated 29 million Americans have been arrested on marijuana charges, roughly 90 percent of them for possession alone. The most damaging consequence of Schedule I, however, has not been to cannabis users, who have gained access through state legalization, but to the research enterprise.” (06/25/26)
