Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by David Gordon

“Paul Cantor will probably be best known to readers of the Mises page for his pioneering use of Austrian economics in literary criticism, and many will also be aware of his brilliant studies of popular culture. (For the former topic, see my review.) He is also one of the world’s leading Shakespeare critics, and his principal theme in this area is Shakespeare as a political thinker, a theme that proves as illuminating as it might at first appear surprising. … Cantor argues that in Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra, the plays discussed in Shakespeare’s Rome, Shakespeare presents a profound account of the transition from Republic to Empire.” (09/16/21)

https://mises.org/wire/shakespeare-helps-us-understand-romes-descent-empire

Source: EconLog
by Bryan Caplan

“Zero cities with over one million people currently have Republican mayors. From the standpoint of the textbook Median Voter Model, this is awfully puzzling. Even if urbanites are extremely left-wing, you would expect urban Republicans to move sharply left to accommodate them. Once they do so, the standard prediction is that Republicans will win half the time. But plainly they don’t. One possibility is that Republican politicians are too stubbornly ideological to moderate. But the idea that virtually no one in the Republican Party is power-hungry enough to tell urban voters what they want to hear is deeply implausible. The better explanation, as I’ve explained before, is that urban voters have party preferences as well as policy preferences. They don’t just want left-wing [sic] policies; they want left-wing [sic] policies delivered by the Democrats.” (09/16/21)

https://www.econlib.org/why-are-there-zero-republican-mega-cities/

Source: The American Spectator
by Shmuel Klatzkin

“One of the immediate effects of the shutdown of legal booze was the scramble to obtain alcohol in whatever illegal way it could be had. … The government had already anticipated that people would try to divert the industrial alcohol to the glasses of now-criminal tipplers. The government therefore decreed that industrial alcohol had to be laced with chemicals that made it foul tasting and even poisonous. … Deciding that causing thousands of deaths was fine as long as the result was less drinking, and since dead men — or women — don’t drink, the bureaucrats pushed things forward. … The callous zealots of Prohibition may have been reincarnated in the mandatory vaxxers of the current Administration. They give no indication that they find any problem in causing millions of people to lose their jobs if they continue to make their own decisions about whether or not to vaccinate.” (09/16/21)

https://spectator.org/the-callous-zealots-of-prohibition-and-their-successors/

Source: Fox News Forum
by Tucker Carlson

“Yesterday we learned that Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is a danger to the country. That was not totally surprising. We already knew he was a reckless nutcase. In June, in the middle of a televised congressional hearing, Milley leveled a racial attack against more than half of this country. Milley told Congress that something called [w]hite rage was a national crisis. He never proved it or even defined the term and yet still he kept his job, which says as much about Congress as it does about him. Then in July, we learned that Milley had suggested the U.S. military was willing to use violence against Donald Trump, who was then the sitting president. ‘We’re the guys with guns,’ he told fellow officers. Still, Congress did nothing.” (09/16/21)

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/tucker-carlson-mark-milley-is-a-danger-to-the-country-and-congress-doesnt-seem-to-care

Source: Reason
by Peter Suderman

“After Congress passed the American Recovery Plan, Joe Biden’s $2 trillion economic relief legislation, the president proposed roughly $4 trillion in further spending. The American Jobs Plan, also known as the president’s infrastructure proposal, accounted for about half of that money. The rest was included in the American Families Plan, a $1.8 trillion package that the Biden administration described as a set of ‘investments and tax credits for American families and children over ten years.’ In other words, it was a welfare bill, and quite an ambitious one. The plan would put most working-age American households on the dole, even when the economy is strong and the country is not in crisis.” (for publication 10/21)

https://reason.com/2021/09/16/america-on-the-dole/