Source: Liberalism.org
by Michael C Munger

“British philosopher Gilbert Ryle famously mocked Descartes’s notion of mind/body dualism, dubbing it ‘the ghost in the machine.’ The mind is in the body, but it’s not of the body. The mind controls the body, independently, ‘everywhere yet nowhere.’ There is a related problem in identifying a ‘will’ in the state: is the state the sort of thing that can have an active, separate will? Or is the will of the state simply the aggregate of individual goals, actions, and votes? The branch of political theory I inhabit, public choice, holds that ghosts don’t exist, because a foundational assumption is methodological individualism. But many people have argued for a romantic, collectivist approach.” (07/13/26)

https://www.liberalism.org/p/the-ghost-in-the-state

Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger

“With the death of 71-year-old U.S. Senator Lindsay Graham and the hospitalization of 84-year-old U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell, not to mention the 80-year-old President Trump, some commentators are questioning whether it’s a good thing that the federal government has so many senior citizens working in it. … The problem America faces, however, is not the old age of its federal officials but rather the dysfunctional systems that 20th-century and 21st-century Americans have grafted onto the federal government. Those systems have brought failure, death, and destruction of liberty and privacy. The result would be no different if the federal government were being run by people with an average age of 45.” (07/13/26)

https://www.fff.org/2026/07/13/the-problem-isnt-old-public-officials/

Source: Exiled Policy
by Jason Pye

“Ayn Rand captured the moral bankruptcy of racism better than almost anyone when she wrote that it is ‘the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism.’ She understood that racism reduces human beings to representatives of a group, assigning moral, social, and political significance to ancestry rather than treating people as individuals. That’s why phrases like ‘heritage American’ bother me. The phrase is deliberately vague. … Every American has a heritage. The descendants of enslaved people have one. The descendants of Ellis Island immigrants have one. The children of Vietnamese refugees have one. Native Americans certainly have one. Heritage isn’t the distinguishing feature. The phrase only makes sense if ‘heritage’ refers to a particular ancestry that some people believe is more authentically American than others.” (07/13/26)

https://exiledpolicy.substack.com/p/hiding-racism-and-nativism-behind

Source: Rutherford Institute
by John & Nisha Whitehead

“The government is watching. It watches where you go, whom you meet, where you worship, what medical offices you visit, what political rallies you attend, what protests you join, what books you read, what websites you visit and what causes you support. It watches through your phone, your car, your doorbell, your appliances, your purchases, your social media accounts and the cameras positioned along the roads you travel every day. This is how freedom dies in the digital police state: not always through dramatic declarations of martial law or soldiers stationed on every street corner, but through the gradual construction of a technological dragnet—an electronic concentration camp—so pervasive that privacy becomes impossible and anonymity becomes suspicious.” (07/13/26)

https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/while_the_political_circus_distracts_us_flock_builds_the_digital_police_state

Source: Underthrow
by Max Borders

“Jennifer Baker, PhD, receives about $100,000 per year in monetary compensation, plus an additional ~$30,000 in benefits. Because she works at a state university—The University of Charleston—supported by both state and federal taxpayers, she is the direct beneficiary of what we might call macrolooting. Her salary depends, at least in part, on compulsory taxation, placing her in the comfortable position of evaluating the ethics of breaching paywalls while leaving the coercive institutions that fund her livelihood unexamined. … ‘let’s turn now to the subject of ‘microlooting.’ Here, Baker opens a recent Psychology Today post. ‘If you deliberately scan one fewer lemon than you are taking at the self-checkout at Whole Foods, you might be ‘microlooting.'” (07/13/26)

https://underthrow.substack.com/p/microlooters-and-macrolooters