Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Mark Nayler

“Luis de Guindos escaped Spanish politics just in time. In March 2018, he stepped down as Economy Minister, having served under prime minister Mariano Rajoy since 2011; three months later, Rajoy was ousted in a no-confidence vote, his Popular Party engulfed in a huge corruption scandal. De Guindos, now 66, has spent the last eight years as Vice President of the European Central Bank (ECB), the institution responsible for maintaining price stability throughout the bloc. He hands over to Croatia’s Boris Vujĉić at the end of this month, leaving Spain without representation on the ECB’s six-member board for the first time in several years, a situation that Madrid is determined to rectify. Under the Socialist leadership of Pedro Sánchez, Spain has emerged as one of the strongest voices in the EU.” (05/10/26)

https://fee.org/articles/seats-of-power/

Source: The American Prospect
by James Baratta

“The only reason we know that U.S. intelligence agencies will maintain their sweeping spying powers under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) through March 2027, irrespective of whether Congress extends the program ahead of its statutory deadline in mid-June, is because of the Fourth Estate. On April 9, The New York Times revealed that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) judge who authorized the program’s annual recertification in a March 17 ruling ‘also objected to tools that agencies with access to the raw data … have created to allow analysts to process messages.’ In analyzing this data, the FBI and National Security Agency (NSA) use filter tools to sift through queries for information on individuals who have communicated with foreign intelligence targets, thus making them legal targets for surveillance. Apparently, those tools are prone to misuse.” (05/11/26)

https://prospect.org/2026/05/11/government-surveillance-spying-fisa-nsa-fbi-republicans/

Source: Paul Krugman
by Paul Krugman

“Interrogating the conventional wisdom that Europe is lagging America.” (05/11/26)

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/is-europe-in-economic-decline

Source: Reason
by Thomas W Hazlett

“Turner held the lead spear when the Late 20th Century Barbarians stormed the gates of the Old Order in American media. Meeting the moment at the perfect instant — when a ‘deregulation wave’ was opening doors long shut — Turner flipped the script on ‘public interest’ regulation concocted during the Progressive Era. Intellectuals largely bemoaned the passing of the administrative state, and the Cronkite audience it favored, devoid of controversy and offered as the ‘news from nowhere’ (as a CBS executive bragged). But the closed-loop spoon feeding was inimical to freedom, open inquiry, and honest debate. Even before he was finished, the creative destruction triggered by Ted Turner’s wild gambits had left the tyranny of licensed, bureaucratic TV in rubble.” (05/10/26)

https://reason.com/2026/05/10/ted-turner-entrepreneur-of-his-age/

Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Joshua Mawhorter

“As kids we may remember the old trope — often seen on TV or in movies — where a stronger kid would overpower a weaker kid and use the weaker kid’s hands and arms to hit him, asking mockingly, ‘Why are you hitting yourself?’ Most adults would recognize this as illegitimate for obvious reasons: though the weaker kid’s hands are literally hitting him, he is obviously being coerced against his will, such that the stronger kid is the aggressor. While most adults would pride themselves on the ability to distinguish between external coercion and self-inflicted punishment, they often fail this when it comes to the state. In fact, this is the very core of Thomas Hobbes’s social contract theory — since the state represents the people by social contract, whatever the state does to an individual, that individual has consensually done it to himself.” (05/08/26)

https://mises.org/mises-wire/hobbess-state-why-are-you-hitting-yourself