Source: The Dispatch
by Micah Ables

“It’s not unusual for victims or their families to be present when death sentences are carried out. After courts rejected a media outlet’s request to publicly broadcast the Oklahoma City bomber’s lethal injection, survivors were allowed to watch Timothy McVeigh’s execution remotely via closed-circuit television. We already have established, appropriate ways to give accountability and closure to those harmed by the criminals sentenced to death. But for the rest of us, no matter how heinous the crime was, a public execution isn’t something we should look forward to with ghoulish glee. A televised one will give us no extra measure of justice that a normally conducted one would not.” (10/13/26)

https://thedispatch.com/article/nidal-hasan-execution-fort-hood-livestream/

Source: Reason
by Jeffrey A Singer

“Governments have spent decades issuing dietary guidelines, sponsoring public health campaigns, and encouraging consumers to cut back on sugary, salty, and fatty foods. Now they’re moving beyond persuasion and adopting more aggressive measures to influence what people eat. In an October 8 article titled ‘Nagging People to Eat Healthily Does Not Work,’ The Economist describes a growing international movement to tax unhealthy foods, restrict advertising, require warning labels, and regulate how supermarkets display and promote their products. Such measures are needed, officials argue, because the earlier approach failed to curb rising obesity rates. … The government has a poor track record in providing nutritional advice.” (10/12/26)

https://reason.com/2026/10/12/the-government-doesnt-know-whats-best-for-you-why-let-it-decide-what-you-should-eat/

Source: Underthrow
by Max Borders

“In 1992, the urbanist Jane Jacobs argued that civilization runs on two moral codes, which she calls syndromes. 1. Guardian Syndrome prizes loyalty, hierarchy, and force. 2. Commercial Syndrome prizes innovation, production, and trade. For centuries, these two codes split the world between the State and the Market. But remember, these exist only as aggregations of people—bureaucrats and businesspeople. Bureaucrats are supposed to bring order and solve societal problems. Businesspeople are supposed to produce and trade goods and services. But an uncomfortable truth lingers: As State and Market have long sought a negotiated political arrangement called the mixed economy, it has created various subspecies of fascism. … Today, that arrangement is breaking down. It’s breaking down because Guardian Syndrome and Commercial Syndrome are functionally incompatible.” (10/12/26)

https://underthrow.substack.com/p/what-comes-after-politics

Source: Liberal Currents
by Janet Bufton

“In 2017, Duke historian Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains argued that the libertarian movement had helped make overt racism in American politics mainstream and undermined liberal democracy. … but she missed the real story. Bizarrely, MacLean focused on Nobel laureate James Buchanan. The far better target would have been ‘Mr. Libertarian’ and co-founder of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, Murray Rothbard. Buchanan was an academic libertarian, while Rothbard spent his later career arguing that libertarianism should ally with the racist, nativist populism of the nationalist right. … The historian Quinn Slobodian takes up MacLean’s task (from a different angle) in his 2025 book, Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right. … Despite its limitations, it demonstrates that libertarians had the intellectual tools to resist the far right’s encroachment but, on the main, chose not to use them.” (10/12/26)

https://www.liberalcurrents.com/a-hard-look-at-libertarianism/