Source: Persuasion
by Luke Hallam

“It’s an occupational hazard of being a philosopher that you may one day end up being associated with ideas that are the precise opposite of what you actually argued — or which, at the very least, ignore the most important aspects of your worldview. Friedrich Nietzsche is doomed to be associated with a kind of moody adolescent nihilism he would certainly have rejected. Albert Camus is constantly lumped together with his frenemies, the French existentialists. Persuasion’s own Francis Fukuyama is still battling the false charge that he claimed there would be no more historical events after 1989. To this pantheon of the misunderstood we can add Niccolo Machiavelli.” (03/03/25)

https://www.persuasion.community/p/machiavelli-would-hate-trump

Source: New York Post
by Miranda Devine

“Anybody who watched the entire Oval Office meeting between President Trump and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky would know that it was not an ‘ambush’ or ‘setup’ by Trump, as characterized by Democrats and malign media entities. It was the opposite. If anyone came to that meeting in bad faith, it was clearly Zelensky, whose body language and attitude was negative from the start. Trump could not have been more cordial, having steered the complex negotiations with Russia and Ukraine to a first step where he believed peace was a real possibility. But Zelensky had other ideas. He contradicted, interrupted and insulted Trump, even before Vice President JD Vance said a word. It was 11 minutes in when Zelensky first contradicted Trump with a gratuitous defense of Europe’s financial support for the war, which Trump repeatedly has noted has been less than America’s.” (03/02/25)

https://nypost.com/2025/03/02/opinion/zelensky-was-the-true-instigator-of-the-oval-office-fracas-not-an-ambush-from-trump/

Source: Coyote Blog
by Warren Meyer

“Here is Coyote’s first law of incentives: There are always incentives. If they are not embodied in written performance metrics, then there are unwritten ones that rule behaviors. And these unwritten incentives are generally a) very powerful and b) almost never aligned with the greater organization’s goals. … To some extent the agencies I worked with were better than most because public lands agencies (eg NPS, state parks) attracted people with a sense of mission which could motivate people even when the organization did not. But in general, government employees operate in a vacuum without any positive metrics — they can’t prove themselves by meeting or exceeding this or that goal because the goals have not been assigned and are not measured. So the default metric becomes this: to avoid screwing up.” (03/03/25)

https://coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2025/03/performance-measures-and-incentives-part-2-what-they-teach-us-about-government-behavior.html

Source: Cato Institute
by Ryan Bourne

“My colleague Deirdre McCloskey, back in 2018, listed over 100 economic and social problems that, through the ages, have been deemed as market imperfections, bad consequences of markets and challenges of limited government, or else failures of standard economics, that supposedly require corrective government action or at least different policies. I’ve trimmed and then added a bunch to her list below. Many of the new additions have surfaced or grown in prominence since her paper was published. What are we missing?” (03/03/25)

https://www.cato.org/commentary/problems-supposedly-requiring-government-action

Source: Big Head Press
by Scott Bieser

Cartoon. (03/03/25)

https://www.quantumvibe.com/strip?page=2524