Source: Adam Smith Institute
by Madsen Pirie

“Economics has a small stock of principles that a first-year student can recite and a Cabinet minister can forget within the hour. Incentives matter; Taxes change behaviour; Prices are signals. These are not obscure theorems. They are closer to proverbs, the kind of thing an intelligent teenager grasps within an afternoon. Yet politicians who could tell you the exact yield on a ten-year gilt will propose a policy that assumes people respond to subsidies but not to taxes, or that a price can be fixed by decree without anyone noticing. The puzzle is not that people are stupid. Despite obvious counter-examples, few politicians are. The puzzle is that intelligence and economic literacy are almost unrelated skills, and the political process actively selects against the second.” (08/04/26)

https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/why-the-intelligent-forget-the-obvious

Source: The Hill
by Merrill Matthews

“After a stinging but widely expected loss at the U.S. Supreme Court, President Trump pressed his enablers to search, once again, for some law he could use to justify imposing new tariff rates on dozens of countries, both friends and foes alike. Yet no Trump policy has been a bigger economic and political failure than his tariffs, alienating other countries, harming U.S. businesses and, most importantly, enraging American voters.” (08/04/26)

https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/6006905-us-trade-deficit-tariffs/

Source: Town Hall
by Stephen Moore

“COVID-19 was a traumatic experience for our families, small businesses, schools, and country. Understandably, people don’t like thinking or talking about it. But we must. We now know, thanks to Sen. Rand Paul’s doggedness and Anthony Fauci’s supreme arrogance, which he freely expresses in his diary, that almost every decision made by the medical-industrial complex was exactly the wrong thing to do. Fauci has blown himself up, and almost overnight he has gone from hero to antihero. Politicians and the media didn’t take note of the fact that Fauci had a track record of hysterical and erroneous predictions about viruses before — he was, for example, the public health official peddling the nonsense about heterosexual AIDS. Instead, when Fauci went on TV in front of tens of millions of Americans preaching Armageddon and contradicting everything Trump was saying, he became a saint. No wonder Fauci developed a god complex.” (08/04/26)

https://townhall.com/columnists/stephenmoore/2026/08/04/five-lessons-learned-from-the-fauci-fiasco-n2680610

Source: Expression
by Chloe Ratner

“The ideological tolerance gap on campus is shrinking, but not because students are becoming more open-minded. Rather, it appears they are becoming less tolerant across the board.” (08/05/26)

https://expression.fire.org/p/college-students-arent-becoming-less

Source: The Bulwark
by Philip Rotner

“The so-called “anti-weaponization fund” established as part of a purported settlement between President Trump and the IRS isn’t dead, it’s just sleeping. Don’t be fooled by the weasel-worded statements that Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche posted on the Department of Justice website and tweeted out late Sunday night. They are clearly intended to give a false impression that a stake has finally been driven into the fund’s heart. It hasn’t. Blanche posted two written statements on Sunday night, one that he calls an ‘order’ and one that he calls an ‘update.’ Let’s look at each of them in turn.” (08/04/26)

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/dont-believe-todd-blanche-about-trump-slush-fund-from-hell-cornyn-tillis

Source: Christian Science Monitor
by staff

“Ask an Iranian in Tehran these days how the war is going and you might get this response: Which war? The on-again, off-again war on Iran by U.S. President Donald Trump? Or the war inside Iran by a regime whose new fear campaign against its people appears to be backfiring? Since January, when Iran saw the largest unrest since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, executions of political dissenters have surged. In late July, the regime escalated its intimidation tactics by holding the first public executions since 2022 – but not before a large crowd tried to stop the construction of gallows in a public square. Videos on social media show security forces in the central city of Isfahan chasing protesters before two young men were hanged.” (08/03/26)

https://www.csmonitor.com/Editorials/the-monitors-view/2026/0803/Iran-s-war-on-its-homefront