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Information from some sites may not be reliable, or may not be vetted.
Some sources may require subscription.
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from FEE (Foundation for Economic Education)
[Information from this site may not be reliable.]
Illegal Immigration is Way Down, Should We Thank Trump?
Illegal immigration is at its lowest point since the Great Depression. President Trump has claimed success, but nearly all of the decrease occurred under prior administrations.
Where Do Prices Come From?
Many people think that haggling is a game of psychological manipulation, and it is certainly is that, but more importantly, it reflects the disinformation between buyer and seller. The seller knows his cost, and more importantly, the going market rate, but the buyer usually does not. Haggling is, therefore, a way of indirectly surveying the price the seller thinks the market will bear. Sometimes the price depends on the cost of a good to the seller, but it just as likely may not. A fashion retailer will sell out of fashion clothing far below cost, and a hot, imported gadget may sell for several times what it cost the seller to acquire.
Soft Despotism Is the Unique Threat to American Liberty
Contrary to partisan and doomsayer laments, the United States remains exceptional, even in regard to its unique despotism.
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from First Things
The recovery in priestly vocations seems to be over. Between 1978 and 2012, after the great crisis of the 1970s following Vatican II, seminaries around the world enjoyed a season of growth. The growth was not constant, nor was it uniform across countries and continents. But the trend was clear. Numbers revealed recently by the Central Office of Statistics of the Holy See show that in the past five years, the vocations crisis has returned.
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from The Guardian (UK)
[Information from this site may be unreliable.]
Amazon paid just £15m in tax on European revenues of £19.5bn
Online retailer’s UK warehouse and logistics operation more than halved its corporation tax bill from £15.8m to £7.4m.
Amazon paid just £15m in tax on European revenues of £19.5bn
Online retailer’s UK warehouse and logistics operation more than halved its corporation tax bill from £15.8m to £7.4m.
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from The Heritage Foundation
[Information from this site may be unreliable.]
The U.S.–China Economic Relationship: Time for a Change in Tone
U.S. and Chinese officials recently met for the inaugural Comprehensive Economic Dialogue (CED) following a 100-day plan to jumpstart bilateral economic relations. Several notable outcomes, such as a commitment to allow beef exports to China, have been celebrated as successes. Moving forward in U.S.–China economic relations, the Trump Administration and Congress should maintain national security interests, play down future dialogues, take targeted action against intellectual property theft, and protect America’s free-market principles.
Impact Aid Program: A Path toward Educational Freedom for Military Families and Other Federally Connected Children
Transitioning Impact Aid into a system of education savings accounts (ESAs) beginning with children attending school in heavily impacted districts and those living on tribal lands represents the bulk of spending under Impact Aid. The Department of Defense should also transition funding for children who attend schools on base into a system of parent-controlled ESAs. Other students who generate Impact Aid funding should also be able to direct their dollars toward options that work for them. However, the lower per pupil amount provided to students who do not fall under one of these three categories necessitates a federal-state choreography where state and local leaders also establish robust school choice options. States should create ESAs for military-connected children and should ultimately move toward universal ESAs for all children.
Why the Crisis in Yemen Matters to the United States
What happens in Yemen could negatively affect regional stability and be disastrous for U.S. interests. It is vital to U.S. interests that Iran’s influence be contained.
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America desperately needs to modernize its nuclear weapons
Congress and the Trump administration must not waver in their support for the U.S. nuclear modernization program.
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from Living Lutheran
Magazine of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America
Commemorating 500 years with Martin Luther
100 years ago, in 1917, any celebration in the United States of the 400th anniversary of the Reformation was tinged with questions about Martin Luther’s German-ness, given that we had just entered into World War I against the Prussian kaiser. Today, the country has replaced anti-German sentiment with other bugbears, and yet the question of how to remember the Reformation after 500 years still puzzles U.S. Lutherans.
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The U.S.–China Economic Relationship: Time for a Change in Tone
U.S. and Chinese officials recently met for the inaugural Comprehensive Economic Dialogue (CED) following a 100-day plan to jumpstart bilateral economic relations. Several notable outcomes, such as a commitment to allow beef exports to China, have been celebrated as successes. Moving forward in U.S.–China economic relations, the Trump Administration and Congress should maintain national security interests, play down future dialogues, take targeted action against intellectual property theft, and protect America’s free-market principles.
Transitioning Impact Aid into a system of education savings accounts (ESAs) beginning with children attending school in heavily impacted districts and those living on tribal lands represents the bulk of spending under Impact Aid. The Department of Defense should also transition funding for children who attend schools on base into a system of parent-controlled ESAs. Other students who generate Impact Aid funding should also be able to direct their dollars toward options that work for them. However, the lower per pupil amount provided to students who do not fall under one of these three categories necessitates a federal-state choreography where state and local leaders also establish robust school choice options. States should create ESAs for military-connected children and should ultimately move toward universal ESAs for all children.
What happens in Yemen could negatively affect regional stability and be disastrous for U.S. interests. It is vital to U.S. interests that Iran’s influence be contained.
President Trump is turning up the heat on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to get back to work and deliver on the promises Republicans made to the American people. “The House is at least putting things across the finish line ... the Senate is just way behind,” says Rep. Dave Brat, R-Va.
Vice President Pence should use his upcoming trip to Latin America to highlight important partnerships and reaffirm the U.S. commitment to this region. Specifically, the Vice President should confirm U.S. commitment to security and prosperity in Central and South America, U.S. support for a responsible implementation of the Colombian peace process, and U.S. commitment to addressing the crisis in Venezuela. While there are significant security and economic challenges in the region, the Trump Administration has a unique opportunity to capitalize on positive political dynamics.
Chicago suffered nearly 800 homicides last year, and that’s only part of the picture. Emanuel announced last weekend that Chicago would sue the Department of Justice over its guidelines concerning sanctuary cities and federal grant money. The grant requirements that he is fighting concern only illegal aliens already in jail for committing crimes on top of entering the country illegally.
As the United States, Canada, and Mexico prepare for next month’s North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) negotiations, several environmental and labor groups have slammed the agreement, calling for an overhaul of NAFTA priorities. Environmental groups claim that NAFTA has contributed to pollution in member countries. Meanwhile, union groups reject NAFTA, claiming the agreement has depressed wages.
Merkel reaffirmed that Germany will put no limit on the number of refugees it is willing to accept. Such large numbers of newcomers quickly present huge societal challenges, not to mention serious security concerns. And no European nation is more endangered by this than Germany.
from The Hill
America desperately needs to modernize its nuclear weapons
Congress and the Trump administration must not waver in their support for the U.S. nuclear modernization program.
________
from Living Lutheran
Magazine of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America
Commemorating 500 years with Martin Luther
100 years ago, in 1917, any celebration in the United States of the 400th anniversary of the Reformation was tinged with questions about Martin Luther’s German-ness, given that we had just entered into World War I against the Prussian kaiser. Today, the country has replaced anti-German sentiment with other bugbears, and yet the question of how to remember the Reformation after 500 years still puzzles U.S. Lutherans.
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from Mises Institute
[Information from this site may not be reliable.]If you invest your money, you will have to deal with numerous risks. For instance, if you buy a bond, you run the risk of the borrower defaulting or being repaid with debased money. Risk premiums determined in an unhampered market align the interests of savers and investors. When central banks interfere with this, trouble results.
Mankind has, so far, gone through three main stages of political organization since Day One, say 200,000 years ago, when anatomically modern men started appearing. We can call them Tribes, Kingdoms, and Nation-States. The problem is that government is based on coercion, and it is, at a minimum, suboptimal to base a social structure on institutionalized coercion.
It seems that anyone on Planet Earth with a pulse now is familiar with the situation at Google in which a male engineer sent a 10-page memo over the company’s internal listserv in which he questioned some of Google’s “diversity” policies. As most of us expected when the story became public, Google fired the employee, citing “incorrect” thoughts about “gender” as its justification. Google can concentrate on innovation and profits — or it can focus on bureaucratic rules against thought crimes. Google has apparently chosen the latter.
A frequently repeated claim is that loopholes in the tax code are “inefficient.” A more efficient tax, economists say, is a flat and all-encompassing tax that is inescapable. Why? Because this means no one will waste resources on tax planning and thus tax avoidance. In other words, more resources will be used in production, which is better for the “economy.” Leaving the moral and ethical argument about tax avoidance aside, the efficiency argument too is completely wrong. It shows how much economists have deviated from understanding what they supposedly try to learn about: the market. The loophole inefficiency argument is based on the view that seemingly unproductive uses of resources are a waste because they don’t contribute to the overall economy. But this is a backward argument, and in fact the same argument as that against “hoarding” of funds. And it assumes that people (or, more specifically, their owned resources) are for the economy, rather than the economy for people. If we want taxpayers to be more efficient, we should be giving them more tax loopholes. Closing loopholes has the opposite effect.
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from New Statesman
"The leading voice of the British left, since 1913."
Homelessness charity Emmaus takes in the desperate. But does it show them a way out again?
from Reason Magazine
[Information from this site may not be reliable.]
A Campus Sexual Assault Proceeding Gets Political and a Student Sues
A male student at the University of Texas at Austin is suing the University of Texas at Austin after the school suspended him for five semesters following a Title IX hearing. The student, known as John Doe, claims UT President Gregory Fenves unfairly intervened in his sexual assault proceedings––perhaps because the alleged victim is the daughter of a wealthy donor, according to the lawsuit filed Monday.
Cops Dig Desperately for a Picture That Can Send a Harmless Old Man to Jail
Prosecutors say the former professor poses no threat but should be locked up anyway.
Lawsuit Says Seattle's Income Tax Illegal, Unconstitutional
Washington state laws, courts, and voters have a long history of rejecting income taxes.
Seattle's "almost certainly illegal" income tax, passed last month, is already the subject of three separate lawsuits charging that it is, well, illegal.
ACLU Sues D.C. Metro for Rejecting Ads, Including One With Text of the First Amendment
A dumb government rule to protect subway riders from controversial ads gets predictable results. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is suing the D.C.'s dysfunctional and much-loathed transit authority for rejecting subway ads the government deemed too controversial, including one that contained the text of the First Amendment.
Does the Federal Government Have a Role to Play in Combatting Bad State Licensing Laws?
Yes, but only because states have abdicated the responsibility themselves. It's still illegal to sell flowers in Louisiana without being a licensed florist. You're still not allowed to sell caskets in Virginia without being a licensed funeral director. Those are outliers inasmuch as most states don't require licenses for those activities. But they're typical in that, like many licensing laws, they don't protect the health and safety of the general public. All they really do is restrict economic freedom by unfairly limiting competition in certain professions.
New York City to Dismiss Hundreds of Thousands of Old Warrants for Minor Crimes
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio may continue to defend "broken windows policing," but prosecutors in his town are increasingly ill at ease with the long-term consequences when police constantly cite citizens for low-level, nonviolent crimes. This week, prosecutors from Brooklyn, Bronx, Manhattan, and Queens announced they were moving to dismiss nearly 650,000 old warrants for unpaid citations from things like public drinking to violating park rules. According to The New York Times, prosecutors have been hammering out this plan for three years.
Why Republicans Didn't Repeal and Replace Obamacare
The GOP's intra-party war continues, with Donald Trump blaming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for the failure of the Obamacare repeal effort. On Twitter, Trump wrote, "Senator Mitch McConnell said I had 'excessive expectations,' but I don't think so. After 7 years of hearing Repeal & Replace, why not done?" It's a fair question. Part of the answer is that elected Republicans failed for years to seriously engage with the question of how to replace the health care law they campaigned so adamantly against. But it's also an exercise in calculated blame shifting, one that demonstrates how little the president understands about the policy process. In other words, it's the entire party's fault.
The Google Memo Exposes a Libertarian Blindspot When It Comes To Power
It's not just the state that wields power and squelches good-faith debate. The "Google Memo" raises at least two big questions from a specifically libertarian perspective: When does an employer have a right to fire an employee and how do social pressures work to shut down speech that makes powerful people uncomfortable?
Trump Administration Blocks an Obscure Regulation, Hysteria Ensues
The regulatory deep state is fighting tooth and nail to preserve and expand its power in the face of Trump's deregulatory push. Witness the fevered reaction to the Trump administration's decision to drop mandated screenings for sleep apnea—a disorder that can interrupt sleep and contribute to fatigue—among train engineers and truck drivers.
The Planetary Protection Racket
It isn't just another useless, overpaid bureaucrat, but a crippler to any mission to Mars. The request by NASA for a new "Planetary Protection Officer" salaried at $187,000 per year has provoked some hilarity, but the problem is much greater than the hiring of another useless overpaid bureaucrat. In fact, NASA's planetary protection program serves no function but to cripple the space program at a cost to the taxpayers of billions of dollars. The program calls for protecting Mars and Earth from "contaminating" each other, but there is not one shred of evidence to support the notion that life of any kind, let alone pathogens of macrofauna or macroflora, or free-living microbes with superior adaptation to the terrestrial environment than native species, exists on the Martian surface.
Shutting Out Foreign Workers Would Cost American Jobs
History suggests that if the government chokes off the supply of foreign labor, American workers won't step in to reap rewards. When people come here from Mexico or China or Nigeria to work, they don't take jobs from Americans; they create jobs for Americans.
A Campus Sexual Assault Proceeding Gets Political and a Student Sues
A male student at the University of Texas at Austin is suing the University of Texas at Austin after the school suspended him for five semesters following a Title IX hearing. The student, known as John Doe, claims UT President Gregory Fenves unfairly intervened in his sexual assault proceedings––perhaps because the alleged victim is the daughter of a wealthy donor, according to the lawsuit filed Monday.
Cops Dig Desperately for a Picture That Can Send a Harmless Old Man to Jail
Prosecutors say the former professor poses no threat but should be locked up anyway.
Lawsuit Says Seattle's Income Tax Illegal, Unconstitutional
Washington state laws, courts, and voters have a long history of rejecting income taxes.
Seattle's "almost certainly illegal" income tax, passed last month, is already the subject of three separate lawsuits charging that it is, well, illegal.
ACLU Sues D.C. Metro for Rejecting Ads, Including One With Text of the First Amendment
A dumb government rule to protect subway riders from controversial ads gets predictable results. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is suing the D.C.'s dysfunctional and much-loathed transit authority for rejecting subway ads the government deemed too controversial, including one that contained the text of the First Amendment.
Does the Federal Government Have a Role to Play in Combatting Bad State Licensing Laws?
Yes, but only because states have abdicated the responsibility themselves. It's still illegal to sell flowers in Louisiana without being a licensed florist. You're still not allowed to sell caskets in Virginia without being a licensed funeral director. Those are outliers inasmuch as most states don't require licenses for those activities. But they're typical in that, like many licensing laws, they don't protect the health and safety of the general public. All they really do is restrict economic freedom by unfairly limiting competition in certain professions.
New York City to Dismiss Hundreds of Thousands of Old Warrants for Minor Crimes
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio may continue to defend "broken windows policing," but prosecutors in his town are increasingly ill at ease with the long-term consequences when police constantly cite citizens for low-level, nonviolent crimes. This week, prosecutors from Brooklyn, Bronx, Manhattan, and Queens announced they were moving to dismiss nearly 650,000 old warrants for unpaid citations from things like public drinking to violating park rules. According to The New York Times, prosecutors have been hammering out this plan for three years.
Why Republicans Didn't Repeal and Replace Obamacare
The GOP's intra-party war continues, with Donald Trump blaming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for the failure of the Obamacare repeal effort. On Twitter, Trump wrote, "Senator Mitch McConnell said I had 'excessive expectations,' but I don't think so. After 7 years of hearing Repeal & Replace, why not done?" It's a fair question. Part of the answer is that elected Republicans failed for years to seriously engage with the question of how to replace the health care law they campaigned so adamantly against. But it's also an exercise in calculated blame shifting, one that demonstrates how little the president understands about the policy process. In other words, it's the entire party's fault.
The Google Memo Exposes a Libertarian Blindspot When It Comes To Power
It's not just the state that wields power and squelches good-faith debate. The "Google Memo" raises at least two big questions from a specifically libertarian perspective: When does an employer have a right to fire an employee and how do social pressures work to shut down speech that makes powerful people uncomfortable?
Trump Administration Blocks an Obscure Regulation, Hysteria Ensues
The regulatory deep state is fighting tooth and nail to preserve and expand its power in the face of Trump's deregulatory push. Witness the fevered reaction to the Trump administration's decision to drop mandated screenings for sleep apnea—a disorder that can interrupt sleep and contribute to fatigue—among train engineers and truck drivers.
The Planetary Protection Racket
It isn't just another useless, overpaid bureaucrat, but a crippler to any mission to Mars. The request by NASA for a new "Planetary Protection Officer" salaried at $187,000 per year has provoked some hilarity, but the problem is much greater than the hiring of another useless overpaid bureaucrat. In fact, NASA's planetary protection program serves no function but to cripple the space program at a cost to the taxpayers of billions of dollars. The program calls for protecting Mars and Earth from "contaminating" each other, but there is not one shred of evidence to support the notion that life of any kind, let alone pathogens of macrofauna or macroflora, or free-living microbes with superior adaptation to the terrestrial environment than native species, exists on the Martian surface.
Shutting Out Foreign Workers Would Cost American Jobs
History suggests that if the government chokes off the supply of foreign labor, American workers won't step in to reap rewards. When people come here from Mexico or China or Nigeria to work, they don't take jobs from Americans; they create jobs for Americans.
from Redoubt News
[Information from this site may not be reliable.]
A Mountain of Misdirection: Discovery in the Bundy Case
“Discovery” in the Bundy Case is reportedly so vast that it contains the texts of entire novels, and hundreds of pages of apparently irrelevant medical records, but did not reveal that FBI agent Charles Johnson was arrested last year, that Dan Love was under investigation, or that Greg Burleson was an FBI informant. As in many cases, defendants and their lawyers are told they must keep the discovery secret from the public—upon penalty of contempt of court. This is true even though the discovery is said to contain public documents and records. At least two news organizations, Battle Born Media and the Las Vegas Review Journal, have filed petitions to have some access to the secret discovery; but the court has denied each request.
[Information from this site may not be reliable.]
A Mountain of Misdirection: Discovery in the Bundy Case
“Discovery” in the Bundy Case is reportedly so vast that it contains the texts of entire novels, and hundreds of pages of apparently irrelevant medical records, but did not reveal that FBI agent Charles Johnson was arrested last year, that Dan Love was under investigation, or that Greg Burleson was an FBI informant. As in many cases, defendants and their lawyers are told they must keep the discovery secret from the public—upon penalty of contempt of court. This is true even though the discovery is said to contain public documents and records. At least two news organizations, Battle Born Media and the Las Vegas Review Journal, have filed petitions to have some access to the secret discovery; but the court has denied each request.
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from The Spokesman-Review
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from The Telegraph (UK)
Sarahah: Why everyone is talking about the 'honesty first' secret messaging app
A new messaging app focused on privacy and trust has soared in popularity since its release in June. The Sarahah app, which lets users send one another anonymous messages, has millions of users and has been at the top of Apple's App Store for weeks in dozens of countries.
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