Source: Semafor
by David Weigel

“By now, people should really stop being surprised when a ‘norm’ gets shattered. The strangest reaction to the bipartisan hit job on the CPD was the idea that Joe Biden, who had run on restoring an old, calm order, had just demolished an American tradition. That tradition started in 1987; it’s younger than ‘The Legend of Zelda’ video game franchise, and enjoyed by fewer people. And it was always controversial. From 1976 through 1984, presidential debates were sponsored by the League of Women Voters, which still plays that role in thousands of down-ballot races. In 1987, the chairs of the Democratic and Republican National Committees colluded to create an alternative, with a permanent budget and the clout to fight back as campaigns argued over moderators and rules.” (05/17/24)

https://www.semafor.com/article/05/17/2024/why-biden-and-trump-ditched-the-commission-on-presidential-debates

Source: New York Post
by staff

“When it comes to Canadian PM Justin Trudeau’s Orwellian Online Harms Act, tech titan Elon Musk gets it: ‘This sounds insane.’ Insane is putting it mildly; look at some of the law’s provisions. Rewarding people who snitch on their ‘hateful’ neighbors up to $20,000 and making the thought criminals pay up to $50,000. Allowing the possibility of a literal life sentence for online hate crimes, including speech. Letting judges, based on snitch testimony, jail people for up to a year because someone thinks they might commit a hate crime. The law would also empower the cops to comb through your old posts — including those made before the law even passed — and punish you. And if social-media companies or other platforms don’t take down your hate speech, they can be fined astronomical sums, up to 6% of gross global revenue.” (05/18/24)

https://nypost.com/2024/05/18/opinion/canadas-moving-to-end-free-speech-with-new-bill/

Source: Law & Liberty
by Adam Tomkins

“Sir Salman Rushdie is first and foremost a novelist, a creator of fiction, an artist. He is brilliant at it and, deservedly, much decorated. His fifteen published novels have been translated into dozens of languages, won the world’s most glittering literary prizes, and attracted the plaudits of critics around the globe. So it is an appalling fact that this is not the thing for which he is most famous. In 1989, the theocratic tyranny that is modern Iran imposed on him a fatwa, condemning Rushdie to death for his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses. … In 2022 he was brutally attacked … an attempted murder which cost him (forever) the sight of one eye and (for a year) the use of one hand. For more than 35 years, then, Salman Rushdie has had more cause than most to reflect on freedom, free speech, religious sensibility, reason, reasonableness, tyranny, violence, writing, words, and art.” (05/17/24)

https://lawliberty.org/book-review/words-and-weapons-in-salman-rushdie/

Source: EconLog
by Peter Boettke

“As much as I was drawn to economics as a philosophical science, the puzzles of economics as understood by my peers in the discipline also intrigued me. The most fundamental puzzle was understanding how markets work. The textbook presentation didn’t seem to explain how the market economy came to be, just what the optimal result would be if the market did all its work. There was no real theory in the textbook of the working of economic forces, only a presentation of the consequences that follow from economic forces having worked.” (05/17/24)

https://www.econlib.org/my-life-as-an-austrian-economist-my-philosophical-vision-and-the-critique-of-scientism/

Source: In These Times
by Sarah Jaffe

“Workers at the Mercedes-Benz U.S. International plant in Vance, Alabama came up short in their first union election on Friday, May 17, with 2,045 votes to join the United Auto Workers and 2,642 against. A brief but high-energy campaign that saw real improvements won at the plant and a worker-led effort to organize failed to create a wave after the high-profile Volkswagen workers’ win in April in Chattanooga, Tennessee. ‘These courageous workers reached out to us because they wanted justice. They led us. They led this fight. And what happens next is up to them,’ UAW President Shawn Fain told reporters shortly after the vote count. ​’Justice isn’t just about one vote or one campaign. It’s about getting a voice and getting your fair share.'” (05/17/24)

https://inthesetimes.com/article/uaw-mercedes-benz-alabama-volkswagen-uaw-union

Source: American Institute for Economic Research
by Paul Mueller

“Sometimes smart people make remarkably naive or deeply problematic comments because their view of the world has been molded by narrow ideology, reinforced by significant consensus in their social circles. Recently Esther Duflo, a Nobel prize winning economist, revealed herself to be such a person. In a Financial Times interview with Simon Mundy, she said the West owed a ‘moral debt’ of about $500 billion annually to the global south due to its contribution to climate change and the resulting harm. I’ve questioned such a calculation elsewhere. And I am not commenting on her published economic work, some of which is no doubt decent. Instead, I want to highlight how outrageously naive global elites, in this case within the economics profession, have become.” (05/17/24)

https://www.aier.org/article/when-ideological-bubbles-trump-economic-thinking/