Source: Brownstone Institute
by Jeffrey A Tucker

“It’s not been a good week for the Censorship Industrial Complex. The machine has been built and put into action over nearly a decade but largely in secret. Its way of doing business has been via surreptitious contacts with media and tech companies, intelligence carve-outs in ‘fact-checking’ organizations, payoffs, and various other clever strategies, all directed toward boosting some sources of information and suppressing others. The goal has always been to advance regime narratives and curate the public mind. And yet, based on its operations and insofar as we can tell, it had every intention of remaining secret. This is for a reason.” (05/07/24)

https://brownstone.org/articles/the-proof-of-censorship-is-censored/

Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Patrick Carroll

“Walsh’s concern about jobs being lost due to technological development is nothing new. Ever since the Industrial Revolution, people have been raising concerns that technology would ‘take jobs’ and leave many out of work. One of the earliest groups to raise these concerns was the Luddites, a 19th-century group of English textile workers who opposed the use of machinery in their trade because it was being used to replace workers. The term ‘Luddite’ has since become a pejorative for someone who opposes labor-saving technological advances — one that Walsh has clearly earned with this take. The issue with Luddism is that it gets in the way of economic progress. Technology is an immensely powerful tool for improving our standard of living, and much of the prosperity we enjoy today is a result of technological advances that replaced human labor with machine labor.” (05/07/24)

https://fee.org/articles/what-matt-walsh-gets-wrong-about-ai-and-work/

Source: EconLog
by Tarnell Brown

“Police department budgets are subject to the same laws of scarcity as everything else, and every enforcement priority comes with opportunity costs. Money and manpower dedicated to, for instance, investigating auto thefts, cannot be used to investigate homicides. Indeed, research has shown that shifting resources towards drug enforcement has lowered the opportunity costs of property crime, leading to an increase thereof (Benson, Rasmussen, & Sollars, 1995). Asset forfeiture allows the drug enforcement apparatus of police departments to supplement their revenue at little cost to the taxpayer outside of the costs of seizure. Moreover, individuals who have their assets seized are often permanently bereft of their property even if they are never found guilty of any crime.” (05/07/24)

https://www.econlib.org/civil-asset-forfeiture-the-war-on-drugs-as-a-law-enforcement-revenue-center/

Source: Foreign Policy
by Kenneth Roth

“Rather than recognize that the ICC represents an independent effort to uphold the international rule of law in the much-touted ‘rules-based order,’ a spokesperson for the administration claimed that the court did not have jurisdiction [to issue an arrest warrant for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu]. That is an allusion to the long-standing U.S. opposition to the ICC exercising jurisdiction over the nationals of governments that have not joined the court, even if their alleged crimes were committed on the territory of a government that is a court member. But Washington’s objections to such territorial jurisdiction were overruled by the governments that created the court in Rome more than two decades ago. And the U.S. government effectively abandoned that argument as well after the ICC used territorial jurisdiction in March 2023 to charge Russian President Vladimir Putin for war crimes in Ukraine.” (05/07/24)

https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/05/07/biden-israel-hamas-icc-gaza-netanyahu-arrest/