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Writing in today’s Wall Street Journal, Thomas Sowell calls for the U.S. government to sell off much of the land it currently owns. Two slices:

The incoming Trump administration will confront some huge financial challenges. It will have to cope with the vast increase in the national debt created by the Biden administration’s reckless spending. It will also need to maintain the solvency of the Social Security system after decades of financial irresponsibility by politicians of both parties.

…..

There is much to be said for the new administration’s plan to have a nongovernmental organization investigate how well, or how badly, government agencies are currently handling the taxpayers’ money. But there is a limit to how much money can be recovered by simply cutting back on “waste, fraud and abuse” in federal spending.

There are, however, additional billions of dollars that could be tapped, from a source that not many people think about. That is the vast—almost unbelievable—amount of land owned by the federal government. Some of that land—such as military bases—is used to house the government’s own operations. But the great majority of that land is not.

The rest of this government-owned land is so vast that there is little to compare it with—except whole countries. And not small countries like Belgium or Portugal. The amount of land owned by the National Park Service alone is larger than Italy. The land owned by the Fish and Wildlife Service is larger than Germany. The land owned by the Forest Service is larger than Britain and Spain combined. The land owned by the Bureau of Land Management is larger than Japan, North Korea, South Korea and the Philippines combined.

This 2017 insight from Arnold Kling about heath-care provision in the United States – and Americans’ attitude about it – is as relevant as ever.

Heather Mac Donald is correct: The murder of Brian Thompson doesn’t call for a “national conversation about health care”; instead, it calls for asking why so many young Americans find sympathy for a cold-blooded murderer. A slice:

It’s no surprise that age is inversely correlated with support for left-wing assassination, since the younger the voter, the more recent his exposure to the American education system. The pro-Mangione reaction epitomizes the dominant traits of contemporary academia: narcissism, a juvenile view of economics, the inability to think in terms of principle and precedent, and ignorance about the civilizational triumph that is Western due process. Campus reaction to the October 7, 2023, terror attacks in Israel put another item on that list: support for barbarism when the victims of that barbarism belong to a group disfavored by the academic Left. We can now add corporate executives to the list of acceptable targets.

The excruciating history of dentistry.”

Who’d a-thunk it? “Trump’s Tariff Plan to Hit Affordable Cars the Hardest.” A slice:

Trump’s tariff proposal could add about $3,000 to the average cost of every car sold in the U.S., according to a Wolfe Research estimate.

Jon Miltimore draws lessons about racism from the movie Trading Places.