David Henderson makes the case for libertarian wariness of war. A slice:
Similarly, in foreign policy, governments do things that have unintended consequences. Take the Middle East. The takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran by a number of Iranians in November 1979 came as a total surprise to most Americans, including me. But that’s because neither they nor I had paid much attention to what the U.S. government had been doing in that part of the world. Indeed, the U.S. president at the time, Jimmy Carter, actively discouraged Americans from thinking about past government policy toward Iran, referring to it as “ancient history.” But the history wasn’t ancient, unless Carter had a young child’s view of time. In 1953, when Carter was 28, the CIA’s Kermit Roosevelt and Norman Schwarzkopf Sr. helped overthrow the democratically elected leader of Iran, Mohammad Mossadegh. (See Sheldon Richman, “‘Ancient History’: U.S. Conduct in the Middle East Since World War II and the Folly of Intervention,” Cato Institute Policy Analysis No. 159, 16 August 1991. Available online at https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/ancient-history-us-conduct-middle-east-world-war-ii-folly-intervention.)
Corey DeAngelis is correct: “Teachers’ unions think they own your kids.”
Akiva Malamet ponders Star Trek.
Odds are that Arnold Kling is correct about the business model of sports-betting firms. A slice:
Sports gambling is an example of a predatory business model. The entire business is designed to find psychologically weak people and exploit them. Maybe 95 percent of sports gamblers do it for fun and don’t hurt themselves, but the point of the business is to capture the other 5 percent. Or so I believe.
Andrew Stuttaford writes insightfully about Zohran Mamdani’s vanguard.
