At this writing, millions of television viewers are tuning in to watch the NCAA basketball tournament, but not to watch NCAA bureaucrats or college administrators.

“It is the talent of 500,000 unpaid athletes that fuels the NCAA’s billion-dollar revenue stream,” explains North Carolina Rep. Mark Walker, a former student-athlete. “The current student-athlete model prohibits college athletes from having financial rights to use their name while allowing an unrestrained, tax-exempt organization to monetize their images to fill stadiums, sell memorabilia and sign multibillion-dollar contracts. That gets at the heart of what is wrong with the way we are currently treating our college athletes.”

A student on a music scholarship can play a paying gig, but a punter at Central Florida was declared ineligible after he refused to stop selling ads on his YouTube page.

Brexit is officially a joke. The two years are nearly up and the United Kingdom is supposed to leave the European Union—except that a large number of politicians who backed Brexit are neither prepared to support a hard departure that would extricate Britain immediately from all the institutional arrangements of the union, nor prepared to support Prime Minister Theresa May’s efforts to negotiate a soft Brexit with Europe that would keep Britain partly tied to the union.

The truth is that Brexit continues to revolve around a basic dilemma: to break up the United Kingdom or to break up Ireland. Most Brexiteers are not prepared to break up either one. The vote against a hard Brexit would indicate Brexiteers want a soft departure. But a soft Brexit negates the essential premise of Brexit, which is to leave the Single Market based on the free movement of goods, services, capital and people, and the Customs Union that forces every country to apply the same tariffs to goods coming from outside, both of which are at the heart of the EU. Then again, if they want a soft Brexit, why did they deny Theresa May the votes she needed for the plan she negotiated with the EU?

Diabetes is arguably the biggest epidemic of the twenty-first century. According to the federal Centers for Disease Control, more than 100 million Americans are diabetic or prediabetic. If left unmanaged, diabetes is fatal and can result in serious health complications, including nerve damage, heart disease, stroke, blindness, kidney disease, and damage to extremities requiring amputation.

For an increasing number of people with diabetes, regular insulin injections are indispensable for managing their condition. Tragically, insulin in the United States is alarmingly expensive, taking a financial toll on many who need it to prolong their lives. A recent CBS News article reports finding “horror stories every day” of diabetics reducing and rationing their insulin doses, risking long-term complications or falling into a diabetic coma.

Fortunately, these stories may now be a thing of the past.

The IRS has a horrible track record when it comes to its use as a tool by powerful politicians to go after their opposition. Presidential administrations from FDR to Barack Obama have overseen scandalous incidents in which cabals of “rogue” IRS agents have abused their authority in using the arbitrary enforcement of tax laws to weaken their political opponents. That’s why today’s IRS must comply with laws limiting the ability of bureaucrats to access and disclose the tax records of regular Americans without their consent.

But should those rules benefit politicians when they run for or hold office? Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists argues that President Trump has broken the “norm” of the voluntary disclosure of income tax returns by political candidates and believes a new norm for tax return disclosure should be established.

Republican representatives and senators are introducing proposals for a constitutional amendment to limit the number of justices on the Supreme Court to nine. This is in response to statements by several prominent Democratic presidential candidates that they will consider supporting legislation increasing the size of the Court to 15 justices from the current nine. Sens. Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, and Kirsten Gillibrand have all expressed approval for expanding the Court in the hopes of a Democratic president nominating liberal justices.

The Constitution only mandates that there be a Supreme Court and a Chief Justice. It is within Congress’ discretion to staff the Court with associate justices as it sees fit. In the early years of the country, the number of justices fluctuated between 5-10. Since 1869, it has been fixed at nine.

As the New York Times reports, Venezuela’s socialist Maduro regime deployed Cuban doctors to give medical treatment to those who promised to vote for Maduro and deny medical treatment to those who did not. The doctors told one emergency patient that oxygen tanks were being reserved for those who would vote for the reigning socialist. For patients outside of Venezuela, this atrocity should be educational.

What American politicians like to call “socialized medicine” is actually government monopoly health care. In Venezuela, the people have no independent alternative, which empowers the government to leverage their vote, and a lot more. Contrary to socialist belief, when politicians gain power they do not shed human vices and prejudices. That’s why it’s dangerous to give politicians unchecked power and take away the choices of the people. As we noted, Americans had a taste of that in the so-called Affordable Care Act.

Much of California enjoys year-round pleasant weather, without the harsh winters of the midwest and northeast, and without the heat and humidity of the deep south. One result is that California homes use less heat and air conditioning than homes in other parts of the country.

Harvard economist Edward Glaeser says that a household in San Francisco has a carbon footprint 60 percent smaller than a similar household in Memphis.

Meanwhile, California has the nation’s most restrictive land-use policies, which prevent new housing from being built, keep housing prices high, and prevent people from moving to California.

Leftists affect to love the community. When they make or support a political proposal, they are likely to say that it is for the community, that it is what the community wants.

In discussions with such people, I find that they think I’m crazy for challenging their conception of community and what promotes the society’s peace, prosperity, and good order. They take me to be some sort of rugged individualist, the sort of character Ayn Rand might relish.

They’re wrong about me. I place a high value on community, and I feel sorry for people who have no membership in one.

But I distinguish true community and false community. The line that separates them is the locus of points at which people bring government compulsion to bear to compel those who disagree with them to fall into line or suffer punishment. This is the line that separates those who recognize and respect everyone’s natural rights and those who do not.

True communities form spontaneously and function voluntarily. False communities represent groups of people who use political means to victimize those outside the group and violate their natural rights. True communities have no need for cops; false communities cannot get by without them. False communities are more accurately described as political factions.

When working at their highest level, science fiction movies provoke and engage in ideas fundamental to human existence. Because these artistic works are often dealing with alien and extraterrestrial experiences, they often probe the depths of human psychology, social psychology, and emotional trauma, testing the limits of the human experience. The recently released movie Captive State falls into this genre of science fiction, and those interested in themes focused on freedom and personal identity should find it a satisfying addition to pro-liberty filmmaking.

The movie opens nine years after first contact from an alien race in Chicago. Facing annihilation, humans have capitulated to the aliens. Weapons and other means of rebellion have been confiscated. National defense forces have been demilitarized. Humans are watched and scanned in order to ensure compliance that “preserves order” and “protects” their safety. The aliens have set up puppet governments run by humans to keep this order and purge resistance.

Every September, as the end of the U.S. government’s fiscal year draws near, thousands of federal bureaucrats go on a massive spending bender, lest they risk having their future budgets cut in the next year because they didn’t spend all the money they could have in the current year.

According to fiscal policy watchdog OpenTheBooks, federal bureaucrats spent $97 billion in a single month to close out the U.S. government’s 2018 fiscal year, setting a new record for their annual spending binge. Here are some selected lowlights from their report, The Federal Government’s Use-it-or-Lose-it Spending Spree: