I was deeply saddened to hear that David Theroux recently passed away. Being a huge fan of the Independent Institute since college and someone who benefited from David’s encouragement and support for years, the loss is especially difficult.
Over the last few weeks, rumors have been circulating that the Kansas City Chiefs are considering moving from Kansas City, Missouri to Kansas City, Kansas.
The Rev. Martin Luther King had a dream that in my youth I came to share wholeheartedly, “[T]hat my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” To my disappointment, my university now has a counter-dream of elevating race-consciousness on campus through a “Take the Pledge” campaign, which challenges long-espoused cherished values of all universities.
Last week, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen became the first member of President Biden’s administration to acknowledge its spending policies are feeding inflation in the U.S. economy.
That admission came during an interview with the Wall Street Journal‘s editor in chief Matt Murray. The video clip below is cued to start with the question he asked that led to her admission. The relevant portion of the exchange starts at the 7:30 mark and takes place in less than a minute.
“Sacramento police want your guns in exchange for gas money,” says a May 6 Sacramento Bee headline. The department asks residents to give away their firearms, which the Second Amendment authorizes them to keep and bear, for a $50 gas gift card that would not even provide a fill-up for many vehicles.
The well-publicized leaked draft of the Supreme Court’s majority opinion on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, if it represents the Court’s final decision, would allow the State of Mississippi to retain the prohibition on abortion beyond 15 weeks into a pregnancy that was passed by the Mississippi legislature. That much is clear. But there is some ambiguity on the degree to which abortion would be permitted, more generally.
At the beginning of the Covid pandemic, schools confronted new difficulties when they were tossed into remote learning due to prolonged lockdowns. Resorting to online classes, schools relied on obtrusive software to proctor online tests. State Senator Dr. Richard Pan is recently advancing with a proposed revision to California’s Business and Professions Code relating to student privacy. The California Student Test Taker Privacy Protection Act aims to curb the invasive surveillance of remote students by their schools.
What if your city government spent millions more than it does today to pay for housing for the homeless? What do you think your community would have to show for it?
Rising wages do not cause inflation (“Raises for Job Switchers Heighten Inflation Risk”, Wall Street Journal, April 25, 2022, p. A1). Instead, rising wages are symptoms of rising inflation rates. When prices are—and people expect them to be—on an upward march, workers demand (and employers are willing to pay) higher cash wages in the attempt to maintain standards of living. To conclude otherwise is to confuse increases in the price of one good (labor) with an increase in the prices of all goods.
We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled. The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision, including the one on which the defenders of Roe and Casey now chiefly rely—the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment (Draft at 5).
So declares a leaked draft majority opinion authored by Justice Samuel Alito in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Of course, we are a long way from a published opinion; moreover, we should all be indignant that someone leaked the draft opinion contrary to all Court protocol. Still, it appears at least five votes have been cast to overturn the Court’s extraconstitutional abortion jurisprudence/public policy and return the issue to the states where the matter can be decided in our 50 laboratories of democracy.
