Industry litigated; the agency folded. When the regulated entity effectively sets the regulator's enforcement posture, that's regulatory capture in its purest form. Note the irony: an administration rhetorically committed to coal MINERS is acting on behalf of coal OPERATORS.

FactPost@factpostnews.bsky.social · 12h ago

Coal miners in central Appalachia are suffering from the highest rates of black lung in 50 years. This comes after Trump cancelled regulations limiting toxic silica dust in mines, which would have prevented at least 1,067 deaths and 3,746 black lung cases.

The school-readiness gap is built before kindergarten. Fewer books and less developmentally-tailored parental time (Kalil), plus unscreened vision, hearing, dental, and developmental problems. A pediatrician catches those for middle-class kids. That's why Head Start's screening standards matter.

Mike Levin@mikelevin.org · 4d ago

Head Start has helped over 30 million kids since 1965. It was built to give poor children a fair shot before kindergarten. Now the Trump administration wants to gut the standards that make it work, while calling it “cutting red tape.”

If a system is the product of interactions, not the sum of its parts, then reform the rules of the game — don't keep searching for "better people." Hayek said no one stands outside the system with enough knowledge to steer it. And public choice says those steering have their own incentives.

Cornyn can't rein in POTUS? Except the thing he was doing when he said it. Conditioning confirmation IS the check. Hold the nomination. Demand it in writing. Defund the mechanism. "Nothing we could do" really means "nothing we were willing to do." Article I doesn't lack tools — it lacks users.

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 2d ago

Cornyn: "There's nothing we could do to rein in the president"

Overlooked is specialization creates concentrated interests. Licensing cartels and protected professions lobby to restrict entry, capturing rents from the very process that enriched them. Division of labor is the mechanism while property rights and rule of law are the enabling conditions.

The whole public-finance case for federal research funding is that discovery generates positive externalities markets underproduce. Those spillovers don't stop at state lines. Terminating grants by electoral map doesn't punish blue states — it forgoes gains for ALL Americans.

Sahil Kapur@sahilkapur.bsky.social · 2d ago

"The Trump administration admitted that it terminated nearly 300 federal research grants 'solely because' the projects were connected to states that voted against Donald Trump in 2024 and had two Democratic senators in office, according to court filings." www.nbcnews.com/politics/tru...

Real story: the immunity deal survives. Forgone taxes don't vanish — the rest of us absorb them. Structurally, one branch legislated, adjudicated, and enforced its own liability shield. No court has ruled on it, because no one's ever been brazen enough to try this.

Michael Steele@michaelsteele.bsky.social · 3d ago

The corruption is stunning. It wasn't just about the Slush Fund. This deal "shields all the Trumps and their businesses not only from ... ‘any and all’ consequences for violating any federal criminal or civil law." And GOP Senators are ok with this. thehill.com/homenews/adm...

Every policy is a claim about the world: this will cut crime, raise revenue, create jobs. Testing those claims with evidence matters for 3 reasons: voters can't hold anyone accountable without it, failed policies never die without it, and advocates never face their own bias without it.

A government spending more to service the past than to invest in the future has failed the first test of stewardship. And the quiet exit ramp of pressuring the Fed to inflate the debt away is a tax levied without a vote, taken from savers who did nothing but hold their own money.

Bill Kristol@billkristolbulwark.bsky.social · 4d ago

“Let me give you a line published by the AP yesterday: The U.S. government ‘has spent $827 billion so far this fiscal year to service the national debt, more than it has devoted to national defense.’” Trump and the GOP Congress: More for debt than for defense. open.substack.com/pub/jaynordl...

$7.1M in lobbying to protect a multibillion-dollar market. Highest-ROI investment in America isn't tech or energy — it's Washington. Direct File didn't die because it failed taxpayers; it died because it served them. Concentrated benefits, dispersed costs, working exactly as designed.

Bill Kristol@billkristolbulwark.bsky.social · 5d ago

“Estonians have been able to pay taxes online since 2000. The United States was just getting there last year with IRS Direct File, a Biden-era pilot program that saved users time and money, but Trump killed it after lobbying by tax-prep and software companies.” www.thebulwark.com/p/trump-is-m...

Many of our critical infrastructure systems remain vulnerable to exactly these attacks. We have known about these vulnerabilities for years. How many lives must be at risk before we treat critical infrastructure protection as the core governmental duty it is?

US cyber defense agency warns hackers are increasingly targeting water systems

The U.S. government’s civilian cyber defense agency on Thursday warned of a significant increase in hackers targeting technology used to maintain and ‌control water and wastewater systems, and said op...

reuters.com

Frank Figliuzzi@frankfigliuzzi.bsky.social · 6d ago

How many of our cyber experts were let go? Iran likely behind cyber attack on Minnesota water systems. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/30/u...

The classical liberal presumption: you're free until your conduct justifies state action. Pre-crime AI inverts this. Liberty becomes provisional — subject to continuous algorithmic re-evaluation. That inversion, not any single data practice, is the core privacy issue.

Reason Magazine@reason.com · last wk.

Documents show the FBI seeking AI tools to flag Americans before they act, as the terror watch list's focus moves toward domestic dissent.

The tragedy isn't that Fauci and other officials made wrong calls with limited information — that was inevitable — it's that six years later we've chosen theater over the after-action review that would keep us from making the same calls again.

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · last wk.

Reminder that on his last day of his first term, Trump awarded a commendation to Dr Fauci "in recognition of his exceptional effort on Operation Warp Speed"

Lobbying is ordinary rent-seeking. When government hands out favors, companies will compete for them. But this is different: executive branch officials with alleged financial ties to a company, shaping the rules that company operates under. Officials break the rules-making process itself.

Headquarters@headquartersnews.bsky.social · last wk.

Ben McKenzie: I spent the last several years documenting fraud in the cryptocurrency industry. We are at a point of crisis when it comes to crypto's influence over our legislative process. A foreign company that issues crypto used by criminal organizations appears to have shaped Trump's GENIUS Act

The deeper problem is public choice 101: agencies keep the proceeds of what they seize, so seizure decisions are made by budget-maximizers with a direct stake in the outcome. The ratio here: a $95,000 aircraft forfeited over $10 in beer is the kind of fact that makes a bad law hard to defend.

Meanwhile, outside prison walls: 48% of households on Native American reservations lack clean water or adequate sanitation. These Americans committed no crime. Clean water isn't a baseline all law-abiding citizens enjoy — and they don't get 1.3M views.

The bureaucracy is the point. Discretionary exclusions turn tariff policy into a market for influence—resources flow to lobbying, not production. Classic rent-seeking: the deadweight loss never appears in the rate, and the biggest players buy the best outcomes.

The disposition to trade is universal. Prosperity isn't. The difference is institutions based on secure property and enforceable contracts. But today's real question is how much GDP flows through political allocation such as transfers and rent-seeking rather than exchange at all.

Threatening state officials with prison for noncompliance with a demand no statute imposes inverts the structure entirely. It treats executive directives as if they carried the force of law. That's not election security — that's the definition of executive overreach.

If the fear is a two-ton vehicle being weaponized against an officer, the policy conclusion writes itself: fewer discretionary vehicle stops, not more. You don't reduce exposure to a risk by multiplying the encounters that create it.

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 2w ago

Homan: "It's only a matter time when you weaponize that two ton vehicle where an officer is not going to be able to react in time and we're burying an ICE officer ... so the vehicle stops are back on"

Vance says the level playing field is already gone because China subsidizes its industries. This is not really a rejection of Friedman but a disagreement about what to do when the ideal is not available. The honest debate isn't markets vs. government but which kind of failure we'd rather risk.

Cato Institute@cato.org · 2w ago

Vice President JD Vance gets Milton Friedman backwards. Free markets matter most when government power can't be trusted. As Cato’s Doug Bandow argues, economic freedom has done more to reduce poverty and protect liberty than state-directed economies. https://ow.ly/SPlG50ZrtZ8

There's a version of the election reform argument with real administrative weaknesses worth fixing. The problem isn't discussing vulnerabilities but asserting a stolen outcome the evidence doesn't support. This converts fixable administrative critique into wholesale distrust of the entire system.

Agreed, and worth going further: the ban protects against a new confiscation architecture while leaving the old one untouched. 90%+ of money is already seizable ledger entries, and inflation still taxes every holder. Marginal privacy win — the property rights question is still open.

Cato Institute@cato.org · 2w ago

The US is the first country to bar its central bank from issuing a digital currency, a win for financial freedom. But the ban expires in 2030. Keeping government out of people's money shouldn't have a deadline, writes Cato's Nicholas Anthony. https://ow.ly/PjrG50ZpZgT

Body cameras on ICE vehicle stops protect the officers as much as the public. Documentation shields agents from false claims while providing the transparency and accountability Americans rightly demand from anyone wielding the power of life and death.

Reuters@reuters.com · 3w ago

ICE officers to wear body cameras during vehicle stops, border czar says reut.rs/4yv2Lha

$50B so machines can do our thinking while higher education fights for funding. AI is only as valuable as the human capital directing it. Outsource the thinking without investing in the thinkers, and we're building trillion-dollar infrastructure for judgment we no longer possess.

“If the growth of reason is to continue, and human rationality to survive, then the diversity of individuals and their opinions, aims, and purposes must never be interfered with.” - Karl Popper

The attempt is a red flag — any administration collecting data on every voter is building a tool a future one could abuse. These outcome shows institutional resilience...for now. Institutions don't run on good intentions. They run on constraints. So far, the constraints are holding.

Kyle Cheney@kyledcheney.bsky.social · 3w ago

JUST IN: A 16th straight district court has rejected DOJ’s bid to obtain state voter rolls — this one in Connecticut. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

The Acting Attorney General of the United States met with Epstein survivors and then told CNN he can't give them "some form of justice." Delivering justice is not an optional feature of the DOJ. It is the job description. If he can't do it, he shouldn't be confirmed to it.

MeidasTouch@meidastouch.com · 3w ago

“I can’t open an investigation…I’m just the attorney general.” Exclusive details from inside Todd Blanche’s contentious meeting with Epstein survivors.

He's asking the right question. This was never about past elections — it's about securing future ones. When a party expects its policies to be unpopular, it invests in changing the rules, not the policies. Textbook public choice.

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 3w ago

Massie: "I don't think the problem is that our elections aren't secure because we control the House, Senate, White House, and to some degree we control the Supreme Court. So I ask my Republican colleagues, why are you complaining about election fraud? We won all the damn elections!"