News – Politics – Opinion – Podcasts
Ian Underwood 
Every summer, kids are out of school for about 80 days, almost 3 months. So, what do parents do with their kids during that time? It’s not like their jobs end. It’s not like they can take 3 months off of work to look after their kids. And yet, the kids get taken care of. … Read more
The premise of Education Freedom Accounts (EFAs) is that some kids are trapped in schools that aren’t serving them, so they should be able to escape. But the idea can’t be to facilitate the breakout by creating a dependency that lasts for years afterward. The idea can’t be to get them to kick heroin by … Read more
From Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address: [I]f the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made in ordinary litigation between parties in personal actions the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to … Read more
Suppose someone said: I live in this state, but that state offers more generous welfare benefits. So I should be able to live here, but collect benefits from there. Or suppose someone said: I live in this county, but that county has a better nursing home, so I’d like my elderly mother to be cared … Read more
Many of you saw a petition warrant article on the agenda at your recent town meetings. The idea was to get towns to vote to send the petition to the legislature and the governor. It’s kind of a silly idea — if you’re going to tell your representative something, you should do that as an … Read more
If you were hoping that Donald Trump and Pam Bondi were going to protect the 2nd Amendment, it might be time to rethink that position. So while we are all waiting for AG Bondi’s report on the Second Amendment, pursuant to President Trump’s executive order, we now find out that the new DOJ is much … Read more
The Judicial Branch, apparently unconcerned about that whole separation-of-powers thing, is telling the Executive Branch what to do. In particular, it’s saying that the Trump Administration has to distribute $2 billion in foreign aid, even though it contains substantial amounts of wasteful, fraudulent, and harmful spending. Ideally, President Trump would take a page from Andrew … Read more
Lately, I’ve been hearing a lot about budget caps for school districts, and the kinds of numbers that are being thrown around. Would a reasonable cap be $25,000 per student? Or closer to $100,000? It’s crazy to try to choose a number without first knowing what you would be getting for that amount of money, … Read more
In a response to a post about whether Education Freedom Accounts (EFAs) should be universal, a reader responded by saying: I still believe it is a societal responsibility to ensure children are schooled. The problem with discussing ‘societal responsibilities’ is that once you get beyond the defense of self and property, there’s usually a lot … Read more
The missing Epstein files were supposed to be on Attorney General Pam Bondi’s desk by February 28. If she had them, we’d have heard about it, right? So presumably she doesn’t. Assuming the files exist, that is. We just have the word of a single whistle-blower who contacted Bondi. But if the files do exist, … Read more
A basic principle of the martial art Aikido is that instead of struggling against an attacker’s force, you work with it. As I listen to Democrats continue to complain about how DOGE shouldn’t be given access to the private data of American citizens because it is staffed by ‘unelected employees’, it occurs to me that … Read more
So, Governor Ayotte is moving us down the road towards universal eligibility for Education Freedom Accounts (EFAs). Awesome! Now what will she do to move us towards universal eligibility for food stamps, and heating oil subsidies, and housing assistance? While I don’t need any of those subsidies, I would certainly like to have them. And … Read more
This morning I am seeing reports that Kash Patel will be named as acting head of the ATF. When? Oh, sometime next week. Probably. I think that would be a good thing, but as someone used to say, I’ll believe it when I see it. It reminded me that for a while now, it’s bothered … Read more
I was recently asked: How would you go about eliminating public schools? I think we would eliminate public schools in the same way that we would eliminate public oil refineries, and public farms and ranches, and public grocery stores, and… Oh, wait, we don’t have those, do we? We don’t have those, because we have … Read more
There’s a rumor going around that there is a web site where people with Education Freedom Accounts (EFAs) can go to find people who need things like printers, or musical instruments, or martial arts gear. Holders of EFA accounts can use them to buy things that have been approved (by the Children’s Scholarship Fund, which … Read more
Wait, isn’t that backwards? Didn’t Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. famously say that ‘Taxes are the price we pay for civilization’? He did, but he had it backwards. Taxes are, as Tommy Shelby said of politics in general, a way of deliberately making things better for some people by deliberately making them worse for others. … Read more
Judy Aron’s regular posts about what is going on in the House are informative, insightful, well-written, and worth reading. Near the beginning of a recent post, she started out with this comment: We knew the 23 bills we had before us were going to yield some very good wins. I don’t think that’s an unusual … Read more
Now that Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii is holding up all of Trump’s nominations , it seems appropriate to re-post a recommendation I made a while back: Okay, if this is the way things are going to go, here’s what I think Trump should do. He should tell the Senate: “You just pick whoever you … Read more
Although many people resist acknowledging this, we use a kind of Marxism to fund our schools: The Accidental Marxist The Accidental Marxist, Part 2 That is, by taxing each property owner in a school district a flat rate on the assessed value of his property, we take more from people who have more. So that’s … Read more
One of the many problems with universal EFAs is that they take money from people who don’t have it, to give to people who don’t need it. Let’s ask a straightforward question: Under what conditions should we give tax money to, or spend tax money on, people who can afford to get along without it? … Read more