Capitalism is not merely “who owns the stuff and chases profit.” At its core, it is the free-market system of private property, voluntary exchange, and competition that harnesses the dispersed knowledge, local insights, and self-interested decisions of millions of producers and consumers. This decentralized process outperforms any central authority at discovering prices, allocating scarce resources, and driving innovation and abundance.

Socialism, whether framed as “the people owning the means of production” or gentler democratic variants, still requires centralized control—through government or collective mandates—to override individual property rights and market signals. This inevitably ignores incentives, distorts information, and produces shortages, stagnation, and coercion. Real-world examples abound: the Soviet Union’s collapse, Venezuela’s economic ruin, and even China’s need to introduce market reforms to escape poverty. No socialist system has ever delivered sustained prosperity; it only allocates scarcity while eroding freedom.

Capitalism feeds the table. Socialism empties it.

https://www.newsweek.com/data-vs-drama-the-20-year-legacy-of-al-gores-climate-warnings-opinion-11967262

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Ensuring the integrity of voting is essential for public confidence in our federal elections. One important question is the potential extent of non-citizen voting.

Estimates indicate there are up to 12 million undocumented adults in the United States who are largely outside the active federal immigration tracking system and that use false, borrowed, stolen, or fraudulent documents for employment, identification, and daily life.

In several states, individuals are automatically registered to vote when obtaining or renewing a driver’s license unless they explicitly opt out or self-identify as a non-citizen. Additionally, certain states automatically send mail-in ballots to all registered voters and permit third-party ballot collection (sometimes called ballot harvesting), with varying levels of restrictions.

States with automatic mail ballots include: California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and others with broad policies. Several of these also allow third parties to return ballots on behalf of voters.

Given the combination of a large undocumented population with questionable documents, automatic registration mechanisms, widespread mail-in voting, and ballot collection practices, there is a plausible pathway for non-citizens to end up registered and casting ballots — whether intentionally or through error.

While some claim this issue has been thoroughly investigated and that audits show non-citizen voting is extremely rare, those studies have a fatal flaw: They only compare voter rolls against federal databases of known legal immigrants or naturalized citizens. They ignore undocumented individuals who are not in those systems and who may be using fraudulent identification.

A relatively straightforward solution is a well-designed pilot study. Select one or more precincts with a priori risk factors (high immigrant concentrations, automatic registration, mail-in voting). Draw a statistically significant random sample of registered voters or cast ballots, then commit sufficient resources to thoroughly verify citizenship and eligibility.

The study would not be used to prosecute or punish individuals. Participants could receive incentives for cooperation. A sample of approximately 3,000–5,000 voters in a high-risk district like California’s 40th Congressional District would provide a meaningful signal about whether non-citizen voting reaches around 1% or higher.

The cost would be modest compared to the value of credible, transparent data on election integrity — data that could either confirm concerns or reassure the public.

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America’s higher education system—one of the nation’s most important and historically productive assets—is at serious risk.

Many of America’s most influential universities have become ideologically homogeneous, with progressive and far-left viewpoints now overwhelmingly dominating faculty, administration, and campus culture.

The data illustrate the scale of the shift. In 1969, self-identified liberals comprised about 45% of faculty, with conservatives and middle-of-the-road scholars each near 27-28%. By 2021-22, the liberal/far-left share had climbed to 74.2%, while middle-of-the-road faculty dropped to 14.9% and conservatives/far right to 10.8%. More recent surveys confirm the imbalance remains extreme, especially in the social sciences and humanities, where ratios of liberal to conservative faculty often exceed 10:1.

This ideological capture has transformed institutions dedicated to teaching students how to think into environments that too often dictate what to think. The consequences are measurable: widespread self-censorship—with nearly half of conservative faculty (47%) and 27% overall feeling unable to express their views due to fear of backlash from colleagues, students, or administrators—along with reduced open inquiry, declining public trust, and a chilling effect that harms everyone.

Restoring the university’s core mission requires recommitting to three mutually reinforcing pillars:

• Institutional Neutrality
Universities must actively restore ideological balance to their faculty, administration, and campus culture. Decades of one-sided hiring and promotion have created deeply entrenched monocultures that stifle dissent and undermine public confidence. Institutions should also refrain from issuing official statements on social and political issues unrelated to their core educational and research mission.

• Open Discourse
Faculty and students must be free to question prevailing ideas, voice dissenting opinions, and explore controversial topics without fear of social ostracism, professional retaliation, or administrative punishment. Robust, good-faith debate—even on uncomfortable subjects—is essential to intellectual progress.

• Academic Freedom
Faculty should have wide latitude to design courses, pursue research, and follow evidence wherever it leads—without dogmatic pressure from administrators, activist colleagues, or external groups.

These three principles reinforce one another. Institutional neutrality, combined with deliberate efforts to restore viewpoint diversity, creates the neutral ground on which open discourse and academic freedom can truly flourish. Without them, universities risk becoming echo chambers that prioritize ideological conformity over truth-seeking and critical thinking.

One promising model is the approach famously articulated in the University of Chicago’s 1967 Kalven Report: “The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic.” By maintaining neutrality and deliberately broadening the range of viewpoints in hiring and leadership, universities can end the era of ideological gatekeeping, create space for genuine debate, and signal that no perspective is officially favored.

Several universities have successfully adopted or reaffirmed this approach in recent years, including Harvard, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, Vanderbilt, the University of North Carolina system, and smaller colleges such as Claremont McKenna College and the College of the Holy Cross. These examples show that neutrality paired with intentional rebalancing is practical and essential for rebuilding trust.

An insightful recent debate on this very question—“Is institutional neutrality necessary to preserve the university as a forum for open inquiry rather than an actor in political disputes?”—featured George Washington University Law Professor Jonathan Turley and Todd Wolfson, Professor at Rutgers University and President of the American Association of University Professors, sponsored by the Steamboat Institute. Watch here.

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Facts Supporting a Laboratory Origin

• China spent more than a decade collecting and studying one of the world’s largest known repositories of bat coronaviruses, particularly SARS-related coronaviruses (sarbecoviruses).

• Chinese researchers, including those associated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, were actively conducting high-risk coronavirus research involving chimeric viruses, humanized mouse models, serial passage experiments, receptor-binding studies, and other techniques designed to evaluate the potential for animal viruses to infect humans.

• Chinese authorities disclosed the genome sequence of SARS-CoV-2 in early January 2020 after the outbreak had already begun in Wuhan.

• In February 2020, China disclosed RaTG13 as the closest known coronavirus relative of SARS-CoV-2. However, the connection between RaTG13 and the previously published BtCoV/4991 sequence was not initially disclosed. BtCoV/4991 had been obtained from a mine in Mojiang, Yunnan Province, where several miners developed severe pneumonia-like illnesses in 2012.

• SARS-CoV-2 contains a furin cleavage site (FCS), a feature not previously observed in any known member of the SARS-related coronavirus (sarbecovirus) lineage. The FCS includes a CGG-CGG codon pair that attracted attention because of its rarity among known sarbecoviruses.

• Prior to the pandemic, researchers associated with EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology proposed work that would have involved inserting furin cleavage sites into SARS-like bat coronaviruses.

• The CGG codon is commonly used in molecular biology and genetic engineering because it efficiently encodes the amino acid arginine.

• Despite extensive investigation and sampling efforts over several years, no direct natural ancestor of SARS-CoV-2 has been identified.

• Despite extensive sampling of bat coronaviruses, no coronavirus containing the same SARS-CoV-2 furin cleavage site sequence has been identified.

• Chinese authorities have limited access to key records, databases, laboratory information, sample inventories, and other data that could help clarify the virus’s origin.

• Some coronavirus databases and research records that were previously accessible were removed from public access during the pandemic.

• U.S. government funding, through EcoHealth Alliance, supported coronavirus research collaborations involving Chinese institutions, including the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

• Evidence released through emails, congressional investigations, and intelligence disclosures indicates that Fauci and other influential officials played an active role in promoting the natural-origin narrative and downplaying the lab-leak hypothesis during the early stages of the pandemic.

• Several recently discovered coronaviruses, including the BANAL viruses from Laos, are somewhat closer relatives of SARS-CoV-2 than RaTG13.

• However, even the BANAL viruses remain evolutionarily distant from SARS-CoV-2 and do not provide a direct ancestral pathway explaining the emergence of COVID-19.

• Critical details regarding the earliest COVID-19 cases, patient records, animal testing, and outbreak investigations in China remain incomplete or unavailable to outside investigators.

Facts Supporting Natural Origin

• Natural zoonotic spillovers have occurred repeatedly throughout history and are a well-established mechanism for the emergence of new infectious diseases.

• Some evidence suggests that a number of the earliest known COVID-19 cases were associated with the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan.

• Environmental samples collected at the market tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, and some researchers argue that this pattern is consistent with a wildlife-associated spillover event.

Conclusion

Neither hypothesis has been conclusively proven. However, given the concentration of SARS-related coronavirus research in Wuhan, the existence of high-risk coronavirus experimentation, the unusual features of SARS-CoV-2, the lack of a confirmed natural progenitor after years of searching, and the continued opacity surrounding relevant Chinese data, the laboratory-origin hypothesis appears much more likely than a natural spillover explanation.

Two of Trump’s worse flaws are he is intellectually lazy and geopolitically naive.

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There is a lot of criticism about the wealth of the richest. However, many people don’t realize that the wealth of the richest is related to their ownership in companies that they have built and, critically important, that most (97%) of the wealth that they have created goes to others: consumers, investors, employees, suppliers and the Government.

It is estimated that the total value created by the companies owned by the 10 richest people is $122.6 Trillion with 51.3 going to consumers, 25.5 going to investors, 20.0 to employees, 11.4 to suppliers and 11.4 to government, with only $3.0 Trillion captured by the richest.

John Cochrane has a great article providing an argument that we want more billionaires as they are the ones creating value for everyone.

The Grumpy Economist

Wealth tax equilibrium accounting

The recent Piketty-Saez-Stiglitz revival of wealth taxes, ostensibly to improve the lot of the poor, makes many mistakes. I’ll focus on one: the difference between wealth and consumption. The poor wish consumption. Turning capital into consumption must destroy the capital that produces consumption. Taxing wealth in the name of inequality will make the…

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13 days ago · 97 likes · 28 comments · John H. Cochrane

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My father used to tell me that if I think everybody is stupid…look in a mirror.

Iran, which has been attacking and killing Americans since 1979, is evil, run by a bunch of kleptocrats and the world would be better off if it was changed.

Trump started down the right path. But he is too intellectually lazy and geopolitically naïve to realize that he’s leaving the world worse off than it started.

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“The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran and their allies [Israel, Hamas, Hezbollah, etc.?] in the current war, by signing this MOU, declare the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon, and undertake from now on not to initiate any war or any military operation against each other, and to refrain from the threat or use of force [terrorism?] against each other, and ensuring the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Lebanon.”