"One of Machiavelli’s most famous ideas is that it is 'better to be feared than loved.' He observed that, in power struggles, being feared can prevent betrayal or confrontation and can command a certain kind of respect.
    "My goal in life is not to pursue power at any cost. I also reject the false choice between being feared or being loved by others. 

    "What I seek instead is happiness—achieved through my own independent effort. I do not wish to live as either a master or a slave to anyone. 

    "Whether others fear me or love me cannot be the foundation of my happiness, because that would make my well-being dependent on them. True happiness, for me, comes from independence: from using my own thinking and actions to create the things I want to see existing."

~ Felipe Lapyda from his post 'The independent man rejects Machiavellian false alternatives'

“Saturday Night Live” could have a field day with the Right’s fallen stars.

Think Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, once dependable conservatives who have steered into chronic anti-Israel rage.

Hard.

Draw your own conclusions as to why. It’s not complicated.

Both Carlson and Owens give satirists endless material of late, above and beyond partisan critiques. Carlson’s current monologues blaming Israel for every ill under the sun are a comedian’s dream come true.

Owens’ deep thoughts, including time travel rants and smears against Charlie Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk, might be too unhinged for traditional satire.

Yet “SNL” hasn’t gone after either ripe target … until last night.

Tucker Carlson stops by the desk to talk Oscar nominations pic.twitter.com/Su5vdbQ6UP

— Saturday Night Live (@nbcsnl) March 15, 2026

The latest “SNL” episode found Carlson, played by Jeremy Culhane, examining the final days of the Oscar race and potential Best Picture winners.

Think “Sinners,” the bravura vampire romp from director Ryan Coogler.

“Because of course, Leftist woke America’s favorite movie this year is about sinning. Huh? Really? Why does that not surprise me? Sorry, kids. We don’t go to church anymore. We go to ‘Sinners.’ That’s the rule. That’s the goal now,” the faux Carlson said.

Moving on to another awards season darling, Carlson skewered the Shakespearean drama “Hamnet,” also up for Best Picture.

“We’re not allowed to say Hamlet anymore,” he cracked. “They took the ‘L’ and gave it to the LGBTQ,” he said. 

RELATED: WHY THAT ‘SNL’ MAGA SKETCH MATTERS 

As for “Bugonia,” Carlson said heterosexual women aren’t allowed to have hair anymore.

The bit wasn’t very funny, which isn’t surprising for modern-day “SNL.” What stood out is two-fold. The Left’s silly view of the Right, vis-à-vis culture, came across as wildly uninformed.

Some conservatives did attack “Sinners” as being a DEI-style pick due to the mostly black cast and racism themes.

.@BuckSexton: “Sinners is like murder porn of white people. It is horrible. It is horrifying.” pic.twitter.com/2QLweAp1fu

— The Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show (@clayandbuck) January 26, 2026

This critic considers that ill-advised, in part because most critics and audiences loved the film and it earned at least some of its Oscar nominations.

Handing the film 16 nominations, more than any other film in Oscars history, is another matter.

Still, that line of comedic attack would be based in some truth. That’s how the best satire works.

But “SNL” scribes don’t even know who Carlson is in 2026. He went from a firebrand Fox News star to a raging Israel hater who promotes conspiracy theorists and skewers the U.S. Military.

The show’s obvious lack of ideological diversity behind the scenes allowed this limp sketch to flower. It missed its target by a wide margin.

Culhane’s impression nailed some of Carlson’s catch phrases and his maniacal laugh, but it missed who the pundit has become over the last two years.

Did anyone on the writing staff bother to Google the real Carlson’s recent monologues? They aren’t smart, sophisticated or remotely conservative.

If you’re going to imitate a famous person, as “SNL” has done for decades, it helps to know who the person actually is.

The post ‘SNL’ Mocks Tucker Carlson, Gets Pundit 100 Percent Wrong appeared first on Hollywood in Toto.

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… is from page 337 of the “Random Thoughts” section of Thomas Sowell’s 2010 book, Dismantling America:

What is especially disturbing about the political left is that they seem to have no sense of the tragedy of the human condition. Instead, they tend to see the problems of the world as due to other people not being as wise or as noble as themselves.

The post Quotation of the Day… appeared first on Cafe Hayek.

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In my latest column for AIER I reflect on my now-long career of teaching introductory microeconomics at the collegiate level. A slice:

I’ve taught Principles of Microeconomics (“ECON 101”) regularly now for nearly a half-century. The first such course I taught was in the Fall Quarter of 1982 at Auburn University, my first year of graduate school there (after having received an M.A. in economics earlier that year from NYU). And except for a few years in the 1990s, I’ve taught ECON 101 every semester since, including in many summers. The total number of “micro principles” students whom I’ve taught over these years is likely in the neighborhood of 12,000. Mostly, I teach this course in auditoriums that hold between 200 and 350 students.

I never tire – and I’m sure that I never will tire – of walking into a classroom to introduce mostly 18-year-olds to the economic way of thinking. It’s still great fun and immensely rewarding, for I do regularly see the proverbial light bulbs being lit over many students’ heads.

My ECON 101 course is taught as if it’s the only economic course my students will ever take. Unlike many professors, I do not teach Principles of Microeconomics to prepare my students for Intermediate Microeconomics, which is the next course up in the curriculum. Some such preparation occurs, I’m pleased to report, but that’s all incidental. My chief goal is to inject my students with the rudiments of the economic way of thinking in order to inoculate them against the most virulent fallacies that are likely to try to infect their minds as they go through life.

What does that inoculation look like in practice? It begins with lessons such as these:

• Those of us alive in the modern, industrial world are among the materially richest human beings who ever lived, by far.
• There’s no such thing as a free lunch.
• In economic matters, there are no solutions, only trade-offs.
• Prices and wages set on markets are not arbitrary; market prices and wages reflect underlying economic realities as they also guide buyers, sellers, employers, and workers to better coordinate their plans and actions with each other.
• Profits in markets are not ‘extracted’ from workers or consumers; profits are the rewards for creatively using resources in ways to better satisfy consumer desires.
• Trade across political borders differs in no relevant economic respects from trade that occurs within political borders.
• Collective or political decision-making is done by the same imperfect and self-interested human beings who decide and act in private markets.

The above list is only a sample; it doesn’t exhaust the topics that I cover in the course. But were I to make an exhaustive list of those topics, some of what most other ECON 101 teachers teach would not be found on my list. I long ago stopped drawing cost curves and teaching the theories of so-called “perfect competition” and “monopolistic competition.” Whatever insights into the real-world economy and market processes are offered by these theories, if they exist at all, are too meager to justify the time required to ‘teach’ them. I instead spend far more time than is conventional teaching both basic public-choice economics and international trade.

No student passes my course without learning that real-world market processes must be compared to real-world political processes rather than to ideal political processes. Likewise, every student who passes my ECON 101 course learns that protectionism neither increases nor decreases domestic employment, and that trade deficits are balanced out by capital inflows.

The post Reflections on a Long Career of Teaching ECON 101 appeared first on Cafe Hayek.

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… is from page 237 of George Will’s 2021 book, American Happiness and Discontents: The Unruly Torrent, 2008-2020 – a splendid collection of many of Will’s columns over these years; (the essay from which the quotation below is drawn originally appeared in the Washington Post’s print edition on March 26th, 2015):

Actually, Americans incessantly “outsource” here at home by, for example, having Iowans grow their corn and dentists take care of their teeth, jobs at which Iowans and dentists excel and the rest of us do not. LeBron James could be an adequate NFL tight end, but why subtract time from being a superb basketball player? The lesson, says [John] Tamny, is that individuals – and nations – should do what they do better than others and let others do other things.

The post Quotation of the Day… appeared first on Cafe Hayek.

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The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board decries the Elizabeth Warren-inspired, Trump-supported bill that would, among other harmful measures, ban institutional investors from owning single-family rental housing units. Two slices:

The Senate’s 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act is a melange of some 40 bills. Call it a blueprint for a bigger Washington. It establishes multiple grant and loan programs for “affordable” housing while expanding federal power over local zoning. The worst provision is a ban on large investors purchasing single-family homes to rent.

Companies like Amherst and Invitation Homes that buy and then rent single-family homes have become a popular scapegoat for high housing prices. The real leading culprit is the Federal Reserve’s pandemic-era monetary policy. Historically low mortgage rates followed by inflation fueled price appreciation and resulted in a lock-in effect for owners that is constricting the supply of homes for sale.

Large investment firms mopped up foreclosed homes after the 2008 housing crash, placing a floor on prices. They account for less than 1% of the single-family housing stock, and the number of rental homes has declined on net by 900,000 since 2017. They manage fewer homes in pricy markets like Los Angeles (0.3%), Boston (0.02%) and Washington, D.C. (0.07%).

President Trump thinks the investor ban polls well and likes to say “people live in homes, not corporations.” But who does he think lives in rental homes—hedge fund managers? Most tenants are lower-income. The Senate bill could force many of them out of their homes.

…..

Imagine how a Democratic administration will exploit this sweeping power. How about a nationwide eviction moratorium or rent control? The bill also instructs the Housing and Urban Development Department to establish housing “best practices” for local governments—solar panels on all homes!

Oh, and don’t forget a grant program to reward local governments that “promote dense development” and “mixed-income housing,” an idea Ms. Warren campaigned on during her presidential bid in 2020. She sent out an exuberant press release on Tuesday listing all of the left-wing groups endorsing the bill.

Eager to claim a housing victory, the White House is pressuring Senate Republicans to pass the bill and wants the House to accept it. But why do Republicans want to provide a down payment for Ms. Warren and fellow progressives to expand Washington control over housing in their states?

The Washington Post‘s Editorial Board distinguishes effective from counterproductive ways to decrease the cost of oil and gasoline. A slice:

On the other hand, repealing the Jones Act, which would allow non-U.S. tankers to transport oil between U.S. ports, would immediately have salutary effects. The decrepit Jones Act fleet makes it cost prohibitive to move products from Gulf Coast refineries to the Northeast or the West Coast. The Trump administration is reportedly considering waiving the law, and there is already legislation introduced in Congress to repeal it. That’s a great idea regardless of anything happening with Iran.

David Hogberg explains what shouldn’t – but, alas, what today nevertheless does – need explaining: “Price controls will not help patients.” A slice:

Anthony Lo Sasso of the University of Wisconsin-Madison warns that price controls will give larger pharmaceutical companies a significant advantage. “Even well-intentioned price controls can sometimes reshape market structure in unintended ways,” Lo Sasso said. “Firms with diversified portfolios and global operations may be better able to adapt than smaller companies reliant on only a few products. Generally, policymakers need to consider whether MFN could inadvertently increase concentration even as it attempts to reduce prices.”

Jacob Sullum is correct: “Trump’s new tariff plan still asserts a crisis that does not exist.” A slice:

When imports exceed exports, the difference is balanced by inflows of loans, capital, and other transfers. That is why, as the government’s lawyers conceded during the litigation over Trump’s IEEPA tariffs, a trade deficit is “conceptually distinct” from a balance-of-payments deficit.

Trump has now changed his tune and his terminology.

Many governments are now forging trade agreements to avoid the uncertainties unleashed by Trump’s protectionist ‘policies.’ Jim Bacchus urges these governments to pursue their new agreements within the WTO. A slice:

As the Trump administration imposes a barrage of illegal and unprecedented tariffs on an ever-increasing number of imported products, the rest of the world is showing that it can continue trading despite these tariffs and without the United States. Other countries are lowering trade barriers with each other by concluding new bilateral and plurilateral trade agreements, and exporters are reconfiguring supply chains to route around American protectionism. Regardless of whether the United States remains indispensable to the global economy, international trade continues—and increasingly so—without the United States.

At the same time, these countries should not be doing what they have mostly been doing: forging new trading arrangements outside the World Trade Organization (WTO). Although the temptation to go outside the WTO legal framework is understandable, the better course would be for the other 165 WTO members to redouble their efforts toward trade liberalization within the institution while pursuing a different approach. That approach should be WTO-based plurilateralism that can build up to multilateralism, which is precisely how, over decades, the original General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) evolved into the WTO.

Scott Lincicome tweets:

Industrial policy FTW: “China’s Tariff-Defying Export Boom Leaves Its Factory Workers Behind: Workers who powered a tariff-defying boom tell a grim story of falling wages and vanishing jobs.” https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-03-09/china-s-tariff-defying-export-boom-leaves-its-factory-workers-behind

Sam Gregg reflects on Adam Smith’s deeply human vision. A slice:

The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations are thus, despite their different foci, methodologically similar works. But they are also unified by an overarching goal: that of introducing improvement into the human condition and changing the world for the better. While Smith was devoted to his scholarly endeavors, he was also anxious to advance a reformist agenda: one that removed the economic fetters of the mercantile system and instead allowed people to pursue lives marked by mature liberty, personal responsibility, and virtue, free of subservience to those who, thanks to the mercantile system, had acquired legal and economic privileges from the state.

Underpinning that reform agenda is a profound awareness, revealed in both The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations, of the interdependencies that characterize the commercial societies then emerging in the European world, especially Britain and its North American colonies. Far from being a society of radical individualists, the picture of human relations that arises from Smith’s two books is one in which people are morally and economically dependent on one another.

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