“A King Would Not Allow a Protest called ‘No Kings.'”

Correct. And here are things a King WOULD do:

Intimidate social media companies into not posting items the government dislikes;

Attempt to disarm the noncriminal population;

Force productive citizens to support the livelihood of nonproductive noncitizens;

Forcibly mask and vaccinate the population for the flu–while forcing the same citizens to work to pay for the “free” vaccines while absolving the manufacturers of all liability;

Open the borders and ship illegals (often violent criminals) into states that do not support the King;

Arrest the former and future President for no reason and then charge him with crimes not on the books that he didn’t commit;

Fix elections and threaten to imprison you when you challenge the unorthodox or brazenly illegal activities of election officials.

Need I continue? It seems to me we have already had a King.

 

 

The post No Kings — Say the Kings appeared first on Michael J. Hurd, Ph.D. | Living Resources Center.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oi8sRxe21qo




Podcast audio:







In this Ayn Rand Institute Podcast episode, Elan Journo and Onkar Ghate discuss the recent ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.




Overall evaluation of the deal;



Evading Hamas’s evil goals;



The injustice of the deal;



Altruism enables the injustice;



Enemies of freedom must be defeated.




This podcast was recorded on October 15, 2025.



Download video: https://www.youtube.com/embed/oi8sRxe21qo



Download audio: https://media.blubrry.com/new_ideal_ari/content.blubrry.com/new_ideal_ari/Injustice_of_Israel-Hamas_Ceasefire_Deal.mp3

News today got me thinking about a quote from T.E Utley’s Lessons of Ulster which was first published in 1975. Below is a scan from my copy.

For the uninitiated he is referring to the creation of a “no go” zone in Londonderry which lasted from 1969 to 1972.

Lessons of Ulster is a magnificent work. Flicking through it 30 years after having read it I was surprised how perceptive he was – more perceptive that I recall thinking at the time. But as you can see from the marginalia, I didn’t entirely agree with Utley and after hearing the news that the threat of Islamic violence has led to Israeli football fans being banned from attending a match in Birmingham I think I can claim that I was right and Utley wrong. Sure, we may not be seeing barricades but there can be little doubt that the British state lacks the will to face down mob violence.

Lest I am doing Utley a disservice, he did also have this to say:

It… seemed to me that, in some degree at least, the tragic conflict in Ulster might turn out to be a rehearsal for an even more devastating challenge to authority on this side of the Irish Sea.

Although – given that this was written in the 1970s – I think he was probably thinking more about communists and trade unions.

Update: Link fixed.

It exemplifies indispensable virtues: dignity through work, independence through skill, and humility through service.

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… is from page 7 of the late William Riker’s 1982 book, Liberalism Against Populism :

No government that has eliminated economic freedom has been able to attain or keep democracy, probably because, when all economic life is absorbed into government, there is no conceivable financial base for opposition. But economic liberty is also an end in itself because capitalism is the driving force for the increased efficiency and technological innovation that has produced in two centuries both a vast increase in the wealth of capitalist nations and a doubling of the average life span of their citizens.

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

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Here’s a letter to a new correspondent.

Mr. D__:

Thanks for your email.

You accuse me of having “a blind devotion to free trade fundamentalism which ignores foreigners’ unfair trade practices like subsidies.”

With respect, I do not ignore those practices. Like every serious advocate of free trade, I’m well aware that foreign governments often subsidize some of their exports. But also like every serious advocate of free trade, I see no good reason why those subsidies justify our government restricting our freedom to trade.

Suppose that you’ve long bought tomatoes from your local Safeway. Recently, however, the teenager next door has started to grow tomatoes in his parents’ backyard. His parents don’t charge him for using the land. Further, his parents pay for his gardening tools. In short, his parents subsidize his production of tomatoes. Your teenage neighbor, therefore, offers to sell tomatoes to you at prices lower than are charged by Safeway. You now commence to buy all of your tomatoes from your teenage neighbor.

Does your teenage neighbor trade “unfairly”? Are you harmed by your ability to purchase subsidized tomatoes from your neighbor? Should Safeway be able to call on government to obstruct your ability to buy your neighbor’s tomatoes?

My guess is that your answer to each of these questions is the same as my answer: “No.” So why do you answer “yes” when the seller is a producer located in a foreign country and the subsidies come from a foreign government? I can see no difference between the two cases that justifies different answers.

The one difference between the two cases is that, in the case of your neighbor’s tomatoes, the subsidies are paid voluntarily, while in the case of foreign exporters, the subsidies are extracted from the taxpayers of that foreign country. So there is indeed, in the case of subsidized exports, an unfairness. But this unfairness is not to us Americans; it’s exclusively to the foreigners who are taxed in order to make our cost of living lower. Yet all complaints about “unfair trade” are premised on the mistaken belief that the unfairness is to us. Reflecting, as they do, the economically uninformed notion that foreign subsidies are unfair to us, all calls for protective tariffs in response to “unfair trade” should be ignored.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

The post “Unfair Trade” Is Unfair Only to Foreigners appeared first on Cafe Hayek.