u/lemon_lime_light

The administration’s holdings are growing at breakneck speed. The running tally at the Cato Institute counts 31 government equity deals...enacted by three different federal agencies acting under murky legal authority...Some of the equity deals appear to have been coerced by the administration...And more stakes are rumored to be on the way. In a single year, Washington went from one position to a diverse and questionable portfolio, with nary a vote from Congress or the American public.

These stakes have already corrupted American businesses [see: US Steel, Apple, Nvidia, SpaceX and Japan’s SoftBank]...

The deals have also invited cronyism. The Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital, with as much as $200 billion in lending capacity, is run by a former Cerberus Capital Management executive whose old firm invests in the same industries. One beneficiary, Vulcan Elements, is backed by Donald Trump Jr.’s venture capital firm. [Commerce Secretary Howard] Lutnick’s former investment firm is connected to USA Rare Earth, which is now partially state-owned. And the president himself has disclosed myriad stock trades involving Intel and other companies either with government ownership and or in the state-backed firms’ close orbit.

These are just the seen costs; the unseen ones are bigger. As expected, speculators are investing billions of dollars in companies based on perceived political momentum, rather than the companies’ actual performance or promise [ie, " textbook capital misallocation"].

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) propose new spending that could more than triple federal outlays. They propose the government pay for health care, housing, higher education, and electricity. Jobs are government-guaranteed, retirement benefits are expanded, paid family leave is universal, fossil fuels are eliminated, and reparations are paid. 

The DSA platform claims that the bill for all this will be sent to “the richest individuals and corporations.” Tally up that bill, and it ballparks between $71 trillion and $212 trillion in new spending over the next decade. Confiscating every dollar of high-end wealth and corporate profits would cover only a fraction of those costs. The DSA agenda necessitates high taxes on middle-class Americans.

As previously covered in this subreddit, while Ayan Farah Abukar of Bloomington stole millions via Feeding Our Future, Minnesota DHS gave her an "Outstanding Refugee Award for Entrepreneurship" in 2021. The occasion even deserved a personal congratulations from Governor Walz. She eventually pleaded guilty for her role in the scheme in which she personally netted nearly $6 million.

According to contemporaneous reporting from Mshale, the other "Outstanding Refugee..." recipient that year was Salman Elmi of Blaine. Now the Star Tribune reports that Elmi faces charges from the Minnesota Attorney General’s Medicaid Fraud Unit that one of his companies "defrauded the state’s Medicaid program of more than $1 million" and is connected to a "massive" Twin Cities sex trafficking case. The article also confirms the details of his DHS award:

>Elmi’s website shows that he runs three companies including Tavolo, a restaurant marketing platform; The Velvet Lounge, a members-only club in Minneapolis; and Top Figure, a digital media company. He was once given the “Outstanding Refugee Award for Entrepreneurship” by the DHS.

>The DHS website for that award has been taken down, but an archive of it shows that Elmi wrote a profile which said: “The biggest thing I hear all the time is that refugees are mooching off of the economy or being a non-productive member of society when, in reality, immigrants contribute to a big part of the U.S. economy, especially here in Minnesota.”

Who was in charge of vetting these "outstanding refugees"?

Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan won Minnesota’s Democratic primary for U.S. Senate by an incredible margin this week, defeating U.S. Rep. Angie Craig by more than 130,000 votes.

Many factors influenced why certain candidates won or lost Tuesday night. But in the current political environment, some young voters are lasered in on a new kind of political baggage: money from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC.

This, it seems, was one of Craig’s leading vulnerabilities and a frequent point of attack by Flanagan ― to the point where it earned the congresswoman a nickname in progressive circles online: “AIPAC Angie.”

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey proposed a $2.3 billion budget Wednesday that would require a 11.3% increase in the city’s property tax levy, the elimination of 100 positions and the consolidation of several departments.

That would be the biggest levy increase since at least 2000, according to city records. But Frey said the city spending is outpacing revenue, and one-time fixes won’t fix this structural imbalance...

The tax increase means the owner of a median-valued Minneapolis home, worth $351,400, will pay $409 more a year. The property tax levy has gone up an average of 7.7% a year since 2018.

Frey’s budget address is just the starting point for months of public hearings and negotiations before final passage of a budget in December. Council President Elliott Payne said he’s not sure substantial job cuts and a hefty levy increase is the “right balance,” but he’d like to avoid another budget veto.

[The newly published political platform of the Twin Cities Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has] a demand that is as breathtaking in its radicalism as it is legally unhinged. The platform demands that we: “Transfer control of Xcel and Centerpoint to our communities without compensation for their corporate owners"....To anyone with a basic understanding of constitutional law, public finance, or macroeconomics, this proposal reads like an economic suicide note...

The impulse to demand local control over vital resources is easy to understand, especially when consumers feel squeezed by rising utility rates or corporate opacity. Public utilities must always be held accountable to the communities they serve.

But the Twin Cities DSA’s plan to simply steal the infrastructure of Xcel and CenterPoint is a dangerous fantasy that completely misunderstands the architecture of our legal and economic systems. You cannot build a progressive paradise on a foundation of asset confiscation.

The uncompensated seizure of our utilities wouldn’t deliver “power to the people”—it would deliver a constitutional crisis, a junk credit rating, a mass exodus of businesses and jobs, and a decaying, underfunded energy grid prone to blackouts.

A federal judge dismissed a Department of Justice lawsuit against Minneapolis Public Schools’ policy aimed at retaining teachers of color on procedural grounds Monday...

In his order, U.S. District Judge Patrick Schiltz, an appointee of George W. Bush, made clear he had “grave doubts about the legality of the racial discrimination in which MPS is forced to engage” under its collective bargaining agreement with the teachers union. The policy in question, which the district and union agreed to following a three-week educator strike in 2022, allows the district to retain “underrepresented” teachers, rather than strictly follow seniority order, during staff reductions. Schiltz said that policy could lead to a Black teacher being retained over a white teacher on the basis of race.

Still, Schiltz said, the lawsuit must be dismissed due to a quirk in how federal law governs discrimination cases. Since the policy was governed by a collective bargaining agreement, Schiltz said, the union was a necessary party to the lawsuit. But the Department of Justice did not and could not include the union in the lawsuit, because under federal law, the U.S. Attorney General can only bring lawsuits alleging a pattern or practice of discrimination against governmental entities — not against private entities like labor unions.

The budget of the federal government is the largest of any organization in human history...And it mostly grows automatically, without regular input from elected officials.

In the past, huge surges in the national debt were largely caused by wars or recessions. They were temporary. When the war concluded or economic growth resumed, debt as a share of the economy would fall.

That’s not how it works anymore. The debt increases due to demographic trends as the bulk of spending goes to programs that serve an aging population...

Around 2030, the United States is projected to surpass three milestones that illustrate the lack of precedent for the government’s fiscal predicament.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, 2030 is the year when federal debt held by the public as a share of the economy will exceed the record set by World War II...this debt shows no signs of ever declining....In 2025, 73 percent of federal outlays were on mandatory spending or interest payments, which are legally obligated to continue.

The year 2030 is also roughly when the ratio of seniors to the total population will reach 1 in 5...Seniors’ rising share of the population mechanically raises Social Security and Medicare costs and pushes them onto a proportionally smaller working population...

[The year] 2030 is also the year when the CBO projects that deaths will begin to exceed births. The entitlement programs making up much of the budget were designed under 20th-century demographic expectations that no longer hold true.

In their book The Individualists, Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi identify six "markers of membership shared by every­one in the libertarian f­amily":

• Private property ("perhaps the central defining feature of libertarianism")
• Skepticism of authority
• Free markets
• Spontaneous order
• Individualism
• Negative liberty

Do you think this a good set of ideas for defining libertarianism? Would you change anything?

Because redistribution uses coercive political power to assign one person’s resources to purposes chosen by others, it requires justification. Need may establish a powerful claim upon our assistance, but it does not automatically establish an unlimited political claim upon the property, labor, and choices of others.

Once redistribution is institutionalized, it does not merely move money from the rich to the poor. It transfers authority from individuals and civil society to the state, which increasingly assumes control over income, savings, work, family incentives, and social initiative. What is truly redistributed is authority from individuals and voluntary associations to a centralized administrative state.

This transfer of authority cannot operate as a single act. Redistribution requires a permanent political machinery of extraction, distribution, and revision. Once taxation is regarded not merely as a means of raising revenue but as an instrument for producing a preferred social pattern, political power is invited permanently into the questions of who has too much, who has too little, who deserves assistance, and who must surrender resources to provide it.

The concern is not moral hard-heartedness. It is the danger of political power without intelligible limits. The more the state attempts to equalize outcomes through political management rather than voluntary aid, family support, mutual assistance, charity, and civil society, the more it must centralize command. 

For many years, I’ve chronicled the intrusion of social justice imperatives into my psychiatry profession and the threat it poses to patient care. Percolating during the 2000s, the trend surged fiercely after the death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, at the hands of Minneapolis policeman Derek Chauvin.

Recall, for example, the Covid-era exhortation from a Johns Hopkins epidemiologist that we all march to protest Floyd’s death even though gathering for other causes was deemed too dangerous. There was also an open letter signed by 1,200 health and medical colleagues urging “to respond to protesters demands in the name of public health"...

To get a feel for the climate, I looked at what took place on the first day of medical school, a day when students around the country participate in a formal induction called the White Coat Ceremony...

In 2022, students at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities campus recited their own written oath. They called their white coats a “symbol of power, prestige and dominance,” spoke of “uprooting the legacy and perpetuation of structural violence deeply embedded within the health care system” and pledged to “honor all indigenous ways of healing that have been historically marginalized by Western medicine"...

[Four years later] I revisited the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities and found students embracing “the tradition of Hippocrates” and viewing “the tools of my profession to be knowledge, compassion and patience.”

These covenants signify that being a doctor requires the same values it always did. I hope that we may be in the early stages of returning academic medicine to its native calling in which patients come before politics.

The U.S. government just took ownership stakes in seven semiconductor start-ups, the latest example of the Trump administration’s embrace of state capitalism...

This is not the proper role of government. The free market is always better than politicians at efficiently allocating investment capital. Republicans once understood the dangers of the federal government picking winners and losers, but the Trump administration has been hoovering up shares of private companies at a rate that would’ve made Democratic predecessors blush....After this latest round of investments, the federal government’s total equity portfolio has ballooned to 30 companies, up from zero before President Donald Trump’s second term...

The Commerce Department claims the equity stakes will “enhance the return for the U.S. taxpayer.” What it does not say is that taxpayers are on the hook if these companies collapse....And if the government decides these companies are too important to fail and must be propped up, it further distorts the market. The most innovative and economically feasible projects might not succeed if the government plays favorites.

Government stakes in private companies inevitably tempt public officials to enrich their cronies....As the government’s portfolio grows, conflicts of interest grow with it.

[Rent control] is a brilliantly seductive piece of political marketing. Why not simply pass a law making it illegal to raise rents past a certain percentage? It feels like an immediate win for the working class, achieved by the stroke of a legislative pen.

[But rent control] is an economic reality so well-established that it achieves rare cross-ideological consensus among economists: capping the price of housing below market rates is the single most effective way to destroy the quality and availability of the very housing stock you are trying to preserve...

The desire to shield working families from soaring housing costs is entirely commendable. But the Twin Cities DSA’s insistence on rent control is a dangerous illusion that completely ignores decades of economic data.

As the historic collapses in St. Paul, Montgomery County, and Portland demonstrate, telling builders they cannot cover their future costs is the fastest way to stop them from building altogether. Rent control does not create a single new apartment; it chokes off supply, destroys union construction jobs, turns existing buildings into decaying liabilities, and forces everyday homeowners to subsidize the commercial real estate market through higher property taxes.

True public policy wisdom lies in building our way out of scarcity. Affordability is achieved by slashing restrictive municipal zoning codes, eliminating mandatory parking minimums, streamlining the bureaucratic permitting process, and encouraging an absolute flood of new housing supply. True progress means making it easier to build, not turning our city into an avoidance zone for the capital that keeps us moving forward

A section in the newly released "Routledge Handbook of Classical Liberalism" looks at "a decisive dimension along which classical liberal views differ: their appraisal of the power and limits of human reason" and asks readers to "compare two quotations, each drawn from a thinker closely associated with classical liberal political theory".

>Ludwig von Mises: “All that man is and all that raises him above animals he owes to his reason. Why should he forgo the use of his reason...in the sphere of social policy and trust to vague and obscure feelings and impulses?”

>F. A. Hayek: “It is probably no more justified to claim that thinking man has created his culture than that culture created his reason...Man did not adopt new rules of conduct because he was intelligent. He became intelligent by submitting to new rules of conduct.”

>While Mises emphasizes the role of reason in improving our condition and setting social policy, Hayek holds that reason will never grasp the full significance or purpose of the social rules we follow. Rather than reason, we must trust the evolved set of cultural values and traditions to guide our decision‑making. This fundamental divide, one which separates two thinkers often presented as espousing identical theories, runs through the center of the classical liberal tradition. There are, on the one hand, rationalists, who believe that reason provides the means to understand society, identify the correct set of values or rules, and guide society in their pursuit. And, on the other hand, there are antirationalists, who stress the limits of human reason, emphasizing, instead, the crucial role of institutions and customs that, although we fail to comprehend them, provide indispensable guardrails for social interaction and cultural development.

Is this "rationalists vs antirationalists" a real or meaningful divide amongst classical liberals? Are you more rationalist or antirationalist?

Billionaires have never exactly been popular, but today they are loathed. Politicians in America’s Congress talk about them far more than ever before, usually to decry their ill-gotten gains or their malign influence on politics, or to insist that their wealth needs taxing....Yet just as politicians think they have hit on a winning message, something unexpected is happening. More and more billionaires derive their wealth not from accidents of birth or from gaming the system, but by providing useful goods and services and by employing thousands of people. Perhaps billionaires are still policy failures—but to a lesser extent than before...

The surge in anti-billionaire sentiment reflects several forces. After a few years of high inflation hitting living standards, people are looking for someone to blame. Billionaires, the thinking goes, use their market power and buy political influence to overcharge for everything from housing to groceries, and then pay low taxes on the profits. The “affordability crisis” and the powerful billionaire are thus two sides of the same coin. And political strategists, chiefly but not exclusively on the left, have realised that billionaires are the perfect enemy. A tax on their wealth would affect almost nobody a voter has ever met....Yet many billionaires make their money without a hint that they enjoy questionable monopolies or political favour...

From 2001, when our data begin, to 2014, the uncompetitive share of billionaire wealth rose slightly. Yet over the past decade the share derived from self-made entrepreneurs in competitive sectors has surged to an all-time high...For the first time, half the wealth of the world’s billionaires is reasonably fairly earned. And since 2021 the total wealth derived from uncompetitive sectors has declined...

Does the rise of the self-made billionaire strengthen or weaken the arguments for wealth taxation? It makes no difference to some of them. Democracy does not work well if a tiny group of people can buy influence—and that is true however they got rich...

Yet if billionaires have too much political power, the solution may be to change the rules on donations rather than to change the tax system. This is because the rise of the self-made billionaire greatly weakens other arguments for wealth taxation. It is now more difficult to say, as many campaigners still do, that billionaire fortunes “were never really earned”...And because a greater share of today’s billionaires spurs employment growth and productivity gains, it raises the economic cost of losing them, if they decide to move away, or work less hard, to avoid taxation. Billionaires may be less popular, but the proposed remedies look weaker than ever.

A recent paper investigates the extent to which de-policing can explain the increase in local homicides amidst the post-George Floyd social unrest (emphasis added):

>This study tests whether the 2020 police murder of George Floyd produced measurable changes in the quantity and qualities of homicide in Hennepin and Ramsey Counties, Minnesota—the epicenter of the ensuing social unrest—and whether these effects were moderated by neighborhood disadvantage or mediated by changes in police activity...

>The police murder of George Floyd triggered a sustained escalation in homicide in the Twin Cities ["The homicide rate increased 2.5-fold—from 0.11 to 0.28 per 100,000 residents—immediately after Mr. Floyd’s murder and remained elevated for 136 weeks, yielding an estimated 183 excess homicides"], driven by situational and interpersonal violence concentrated in disadvantaged neighborhoods. De-policing explained part of the increase ("reduced police stops mediated 25% of the total effect").

Here are some visuals on how the rate of homicides changed:

https://preview.redd.it/omg2wbusesfh1.png?width=1417&format=png&auto=webp&s=40a2b518755ea2bedda80972369304217299eecd

https://preview.redd.it/ii8cgftvesfh1.png?width=540&format=png&auto=webp&s=431f8a4d23d0355bbeb31a840726d1dab26a8148

And here's an interesting discussion on "Policing and De-policing" from the paper:

>The evidence that certainty—more so than severity—of punishment deters crime is robust (Nagin 2013). Policing can affect homicide through visibility (certainty), incapacitation, and targeted tactics. Randomized hot-spots experiments and systematic reviews demonstrate that focused patrol and problem-oriented strategies reduce crime in small geographic areas (Sherman & Weisburd 1995; Braga et al. 2014, 2019). Yet how police deploy their resources matters: Spelman (2017) shows that tactical quality and deployment decisions often outweigh simple headcount increases...

>High-profile police killings can trigger dual reactions—legitimacy shocks among the public (legal cynicism and reduced cooperation) and behavioral pullbacks within departments (declines in proactive activity). In Minneapolis specifically, the police workforce contracted sharply following Mr. Floyd’s murder. Between 2020 and 2022, 273 officers left the department—about 40% of its sworn strength—through retirements, resignations, and a surge in workers’ compensation claims (Kolls 2023). Evidence from the Ferguson era shows that public scrutiny following police violence produced measurable reductions in officer-initiated stops nationwide, accompanied by modest short-term increases in violent and property crime (Powell 2023). Similarly, Vandegrift & Connor (2020) find that a police use-of-force incident predicted nearly a two percent rise in murders two months later, with effects stronger pre-Ferguson but reversing in some later contexts. Yet other multi-city analyses find mixed or null average effects (Pyrooz et al. 2016; Rosenfeld & Wallman 2019).

>At finer scales, neighborhood-level studies report that sharp drops in stops correlate with increases in violent and property crime (Nix et al. 2024) and that Minneapolis experienced contemporaneous jumps in carjacking and homicide after George Floyd’s murder (Lind et al. 2024)...

>Taken together, the literature supports the situational deterrence value of proactive policing but underscores its heterogeneity. The balance of evidence suggests that policing pullbacks do occur after legitimacy crises, but their crime consequences are contingent on local context and several other mechanisms this study investigates at the neighborhood level.

Friedrich Hayek is a hero and an inspiration to conservatives all over the world, but in one of his sharpest essays, he explained why he is not a conservative. He urged that while conservatives seek to impose a salutary brake on change, they do not tell us where to go. He argued that conservatives do not sufficiently respect freedom and that they are far too willing to override it. He believed that conservatives do not make enough space for pluralism. He claimed that they are wrongly opposed to novelty as such and fall prey to "obscurantism," particularly in rejecting science. He vigorously objected to conservative nationalism and saw it as a precursor to collectivism. Although he agreed with conservatives on many things, including the importance of traditions and incremental change, he insisted that they have something in common with socialists, and that liberals of his distinctive kind offer a different and better path.

A Minneapolis restaurant took prices off the menu....Neighbors say they paid a price.

It’s been six months since the cafe on the corner of Chicago Avenue and East 32nd Street changed its name from Modern Times to Post Modern Times and stopped charging for food....But donations ran low, and so did neighborhood goodwill.

[Owner Dylan] Alverson announced Friday that the restaurant is closing for a few weeks, starting Sunday, while he hammers out a new business model...

Were the past six months a feel-good story? It depends on who you ask.

“I’m just trying to feed people,” Alverson once said. He and his staff tried to treat everyone who walks through the door with kindness and dignity. He’s seen what that means to someone experiencing homelessness, addiction or mental illness...

Outside the restaurant walls, neighbors told a different story. They talked about overdoses on the sidewalk. Used syringes in the alley. Human feces in their yards. Thefts. Fights. Crowds of people lingering on the corner for hours on end, six days a week.