Tag: big government

Gallup Poll: Americans Say Government Is the Number One Problem Today

According to a recent Gallup poll, Americans say that government is their number one problem, beating out inflation for the top spot. In response to the question: “what do you think is the most important problem facing the country today?” 21 percent of Americans answered “Government,” up from 15 percent last year. According to Gallup’s…


Government Spending Threatens Americans’ High Standard of Living

Commentary The average American home is almost 2,200 square feet. An average home in the United Kingdom is a minuscule 818 square feet, in Finland 880 square feet, and in Germany under 1,200 square feet. Cramped. Americans have bigger houses and a higher material standard of living—more appliances, clothing, and cars—largely because they can keep…


National Debt Reflects a Nation That Has Lost Its Way

Commentary As tensions about raising the nation’s $31.4 trillion debt ceiling build, the headline that should be flashing in front of every American is that our country is not working. Nothing is going to get fixed—really fixed—until we come clean about this basic, sad, and distressing fact. How can it be that we have national…


New IRS Requirement Raises Questions About Vow to Expand Audits Only on ‘Rich’

Commentary Next month, the U.S. Postal Service will be busier than usual. Not because of late Christmas cards or thank-you letters, but because of the extra Form 1099-Ks the IRS will be mailing out. Under the American Rescue Plan, third-party payment facilitators like Venmo, eBay, Etsy, and Airbnb are now required to send Form 1099-Ks…


Big Business, Big Government, Big Brother

Commentary These days, poisonous collusion between powerful private sector interests and the state turns one’s thoughts to insecure cell phone data and social media censorship in the service of the Democratic Party. But devil’s bargains between Chamber of Commerce members and elected officials have been going on for a long time, maybe back to the…


The Twitter Files: Just the Beginning

Commentary Last night was quite the ride. Bari Weiss, who left the New York Times in protest against the culture of that paper, had been given access to another tranche of inside information about the operation of Twitter before Elon Musk took over. She found vast confirmation of what we’ve suspected for years now: the platform was…


Can Private Companies Censor If They Want To?

Commentary It’s like clockwork. Every time we get a new batch of proof that Big Tech companies have been censoring information related to COVID controls, vaccines, or other controversial topics, someone pops up with the same argument. They say these are private companies and they can do whatever they want. They aren’t violating the First…


Who Really Owns Big Digital Tech?

Commentary By now it should be perfectly clear that the most prominent Big Digital companies are not strictly private, for-profit companies. As I argued in “Google Archipelago,” they are also state apparatuses, or governmentalities, undertaking state functions, including censorship, propaganda, and surveillance. Katherine Boyle, “a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz where she invests in companies that…


The War on Truth in This World and the Next

Commentary Chris Hardwick, the American comedian and actor, once said: “We’re not in an information age anymore. We’re in the information management age.” He’s right. We are. With so much information out there—a lot of good and a lot of it bad—it’s difficult to separate fact from fiction. This is why governments worldwide are stepping up…


Had Enough Yet?

Commentary I’m currently down here in the free state of Florida for a summit this weekend where I am one of the legal experts on the panel of lawyers (hence me being a day late in posting this week’s Substack). The lineup of speakers here has been phenomenal. Truly brilliant minds, all coming together to…