Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
“The U.S. government will lend Spirit as much as $500 million in exchange for warrants to take a potential stake in the carrier, according to the report.”
https://finance.yahoo.com/economy/policy/articles/trump-administration-nears-deal-rescue-150532605.html
Trump is destroying what it means to be an American.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHEoPFrZIhw
Studies don’t add up to supporting that inequality matters outside of the inequality itself. Instead of focusing on inequality, it’s better to focus on helping everyone live a better life than on inequality per se.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziVSakxDaPk
Distortionary subsidies helped create suburbanization and longer commutes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKMcs9eYvq4
The Chinese Communist Party forced Apple to lower prices on the Apple Store for Chinese residents. Trump talks big, but he lets the Chinese Communist Party push around American companies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WARSIG9iq8A
Facebook changed its name to Meta and spent billions on the Metaverse. This was a failure. If government had done this, it would be lambasted and held up as proof that government is incompetent and can’t do things. Yet, when the private sector does this, we let it go. We shouldn’t have this double standard. In both cases, if some money isn’t wasted on failed ideas, then we aren’t trying enough new ideas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQGDnM2fSwI
“Trump’s tariffs, framed as industrial policy to reindustrialize the country, protect workers, and lower prices. Instead, tariffs have quietly consumed much of the manufacturing sector’s profits. This is unsurprising. Most U.S. imports are inputs used to make American goods. Tariffs, therefore, are taxes on American manufacturing.
Empirical work by the Kiel Institute shows that foreign exporters absorb only a trivial share of the cost. Roughly 96 percent of the burden is passed to American buyers. U.S. households and businesses—not foreign firms—overwhelmingly covered the roughly $200 billion in customs revenue collected in 2025. Companies we import from responded not by cutting prices but by shipping fewer goods to the U.S. As Kiel economist Julian Hinz put it, the tariffs amounted to an “own goal” that raised costs, compressed profits, and weakened the very industries they were meant to protect.
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Tariffs did not restore competitiveness or pricing power. They jacked up costs and made American production less attractive at the margin.”
https://reason.com/2026/01/29/from-georgias-film-subsidies-to-intels-collapse-industrial-policy-keeps-failing/
“In 2022, Seattle became one of the first cities in America to pass a minimum wage law for food delivery drivers. The law went into effect in 2024, and the results were nothing short of calamitous. Food orders plunged to unprecedented lows, delivery costs exploded, and driver earnings appeared to crater.
Now, new research on Seattle’s delivery driver minimum wage ordinance shows that the law had no long-term effect on driver wages. And yet, Seattle’s city council shows no signs of changing course, even with higher consumer costs and zero growth in driver pay.”
https://reason.com/2025/12/20/seattles-delivery-minimum-wage-failed-drivers-and-raised-costs/
“The National Park Service (NPS) owns five golf courses across three properties in the nation’s capital: East Potomac Park Golf Course (home to three courses), Langston Golf Course, and Rock Creek Park Golf Course. If that seems like a weird thing for the federal government to do, you’re right—but it’s common in the D.C. area, where the NPS might also own your favorite concert venue or theater, parkways on your commute, your marina, or the park in the traffic circle a block from your office.
All that federal control means the president might suddenly take an interest in, and mess with, your favorite hobby.
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“National Links Trust has done everything it promised, and the Trump administration isn’t retaking control of D.C.’s public golf courses to make them nicer and more affordable for taxpayers,” according to sports business writer Joe Pompliano, who reviewed the lease. “They are doing it to create an upscale venue that can host a Ryder Cup, replacing the promise of affordable golf with prices most taxpayers cannot afford.”
In short, the government said it needed help fixing the golf courses. National Links Trust got a 50-year lease to do so. Government red tape made it hard to do the work quickly. Then the Trump administration had a shiny (possibly far-fetched) idea, blamed National Links Trust for not going fast enough, and cut off the lease. That’s not exactly going to encourage more nonprofits or private contractors to work with the administration, or possibly with the government in general.”
https://reason.com/2026/01/06/how-the-trump-administration-quietly-and-quickly-took-over-3-golf-courses-in-washington-d-c/
“Large institutional investors have gone from buying effectively zero single-family homes before the Great Recession to being responsible for a small but non-negligible percentage of home purchasers in recent years.
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any real federal effort to squeeze institutional investors out of the single-family housing market is bound to make shelter more expensive and less plentiful.
For all the political attention paid to larger institutional investors, they make up a small percentage of home purchasers and own an even smaller share of the country’s single-family homes.
According to The Wall Street Journal’s parsing of the data, investors were responsible for about 25 percent of single-family home purchases in the first quarter of 2024. That is up from 20 percent in 2016, and the increase is almost totally driven by larger investors who own upward of 100 homes.
Over the past few years, companies owning 1,000 or more homes have accounted for only about 1 percent of all single-family purchases, but in 2024, their purchases appear to have dropped to effectively zero.
Purchases by entities that own more than 10 homes have ranged from 2 percent to 6 percent in recent years. That means that the 20 percent or so of homes being bought by investors are predominantly being sold to smaller landlords who own 10 or fewer homes.
And the bulk of home sales (some 75–80 percent) continue to be owner-occupiers.
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An owner-occupier doesn’t need to argue with a landlord about replacing an old appliance. They don’t need to worry about a tenant not paying rent, damaging the property, or moving and leaving them with a vacancy to fill.
As such, owner-occupiers are willing to pay a higher purchase price for a home. Landlords who do have to absorb all the risks and costs of their business demand a higher offsetting yield from owning a home, says Erdmann, which means demanding a lower purchase price.
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The only growth in home production to be squeezed is from expanding build-to-rent construction. While politicians are interpreting this activity as homes taken from homeowners, they are, in fact new supply that would go away under any ban on institutional investors.”
https://reason.com/2026/01/08/trumps-proposed-ban-on-institutional-investors-owning-single-family-homes-would-make-no-one-better-off/