FRIDAY short TAKES.

Government must do something.  This is something.  "Markets thrive on predictable rules and organic adaptation, not capricious, whipsaw meddling from politicians.  Businesses facing White House micromanagement will respond with risk aversion and curtailed investment, undermining the very economic dynamism Trump claims to champion.  The American conservative tradition properly recognizes that prosperity emerges not from top-down directives but from establishing conditions where individuals can pursue their ambitions. True flourishing, then, requires humility about our predictive powers—a quality conspicuously absent in this administration’s current economic approach."

Bet on emergence.  "The lesson here isn’t that we should fight harder to protect Essential Air Service.  It’s that we should have built a town that didn’t need it.  Strong towns are resilient.  They don’t bet everything on federal money and fragile systems.  They grow from the bottom up, incrementally, with a feedback loop between public investment and community value.  They don’t build for prestige.  They build for people."

True patriot love.  “My country, right or wrong — when right, to be kept right; when wrong, to be set right.”

The weekly round-up of mostly pithy elaborations on traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

1.  Always expect a train.

2.  Unbourboned?  "Imagine Michelangelo having to create David out of Play-Doh."

3.  The punishment cycles are the new rules.  "Being better only works politically if you’re noticed as being better."  Up next:  "The left is all out of epithets, and we’re all out of patience."

4.  I trained the future pontiff.  Serene, balanced, and fit.

5.  College has broken our society.

6.  AWFUL, indeed.  "Miserable, liberal White women are a pox on our nation."

7.  The Sunday shows, and Washington politics.  "A plurality of the American public regards most of what transpires and has transpired in Washington as kayfabe."

8.  Dynamists, stasisists, revisited.  "Countries with flexible labor markets transform creative destruction into widespread prosperity. Those that preserve the status quo guarantee decline."

9.  The Washington racket.  "There are two tracks for justice in Washington."

10.  Woe, Canada?  "The message from the East? Shut up, pay up, and stay in your place."

11.  Power down?  "A desire for net zero virtue signalling trumped concerns over grid security."

12.  Bourgeois norms.  "It is perfectly possible to remain respectful, magnanimous, and well-meaning toward Biden in terms of his battle with cancer while continuing to seek answers about who knew what, and when."

13.  Kamala Harris Didn't Lose Because of Sexism.

14.  Coastal condescension, too.  "Republicans care about more things, true things, and issues with a better chance of finding cross-party appeal. The Trump coalition is a multi-racial working-class party. The Democratic Party is white, overeducated, rich, and laughably regional."

15.  The real debt ceiling is creaking.  "Today, the U.S. Treasury’s $16 billion sale of 20-year bonds saw weak demand, reflecting growing investor concern over the nation’s rising debt."

16.  We told you so.  "Conservative Americans have been right about a lot of things for a very long time."

17.  Destroy the proletariat to save it!  "As the communist regime failed, the search for scapegoats and traitors turned more and more people into acceptable sacrifices for the greater good."

18.  Medicaid.  End It, Don’t Mend It.

19.  As Illinois goes, so goes the Nation.  "The thought of the portly JB Pritzker leading the heroic anti-fascist fighters into the streets is nothing if not hilarious."

20.  Politics.  "A fair conclusion to draw from the contents of the Republicans’ “big beautiful bill” is that the American right still does not have the votes — or the public support — to pass meaningful reform, and that, political gravity being what it is, this unfortunate fact has now beleaguered Donald Trump in the same way as it beleaguered his predecessors."

21.  Si vis pacem, para bellum.