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As the Trump Administration and congressional Republicans work to lower Americans’ cost of living this year, they should be guided by a simple principle: all affordability is local.

Democrats and too many establishment Republicans still think they create jobs, economic growth, and opportunity. Whenever high prices pinch consumers, lawmakers huddle up with K Street lobbyists to see what Big Business, Big Tech, and Big Banks want…and give it to them. Yet they scratch their heads as corporate profits surge while working families’ monthly bills only climb higher.

We’ve seen this pattern again and again. Obamacare. Federal student loans. Subsidized mortgages. The Build Back Better inflation bomb. These policies doled out billions to insiders and middlemen but left everyday Americans holding the bag.

Listen to the full conversation on the Perspectives Journal podcast, available to subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, and all other major podcast platforms.

In a 2024 man-on-the-street-style video, two producers asked people from all over the country why they loved America. Most of the answers they received were laughable: interviewees claimed to love this country for reasons that had nothing to do with America itself, such as cultural diversity, the freedom to critique its past and present, or the ability to be whatever or whoever one chooses. In other words, Americans could find nothing positive to praise about their own country.

This grim video speaks not only to our confused cultural priorities but also to many Americans’ general ignorance, the latter in many ways being the source of the former. Life mimics art, or so the ancient philosophers of Western civilization believed: man imitates what he contemplates, often without willing it.

The solution to the problem of ignorance is not only to cut out bad teaching, but also to replace it with good. “Culture”—literally “to tend” in the agricultural sense—requires something to be cultivated: a positive tradition, typically of stories, poetry, and images. As we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the American Founding, it is an excellent time to reflect on the character of an American culture that can sustain free government.

This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

“We tell the stories that perpetuate the narrative or the myth we want, and we erase the others,” Chris Hedges states in this interview with Ray Nayler about his new book, “Palaces of the Crow,” which centers around four teenagers from varying backgrounds who struggle to survive during World War II. The war, Nayler says, fundamentally reshaped the world geopolitically, technologically and socially in ways that have profoundly impacted the environment in which we live today. Critical lessons from that moment in time are being lost, with media and governments covering up the deep and long-lasting wounds inflicted upon tens of millions of people. Nayler says that “We can’t move away from that time period before understanding it.”

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has called on The Australia Institute to be “fair dinkum” about its calls for a 25% gas tax.

Today, The Australia Institute has taken out full-page advertisements in newspapers around the country to remind the Prime Minister that there’s nothing more fair dinkum than getting a fair price for Australian gas to pay for essential services like hospitals, schools, public housing and supporting Australians living with disabilities.

The advertisements remind readers that Australian nurses pay more tax than the gas industry pays.

They also remind Australians that a flat 25% gas export tax would raise more than $17 billion a year for a budget which is forecast to remain in deficit every year to 2029-30.

“I can assure the Prime Minister that The Australia Institute is fair dinkum in our calls for Australians to get a fair return for our gas,” said Dr Richard Denniss, co-CEO of The Australia Institute.

“Mr Albanese’s government chooses to give gas away for free to the gas export companies, gas that could be taxed and raise more than $17 billion per year.“

The Prime Minister is trying to downplay the importance of a gas export tax by calling it a ‘social media campaign’.

On this episode of Dollars & Sense, Greg and Angus discuss why Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the Australia Institute needs to get “fair dinkum” about gas exports, the post-budget meme-wars over capital gains tax, and the “death tax” scare campaign.

This discussion was recorded on Thursday 21 May 2026.

Visit The Point for research, analysis, explainers and factchecks from experts at the Australia Institute and beyond.

Host: Greg Jericho, Chief Economist, the Australia Institute // @grogsgamut

Host: Angus Blackman, Executive Producer, Podcasts, the Australia Institute // @AngusRB

Show notes:

Death, taxes and scare campaigns: here’s the truth about Labor’s budget changes by Greg Jericho, Guardian Australia (May 2026)

Keating backs CGT reforms, says Howard changes made house prices “blast off” by Greg Jericho, The Point (May 2026)

Listen to the full conversation on the Perspectives Journal podcast, available to subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Amazon Music, and all other major podcast platforms.

Moses Coady was a Catholic priest, a scholar at St. Francis Xavier University and, most importantly, he was an organizer who was best known for leading the Antigonish Movement: a co-operative movement focused on adult education, microfinance, and rural development.

Thurs May 28 at 12:30-2pm ET


More “Announcement
Webinar “Is there a way out of an economy built on debt?” with Michael Kumhof (May 28)”

Simone Lenzu

In the third quarter of 2025, America’s largest tech firms for the first time spent more on capital investment than they earned from operations. The implication is that AI, a technology with the potential to make the economy more productive, is, for now, absorbing resources faster than it is generating returns. This post discusses how the tension between AI’s long-run promise and its short-run costs affects the outlooks for inflation, real activity, and financial stability.

The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

America 250: Go Big Or Go Home | The Roundtable Ep. 318

The Australia Institute has taken out a full-page advertisement in today’s Adelaide Advertiser to remind South Australians that Premier Peter Malinauskas’ decision to overturn the state’s ban on gas fracking is not only irresponsible, but also unnecessary.

Co-CEO of The Australia Institute, Dr Richard Denniss, said everyone from former Federal Opposition Leader Peter Dutton to current One Nation MPs in South Australia understand there is no need to extract more gas from South Australia.

“Australia has never had a gas shortage. What we have is a gas export problem,” Dr Denniss said.

“In the past five years, our governments have allowed foreign gas exporters to export enough gas to supply Australia for more than 20 years.

“Just last week the federal government introduced a policy to ensure more Australian gas was kept in Australia.

“A 25% gas export tax would be even more effective in helping Australians. An export tax would see more gas diverted to domestic markets, end the fake shortages, and push gas prices down for Australian households and businesses.

“Not only that. A gas export tax would raise $17 billion a year which could be used to fund essential services for South Australians like aged care, health, housing, and better support for people living with a disability.

“To suddenly reopen South Australia to destructive fracking makes no sense.

As we approach the 250th anniversary of the American Founding, it’s important to point out that the Declaration of Independence does not begin with politics. Before it speaks of rights, consent, or government, it makes a claim about the structure of reality itself. The rights it asserts are not the product of historical circumstance or collective will. They are grounded in a prior truth: that human beings are created by God.

The Declaration’s appeal to “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” is not ornamental or rhetorical—it is the foundation on which its entire argument rests. The founders believed they were obligated to explain to mankind the reasons for their separation, and those reasons started with God and his law.

With this foundation, we can then proceed to the Declaration’s most famous sentence—“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” Though it is often treated as a moral flourish or a proto-democratic slogan, it is in fact a tightly ordered philosophical claim that proceeds in three stages, each dependent on the one before it.

On this episode of Follow the Money, Bill Browne joins Ebony Bennett to discuss why the High Court voided Victoria’s undemocratic political donations laws. They examine what this could mean for other jurisdictions and why a principled, transparent approach to political donations reform is needed – not legislation that skews the system in favour of major parties.

This episode was recorded on Tuesday 19 May.

Visit The Point for research, analysis, explainers and factchecks from experts at the Australia Institute and beyond.

Guest: Bill Browne, Director, Democracy & Accountability, the Australia Institute // @browne90

Host: Ebony Bennett, Deputy Director, the Australia Institute // @ebonybennett

Show notes:

Victoria’s donation restrictions are unconstitutional – what happens now? by Bill Browne, The Point (April 2026)

While many Australians are already aware that  multinational gas exporters pay less in PRRT than is raised by beer excise or student loan repayments, last week’s budget also revealed that the government collects significantly more from smokers of legal cigarettes, spirits drinkers and visa applicants.

The PRRT is supposed to ensure Australians get a fair return for the sale of our nation’s natural gas resources.

Next financial year the government expects to collect $6.2 billion from visa applicants, $3.6 billion from smokers, $3.3 billion from spirits drinkers, $2.8 billion from beer drinkers … and just $1.9 billion from the PRRT.

“Once again, the evidence that Australians are being taken for a ride by the gas industry is on full display in the budget papers,” said Dr Richard Denniss, co-CEO of The Australia Institute.

“It’s time the Prime Minister was fair dinkum with Australians.

“Last week Anthony Albanese said that the PRRT revenue was ‘ramping up’, but the budget papers reveal that simply isn’t true. The Prime Minister’s own numbers show that revenue from the PRRT is expected to fall from $1.9 billion next year to $1.3 billion by the end of the decade.

Nina Boyarchenko and Leonardo Elias

Throughout the 20^th century, Canada built a world-leading telecommunications system through a productive balance of private and public carriers. But within a generation, conservative governments at all levels across the country privatized almost all of the public side of that balance. Today, NDP Leader Avi Lewis’ “public option” platform is recontesting the question that Prairie telecom pioneers first fought for 120 years ago. Furthermore, Canada has fallen behind countries around the world in building out fibre telecom infrastructure for faster internet speeds. Many of these countries have maintained public ownership in their markets while Canada’s public telecom shrinks. However, SaskTel, one of the last holdouts of public telecom in Canada, outperforms the national average on fibre deployment. This article makes the case that to continue to invest in the 21^st century economy, Canada has to rebuild public ownership of telecoms.

Though hype and doomerism tend to suck up a lot of oxygen in the AI discussion, it will probably be more productive for Americans to focus on the concrete goals desired by leaders in the industry. Then we may ask whether and how a majority of citizens might be convinced those goals are worthy of the effort required to attain them. I propose we focus first on the question of “compute”—how much computing power is required to operate cutting-edge AI at scale, and what kind of data centers are required to provide it.

There are some in the AI industry—developers, advocates, and the “hyperscalers” who want to build super-massive data centers—who do what they do out of an obsessively spiritual devotion to what they’re building. But a great deal of the business is run by successful Americans in the industry who mostly just really enjoy doing what they do best, which is building new things using state-of-the-art tools. This may not be obvious to the cross-partisan group of citizens who range from skeptical to hostile toward AI, who tend to think of all tech enthusiasts as wide-eyed, quasi-religious fanatics dreaming of a robot apocalypse or singularity. So for skeptics, an important reality check is realizing that many—probably the majority—of AI’s day-to-day builders have more practical and cosmically modest aims.

Issue Theme: Future technology, land economics, and economic rents Progress magazine invites submissions for our upcoming issue exploring the intersection of emerging technologies, economic rent, and contemporary Georgist thought. As artificial intelligence, datacenters, and digital platforms reshape our economy, we seek rigorous analysis of how classical insights on land and monopoly apply to 21st-century challenges. […]

On this episode of After America, Dr Emma Shortis and Angus Blackman discuss the fallout from Donald Trump’s China visit, how Xi Jinping got the commentariat talking about long-dead Greeks, and why Trump’s approval rating is still hitting new depths.

This episode was recorded on Monday 18 May.

The latest Vantage Point essay, Rich Kid Poor Kid: The Battle for Public Education by Jane Caro, is available now for $19.95. Use the code ‘PODVP’ at checkout to get free shipping.

Host: Emma Shortis, Director, International & Security Affairs, the Australia Institute // @emmashortis

Host: Angus Blackman, Executive Producer, the Australia Institute // @angusrb

Show notes:

Shorter America: He started it; Won’t someone think of the billionaires; Creeps and weirdos by Emma Shortis, The Point (May 2026)

Executive summary Australia’s housing system is producing a widening intergenerational divide. The divide is not merely between older owners and younger non-owners. It is between those who hold scarce, well-located land and those who must now buy, rent or wait in a market where the price of access has detached from wages. Home ownership among […]

Justice Clarence Thomas’s recent speech at the University of Texas was vintage Thomas: deeply reflective, historically grounded, and unapologetically devoted to first principles. At a moment when many public officials seek safety in ambiguity, Thomas instead offered moral clarity. He spoke not merely as a jurist, but as a statesman concerned with the long-term health of the American republic. In doing so, he echoed themes long championed by scholars associated with the Claremont Institute: the primacy of natural rights, the centrality of the Declaration of Independence, and the necessity of civic courage in preserving constitutional government.

Thomas’s remarks were particularly striking because they resisted the fashionable reduction of constitutional interpretation to technocratic expertise or evolving social consensus. Instead, he returned repeatedly to the enduring truths that undergird the American experiment. The Constitution, in Thomas’s telling, is not simply a procedural document or a malleable framework for administrative governance. It is the institutional embodiment of a moral and political philosophy rooted in the self-evident truths proclaimed in 1776.

The Right won the 2024 election by successfully assembling a coalition capable of competing nationally. Whether it can consolidate that power into a lasting majority is far less certain.

The coalition that returned Trump to the White House is beginning to fracture. While support for the agenda the president ran on remains strong, confidence that it will be secured is fading. And that perception, whether justified or not, is lethal.

Voters in this coalition did not turn out for incremental change, executive orders, temporary regulatory reform, or procedural wins. They voted for a decisive shift in national direction—mass deportations, accountability for corruption, a more affordable daily life, an end to foreign entanglements, and political power given back to the American people.

A coalition built on expectations like these cannot sustain itself absent visible exercises of power. If it does not see power used to benefit the common good, it will break apart, first into frustrated factions, then into disengaged actors, and eventually into opposition.

Matthew Higgins and Thomas Klitgaard