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Many American Founders, including our first four presidents, hoped to establish a national university that would educate statesmen for the new republic. During his second term, George Washington was presented with what seemed to be a golden opportunity to accomplish this goal—and rejected it on cultural grounds.

In 1794, the Swiss exile François d’Ivernois had written to John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, whom he knew from their years of diplomatic service in France. His home city of Geneva was suffering “convulsions” due to “the great political drama which now agitates Europe,” namely the French Revolution, whose terror had recently reached its nadir but whose fervor was still disrupting neighboring countries. D’Ivernois, himself “too much a republican” for the Calvinist Republic of Geneva but “too little a republican” for Revolutionary France, proposed a scheme “to transport into one of your Provinces our Academy [the University of Geneva] completely organised, and with it its means of public instruction.” At a stroke, it seems, Washington could have whisked away one of Europe’s premier universities and established it in the American republic.

Washington balked. “That a national University in this country is a thing to be desired, has always been my decided opinion,” but he doubted the ability of “an entire Seminary of foreigners, who may not understand our language,” to “be assimilated.” As Washington explained to Adams:

Special announcement: As I said Friday, I have secured a fiscal sponsor for Notes on the Crises. That fiscal sponsor is the organization the “Alternative News Foundation” (ANF). What that means in practice is that people can make tax deductible donations to Notes on the Crises. I will have an email laying out more of these details and laying out other options for donations such as venmo, paypal or physical check. For now, those who want to donate can find Notes on the Crises on the popular non-profit fundraising platform Fundrazr.

Hello readers, an hour ago I had an Op Ed published in Politico about the Federal Reserve. For those that didn’t hear, late last night Trump declared that he fired Lisa Cook over the “mortgage fraud” allegations I mentioned last Friday. Apparently I had my finger on the pulse of events. 

As I argued in the first part of this essay, the Catholic Church has much to contribute to the revitalization of right reason and the moral foundations of democracy in a Western world that has increasingly lost sight of its civilizational soul.

But as Paul Seaton has compellingly argued in a recent article at The Catholic World Report entitled “Western Civilization Under Attack,” the current leadership of the Church no longer speaks with any confidence about the need to defend Western civilization, that civilizational order with roots in Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome “in which the humanity of man has been most explored, extolled, and realized (if imperfectly, as such things must be).” As Seaton strikingly adds, if the West—including its deep-seated commitments to constitutional government, liberty under law, religious liberty, and the search for truth—“were to leave the stage of history, both as ideal and as reality, humanity would be immeasurably diminished.”

This blog from Caroline Tosal-Suprun as part of our ongoing Community Economist project, which you can read more about here. Read the first blog, What is the Economy? What is a community economist? Someone with no formal training or in-depth knowledge about the economy who wants to be part of challenging economic inequality. By design, […]

The post Community Economists: How Do You Start Talking About Economics? appeared first on Equality Trust.

Tell your blue state officials that they must proactively protect the people of your state from Trump's "specialized units."

We have to do all we can to head off the occupation of blue states by National Guard troops unlawfully activated in or sent to them. Right now, that means alerting your state officials to the danger and urging them to take strong prophylactic measures.

This morning, Donald Trump signed an Executive Order that directs a barrage of federal agency action to escalate his dictatorial takeover of the District of Columbia. Embedded in the EO is a deeply chilling provision that orders Pete Hegseth and the DOD to create specialized military units for rapid deployment across the nation for "quelling civil disturbances and ensuring the public safety and order whenever the circumstances necessitate." Trump is commanding the creation of standing army units to occupy states across the country.

Policy can seem like opening a blind box: you’ll get something, but probably not what you want. Jim Chalmers’ economic roundtable was no different. Every option is on the table, yes, but what we’ll get is as unknown as what is driving the Labubu craze.

First, the positives. Holding the roundtable is at least an indication that the government is looking to expand the mandate it took to the election. Despite Anthony Albanese’s repeated statements (always carefully worded in the present tense) that “the only tax policy that we’re implementing is the one that we took to the election”, every Labor MP privately admits there is not only the need to do more on tax but also the space. A whopping majority tends to focus even the most recalcitrant minds on the art of the possible.

The issue with the roundtable is that the same groups advising on how to disarm the intergenerational economic bombs that have started to explode are the same groups that helped set them.

The Productivity Commission, Treasury, the Business Council — the same outfits that have spent the past 25 or more years advocating for more privatisation and tax cuts, claiming they are panaceas for productivity growth — are now sounding the alarms that productivity has continued to fall.

On this episode of After America, Allan Behm joins Dr Emma Shortis to discuss Trump’s deployment of federal authorities to Democrat-voting jurisdictions, land grabs by the Russian and Israeli governments, and what a collapse of American democracy might mean for Australia.

This episode was recorded on Friday 22 August.

You can sign our petition calling on the Australian Government to launch a parliamentary inquiry into AUKUS.

Dead Centre: How political pragmatism is killing us by Richard Denniss is available now via the Australia Institute website.

Guest: Allan Behm, Special Advisor, International & Security Affairs, the Australia Institute

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

Show notes:

Beyond the Two-State Solution: Policy responses to the Destruction of Palestine and the Insecurity of Israel by Emma Shortis, Allan Behm and Bob Bowker, The Australia Institute (February 2025)

Sophia Cho and John C. Williams

The Economic Reform Roundtable is ostensibly all about productivity. Treasurer Jim Chalmers has argued that cutting red tape and speeding up approvals is the key to unlocking growth. It’s the old trickle-down idea made new again by Ezra Klein’s book Abundance: make it easier to build, and prosperity will follow. It’s an appealing story. But […]

In 1790, the first United States census was a straightforward affair. Marshals rode on horseback, counted people where they lived, and returned with ledgers that would determine representation in Congress. The idea was as simple as it was profound: political power should follow the actual number of people—not estimates, not probabilities, not manipulated figures—residing in each state. This “actual Enumeration,” written into Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution, was meant to be one of the republic’s great safeguards of equal representation.

Two hundred thirty years later, the Census Bureau turned that safeguard upside down and thwarted the will of voters. In 2020, it implemented “differential privacy,” an opaque algorithm that deliberately injects false numbers into small-area data. Supposedly designed to protect privacy and identities, it instead scrambled population counts in ways that Harvard researchers found made it “impossible to follow the principle of ‘One Person, One Vote.’”

At the same time, the incoming Biden Administration dismantled the Administrative Records Project, the Trump-era initiative that would have allowed the bureau to use existing federal data to determine citizenship and correct census errors. The result was a census that was riddled with miscounts, opaque to challenge, and constitutionally suspect.

The Albanese government’s Economic Reform Roundtable has far more to do with political power than how best to boost the rate of production at Australia’s factories or mines. The agenda was far narrower than the breadth of problems facing Australia and the attendees. With a few notable exceptions, those assembled were more likely to demand more tax cuts and more cuts to government spending than to question why decades of doing precisely that has delivered not just record low productivity growth but also record low quality in our essential services.

One of the core beliefs that unites Australian chief executives, the Department of the Treasury, the Productivity Commission and most of the Australian media is that the less tax a country collects and the less money it spends on essential services, the better its economy will perform. If only there was some data to back up their strong feelings.

According to the pinko lefties at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the OECD – now headed by that well-known progressive Mathias Cormann – Australia is already one of the lowest taxed countries in the developed world and has one of the smallest public sectors. Yet despite decades of taking the advice of organisations such as the Productivity Commission and Treasury, resulting in decades of deregulation, privatisation and tax cuts, Australia has witnessed a collapse in productivity growth.

The laws – which were rushed through late last year – came into effect from the new financial year, ahead of the next state election on March 21, 2026.

The laws go further than any other state in Australia in banning political donations and replacing them with taxpayer funding of parties and candidates.

However, the same pattern appears in other states and in recent changes to federal election laws – the new taxpayer funding is not fairly distributed between parties and candidates, and restrictions fall more heavily on new entrants and independents while loopholes ensure major parties can still operate comfortably.

New entrants are strictly restricted in the donations they can receive – but are not eligible for the same taxpayer funding that existing players will be.

In South Australia, minor parties and independents will struggle while incumbent political parties run multimillion-dollar campaigns with public money.

The 2026 state election should provide more data on how incumbents and challengers alike respond to large-scale taxpayer funding of elections.

Independents and new parties considering national politics will watch with interest, since a Labor/Liberal deal means that the next federal election will also feature party campaigns funded by the taxpayer and restrictions on
fundraising that fall more heavily on new entrants.