You probably use a computer — in fact, you’re probably reading this column on a computer.

For 72% of you, that computer is  the ubiquitous “standard” Windows PC or laptop. For 20% of you, it’s a Mac. The other 8% of you oddballs mostly use Linux or (Linux-based) ChromeOS.

I know the 92% of you who use Windows or macOS get tired of the cool kids telling you this, but it should be the other way around. Almost everyone should be using Linux almost all the time.

Instead of leading off with the technical reasons why, though, I want to hit you with the political, and personal financial, reasons for making the switch.

I’m going to start from the assumption that, like most people most of the time, you’ve had your “daily driver” computer — the one you use at home to browse the web, check email, stream YouTube videos, and maybe take a Zoom meeting every now and then — for at least a couple of years and you’re starting to feel like it’s a little slow and you might need a new one (if you just unboxed that brand new PC and got it set up, feel free to bookmark this article and come back to it in two years).

You may have noticed that new computers are suddenly getting expensive every day. Not just top-of-the-line machines, either. I bought the “cheap” Raspberry Pi 5 kit I’m writing this column on less than a month ago. I paid $229 for it. As of this morning, the going price is $299.

There are “market” reasons for this sudden price rise trend — cryptocurrency miners have been buying up graphics cards as fast as they can be made for years, and now artificial intelligence companies are doing the same thing with RAM and storage devices.

There are also political reasons. The US regime’s desire to engage in “trade wars” with China and other countries has mucked up the supply chain connecting US consumers to cheap electronics., including computers and computer chips. It’s getting harder to get that stuff, and Donald Trump’s bizarre tariff fetish hits American consumers right in their wallets.

Which is where Linux comes in.

You probably DON’T need a new computer. Your current machine will almost certainly run faster and perform better, while doing all the things you normally do, if you’re willing to spend $0.00 and half an hour switching from Windows to Linux (or, if you have one of the old Intel-based Macs, from macOS to Linux).

Yes, $0.00. Not the $139 Microsoft wants for a Windows 11 license. Most versions (“distributions”) of Linux cost $0.00, and I don’t mean “preview” or “lite” versions.

Yes, half an hour, tops.

The dirty little secret Microsoft doesn’t want you to know: For years now, Linux has been easier to install, easier to set up, at least as easy to use, and MUCH easier to deal with updates on, than Windows.

You don’t have to buy Apple’s over-priced hardware to get the “look and feel” you associate with macOS, either. A number of Linux distributions copy that “look and feel.”

Here are two sites where you can answer a few questions and get recommendations for which flavor of Linux best fits your current machine and your personal preferences:

https://distrochooser.de/
https://www.distrowiz.com/

If you’re a normal computer user doing normal things — pretty much everyone except uber-gamers and tech people who require bespoke software — you can stick it to the cronies whose bottom lines the US regime is “protecting” with its tariff and trade war nonsense, and avoid the market bottleneck pricing on GPUs, CPUs, RAM, and storage.

Linux is good politics AND a wise financial decision.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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“There will be Voter I.D. for the Midterm Elections,” US president Donald Trump declared in a February 13 Truth Social rant,  “whether approved by Congress or not!”

While I oppose government ID mandates for any purpose — as did “conservatives,” at least as late as the 1990s,  when it came to national requirements of the sort — I don’t consider voting a special case for which my objections need be stronger or weaker.

Voting in America is a ritual through which we flatter ourselves that we’re engaging in “democracy,” even “self-government,” when 99% of participants periodically choose between two convergent (and nearly identical) wings of the single state-approved political party.

As for the other 1%, which includes me (I’m a partisan Libertarian), we enjoy the freedom to cough during communion, to whisper “I rather prefer freedom” as the crowd yells “Hail Caesar,” but it’s not like our votes are going to bring down the Church of American Government.

It makes about as much difference to how we’re governed from DC as the selection of local Communist Party delegates in Norilsk made to how the Soviet Union was governed from Moscow.

Since voting is purely ceremonial affirmation of our masters’ authority over us, I don’t see that adding a card-flashing element to the liturgy makes much difference.

I am, however, glad to see Trump once again reaffirming Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought’s 2022 observation that “we are in a post constitutional moment in our country.”

Vought says that like it’s a bad thing, calling on his audience to become “radical constitutionalists.”

His version of “radical constitutionalism,” though, can’t be found anywhere in the actual Constitution. Instead of the mere functionary described in the Constitution, whose job is to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,” Vought envisions the president as Kim Jong Un on the Potomac.

Which brings me back to voter ID.

According to Article I of the Constitution, “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.”

And the Constitution leaves the selection of presidential electors to the states.

Here’s the constitutional role of the president in American elections:

THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK

So, constitutionally, Trump is not acting — and cannot be acting — as president when he bellows “whether approved by Congress or not!”

Post constitutional much?

But that’s just saying the quiet part out loud. In reality, we’ve been in “post constitutional” mode for most of the country’s history. As early as 1867, Lysander Spooner noted that “whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain — that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.”

Now that even supposed constitutionalists are openly admitting it, the rest of us should start acting on it.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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In early February, drug company Novo Nordisk sued telehealth company Hims & Hers.

The complaint: Hims & Hers sells GLP-1 drugs at lower prices than Novo Nordisk. That’s the simple version.

The legalese version is that because semaglutide (the drug behind the Novo Nordisk’s “Wegovy” brand name) was removed from the US Food and Drug Administration’s “Drug Shortage List” more than a year ago, “compounding pharmacies” like Hims & Hers no longer operate under a Very Special Important Legal Dispensation to produce it without the permission of Novo Nordisk, which has a Very Special Important Government-Granted Monopoly, aka a patent, on the substance.

“This is a complete sham, and it has been a sham since the shortage ended,” Novo Nordisk attorney John Kuckelman tells CNBC.  “The fact is that their medicines are untested, and they’re putting patients at risk.”

That last part is a startling claim from an attorney about his own client’s product (the difference between semaglutide from Hims & Hers and semaglutide from Novo Nordisk is the name on the label), but I’m more interested in the “shortage” claim.

Novo Nordisk recently introduced Wegovy in pill form, at a price of about $150 a month. Hims & Hers had planned to offer the same chemical compound, without Wegovy branding, for about $50 a month.

The whole POINT of Novo Nordisk’s attempt to enforce its patent is to CREATE a shortage of semaglutide in pill form.

Why? Money. The patent, if enforceable, allows Novo Nordisk to charge customers AT LEAST three times as much for its pill as the market says it can  be sold profitably for. Hims & Hers wouldn’t offer it for $50 if it expected to lose money doing so.

In the theoretical economic environment of “perfect competition,” prices settle at, or infinitesimally above, the cost of production, because the seller who doesn’t offer the lowest possible price won’t move much product.

“Perfect competition” is indeed hypothetical. A million variables affect a million things. If my pencil factory is further from the store than yours, you won’t have to spend as much on shipping. If I make a better pencil commercial than you do, more people will convince themselves my pencils are better than yours. And so on, and so forth.

But even absent “perfect competition,” most people wouldn’t voluntarily pay three times as much for the same thing from Novo Nordisk as they’d pay for it from Hims & Hers.

So, what is the purpose of patents?

According to the US Constitution, it’s to “promote the progress of science and useful arts” by giving inventors the “exclusive right” to their inventions for some set period of time.

But that’s just another way of saying the purpose is to create artificial shortages so that inventors don’t have to compete with others who may copy their inventions — or even independently invent similar things.

Novo Nordisk has already reaped the benefits of being first to market and promote semaglutide, and has fared well in competition with other GLP-1 products from other inventors/manufacturers. Apparently doing well in competition isn’t enough, though — it wants the government to remove its competitors from the market.

Given the hype around semaglutide and other GLP-1s — it seems we’re being led to believe that they cure, prevent, or minimize the effects of pretty much every negative human condition, physical and mental — I’d say they make a pretty good test case against the fiction of “intellectual property.”

While I’m skeptical for the wildest claims about the benefits of GLP-1s, they’re clearly beneficial to enough people, in enough ways, that we should ask why governments are handing out price-gouging opportunities, in the form of monopolies, on them.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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