If there’s one thing we should all be able to agree on, it’s that no one should be murdered for speaking.

In the aftermath of Charlie “Prove Me Wrong” Kirk’s murder at a Utah campus event, it’s clear that no, we don’t all agree on that.

The bulk of responses to Kirk’s assassination consisted of:

1) Sober condemnations of murder in general, or murder over speech, from most people, and

2) Opportunistic condemnations of “political violence” from the most politically violent creatures on the planet, politicians.

But we also saw significant amounts of celebration among Kirk’s opponents, and baying for the blood of anyone not aligned with Kirk among Kirk’s supporters (some of whom on “the right,” it should be noted, were vehement critics right up until the instant the single shot rang out).

Not good. More and more Americans seem more and more willing lately to countenance the “political violence” that most Americans (including its politician practitioners)  still condemn.

Despite this last week’s fevered comparisons of the killing to the killings of JFK, RFK, MLK, and 3,000-plus people on 9/11, Kirk’s life and death, and his killer’s, are likely destined, within a few short years, to become the material of minor footnotes in dry historical texts.

Kirk and his killer are this past week’s, maybe this year’s, Brian Thompson and Luigi Mangione.

Yes, their notoriety will persist for more than the usual short news cycle, with bumps during associated court cases, etc., but none of them were so wildly noteworthy before their tragic interactions that they’ll be universally remembered a decade, let alone a century, hence.

That thought might comfort you.

It shouldn’t.

Last year, about 17,000 Americans were murdered.

How many of their names do you remember?

Do you consider “political violence” a differentiating factor worthy of closer attention than you’d give the victims of street robberies or domestic violence?

If so, ask yourself whether you’ve even heard names given to the 11 people politically murdered by the US government on a boat in the Caribbean on September 2.

I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I’ve heard Lavoy Finicum’s name mentioned in the nine-year period starting about a month after his political murder by FBI agents in 2016, or Garrett Foster’s name mentioned in the last year, starting shortly after his political murderer was pardoned by Texas governor Greg Abbott.

Charlie Kirk’s name will fade from memory precisely because “political violence” is the not-so-new normal.

Personally, I’d prefer to live in a society where murder is so rare that we can remember every victim’s name whether the motive for the killing was “political” or not — and a society where the victim’s speech is never used as moral justification.

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.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“The scientists get the patents,” US commerce secretary Howard Lutnick tells Axios.  “The universities get the patents. And the funder of $50 billion [in research leading to the patents], the US government, you know what we get? Zero. … The United States of America taxpayer should get half the benefit.”

Put that way, it doesn’t sound so wrong, does it? But in reality, it’s piling a third bad idea on top of two others.

Explaining why “intellectual property” in general and patents in particular — the bottom layer of the poisonous three-layer policy cake — are bad ideas is a book-length, not op-ed length, endeavor. Suffice it to say that “intellectual property” ISN’T property, but rather a pernicious system of government-granted monopolies on ideas. If you want to dig into that claim, I recommend N. Stephan Kinsella’s book Against Intellectual Property (available free online from though, oddly, copyrighted by, the Ludwig von Mises Institute).

The middle layer is using taxpayer money to fund university research, then allowing the researchers and universities to patent, and realize revenue from, the results of that research.

It’s here that Lutnick is absolutely correct: If the government funds research, the taxpayers who funded the research should be the beneficiaries. The proper way to accomplish that is to put all results of government-funded research in the public domain. Goods produced using the research would be price-competitive because no single manufacturer would enjoy a monopoly on their production.

Lutnick’s proposal for a new top layer is bad all around.

The choice for universities would be to spend less on innovative research (incentivizing innovation is the go-to excuse for defenders of patent), charge more for the licenses on their patents, or (most likely) some combination.

Taxpayers still wouldn’t enjoy any choice in the matter. The combination they’d get out of the deal would be fewer new, worthwhile products AND higher prices for those products.

As for the federal government, the revenues would likely be a wash at best.  University patent revenues come to low single-digit billions of dollars per year. 50% of that would come to a fraction of what the federal government spends per DAY … and would likely be more than offset by the economic disincentives to innovation and production.

If the feds won’t eliminate patents and government research funding, they should at least eliminate any and all combinations of the two, rather than demanding their own taste of the racket’s revenues.

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.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

The Producers at the Muny in 2008. Photo by Meetmeatthemuny. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

Here we go again. It’s time for another performance of American politicians’ favorite off-Broadway play, “Shutdown Panic.”

“Congress only has a few weeks to avoid a government shutdown,” Mitchell Hill reports at WTOP, “but leaders of both parties are still a long way from agreeing on a stopgap spending bill to keep federal workers on the job.”

The cast changes but slowly. The plot gets tweaked but little.

Act One: “There’s a government shutdown coming if we don’t pass a spending bill!”

Act Two: “Let’s fight about it!”

(The most common plot tweak comes in here with the occasional insertion of a short supposed “shutdown”)

Act Three: “SURPRISE! We made a deal!”

Act Three always closes with a set change: A road, and cast members kicking a can down it.

Curtain call — the cast takes its bows. They’ve once again saved the day by borrowing and spending more money than ever before. Please clap.

At this point, I pause to check two numbers. The “National Debt Clock” tells me that the play’s producers owe nearly $37.5 trillion to their backers and that 2025’s expenses stand at nearly $2 trillion more than box office receipts.

It’s Max Bialystock’s and Leo Bloom’s wildest dream: “Springtime for Hitler” isn’t just a money-making (for them, but nobody else) flop, it’s history’s longest-running such flop!

The last time US politicians actually (and very temporarily) paid off their ever-growing debt was 190 years ago in 1835. The last time they even managed to theoretically balance one year’s budget was 24 years ago in 2001.

And, let me emphasize: It’s THEIR debt, not YOUR debt.

The organization they run (“the US government”), not you, borrowed the money.

They love to talk about a “national” debt and shake their heads in amazement at how much each American “owes” (about $110,000), but your signature isn’t on any of those loan documents. In fact, if you hold the US government’s bonds, you’re actually among their unlucky creditors.

Let’s throw in two more numbers: 123.8% and 70.

The former is the ratio of the politicians’ debt to the country’s Gross Domestic Product; the latter is the IQ cut-off point separating those who believe the debt will ever be paid off from those who know it won’t.

In May, Moody’s lowered the US government’s “sovereign credit rating” from Aaa (“highest rating, representing minimum credit risk”) to Aa1 (“high-grade”).  In reality, that rating should be Ca (“highly speculative, or near default”) or C (“little prospect for recovery of principal or interest”).

At some point, the producers of a commercially unsuccessful play default and the play’s run comes to an end.

That’s going to happen with the US government. And the longer it takes to happen the uglier things will get.

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.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY