Tuesday, June 30, 2026

Today, Victor Davis Hanson reflects on the enduring principles of the Declaration of Independence and the constitutional order, and revisits Thomas Jefferson’s vision for the republic; Scott Atlas argues for fundamentally redefining the FDA’s role in medicine; and John Cochrane explains how today's policy world thinks about inflation expectations. We also celebrate Thomas Sowell’s 96th birthday by revisiting the ideas of one of America’s most influential economists and public intellectuals.

USA at 250

The Declaration of Independence and the Fight for America’s Future

In a new episode of Uncommon Knowledge, Victor Davis Hanson—fifth-generation rancher in California’s San Joaquin Valley, classicist, military historian, Hoover Institution senior fellow, and author of more than two dozen books, including The Case for Trump, The Second World Wars, and The Dying Citizen—joins host Peter M. Robinson to discuss the founding of the United States and the nation’s critics.  Drawing on the lessons of ancient Greece and Rome, the Magna Carta, the French Revolution, the Civil War, Woodrow Wilson’s administrative state, and the Trump era, Hanson argues that the genius of the American system lies in its difficult but durable structure: checks and balances, ordered liberty, and a constitution built for flawed human beings. Watch or listen here.

Thomas Jefferson: The Ambiguous Agrarian Saw Farmers as Ennobling the Nation

In an essay at Freedom Frequency, Hanson takes a classicist’s look at Thomas Jefferson and his animating love for agrarianism. But Jefferson was more than a simple “yeoman farmer,” he writes: “America’s third president wanted the citizens of the new nation to embrace the values of practical skill, independence, skepticism, and strength that he saw among the ancient Greeks and Romans.” Jefferson, of course, was also a man of contradictions: Praising the small farmer, he owned thousands of acres. Lauding independence, he owned slaves. These conflicts, and Jefferson’s evolving views about the importance of trade and industry in the future nation, gives him a shifting aura that was formed in, but moved beyond, his arcadian idyll. Read more here.

Healthcare

FDA Has the Wrong Mission. That’s Why It Fails

In an op-ed at RealClearPolitics, Scott W. Atlas argues that Congress’s proposed legislation allowing seriously ill patients to access certain physician-prescribed treatments without Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval would mark a “fundamental departure from the FDA’s total control over every prescription drug in America.” He contends that the agency should be responsible only for ensuring drug safety—not determining efficacy—and that the FDA’s power to certify whether drugs work has delayed patient access to promising treatments, restricted physician judgment, and prevented some therapies from ever reaching patients. Atlas also explains that the FDA’s efficacy mandate has contributed to regulatory capture, resulted in more sickness and death than it prevented, and diverted attention from core responsibilities such as food safety. He proposes repealing the agency’s authority over drug efficacy, leaving decisions about treatment effectiveness to independent medical organizations, hospital formulatory committees, and state Medicaid effectiveness programs, while relying on existing fraud and consumer protection laws to police false claims. Read more here.

The Economy

Sluggish Expectations

At The Grumpy Economist, John Cochrane explores the current policy view of inflation expectations, a view that can be distilled to what might be called “sluggish expectations.” This view, he contends, acknowledges that "expectations are important, but does not tie them rigidly to past experience (adaptive) or to the model’s predictions of the future (rational). Expectations vary through time and in response to various forces, many external to central bank actions.” Further, he explains that expectations eventually respond to the experience of inflation, though not in a predictable way. “Faith that the central bank will eventually do something can ‘anchor’ expectations through a period of inflation” he writes, “But that faith and 'anchoring' can evaporate, at which point a spiral breaks out.” Read more here.