Thursday Night Links

• Texas, in aggressively growing metro suburbs across several economic powerhouse regions across the state, enables a very achievable driving distance proximity. It’s possible here, and common given the critical mass of the state’s economy, for extended families to be no more than 3-4 hours apart with no compromise on economic opportunities. On net, in its emphasis on jobs in highly technical sectors, Texas seems to be getting smarter, if comparable standardized test scores are analyzed. Perhaps the achievable ideal for professional extended families is frequent, doable road trips, between equally nice suburbs in DFW, Houston, San Antonio, and Austin. Demographers call this economically dense super-region the “Texas Triangle,” and right at its beating heart, nearest its population-weighted center, sits College Station. It’s a compromise that certainly beats the hell out of cross-country Thanksgiving flights. [The Tom File]
• I’ve long been in the “higher for longer” camp, insisting that the US Federal Reserve must hold short-term interest rates at the current level or higher to get inflation under control. The facts have changed, so I’ve changed my mind. The Fed should cut, preferably at next week’s policy-making meeting. [Bill Dudley]
  
• Scott is sometimes described as an anarchist, and he was influenced by a number of anarchist thinkers (especially Colin Ward). But he was ambivalent about whether abolishing the state entirely was a practical goal—to quote one of his book titles, he gave just Two Cheers for Anarchism. Nor would he describe himself as a free-market libertarian: While there was obvious overlap between his thinking and, say, Friedrich Hayek's ideas about dispersed knowledge, Scott saw his work as a critique of large-scale corporate capitalism as well as of the state. In an oral history interview conducted in 2018, he remembered William Niskanen of the Cato Institute calling to ask if he would speak at a libertarian event: "I remember my partner was with me and I put my hand over the phone and said to her, 'What have I done wrong that the Cato Institute is calling me and wants me to sort of talk at their conference?'" [Reason]
  
• "As escalating uncertainties drove an increased need for risk management across all asset classes, CME Group achieved record Q2 volume and generated record revenue, adjusted net income and adjusted earnings per share," said CME Group Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Terry Duffy. "During the quarter, and for the first time in more than a decade, our volume and open interest grew in every asset class, with overall ADV up 16% in commodities and 13% in financial markets. We also reached significant records in many of our U.S. Treasury products where ADV increased 36% to 8.2 million contracts." [CME Group Inc.] 
• Under this metric, a number of counties in Pennsylvania have extremely unlikely distributions of voter birthdays. Seven counties representing almost 1.4 million votes total (Northumberland, Delaware, Montgomery, Lawrence, Dauphin, LeHigh, and Luzerne) have suspicious birthdays above the 99.5th percentile of plausible distributions, even when using conservative assumptions about what these distributions should look like. These suspicious birthdays also matter significantly for election outcomes. While there are suspicious counties that vote Republican overall, in general more suspicious birthdays in a county are strongly associated with a larger Biden vote share, and a higher Biden vote share relative to all Democrat presidential candidates since 2000. More suspicious birthdays are also associated with a higher vote share for Jorgensen relative to Trump (consistent with a fraud scheme aiming to get Biden high but not “too high”, while simultaneously giving as few votes to Trump as possible). [Revolver]
• In the Telecommunications Act of 1996, Congress delegated its taxing power to the Federal Communications Commission. FCC then subdelegated the taxing power to a private corporation. That private corporation, in turn, relied on for-profit telecommunications companies to determine how much American citizens would be forced to pay for the “universal service” tax that appears on cell phone bills across the Nation. We hold this misbegotten tax violates Article I, § 1 of the Constitution. [United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit]
• Donald J. Trump long ago decided he wanted a very different Republican Party platform in 2024. The delegates who arrived in Milwaukee early last week before the Republican National Convention, with grand plans of drafting a sweeping document of party principles, quickly found out just how determined he was. Within minutes of their arrival, their cellphones were confiscated and placed in magnetically sealed pouches. There would be no leaks of information. It was only then that the delegates received a copy of the platform language the Trump team had meticulously prepared, which slashed the platform size by nearly three-quarters. “This is something that ultimately you’ll pass,” Mr. Trump told the delegates by phone and made audible to the room, according to a person who was there and who was not authorized to speak publicly. “You’ll pass it quickly.” [NY Times]
• Here the inexpert reader must note an important detail about the British undercover world. Cornwell’s reports on Mitchell had been going to an organization often called MI5, whose real name is the British Security Service. Lazy or incurious journalists frequently suggest that its employees are spies. But this is an evasion at best. The only proper description of MI5 is that it is a secret police force. Though it has no powers of arrest, it knows people who do. And its job has always been to snoop on those whom the current government regards as potential enemies. It once snooped on me, because it thought I was too left-wing, and I suspect it may soon snoop on me again because it thinks I am too conservative. Thanks to his most famous books, Cornwell is generally associated with the supposedly more reputable and romantic MI6 (properly the Secret Intelligence Service or SIS), which does employ spies. But this is not quite right. MI5 and MI6 dislike and mistrust each other, and it is quite unusual for anyone to serve in both, but Cornwell did. And in his letters, he confesses to German friends that he viewed MI5, the Secret Police, as “ultimately more rewarding, more obviously necessary, more vocational” than MI6, the spies. [Peter Hitchens]