iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Christine Villaverde @villaverde4nc.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Peikoff's warning about state capture of schooling is historically grounded but is incomplete, It never gives a test for telling education from indoctrination. Every movement reaches for the young. What makes one side's outreach education and another's indoctrination?

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Christine Villaverde @villaverde4nc.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

The sheep will spend its entire life fearing the wolf, only to be eaten by the shepherd. — African Proverb

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Christine Villaverde @villaverde4nc.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Steven B. Smith: modern culture is "enamored with numbers, statistics, and data … dismissing individual greatness as no more than a statistical outlier." Ask what leaders typically do, and the exceptional one is an anomaly. Ask what they should do, and it's the standard.

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Christine Villaverde @villaverde4nc.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Markets weed out inefficient firms through losses. Bureaucracies don't face losses, they face appropriations. The fix is to restore the missing selection mechanism by giving users exit options, tying budgets to measurable outcomes, and adding sunset clauses so programs must justify their survival.

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Christine Villaverde @villaverde4nc.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

“Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.” — James Madison

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Christine Villaverde @villaverde4nc.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Gómez Dávila once wrote that "Democracy has terror for its means and totalitarianism for its end." Dávila was no fan of the all-powerful state. He attacked big government, democracy treated like a religion, and the state taking over the roles of family and tradition.

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Christine Villaverde @villaverde4nc.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

"A stationary condition of capital and population implies no stationary state of human improvement." —J.S. Mill Mill was half right: growth isn't everything. But when economies stall, people fight over a fixed pie. Growth makes progress easier.

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Christine Villaverde @villaverde4nc.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Every policy debate should start here: how do we structure institutions to capture economic gains broadly while making regulatory capture costly and rare? Incentives, not intentions, decide who the system ends up serving.

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Christine Villaverde @villaverde4nc.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Public choice: when review gets costly, relabel the project. The ballroom became a "military complex," the arch got snipers, and the press became a "threat." Stretch "national security" to cover everything and it protects nothing. Courts should demand evidence, not defer to a post.

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Christine Villaverde @villaverde4nc.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

"The best life is the one in which the creative impulses play the largest part and the possessive impulses the smallest. Without effort and change, human life cannot remain good. It is not a finished Utopia that we ought to desire, but a world where imagination and hope are alive."- Russell

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Christine Villaverde @villaverde4nc.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

On this National POW/MIA Recognition Day, we pause to honor every American who was held as a prisoner of war and those who remain missing in action. We recognize their sacrifice and courage, and the steadfast resilience of the families who carry their memory.

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Christine Villaverde @villaverde4nc.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Robert Maynard Hutchins warned democracy dies from "apathy, indifference, and undernourishment." Public choice adds: disengagement is often rational. One vote rarely matters; staying informed is costly. It's an incentive problem. Education matters, but the fix is incentives, not lectures.

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Christine Villaverde @villaverde4nc.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Economists already put ethics in their models through discount rates, welfare criteria, and what they count as value. Should those choices be stated openly, or left to policymakers and voters?

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Christine Villaverde @villaverde4nc.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

No mom walks out of the grocery store saying "well, at least the eggs were cheap." We do not read the line items. We read the total at the bottom of the receipt, and that number stings.

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Christine Villaverde @villaverde4nc.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

AI CEOs are pitching the FAA as the model for AI regulation. Worth remembering the FAA-era outcome: four legacy carriers, near-zero new entrants for decades, and a certification process that functions as a private veto over rivals. Safety was the argument. Barriers to entry were the result.

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Christine Villaverde @villaverde4nc.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

“Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others.” — Otto von Bismarck

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Christine Villaverde @villaverde4nc.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

"...it is jealousy and not confidence which prescribes limited constitutions to bind down those we are obliged to trust with power; and in questions of power, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution." - Thomas Jefferson

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Christine Villaverde @villaverde4nc.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

"Government is not something which just happens. It has to be laid on by somebody." — T.D. Weldon True. And whoever lays it on wants something. That's the whole case for constitutions.

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Christine Villaverde @villaverde4nc.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Comparative institutional analysis replaces the ideal benchmark with a feasible one. The question is never "does this institution fail?" (all of them do) but "relative to the actually available alternatives, at the margin, which set of failures do we prefer, and who bears them?"

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Christine Villaverde @villaverde4nc.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

"The value of a university education should not reside in the learning of many facts, but in the training of the mind to think." - Albert Einstein

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Christine Villaverde @villaverde4nc.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Public choice is famous for the cynical half: politics is self-interest. Buchanan cared more about the other half. You don't know which coalition you'll be in next. That's a reason to bind everyone by rule. Hence his answer to deficits — a constraint, not better economists.

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Christine Villaverde @villaverde4nc.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

Niskanen, 1971: "Nothing inherent in the nature of bureaus or our political institutions leads officials to know, seek out, or serve the public interest." Niskanen reached the conclusion that bureaus aren't built to discover the public interest, so don't be surprised when they don't.

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Christine Villaverde @villaverde4nc.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Timely example: tariffs on Canadian lumber, cars, and paper. Cars and paper are the things that had been getting cheaper. Now a policy makes them more expensive. That's the pattern — affordability breaks where rules limit supply.

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Christine Villaverde @villaverde4nc.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

"Liberty of any kind is never lost all at once." — David Hume It goes one small step at a time. Each step looks normal. The danger isn't the bad rule. It's getting used to it.

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Christine Villaverde @villaverde4nc.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Röpke: free prices and markets are "the only economic order compatible with human freedom." Breaking with Mises and Hayek was on what comes next. The market is necessary and nowhere near sufficient. It cannot produce the moral framework it runs on. Law and property first then family and church.

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Christine Villaverde @villaverde4nc.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

"I may be wrong and you may be right, and by an effort, we may get nearer to the truth." — Karl Popper Popper's great insight: we don't make progress by proving ourselves right. We make progress by trying hard to prove ourselves wrong.

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Christine Villaverde @villaverde4nc.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

Flock Cameras and our rights. Rights aren't privileges reserved for the innocent. Mass surveillance reverses the Constitution's presumption of liberty — and it doesn't have to be used to harm you. People who know they're watched speak, assemble, and worship differently. The watching is the injury.

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Christine Villaverde @villaverde4nc.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

$1 trillion: what Washington pays in debt interest this year. $25,000: avg annual family insurance premium. Do the math—that's premiums for 40 million families, every year, spent on a budget line with no program, no output, and no constituency. Debt isn't free. It's compounding.

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Christine Villaverde @villaverde4nc.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

"We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both." -Louis Brandeis

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Christine Villaverde @villaverde4nc.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

United States debt passes $40 Trillion. "Spread out over the approximately 343 million people in the U.S., the figure amounts to $116,618 of debt per resident." This trajectory is unsustainable, and policymakers can no longer treat a fiscal plan as optional.

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Christine Villaverde @villaverde4nc.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Weak jobs numbers look the same whether workers disappeared or hiring dried up. The tell is wages and unemployment. Right now the signals point both ways. Anyone claiming it's obvious is selling a story, not analysis.

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Christine Villaverde @villaverde4nc.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

Every "common good" argument has the same gap: it assumes the people in power are good. History says otherwise. When "the common good" becomes cover for helping the well-connected at everyone else's expense, good intentions won't stop it. Only the Constitution will.

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Christine Villaverde @villaverde4nc.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

Refusing to promise DOJ "independence"? There's a real constitutional case for that. But when asked what HE would do if told to cross a legal line, "he'd never ask" isn't an answer. He should have said "I will never break the law or my oath." He didn't say it.

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Christine Villaverde @villaverde4nc.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

Congratulations to the Johnston County 12U Softball team on their championship — a 2-0 shutout to bring home the title! 🥎🏆 These young ladies represented North Carolina with grit, discipline, and heart. So proud of this team! #SoftballChamps #NCProud

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Christine Villaverde @villaverde4nc.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

America's illusion of freedom? Mill's principle isn't dead, but it is selectively enforced. You can speak freely but not cut hair without a license. The selection isn't governed by principle but is governed by interest-group economics.

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Christine Villaverde @villaverde4nc.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

Set aside whatever you think of Fauci. Holding anyone in contempt for invoking the Fifth Amendment is a disgrace. Constitutional protections that only apply to people you like aren't protections — they're privileges.

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Christine Villaverde @villaverde4nc.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

Industry litigated; the agency folded. When the regulated entity effectively sets the regulator's enforcement posture, that's regulatory capture in its purest form. Note the irony: an administration rhetorically committed to coal MINERS is acting on behalf of coal OPERATORS.

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Christine Villaverde @villaverde4nc.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

The school-readiness gap is built before kindergarten. Fewer books and less developmentally-tailored parental time (Kalil), plus unscreened vision, hearing, dental, and developmental problems. A pediatrician catches those for middle-class kids. That's why Head Start's screening standards matter.

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Christine Villaverde @villaverde4nc.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

If a system is the product of interactions, not the sum of its parts, then reform the rules of the game — don't keep searching for "better people." Hayek said no one stands outside the system with enough knowledge to steer it. And public choice says those steering have their own incentives.

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Christine Villaverde @villaverde4nc.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

Cornyn can't rein in POTUS? Except the thing he was doing when he said it. Conditioning confirmation IS the check. Hold the nomination. Demand it in writing. Defund the mechanism. "Nothing we could do" really means "nothing we were willing to do." Article I doesn't lack tools — it lacks users.

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Christine Villaverde @villaverde4nc.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

Overlooked is specialization creates concentrated interests. Licensing cartels and protected professions lobby to restrict entry, capturing rents from the very process that enriched them. Division of labor is the mechanism while property rights and rule of law are the enabling conditions.

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Christine Villaverde @villaverde4nc.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

The whole public-finance case for federal research funding is that discovery generates positive externalities markets underproduce. Those spillovers don't stop at state lines. Terminating grants by electoral map doesn't punish blue states — it forgoes gains for ALL Americans.

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Christine Villaverde @villaverde4nc.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

Real story: the immunity deal survives. Forgone taxes don't vanish — the rest of us absorb them. Structurally, one branch legislated, adjudicated, and enforced its own liability shield. No court has ruled on it, because no one's ever been brazen enough to try this.

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Christine Villaverde @villaverde4nc.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

Every policy is a claim about the world: this will cut crime, raise revenue, create jobs. Testing those claims with evidence matters for 3 reasons: voters can't hold anyone accountable without it, failed policies never die without it, and advocates never face their own bias without it.

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Christine Villaverde @villaverde4nc.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

A government spending more to service the past than to invest in the future has failed the first test of stewardship. And the quiet exit ramp of pressuring the Fed to inflate the debt away is a tax levied without a vote, taken from savers who did nothing but hold their own money.

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Christine Villaverde @villaverde4nc.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

$7.1M in lobbying to protect a multibillion-dollar market. Highest-ROI investment in America isn't tech or energy — it's Washington. Direct File didn't die because it failed taxpayers; it died because it served them. Concentrated benefits, dispersed costs, working exactly as designed.

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Christine Villaverde @villaverde4nc.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

Many of our critical infrastructure systems remain vulnerable to exactly these attacks. We have known about these vulnerabilities for years. How many lives must be at risk before we treat critical infrastructure protection as the core governmental duty it is?

reuters.com

US cyber defense agency warns hackers are increasingly targeting water systems

The U.S. government’s civilian cyber defense agency on Thursday warned of a significant increase in hackers targeting technology used to maintain and ‌control water and wastewater systems, and said op...

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Christine Villaverde @villaverde4nc.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

The classical liberal presumption: you're free until your conduct justifies state action. Pre-crime AI inverts this. Liberty becomes provisional — subject to continuous algorithmic re-evaluation. That inversion, not any single data practice, is the core privacy issue.

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Christine Villaverde @villaverde4nc.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

The tragedy isn't that Fauci and other officials made wrong calls with limited information — that was inevitable — it's that six years later we've chosen theater over the after-action review that would keep us from making the same calls again.

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Christine Villaverde @villaverde4nc.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

Lobbying is ordinary rent-seeking. When government hands out favors, companies will compete for them. But this is different: executive branch officials with alleged financial ties to a company, shaping the rules that company operates under. Officials break the rules-making process itself.

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