Goldberg's father-in-law, who escaped communist Hungary by swimming the Danube and later made a fortune with supermarkets in Alaska, had a decision rule for evaluating business ideas: 'Can you eat it?' meaning reliable returns come from meeting basic human needs rather than speculative asset appreciation.

Land valuation for tax purposes is vulnerable to corruption because property owners have strong incentives to have valuations set as low as possible, and the stakes are high.

Reliable returns on investment for basic human needs will always exist in ways that speculative assets won't, making land and basic resources valuable across time.

The return on investment in land as a pure asset (outside of tourism and Veblenian status goods) is diminishing in the 21st century as dematerialization and remote work reduce the economic value of physical proximity.

The Kenneth Arrow impossibility theorem in political science shows that all election models have inherent filtering problems that are unfair in some circumstance, so all election systems and primary systems are always pursuing the least bad option rather than a perfect option.

Friedrich Hayek first became interested in economics because of Henry George, and William F. Buckley loved Henry George, showing that Georgist ideas influenced conservative/libertarian thought despite George's egalitarian redistribution proposals.

Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward was one of the first utopian science fiction novels and was hugely influential, spawning Nationalist Clubs that overlapped with Georgist movements, but the book and its influence are now utterly forgotten despite being a major intellectual force in the late 19th century.

Goldberg notes that valuation of land for taxation purposes is fundamentally vulnerable to corruption and arbitrary bureaucratic judgment because land is not a fungible commodity—value depends entirely on subjective assessments of location and intangible capital, making it impossible to establish an objective valuation standard like one could for commodities.

Charles Murray observed that many policy ideas work well in Sweden not because the ideas are good but because Sweden has exceptionally high social solidarity and communitarian cooperation, allowing unusual models (from Skinnerism to kibbutzism) to function temporarily before eventual erosion of trust and cooperation.

The Economist publishes coverage of financial markets and policy through its editors like Michael Bird (Wall Street editor), who provide analysis of how land finance and property systems work globally.

Goldberg observes that the left-right political binary was not fully established in America until the 1920s when journalists covering the Soviet Union and Europe began describing politics in left-right terms, and this binary reorganization erased entire ideological traditions like Bellamy-Nationalism and Georgism that did not fit neatly into either camp.

Germany has been rearming in response to Trump's NATO pressure, and Britain has been 'negligent' in its national security spending and policy, suggesting that Europe may be forced into stronger self-defense despite Trump's undermining of NATO.

Intellectuals and pundits are engaging in goalpost-moving rationalization of Trump's policies in part because they want to remain relevant to the administration and have influence with decision-makers.

Ideals and moral principles have real causal efficacy in international relations; the realism vs. idealism debate is false because whether people trust you, admire you, and want to help you actually determines outcomes, making moral standing a hard power asset not a soft one.

Realistic foreign policy must recognize that national honor and keeping commitments to allies have real material consequences for future cooperation, and that betraying allies undermines the credibility that keeps the US dollar as the world's reserve currency.

The argument that Trump's first term was successful because 'the economy was great' conflates correlation with cause and relies on nostalgia that overlooks genuine harms, while treating the best-case scenario as the most likely scenario without accounting for changes in institutional constraints.

Trump won the 2024 election with a narrow popular vote margin of approximately 1.5 to 2 million votes and the 44th largest Electoral College win in American history, contradicting claims of a landslide mandate.

Trump's core supporters—Hispanic mechanics, working-class voters concerned with COVID, inflation, and the border—did not vote for authoritarian moves like Cash Patel running the FBI or January 6 pardons, and polling shows the January 6 pardons are unpopular even among his supporters, indicating Trump is overestimating his mandate.

Job interviews for Trump administration positions now include loyalty tests like 'Who won the 2020 election?' and 'Who were the real patriots on January 6?' with wrong answers resulting in disqualification or termination.

Trump's first term was constrained by 'Normie Republicans' who warned him off bad decisions and narrowed his scope of options, whereas Trump 2.0 is surrounded entirely by absolute loyalists whose mission is to enact whatever Trump wants rather than push back on it.