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I found out Sunday night that the Hostess Brownie Bits — and a few other Hostess products — are still on the shelves of the Target near me. But the shelves for Hostess products was mostly empty. I couldn’t find a Twinkie anywhere. What’s really going on as these iconic brands disappear from our store shelves?

Since the company best known for making products such as Twinkies and Wonder Bread announced it was shutting down, I’ve heard two consistent narratives about it. One comes from conservatives and one comes from progressives on the left. I’d like to suggest that both narratives are overly simplistic.

For conservatives, the story of Hostess Brands is a narrative of evil unions destroying an otherwise-healthy company. For progressives, the story of the shutdown is valiant workers standing up against evil bosses in the name of fairness. I don’t think either side has the facts to really back up the story in just those terms.

Let me admit my bias right up front. I can’t stand unions. I wouldn’t be a member of a union. I think they tend to make companies function poorly, because they tend to infect the workers’ attitude with an us vs. them mentality. I still remember when my father worked for a coal mining company when I was in high school, and the miners would go on “wildcat strikes” on the first day of deer-hunting season or when they wanted a day off. They were lazy and had lousy attitudes, from what I could tell.

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As I slowly lost all respect for elected politicians over the years, I never lost respect for U.S. Rep. Ron Paul. As I came to the conclusion that the coercive state is irredeemably immoral and unsalvageable, I parted way with Paul on how to change the world. But I never lost my respect for him, even though I opposed electing anybody president, even him.

After spending 23 years in Congress (over a 36-year period), Paul is retiring this year. He declined to run for his House seat in order to focus his attention on his presidential campaign. Now that his last term is ending, he delivered a speech on Wednesday that might be his most important one to Congress.

In his 48-minute farewell speech, Paul asks tough and blunt questions. He lays out a case that you and I know well, and it’s filled with a kind of intellectual honesty that’s rarely heard in Congress. I think the core of what he has to say is a section in which he asks a series of 31 questions. The members of Congress who heard him aren’t trying to answer those questions, but they’re questions that deserve an answer in any sane world.

Since Paul chose to try to fix the problems of the state from inside the coercive state, I saw him as trying to redeem the irredeemable. I saw him as trying to tinker with something so evil that it was a very misguided approach. But if he’s been a statist, he’s been my favorite statist. And he makes a cogent and moral case for individual freedom — one which his congressional hearers can’t bring themselves to truly hear.

I urge you to read the entire speech. It’s worth your time. And if you haven’t watched it, I’ve linked the video at the end of the text.

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Who gets to decide what risks you’re allowed to take on your own property? Is it legitimate for police to make that call? Or is it your life and your right to risk it if you want to protect your home?

In Florida, a 42-year-old man realized that his neighbor’s house was on fire. It had apparently started as a kitchen grease fire, but the fire had spread. Before firefighters arrived, Daniel Jensen grabbed a hose and started spraying water on the fence between his house and the burning house and on a corner of his roof. At one point, he was afraid his house was in danger and he wasn’t sure whether his daughter was out of the house, so he was spraying water around her window.

All of this seems pretty reasonable to me, but I haven’t had police training that tells me I’m always in charge and my orders must be obeyed.

Police pulled him back from the area of the fire. Then when Jensen again saw flames getting closer to his house — and with firefighters still not on the scene — he grabbed the hose again and started spraying.

At the direction of a sergeant on the scene, an officer then used a taser to knock Jensen down into the puddle of water he was standing in.

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