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Musk, who has had more than a few feuds on Twitter - and feuds with Twitter - may have begun the takeover as a hectobillionaire's lark, but he appears to be sincere in his commitment to work toward a genuine culture of free speech and transparency at Twitter, suggesting that the firm should make some of its algorithms and content-moderation practices public. After Disney said it would fight a new Florida law on school curricula - which requires instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity to be age-appropriate - Governor Ron DeSantis and the state's Republican legislature passed a new law removing long-standing legal privileges the company has enjoyed in the state. Across Africa, he argued, there is poverty not because of long-concluded colonial oppression but because too many African countries are ruled by dictators and autocrats, some of them naïve idealists who wrecked their countries' economies by means of socialist central planning and some of them simply corrupt kleptocrats whose misgovernance and rapacity prevented investment and economic development. His country, like his state, is better for the multitudes he contained. [Extracted from the article]

The good news is that it may still be possible to reverse these vicious cycles, and the hardest step has in fact been a cherished objective of small-government conservatives for many years. Markets were never the central problem, but they have magnified the impact of other mistakes that were made, in both public policy and culture. This problem is perplexing to small-government conservatives, because they are accustomed to treating market growth as an unambiguously good thing, and indeed as the solution to a wide range of social problems. Progressives, meanwhile, reach cheerfully for their wish list and start demanding free maternity care, paid parental leave, and universal pre-K. Only the small-government conservatives feel awkward at this juncture: They like babies, and human civilization, but they don't like lifestyle-invasive state programs, or steep hikes in entitlement spending. [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses the effective economic policy to improve the status of poor people in the U.S. Topics mentioned include the relation of the Social Security disability system to welfare, the role of failing families in income inequality and poverty, the importance of improving education of poor people, and the main obstacle to change.

The author criticizes what he calls crony consumerism, or the practice of the federal government providing for easier access to credit to lower-income people in the belief it will promote economic activity while reducing poverty. Among examples he cites are policies of the U.S. Federal Housing Administration that contributed to the near-insolvency of the government-sponsored financial enterprise Fannie Mae in the 1980s.