Mary Anastasia O’Grady writes insightfully about the calamity that is Cuban communism. Two slices:
Take the island’s energy crisis. Regime talking points, repeated ad nauseam by the international media, blame it on Washington sanctions. But major power outages across Cuba have been a recurring nightmare for decades. The worsening situation this year is the death rattle of an electric utility that is never going to be functional without a change in management.
Cuba’s thermoelectric power plants provide some 60% of the country’s installed electricity capacity, according to Jorge Piñon, an energy expert at the University of Texas at Austin. Those plants are powered by Cuban heavy crude, which means their fuel supply isn’t affected by U.S. sanctions policy. Distributed-generation plants around the country provide another 20% of capacity, according to Mr. Piñon. They rely on diesel. But with one-third of those plants inoperable due to poor maintenance and a lack of capital investment, fuel shortages affect only about 13% of generating capacity. They can’t explain the darkness.
It’s true that fuel shipments are down, but that isn’t all about sanctions. Cuba has run out of friends willing and able to underwrite its kleptocracy. Hugo Chávez, who led Venezuela from 1999 until he died in 2013, sent oil to Cuba in exchange for platoons of communist teachers and medical personnel to indoctrinate his nation. The regime in Havana would resell a good part of the oil to other countries and rake in the cash. That practice continued at a reduced pace during Nicolás Maduro’s rule from 2013 through 2025. Now it’s no more.
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Get ready for television specials promoting the regime narrative that the country is on the brink of a humanitarian disaster because of U.S. policy. Cue the images of dying babies in broken-down hospitals that can’t keep the lights on. Never mind the more than 800 political prisoners rotting in Cuban dungeons and the goon squads that have plenty of gasoline to patrol the streets.
Expect also to hear that Cuba is pursuing economic “reform.” Don’t buy it. Cuba’s version of change is reminiscent of the Soviet elites who moved in and got rich as the Bolshevik experiment disintegrated. The island needs new rules that provide investors with certainty. That’s not going to happen as long as the Castro family and its inner circle remain in power.
Nordhaus may be remembered by the left as a carbon taxer, but his true contribution was bringing rigorous cost-benefit analysis to a policy field that was sorely lacking it. In doing so, he showed that a net-zero policy failed the assessment worse than doing nothing at all, and that tolerating a good deal of global warming would be better in the long run for human welfare than overreacting today.
Kyle Smith remembers with great fondness William Nordhaus’s teaching. Three slices:
Here’s the thing: Nordhaus, who died of brain cancer at 85 on Oct. 30, was one of the most effective and memorable teachers I ever encountered. He wasn’t one of the song-and-dance men who try to charm the students. With his out-of-time horn-rimmed glasses and dry, deadpan attitude, he was like an unusually slender owl. He didn’t care whether we liked him; he cared whether we learned. His course wasn’t entertaining. It was merely life-changing.
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This was our introduction to the concept of scarcity, and the related question of value. Nordhaus walked us through supply and demand—why the one curves up (the higher the price you can get, the more you will make) and the other curves down (buyers want things to be cheap). He was the first person I ever heard explain trade-offs, or the phrase “guns or butter.” Pick one or the other. But you have to pick. Difficult choices are everywhere.
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Politicians, those masters of telling people they can have something for nothing, distort prices in their own interest but at everyone’s peril, and are the natural enemies of economic thinkers. Nordhaus’s course implicitly showed us how to think about political claims: What are the trade-offs Sen. Fantasyland isn’t mentioning? What is the actual cost? What is the actual benefit? Is “doing something” potentially worse than doing nothing?
Underlying his lectures was an appreciation for how markets create wealth with a never-ending cycle of innovation. This innovation often seems disorienting in the short term but makes us unimaginably better off in the long run. Jobs get destroyed, new and better jobs get created. Inefficiency gets wrung out of the system. In 1900, thanks to Thomas Edison’s light bulb, workers could purchase 10 days of reliable light for only a single 60-hour week of work. This was miraculous at the time. By 2017, Nordhaus noted, that same amount of light could be purchased with a fraction of a second of labor.
Prices do their work. The market adjusts. Resources are allocated, and re-allocated, and re-re-allocated, ever more efficiently—albeit forever dogged by governments interfering with prices and creating their own, often misshapen, incentives.
Voters hated Trump’s tariffs – a proposition for which Jon Miltimore and Laura Williams offer evidence. Two slices:
So Vance is not wrong that the Iran war was unpopular and contributed to the GOP’s defeat. But an abundance of data show the second item on his tweeted list — “focus on the cost of living/inflation” — is the reason, as he said “Our voters showed up. And…many of them voted for Democrats.”
Voters clearly despised the impact of this administration’s tariffs. In a nationwide ABC News poll, about one in three voters said the war in Iran was “crucial” to their vote, while fully half said the same about the cost of living — and government corruption.
Despite Trump’s populist rhetoric around their launch, tariffs were unpopular with voters. Writing at the Cato Institute prior to the election, Alfredo Carrillo Obregon explained that tariffs had become bad politics, as well as bad economics. The bipartisan conventional wisdom in Washington that protectionist policies win electoral votes was turned on its head as voters linked tariffs to affordability.
“Concerns about affordability sit at the top of most voters’ minds these midterms, and thus, high and sweeping tariffs promoted by the White House have understandably become a culprit behind increases in Americans’ cost of living,” Obregon wrote. Polls, and likely the final vote tally, proved him correct.
While Vance framed the disconnect as a messaging failure, voters were right to identify tariffs as a threat to an affordable American life. Last month, economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York published a paper finding that tariffs had raised the cost of goods in 67 categories in 2025. The typical American household is paying at least $1,000, and perhaps several times that, more to maintain the same standard of living under the new tariff regime.
Economists have always understood that, contrary to the President’s promises, taxes on imported goods are paid by American consumers, not by foreign governments or overseas manufacturers. Rising prices on imported varieties of a good account for about 64 percent of the tariff’s bite, according to the Fed paper, but another 36 percent comes from higher-priced domestic producers, who are either paying more for the imported inputs to their products, or were able to raise prices when foreign competitors were penalized.
Making goods more expensive, some have argued, is exactly the point of a successful tariff. Americans now pay 75 percent more for aluminum and 64 percent more for steel than the rest of the world. The trade deficit indeed seems to be contracting. And manufacturing jobs are rising again, but only after cratering during the first year of Trumpian tariff theatrics. As our colleague Dave Hebert pointed out recently, the administration is now claiming a job-creation victory for partially filling the hole it dug. Tariffs have done little to nothing to return manufacturing to the US.
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But tariffs became broader and harder to avoid, and businesses were relatively transparent about having to pass those costs on to American buyers. Amid an affordability crisis driven by dollar debasement and falling real income, Americans reacted. Fed research showed Americans cut their consumption of tariffed goods proportionally more than the price rose, suggesting a behavioral backlash.
The 2026 election suggests Americans are no longer willing to pay the price of protectionism.
Cullen Hendrix reports that “Santa’s sleigh will be weighed down by tariffs.” (HT Scott Lincicome)
Daniel Hannan reflects on the midterm election results. A slice:
Indeed, it is hard to find any ruling principle behind MAGA beyond the convenience, at any given time, of Trump.
Except one. The President has been a lifelong opponent of free trade. “I am a tariff man,” as he likes to say. Well, all the other tariff men, which is to say everyone in his administration, are now tainted by that association.
They must have known that Trump’s trade policy would fail, for they are not fools. They must have grasped that it would not reshore jobs or raise revenue.
They must have understood that tariffs would fall on American consumers, not foreign governments – which is why no foreign governments are queuing to get their money back following the Supreme Court’s decision that the tariffs were illegal.
Above all, they must have realised that trade deficits, which so obsess Trump, don’t matter. The United States has been running them solidly since 1975, and has outperformed the rest of us.
Basic economics would have told them trade deficits are matched by investment surpluses (or vice versa) and that Trump’s demand for both surpluses and simultaneous increased investment was mathematically impossible.
But, ambitious, obsequious or frightened of the MAGA voting bloc in Republican primaries, they never objected. Instead, they flattered and amplified Trump, like so many eunuchs around a vicious child emperor.
They will surely pay a political price. JD Vance, who had previously been the bookies’ choice to succeed Trump, has seen his stock plummet.
National Review‘s David Bahnsen shares his wise reflections on the GOP’s electoral drubbing. A slice:
The debate over the Iran war’s role in this Republican debacle would be comical if it were not so maddening. With virtually no one operating in good faith or making a serious argument, a whole cabal of people have claimed, all statistical evidence and voter polling to the contrary, that the sole reason for states like Texas, Kansas, and Mississippi flipping is the Iran war. Inversely, no one who disputes that monocausal theory of the case denies that the Iran war is unpopular, and that its unpopularity was a contributor to the decline of approval for President Trump and to the results Republicans suffered all over the country Tuesday night. That voters detest the state of prices, and that they believe (with obvious basis in fact) that tariffs are connected to this, is not disputable by credible people. That the bizarre handling of the Iran war led to a Strait of Hormuz debacle, and to significant problems for fuel prices and a downstream impact from diesel prices, is also obvious. Reasonable people can disagree as to how much of the Iran war contribution was related to opposition to de-nuclearizing Iran versus the way in which it all went (e.g., a failed MOU negotiated by the vice president, repeated claims of victory that were obviously untrue, and a sustained period of time with no clear resolution). But all advocates of a multi-causal explanation of the midterms recognize the significant role Iran played.
While those who predicted the economic pressures tariffs would create (yours truly included) and others who are more focused on Iran (some due to strong anti-Israel obsessions) socially post to their heart’s content about those two issues, it seems to me that the framework of Burkean conservatism is under assault in this new right, populist, Trumpian, Vanceguard moment, and the election results reflect this internal right-wing implosion. My contention is that a lack of focus on the free and virtuous society cost the GOP dearly in 2026 and will cost the GOP dearly until that framework is recovered.
Advocates of a free society have never called for central planning as a tool for economic growth. The anti-constitutional, discretionary, imperialistic, arbitrary wielding of tariffs has been a sight to behold, but not nearly as much of a sight as watching people try to defend it. From “Canada is ripping us off” claims to “this will restore manufacturing jobs” to “we must protect our national security interests” to “tariffs are making us rich” — the statist dogma embedded in all of this was trumped only by the intellectual incoherence. Tariffs have been put on, then taken off, and applied so randomly and inconsistently, it has caused the few honest pro-tariff people out there to admit this has been an unmitigated disaster even for so-called economic nationalists.
But the heavy hand of counterproductive and imperialistic tariffs has hardly been the only policy priority undermining a free society. The first two years of this Trump administration created 40 times the quantity of something President Obama did just one time — the taking of an ownership interest in a private U.S. company. If you had told me that in 2026 the United States government would have 41 companies on its balance sheet, I would have told you that neither the Republicans nor Democrats won in 2024, but rather that the CCP did. Generational critique of state-owned enterprises has been muted in exchange for indefensible government equity positions, making a mockery of cogent defense for optimal capital allocation and repudiation of cronyism.
Add to the mix an economic agenda that has pushed deficits to record levels (unashamedly), suggested paying married women taxpayer money for being home with their kids, promoted the idea of blocking private ownership of private property, advocated for price controls in credit cards, and made demands of private businesses repeatedly around their own priorities of investment and resource allocation, and what we have seen is a rhetorical opposition to the DSA movement of the left that is accompanied by DSA-light policies on the right. This is political malpractice, in that it has never worked in history to offer a weak and limp echo to the worst policies of progressivism, but it is also an ideological heresy for conservatives. Those who say voters were only motivated by prices in this election are wrong and miss the point that some of the administration’s policies heavily exacerbated high prices, but they also underestimate the role that a potent opposition to left-wing policies represents. The strongest talking point the GOP had this election was that the Democrats seem to be increasingly radicalized. They spent two years taking that opposition off the table by an unending game of footsie with these populist embraces of government interventions in the economy.
For, “to give” requires some degree of other-regarding, minimally expressed through an awareness of and even sympathy for someone else’s needs and wants. That necessitates a willingness to put yourself in another person’s place, even if briefly and temporarily. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith devotes many pages to describing how this occurs. “To take,” by contrast, demands no substantive reflection on another person’s ambitions or needs, let alone the conditions under which other people find themselves.
Soon enough, the [Berlin] wall would indeed come down. That is often thought of as the first domino to fall in Eastern Europe, but in fact, it occurred a few months after Poland held its first semi-free parliamentary elections in June 1989. Solidarity claimed 99 percent of the open seats, and Lech Walęsa went on to become president of a democratic Poland.
Those who built and maintain the Berlin Wall pretend it is permanent. It cannot be. One day it – and all those like it – will come down. As long as the wall stands, it can never be porous enough for free men and women in the West, and freedom-loving men and women in the East, to tolerate it. Freedom, not repression, is the way of the future.
Intellectual elites may imagine that they have all the consequential knowledge required to create the social justice world they seek, despite considerable evidence to the contrary. But, even if they were somehow able to handle the knowledge problem, there still remains the problem of having enough power to do all that would need to be done. That is not just a problem for intellectual elites. It is an even bigger problem – and danger – for the people who might give them that power.
