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… is from page 117 of the late Anthony de Jasay‘s brilliant 1997 volume, Against Politics [original emphasis]:

The hard part in political theory is to excogitate, not what we ought to want, but how to get it. It is easy enough to call for institutions “designed to” do this, that and the other. The puzzle and the pain begin when the institutions that will do these things have actually to be “designed,” and (even before the design could start) specified in hard engineering language that has a “falsifiable” information content.

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Here’s a letter of mine that’s just been published in the Washington Post.

The Trump administration announced that the prices it will charge foreigners to enter U.S. national parks will be higher than the prices charged to Americans, as was reported in the Nov. 28 news article “‘America-first’ upcharges to be levied on foreign visitors at national parks.” This plan is a continuation of the administration’s incoherent trade policy.

Foreigners who visit U.S. national parks are purchasing an American export: American tourism services. If foreign governments wanted to protect their own tourist industries from American competition, among the tools at their disposal would be tariffs on their citizens’ purchases of tickets to U.S. parks. This protectionist practice, which would indeed reduce foreign demand for an important American export, is one that President Donald Trump would probably denounce with cries of “ripping us off.”

And yet the Trump administration’s higher park fees for foreigners are economically very similar to foreign tariffs on an American export. With these higher park fees, Trump saves foreign governments from the bother of imposing tariffs to protect their tourist industries; he himself is protecting other countries’ tourist industries from American competition.

Donald J. Boudreaux, Fairfax

As I noted last week in this related post, there might nevertheless be a sound case for charging foreigners higher fees than are charged to Americans for admission to U.S. National Parks. That case would rest on the ability of price discrimination to yield more revenue than would be yielded by non-discriminatory pricing. In effect, the higher fees charged to foreigners would be revenue tariff on exports. Still, even revenue tariffs work protective effects, even if these effects aren’t their motivation. And the parties protected here are foreign suppliers of leisure and hospitality.

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In my latest column for AIER I pose some questions to those persons who decry income inequality in market economies. Two slices:

Objections to income inequality are commonplace. We hear these today from across the ideological spectrum, including, for example, from the far-left data-gatherer Thomas Piketty, the far-right provocateur Tucker Carlson, and Pope Leo XIV.

Nothing is easier – and, apparently, few things are as emotionally gratifying – as railing against “the rich.” The principal qualification for issuing, and exulting in, denouncements of income inequality is first-grade arithmetic: One billion dollars is a larger sum of money than is ten thousand dollars, and so subtracting some dollars from the former sum and adding these funds to the latter sum will make incomes more equal. And because income is what people spend to achieve their standard of living, such ‘redistribution’ would also result in people being made more equal. What could be more obvious?

Countless careful researchers have convincingly shown that popular accounts of the magnitude of differences in monetary incomes are vastly overstated. But let’s here grant, for the sake of argument, that differences in monetary incomes within the United States are indeed vast. And then let’s pose some probing questions to proponents of using the state to tax and ‘redistribute’ high incomes.

…..

Nobel-laureate economist William Nordhaus found that entrepreneurial innovators in the US from 1948 through 2001 captured, on average, only 2.2 percent of the total social value of their technological innovations. As Nordhaus put it, nearly 98 percent “of the benefits of technological change are passed on to consumers rather than captured by producers.” Does the fact that market competition obliges entrepreneurs to share the vast bulk of their wealth creation with consumers give you pause in your demands for ‘redistributing’ the wealth that these entrepreneurs manage to retain for themselves?

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George Selgin’s remarkable False Dawn is understandably among this year’s ten best new books, according to the Wall Street Journal. Congratulations, George! A slice from the WSJ‘s announcement:

False Dawn: The New Deal and the Promise of Recovery, 1933–1947
By George Selgin | Chicago

The New Deal, George Selgin suggests, did not work the way most historians claim. This economist’s eye-opening analysis shows that the increased government centralization of the 1930s rarely resulted in on-the-ground stimulus or sustained growth. The war effort did eventually put the economy back on its feet, but equally important was President Roosevelt’s choice, in a time of crisis, to finally work with, rather than vilify, America’s businesses.

Read Judge Glock’s review

George Will is rightly appalled by the actions of the Trump administration. A slice:

No operational necessity justified Hegseth’s de facto order to kill two survivors clinging to the wreckage of one of the supposed drug boats obliterated by U.S. forces near Venezuela. His order was reported by The Post from two sources (“The order was to kill everybody,” one said) and has not been explicitly denied by Hegseth. President Donald Trump says Hegseth told him that he (Hegseth) “said he did not say that.” If Trump is telling the truth about Hegseth, and Hegseth is telling the truth to Trump, it is strange that (per the Post report) the commander of the boat-destroying operation said he ordered the attack on the survivors to comply with Hegseth’s order.

Forty-four days after the survivors were killed, the four-star admiral who headed the U.S. Southern Command announced he would be leaving that position just a year into what is usually a three-year stint. He did not say why. Inferences are, however, permitted.

The killing of the survivors by this moral slum of an administration should nauseate Americans. A nation incapable of shame is dangerous, not least to itself. As the recent “peace plan” for Ukraine demonstrated.

Marco Rubio, who is secretary of state and Trump’s national security adviser, seemed to be neither when the president released his 28-point plan for Ukraine’s dismemberment. The plan was cobbled together by Trump administration and Russian officials, with no Ukrainians participating. It reads like a wish-list letter from Vladimir Putin to Santa Claus: Ukraine to cede land that Russia has failed to capture in almost four years of aggression; Russia to have a veto over NATO’s composition, peacekeeping forces in Ukraine and the size of Ukraine’s armed forces. And more.

Matt Yglesias hits an important nail squarely on its head with this criticism of “critical theory.” Two slices:

Modern liberalism was experienced at fending off challenges that announced themselves at the front door, but one of the most successful anti-liberal challenges crept through the side gate. Critical Race Theory and related identitarian ideas fooled many of us into thinking it was just a new, strange version of liberalism. These ideas fooled us in part because they were so poorly understood even by those arguing for them.

In this essay, I’m using “liberalism” in the philosophical sense: the view that the basic unit of moral concern is the individual; that institutions should be governed by general, neutral rules; and that rights and due process are core to justice. The illiberal ideas I’m critiquing, on the other hand, treat groups — particularly racial, gender, and sexual identities — as the real subjects of politics, see “neutral” rules as a cover for domination by whites and men, and redefine justice as rebalancing power between groups rather than protecting the freedoms and rights of all individuals.

What I’ve come to see in retrospect is that we were witnessing large-scale entryism of a deeply and explicitly anti-liberal program into liberal spaces. But it happened in a genuinely confused and confusing way.

Most of the people spouting these phrases and churning out the takes had no more familiarity with the source texts than I did. They were giving us a copy of a copy of a Tumblr post paraphrasing a summary of something Kimberlé Crenshaw wrote, not faithfully reconstructing the core ideas in their original context.

…..

Once you accept (even half-consciously) that groups, not individuals, are the basic units that matter, that “neutral” rules are just tools of oppression, that justice is about rebalancing power between groups rather than individual rights, you’ve already stepped outside the liberal project, whether you admit it or not.

DBx: Yglesias is right. But what’s remarkable about his essay is that it is written by someone on the political left. Classical liberals and libertarians such as Richard Epstein, Nick Gillespie, Deirdre McCloskey, Sheldon Richman, John Stossel, and George Will (to name only a few) have understood and said these things all along.

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy, is correct: “Populists left and right say America is failing. The facts don’t.” A slice:

The populist poles of the left and right are now linked in what political scientists call the “horseshoe.” As each gets further from the center, it bends closer toward its counterpart on the other side. Both distrust markets, both want to micromanage industry, both are protectionist, both romanticize manufacturing work and resent the disruptions that come from open global competition. Both, in other words, are hostile to the core tenets of the liberal economic order that made America prosperous.

Each side blames a different villain. For the left, it’s corporations and rich people; for the right, it’s immigrants and trade. But both sides insist that a brighter future is possible only through top-down political control, and neither wants to confront the real risk: a government already too large, spending money it doesn’t have and drifting toward fiscal crisis.

Over at The Dispatch, Kevin Williamson captured something important: Nostalgia is manufactured as easily as plastic trinkets, and it distracts adults who should know better. The 1950s, mythologized by the New Right in its push for a more traditional social and economic order, were not an idyll.

Instead it was an era of shorter life expectancy, of higher poverty by today’s standards, of legal and de facto discrimination, of limited economic opportunity for women and minorities, of gay Americans often being persecuted, and of far fewer consumer goods, technologies, and comforts. Implying that it was a golden age overlooks economic facts and the individuals whose rights and opportunities were sharply constrained.

The left’s narrative—that America remains fundamentally unjust and economically stacked against working families—is equally disconnected from empirical reality. As Michael Strain and Clifford Asness recently detailed in The Free Press, we live in the wealthiest mass-affluent society in human history. Typical workers’ real wages are dramatically higher than they were two generations ago. Post-tax incomes for the bottom fifth of the scale have more than doubled since 1990. Wealth for the poorest quarter of U.S. households has tripled. Consumption, the best measure of a lived-in well-being, is hitting record highs.

These data do not deny that some people struggle, but they show that the dominant narrative of national economic decline is false.

For our recent season of relatively few hurricanes, Bjorn Lomborg thanks climate change. A slice:

The 2025 Atlantic hurricane season ended on Sunday, and not a single hurricane made landfall in the continental U.S. this year. This is the first such quiet year since 2015; an average of around two hurricanes strike the U.S. mainland annually. You’d think this would be cause for celebration—or at least curiosity about what role, if any, global warming played. Instead there has been resounding silence.

We heard plenty about Hurricane Melissa, the monster storm that hit Jamaica in late October with 185-mile-an-hour winds and flooding, causing roughly 100 deaths across the Caribbean. Headlines screamed that climate change was to blame. Attribution studies quickly followed, concluding that human-induced warming made Melissa more likely and worse.

These analyses typically run climate models simulating the world as it is today, with elevated sea-surface temperatures, and compare them with a hypothetical preindustrial world with cooler oceans. If a hurricane is more likely in the former scenario than in the latter, the conclusion is that climate change made the hurricane more likely. Generally, climate change increased the likelihood of about three-quarters of hurricanes, floods and droughts and other events studied worldwide.

But notice what’s missing from the coverage. A New York Times article in October highlighted hurricanes “turning away from the East Coast,” noting 12 named storms so far but only one minor tropical storm brushing the U.S. This was framed as welcome relief, with the misses attributed to atmospheric steering patterns like the Bermuda high-pressure system.

Not once did the piece invoke climate change. The journalists seem to believe that climate change can cause only bad outcomes. If warmer oceans energize storms, couldn’t they also influence other meteorological phenomena that diverted this year’s hurricanes harmlessly out to sea? No one ran the models to check. No professors lined up for quotes.

This isn’t an anomaly; it’s a pattern. Dig into past coverage, and you’ll find climate framing in hurricane coverage dating back to the mid-2000s—tying intense storms and active seasons again and again to global warming. These stories overflow with experts declaring each event a harbinger of climate doom, backed by fresh attribution studies. Yet when reality bucks this narrative, no one makes the connection.

Thérèse Boudreaux (no relation) reports on U.S. government budgetary shenanigans.

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… is from pages 58-59 of the 1962 Gateway edition of University of Georgia economist David McCord Wright’s unfortunately now-neglected 1951 book, Capitalism:

One of the most widespread criticisms of the modern economic market is that capitalistic advertising is not always truthful. Who, however, could maintain that political speeches are always truthful? Again, products, it is said, are often “sold” to the public rather than spontaneously demanded by it. Is this not often true of political programs? Next people will say that certain capitalist businessmen have special influence over the market. But do not certain political leaders have special influence over the political market? Finally some people will object that they are forced to choose among the alternatives presented to them and cannot simply have anything they wish…. But also in political life are not most of us obliged to choose among the candidates presented to us in a given campaign rather than “running our own man”?

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Writing at Law & Liberty, Jon Miltimore notes that the example of California “goes to show that progressive ideology cannot make good on the promises of affordability its advocates make.” A slice:

Economists don’t always agree, but one thing virtually all economists agree on is that rent control doesn’t make people better off. A 2024 University of Chicago survey of 45 leading economists showed striking agreement on two core questions: None of the economists agreed that a 5 percent rent-control cap would substantially reduce income inequality, while just one said a rent cap would make middle-income Americans better off over the next decade.

Rent control laws have many flaws, but the biggest is that they discourage the one thing that most effectively lowers housing prices: building new homes. By making it harder for landlords to turn a profit, rent control discourages the creation of new housing units (and disincentivizes maintenance of current units). Whether you’re looking at recent rent-control results in Europe and the US or historic examples in Latin America, the research tells a similar story: rent control makes housing affordability worse.

Lawmakers in my home state of Minnesota recently discovered this. In 2021, voters in St. Paul, the state capital, approved one of the toughest rent-control laws in the country. The following year, data showed building permits were down 80 percent—which prompted the city’s Democratic mayor to urge the city council to amend the law. Two years later, the St. Paul city council quietly gutted the measure.

A simple glance at Los Angeles’s housing stock reveals the city’s real problem. Los Angeles has seen a steady decline in residential property permits in recent years, which largely stems from the city’s four-year “rent freeze” and aggressive tenant-rights laws that make it extremely difficult to evict tenants, even if they’re not paying rent or are destroying property. “It’s really hard to tell investors, ‘Let’s take all this risk,’ in a city that hates landlords and developers,” developer John Gregorchuk told Politico.

John Cochrane rants productively about “the trouble with tariffs.” A slice:

And it doesn’t matter if trade is fair or balanced or if the other side does the same thing. If China puts in a tariff, i.e. puts rocks in their ports, why are we better off by putting rocks in our ports in exchange? The only thing that matters for trade is that it be mutually advantageous. We want to buy and they want to sell. That’s better for all of us.

The Editorial Board of the Washington Post explains that Costco’s just-announced lawsuit against Trump’s tariffs punitive taxes on Americans’ purchases of imports confirms who pays the bulk of these tariffs: Americans. A slice:

Costco, America’s 12th-largest publicly traded company by revenue and 15th-largest by number of employees, has filed suit at the U.S. Court of International Trade seeking refunds of the tariff money it has paid so far.

This suit confirms that American businesses pay American tariffs. If, as Trump believes, foreigners were paying them, there would be no reason for Costco to seek a refund. And Costco’s suit is one of many that will be filed as the thousands of American businesses robbed by the president seek their just recompense.

Costco says imported goods account for about one-third of its sales. The warehouse club is famous for its ruthlessness in cutting prices for its members. Obstacles to lower prices don’t normally include American customs officials running roughshod over the law.

Trump may lash out against Costco with one of his Truth Social tirades. But attacking a company that has mostly kept its prices low won’t go over well with inflation-weary voters. Nearly one-third of Americans shop at Costco, and they’re concentrated in the suburban areas so crucial to electoral success.

Big business is now acting on what small businesses felt instantly: Tariffs are taxes on Americans. The largest companies had enough money to absorb some of those costs for a while, but time is running out, and they don’t want to pass them on to their customers.

Scott Lincicome tweets:

Goldman: US companies with more exposure to tariffs and related policy uncertainty have disproportionately announced price hikes and cut job openings.

Responding to Michael Green’s attempt to defend his claim of a U.S. poverty line of $140,000 in annual income, Reason‘s Eric Boehm makes clear that “the poverty line isn’t a vibe.”

Citing some of the excellent empirical work of GMU Econ alum Jeremy Horpedahl, Steve Winkler writes about the supposed secular economic decline of America’s middle class.

Kevin Williamson writes insightfully about capitalism. A slice:

But what about all that economic inequality we hear about? Surely that is a problem that is economic in origin? That is, at most, half right: economic—yes; a problem—no, not really.

An extraordinary thing has happened with the incomes and total wealth of the tippy-top of the distribution since the 1990s and the emergence of the internet and that vaguely defined collection of international phenomena we call, for lack of a better word, globalization. The fortunes acquired by such tech titans as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are indeed remarkable. They have almost nothing to do with the economic situation of the poor or the middle class, and they are not, in the main, the result of public policy. That is not to say that public policy could not diminish those fortunes (for instance, by simply seizing them, as many of my leftist friends desire), but Amazon and Apple and such have not exploded in value the way they have mainly because of government favoritism or political steering, though, the world being a fallen place, these exist and are factors. (Critics here will point to the subsidies enjoyed by Musk’s constellation of rent-collecting enterprises, and they are not wrong to do so. But even with these subsidies in mind, the broader point stands, for reasons that I hope the following lines will make clear.) What has made Bezos’ splendid fortune is the growth and integration of markets: If you have the most successful car dealership in Plainview, Texas, then you probably do pretty well—but you do a lot better if you have the most successful car dealership in Los Angeles. Same business, bigger market, hence, bigger returns to small improvements in margins.

If Jeff Bezos were the most successful shopkeeper in New York City, he’d be wealthier than if he were the most successful shopkeeper in Little Rock or Indiana—as it happens, he is the most successful shopkeeper in the world, serving hundreds of millions of users in more than 100 countries. Where markets are very large, returns to profitable innovation, efficiency, investment margins, excellence in corporate management—or luck!—also are very large. When Saks & Company was just a shop on Fifth Avenue, there was no way for its owners to make the kind of profits that a large, international chain of department stores could—to say nothing of the kind of profits Amazon can generate. But these profits are not, vulgar class-war rhetoric notwithstanding, deductions from the common good or from the share of wealth available for distribution—they are the result of wealth created, not merely wealth distributed.

The poor are not poor because the rich are rich. The poor are less poor because of the same economic factors that have made some of our rich guys so shockingly rich. Creating wealth makes societies—and the world—wealthier. Even with the returns going lopsidedly to a relatively small number of investors, wealth creation of the kind that makes billionaires also produces tons of economic benefits and secondary activity, tax revenue, etc. The thing about richer societies is, they’re richer.

But, strangely, when my progressive friends talk about economic inequality, they invariably talk about the incomes of the very wealthy—and almost never about the poor. And there is a reason for that: The story of the economic situation of the world’s poor does not offer very much rhetorical fodder for the enterprising anticapitalist.

Among the best decisions of this Trump administration is to appoint Paul Atkins as Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission – and Atkins writes here in the Wall Street Journal. Two slices:

America marks its 250th anniversary next year. Our founders understood that markets can unleash a nation’s dynamism as no monarch or government ministry possibly could. The securities markets soon emerged to unlock the most daring mobilization of capital in history. The steel that built our cities, the oil that powered our factories, and the electricity that illuminated our homes were carried forward by domestic and foreign investors willing to stake capital on an America still in formation.

As the 20th century unfolded and competing ideologies sought to engineer economic strength from the top down, our model steadily proved its value. The Soviet system collapsed under its own contradictions, while American life made giant leaps thanks to a system that rewards those who take risks.

But principles don’t preserve themselves. In recent years, our regulatory direction has veered from the founding ideals that helped the U.S. stand without peer as the world’s destination for public companies.

…..

The idea that disclosure requirements should scale with a public company’s size and maturity is hardly novel. The SEC first tailored disclosure requirements for smaller public companies in 1992. Two decades later Congress, through the bipartisan JOBS Act, gave certain newly public companies an “IPO on-ramp” and permitted them to comply with some of the SEC’s disclosure requirements on a delayed basis.

My goal is to examine all this anew through the lens of achieving disclosure that actually informs investors of the particular investment’s real risks and returns.

These remedies are long overdue, but they are only the first steps in a broader effort to realign our markets with their most fundamental purpose—placing American might in the hands of citizens instead of the regulatory state.

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… is from page 181 of the late UCLA economist William Allen’s superb 1989 collection of the transcripts of his radio addresses, The Midnight Economist; specifically, it’s from Allen’s April 1985 address “Employment and Wages, Competition and Fairness”:

The more valuable the worker, the higher the bid for his services. The high wage offer reflects rational concern of employers for their well-being, not a delicate sense of altruism or fairness. If you are technologically efficient in performing services which the community values highly, and if relatively few other workers are so productive, you will prosper. It is competition among the hateful employers that raises wages, for they must bid against each other for labor to supply demanded products and thereby earn rewards. And it is competition among lovable fellow workers that holds wages down by providing alternative to employers.

DBx: Yep. Economics reveals that if you are unhappy with your current wage, your ire should be aimed at other workers who are selling the same set of skills that you are selling. Your wages are kept as low as they are by these fellow workers. Also, of course, your fellow workers can and should include you among those who they blame for their low wages.

Likewise, economics also reveals that if you are unhappy with the high prices you pay, following a natural disaster, for tanks of propane and sheets of plywood, aim your anger at your fellow consumers who are responsible for bidding the prices of these items upward. Also, of course, your fellow consumers can and should include you among those who they blame for the high prices they pay.

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Joshua Rauh and Benjamin Jaros make the case for greater transparency in government data. A slice:

Washington is hurtling toward a spending crisis, but the fiscal watchdogs meant to check its excesses are already trapped in a crisis of credibility. Congress, for good reason, increasingly distrusts the estimates from the Congressional Budget Office and its tax-scoring counterpart, the Joint Committee on Taxation, which play a vital role in federal budgeting. It’s not just grousing that these agencies sometimes deliver lawmakers bad news. Years of opacity from the CBO and JCT have produced costly errors that no one outside the agencies could detect before it was too late.

That cost falls on voters. Errors from the CBO and JCT mean more taxation or that funding for programs comes up short—either way leaving everyday Americans holding the bag. Which is why the public should hope CBO director Phillip Swagel was making a real commitment when he testified before the House Budget Committee on Nov. 18 that transparency is a “fundamental goal” of the agency. Without insight into how the CBO and JCT arrive at their estimates, it’s all but impossible to locate errors until after the legislation has passed. The CBO’s latest mistake was scoring the One Big Beautiful Bill Act with interest-rate assumptions and methods that the agency was still actively updating. Yet the CBO presented the estimates as if they were definitive, leaving legislators working from a report that likely overstated the deleterious budget effects.

In recent legislative debates such as that over the OBBBA, it’s become all the more apparent that the CBO and JCT estimates continue to come from black-box models updated without documentation and applied inconsistently across legislation. In work with our Hoover Institution colleague Daniel Heil, we’ve documented that key assumptions remain hidden, model revisions are made without explanation, and even politically consequential scores rely on unpublished or soon-to-change methods.

The large misses that have resulted in recent budget scores have fueled distrust of the agencies. In scoring the Inflation Reduction Act, the CBO and JCT made erroneous forecasts for key components of the 2022 legislation. The JCT underestimated the costs of the law’s energy tax credits by at least $400 billion. And early returns from the IRA’s Medicare Prescription Drug Price Negotiation Program suggest the CBO was far too optimistic about the program’s price cuts.

Speaking of data, Davidson Heath argues that obsession with statistical significance leads to bad science.

Shawn Regan rightly applauds a Trump-administration proposal to clip the overgrown wings of the Endangered Species Act. A slice:

The Endangered Species Act of 1973 is one of America’s most far-reaching environmental laws. It can stop projects, block land use, and impose sweeping restrictions to protect wildlife. Yet after more than half a century and billions of dollars, only 3% of species deemed threatened or endangered under the act have recovered and are no longer in peril.

The Trump administration recently proposed reforms to correct one of the act’s most counterproductive aspects. Environmental groups responded with fury in the predictable ritual that accompanies any re-examination of the law. “Trump’s proposals are a death sentence for wolverines, monarch butterflies, Florida manatees and so many other animals and plants that desperately need our help,” said Stephanie Kurose of the Center for Biological Diversity. Fundraising emails warned of mass extinctions. Critics lamented that protections were being “gutted.

These warnings don’t match reality. The proposed changes aren’t a rollback. Instead, they codify a lesson that Democratic and Republican administrations alike have learned: Rigid, one-size-fits-all regulations can backfire, and that species recover faster when local communities have a reason to help rather than fear federal enforcement.

As usual, Arnold Kling is insightful:

When it comes to health care policy, you can try to sound sophisticated by citing “asymmetric information” as an explanation for why government intervention is appropriate. But I think that those rationalizations are off base.

The reason that we have government intervention in health care is that we have an instinct that making an individual pay for health care is immoral. It is taking advantage of the individual’s misfortune.

When someone is desperately poor and needs to borrow money to keep from starving, charging interest is regarded as immoral. Back in the day, that is what made usury a sin and made Shylock a villain.

When someone is suffering from illness, making them pay for treatment is analogous to usury. Still, we understand that health care providers deserve to get paid. So we turn payment for treatment into a collective problem, to be dealt with by insurance or, ultimately, by socialism (government).

I think that the moral intuition that an individual suffering from a health problem should not have to pay for treatment is something that we need to re-think. In the 21st century, the array of medical services is so vast and so varied that it is no longer appropriate to take away the individual’s responsibility for paying. As an individual, you think you have “good” health insurance if it pays for eyeglasses and teeth cleaning and for every precautionary MRI. But for society as a whole, it is not good.

Katherine Mangu-Ward writes that “Friedrich Hayek’s most popular work was dedicated to ‘the socialists of all parties.’ That phrase perfectly captures politics in 2025.”

Stefan Bartl explains that liberty creates abundance.

GMU Econ alum Dave Hebert remembers Walter Williams. A slice:

Walter’s impact on me is enduring, both professionally and physically. Professionally, he instilled in me both an appreciation for economics done right and the difference between education and proselytization. Walter suffered no fools and was demanding in his grading and in his writing. You were not going to get any leeway for using the wrong word and pleas of, “but this says the same thing!” would absolutely fall on deaf ears. You were expected to know your stuff and to know how to communicate it well.

He also instilled in me the importance of how one conducts themself in the classroom. Professors are there to educate, not to proselytize or indoctrinate. Walter took great care to never use any type of normative language, keeping everything positive. “Will minimum wage legislation lead to disemployment effects, yes or no?” is a scientific, and positive question. “Should we raise the minimum wage or not” is fundamentally different question because it involves evaluating trade-offs and is inherently value-laden/normative. You can use positive analysis to inform your normative conclusions, sure, but the two are fundamentally different. Testing students on the latter is indoctrination. Testing them on the former is education. Walter instilled in all of his students the importance of never indoctrinating students.

For him, this was incredibly impressive. He was (obviously) a prolific writer, so his normative stances on so many issues were easy enough to find. And plenty of people who were not enrolled at GMU would sit in on his classes, hoping to learn why the democrats were wrong… or something. They’d ask questions about Walter’s stance on some policy and he’d just reply, “You can look that up on your own time, Mr. Whatever. We’re here to learn economics, not talk politics.”

Physically, Walter is the man who designed the tattoo on my right bicep. After passing my microeconomics prelim exam after my first year of grad school, I was ecstatic. I went straight to Walter’s office and asked him if he would draw one of the economics graphs from the exam for me. He looked confused and said, “Mr. Hebert, as you demonstrated, you are more than capable of drawing that picture yourself.” But when I told him that I wanted to get it as a tattoo and that it would be a tremendous honor if he would draw it himself, he chuckled. “In all my years, nobody has asked me to design a tattoo for them. Can I bring it to you tomorrow? I want to make sure I draw it well.”

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… is from page 189 of the 1955 edition of Stuart Gilbert’s translation of Alexis de Tocqueville’s wisdom-packed 1856 masterpiece, The Old Régime and the French Revolution:

Paradoxically enough, what made things worse was that the King and his Ministers were inspired by purely altruistic ideals; for by showing that methods of violence can be employed with good intentions by people of good will, they set a dangerous precedent.