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The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal is understandably dismayed that J.D. Vance’s hostility to immigrants is more intense than is even Donald Trump’s hostility to immigrants. Two slices:

He [Trump] then criticized his Administration’s immigration raid on a Hyundai-LG Energy Solution battery plant in Georgia when hundreds of South Korean nationals were detained. “They had like 500 or 600 people, early stages to make batteries and to teach people how to do it,” he said. Immigration agents “wanted them to get out of the country. You’re going to need” them.

He’s right. Nearly half of the Fortune 500 companies, including Nvidia, Google and Tesla, were founded by immigrants or their children. A quarter of billion-dollar U.S. startups were founded by an immigrant who arrived as an international student. These are often the people who remain in the U.S. after graduation on H-1B visas. Mr. Trump seems to recognize it is self-destructive to train these students and then send them back to India or China instead of building firms here.

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As for Mr. Vance, he replied to an immigration question at a Turning Point USA event last month this way: “My honest view is that, right now, America, thanks in part to the Biden border invasion, but also thanks in part to a lot of bad immigration policy, right now, we have let in too many immigrants.” He also said legal immigrants “are undercutting the wages of American workers.”

On wages, Mr. Vance is repeating the lump of labor fallacy that American and foreign workers compete for a limited number of jobs. Studies have generally found that immigration raises average wages and employment of native-born workers, in part because their work is complementary. Economists from the University of California, Davis, last year calculated that immigrants increased wages for less educated native workers by 1.7% to 2.6% between 2000 and 2019.

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Think of the Irish in the 19th century, Italians in the early 20th, or multiple Asian ethnicities today. The children of these immigrants learn English, attend American schools and most of the time absorb U.S. values. They certainly work hard. More than a quarter of Hispanics are marrying non-Hispanics.

The worst damage to our “common community” owes to the identity politics pressed by the political left, which includes hostility to America’s founding principles. That worldview preaches racial grievance and ethnic division, a la the New York Times 1619 project. The best response to that isn’t an identity politics of the right. It’s a reaffirmation of American principles that unites the country, as well as promoting economic growth and mobility to assure everyone has opportunity.

National Review‘s Jim Geraghty is right that “the Groypers are so wrong about America’s opportunities.” A slice:

There are high-paying jobs that do not require a college degree. As of 2024, aircraft and avionics equipment mechanics and technicians have a median salary of $79,140 per year. Electrical power-line installers and repairers have a median salary of $92,560 per year. Elevator and escalator technicians have a median salary of $106,580 per year.

(Median salary means half the people in the group make more than that number, and half make less than that. Salary levels are influenced by the company, by experience, by location, by skill level, and in some cases, how well the employee can negotiate a higher salary. I know that after this is posted, someone on social media will say the above numbers are a lie because they know an elevator technician who makes much less than $106,000 per year. This also happens whenever I mention the national average price for a gallon of gas.)

Commercial pilots need a high school diploma, FAA certifications, and flight training, which can cost $55,000 to $100,000. But that investment in yourself can pay off; in 2024, the median salary of a commercial pilot was $198,100 per year.

If you can get an associate’s degree, you can work in some jobs in medicine and health care — MRI technologists, sonographers, dental hygienists, nuclear medicine technologists, and radiation therapists have median salaries ranging from $88,180 to $101,990 in 2024.

Bryan Riley tweets these data that reveal that a significant portion of U.S. imports of manufactured goods are inputs used by manufacturers in America or otherwise complement U.S. manufacturing activities: (HT Scott Lincicome)

Ted Zachariadis’s letter in today’s Wall Street Journal is spot-on:

After last week’s elections, Jim LeMunyon writes that Republicans need to wake up and smell the coffee (Letters, Nov. 10). Good idea, but with the effect tariffs are having on the price of java, they might not be able to afford it.

Will Marshall explains that “reindustrialization is just central planning, MAGA-style.” (HT Arnold Kling) A slice:

Trump believes free trade agreements and globalization eviscerated U.S. manufacturing, studding the landscape with shuttered factories — “tombstones” as he put it in his bleak 2017 inaugural address.

In fact, U.S. manufacturing output has grown substantially since 1980. What has declined is factory employment and manufacturing’s share of GDP. That tracks the trend of deindustrialization and rising demand for services in all advanced countries, regardless of trade policies.

Nonetheless, the president is ripping up trade agreements and taxing imports from friends and foes alike, in hopes of generating lots more factory jobs. But building walls around our economy won’t change the fact that automation has severed the old relationship between increased industrial production and blue-collar job growth.

Jack Nicastro rightly criticizes the Trump administration’s hare-brained proposal to introduce 50-year mortgages. A slice:

[Bill] Pulte simultaneously pitched the plan as a “big deal for consumers.” On this point, he’s not wrong—the policy is eerily reminiscent of those that precipitated the 2008 financial crisis; it socializes the risk and incentivizes lenders to issue loans to those who are more likely to default. Anthony Randazzo, former senior fellow at the Reason Foundation (the think tank that publishes this magazine), explains that, leading up to the Great Recession, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac “decided to begin taking on riskier mortgages in order to grab a slice of the subprime mortgage market [because] they knew they had a government safety net to back them up.” Adding insult to injury, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged top executives of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac with securities fraud for misleading investors about their subprime exposure.

GMU Econ alum Paul Mueller remembers Frank Meyer.

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… is from the May 1930 letter, signed by 1,028 economists, sent to Washington, DC, to plead against enactment of the Smoot-Hawley tariff:

We are convinced that increased protective duties would be a mistake. They would operate, in general, to increase the prices which domestic consumers would have to pay. By raising prices they would encourage concerns with higher costs to undertake production, thus compelling the consumer to subsidize waste and inefficiency in industry. At the same time they would force him to pay higher rates of profit to established firms which enjoyed lower production costs.

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The Washington Post‘s Editorial Board points out the unseriousness of Trump’s promise of tariff-rebate checks of “at least $2000 a person.” Two slices:

The administration keeps trying to have its tariff cake and eat it, too. At the Supreme Court last Wednesday, Solicitor General D. John Sauer said the tariffs are regulations, not taxes, and that the revenue they raise is only incidental. Days later, Trump was back to emphasizing how much revenue the tariffs are generating.

The president can claim all he wants that tariffs are paid by foreign countries and companies. But the receipts make clear that the bulk are paid by U.S. companies. Americans pay taxes on the goods they import, and the sums are significant. The Tax Policy Center calculates that federal revenue from tariffs will bring in $299 billion next year alone, and $2.5 trillion accumulatively between 2026 and 2035. In other words, even if rebates eventually come, they would do little to offset the biggest tax hike on American businesses in modern history.

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Trump wrote on social media, “People that are against Tariffs are FOOLS!” There is plenty of foolish thinking to call out, but it’s hard to ascribe much of it to critics of the administration’s erratic trade policy.

James Pethokoukis explains that “the courts can’t free America from uncertainty city when it comes to trade.” A slice:

A SCOTUS ruling is expected by December 2025 or January 2026, but a firm judicial rebuke of executive overreach will not by itself restore predictability—much less the pre-Trump status quo. Remember that economists view economic policy uncertainty as toxic for investment. When firms cannot foresee the rules of the game, they postpone hiring, delay projects, and hoard cash instead of building for the future. And the Trump administration would almost certainly use alternative authorities to maintain negotiated tariff deals, keeping global partners guessing and domestic firms on edge. Indeed, one would guess all these backup plans are currently being readied, just in case.

Ben Bayer argues that “the idea that the president is due some deference to manage his sweeping global tariffs in the name of ‘foreign policy’ is a complete sham.” Here’s his conclusion:

If no delimited, intelligible principle governs the congressional delegation, the separation of powers is dissolved and the door is opened to autocratic authoritarian control of the economy. The real targets will not be alleged threats from abroad, but the liberties of American citizens at home.

Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley writes about the demise of the Heritage Foundation. Two slices:

In the 1960s, William F. Buckley famously shunned conspiracy-minded Birchers, to the lasting benefit of the conservative movement. The current effort to marginalize figures such as Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon and Nick Fuentes is evidence that the political right is still capable of policing itself.

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According to Mr. [Tim] Chapman, Heritage consciously decided to alter its mission. It is becoming the “enforcer” of the party leadership. What the White House proposes, Heritage advocates, regardless of the policy’s merit or the organization’s past positions. The rationalization is that the country faces an existential crisis and the Trump movement is the only way to save it from the political left.

Mr. Chapman’s assessment may be correct. Unfortunately, too many people on the left and right now traffic in apocalyptic scenarios should their political opponents prevail. The reality is that the country remains divided, but democracy isn’t under mortal threat, as evidenced by the robust turnout in last week’s off-year elections.

GMU Econ alum Julia Cartwright offers wisdom about populism and constitutionalism. A slice:

The New Right has been politically potent because it has mastered populism’s simple moral drama. Divide the world into two antagonistic camps, the virtuous “people” and the corrupt “elite,” and then promise power as the instrument of justice. Because populism is a “thin-centered” ideology, it readily fuses with other commitments like nationalism, cultural conservatism, and industrial policy. The current flavor of populism has produced an elastic coalition that includes Midwest factory workers who feel displaced by globalization, voters suspicious of credentialed expertise, citizens frustrated by immigration disorder, and even some small-government conservatives who see the state as a temporary sword to cut through captured institutions. Many of the New Right’s current policies would have been familiar to the Left a decade ago: tariffs and industrial policy; fixation on the trade deficit as a national scoreboard; a growing willingness to police speech in the name of public morality or national cohesion; and an eagerness to bend independent institutions to executive will. This is a politically marketable package because it translates frustration into concrete action: use the state. The rhetoric is crisp, the villains are named, and the time horizon is now.

But this is precisely why rule by populist diktat is so dangerous when the subject is speech. Tariffs and subsidies waste resources, regrettably, but discretionary censorship degrades the constitutional order that makes wealth creation and civic peace possible in the first place. Whether it is pressuring agencies to “do something” about disfavored pundits, threatening to make offensive expression a criminal act, or floating schemes to subordinate independent economic stewards to presidential whim, the logic is the same: expand discretion and promise it will be used for the “right” ends. Nevertheless, powers created to punish enemies never remain in friendly hands. The next administration will inherit the enlarged toolkit and repurpose it. In game-theoretic terms, precedents are strategies over time; once you normalize ad-hoc exceptions to speech protections, you change the repeated game from rule-guided cooperation to tit-for-tat escalation. The country then spirals into a contest of retaliation and control rather than a society governed by predictable, general rules.

Classical liberalism approaches the matter of free speech through the lens of preserving institutions that protect individual rights and pluralism rather than maximizing immediate leverage. It is less concerned with who wields power today and more with designing constraints that minimize damage when power is inevitably misused tomorrow. Classical liberalism values free speech not because every utterance is virtuous, but because open contestation is the only mechanism that reliably disciplines error, exposes falsehood, and diffuses power. Its time horizon is long, its disposition humble about knowledge, and its focus fixed on the rules of the game, not the score of the current inning.

Human Progress tweets: (HT Scott Lincicome)

Neoliberalism made two major promises: It would put Western nations on a better economic track and turbocharge development in the third world.

On both counts, it delivered.

George Will says about Ken Burns’s new documentary on the American Revolution that it “tells a tale sometimes dismaying but ultimately exhilarating.” A slice:

History’s gears are lubricated by gore. Witness America’s Revolutionary War, whose continuing reverberations have done more to improve the course of human events than any other event in history.

The war was fueled by crystalline ideas couched in elegant prose authored by members of the Colonial upper crust. But from 1777 on, most bleeding was done by “the poorest of the poor — jobless laborers and landless tenants, second and third sons without hope of an inheritance, debtors and British deserters, indentured servants and apprentices, felons hoping to win pardons.”

So says a new telling of America’s origin story, which is a tapestry of suffering, viciousness, selflessness and nobility. Beginning Sunday, in six two-hour episodes on PBS, “The American Revolution” will immerse viewers in an often bewildering, sometimes dismaying, but ultimately exhilarating documentary by Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt.

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… is from page 654 of the 1988 collection of Lord Acton’s writings and notes to himself (edited by the late J. Rufus Fears), Essays in Religion, Politics, and Morality; specifically, it’s a note drawn from Acton’s extensive papers at Cambridge University:

False opinions work more mischief than bad men.

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Wall Street Journal columnist Gerard Baker argues that “Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes promote noxious ideas that imperil the American right.” Two slices:

The rise of populism has been characterized by a liberalization of thought and speech that had previously been suppressed by the prevailing authorities of orthodoxy. Much of this was necessary and welcome. The cultural limitations on what ordinary people were supposed to think about issues like immigration and “gender identity” were thrown off when populist leaders came along who dared to say things that many people had felt. But with this liberation of legitimate and reasonable ideas inevitably came a wider unleashing of much uglier sentiments on the right.

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But nationalism has its malignancies. National exceptionalism is easily interpreted as national supremacism and, even in a multiethnic country like the U.S., as ethnic supremacism. As generations of Jews around the world know better than anyone, nationalism often breeds antisemitism and other bigotries.

The second factor feeding the far right is the collapse of trust in major institutions. Universities, public “experts” and the media have forfeited their credibility by promoting ideological viewpoints disguised as research and reporting. The effect has been to weaken public faith in authority more widely. Part of the far right’s appeal is to say: “If they lied to you about climate change and Covid, how do you know they’re not lying to you about the Holocaust and slavery?” In this void of mistrust, all kinds of noxious ideas will flourish.

Barry Brownstein reminds New Yorkers about what they’ve forgotten about prosperity.

Jim Dorn shares the wisdom of the great Chinese economist Weiying Zhang, who points out that continued economic development in China requires that markets there be made much freer.

Timothy Taylor explains that “if China can draw on a population of 1.3 billion for future technology and innovation, and the US effectively limits its own talent search to its existing population of 340 million, the US would be surrendering one of its primary economic advantages.”

Jack Nicastro reports that “Trump baselessly accuses meat packers of ‘criminally profiting at the expense of the American people.'” Here’s his conclusion:

Trump has expressed concern that American ranchers are being improperly blamed for high meat prices at the checkout counter. To ascribe blame for the recent uptick in meat prices to four-firm concentration in the meat packing industry is unconvincing at best and, at worst, a deliberate smokescreen for his restrictionist trade policies that have exacerbated the problem.

Erica York tweets: (HT Scott Lincicome)

The President is confusing tariff revenues with investment plans

Tariff revenues are paid by US importers (CBP shows $89B paid through mid-Sept) and would need to be returned.

Investment plans from foreigners are separate and would not require repayment if abandoned.

Ben Connelly rightly criticizes state lotteries. Here’s his conclusion:

Conservatives should be clear about something. Gambling is a vice. It is not a social good. It is not an individual good. One of the roles of the conservative in society is to frown upon vices, to enforce social stigma against those activities that harm both the individual and society. Whether or not you believe that adults should be free to make their own choices about their money, including choosing to waste it on sports betting or lotteries, every conservative should agree that states shouldn’t be profiting from a vice. Even libertarians should agree with that, even if they don’t believe there’s anything wrong with gambling.

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… is from page 359 of Gordon Wood’s great 1991 book, The Radicalism of the American Revolution:

“The public happiness,” said Daniel Webster, “is to be the aggregate of the happiness of individuals. Our system begins with the individual man.” People did not have to feel guilty any more about pursuing their personal happiness here and now.

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I’m reading the abstracts that Bob Lawson and Phil Magness helpfully compiled into their new volume, Neoliberal Abstracts. This volume brings together in one place the abstracts of 100 of the most unintentionally zany and moronic papers that are poorly costumed as “scholarship.” Each of these abstracts is to a paper by an author (or authors) who use(s) the term “neoliberal” (or any of its variations) to smear those of us who reject ‘progressive’ notions of identity politics, collectivist economics, class warfare, and all of the other uninformed presumptions and juvenile attitudes that today haunt too many halls of higher education.

Reading these abstracts – each of which is meant to be serious – provokes a mix of laughter and despair: Laughter at the inanity (often verging on insanity) of the self-anointed crusaders against “neoliberalism,” and despair that such people are employed as college professors.

One other impression warrants mention: None – and I mean none – of these anti-neoliberals writes intelligibly. It’s as if there’s a contest underway for who can mash together multiple syllables into the greatest number of made-up words that are then strung together into convoluted sentences that defy the understanding of anyone not completely tripped out on acid.

The “scholars” who wrote these papers and abstracts are self-parodying.

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The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board unpacks the illogic revealed by Trump’s new promise to rebate the tariff revenues to Americans in the form of checks worth “at least $2000” as he and his White House witch doctors also use these same funds to pay down the U.S. government’s indefensibly gargantuan debt. Two slices:

This is a teaching moment for a high school logic class. Start with the contradiction that Mr. Trump can both pay a tariff rebate and pay down the national debt. The annual federal budget deficit is roughly $1.8 trillion even with tariff revenue, so paying a rebate would add to the national debt, not reduce it.

Mr. Trump’s claim of a revenue benefit from tariffs also belies what his Solicitor General, John Sauer, told the Supreme Court on Wednesday. In arguing that tariffs aren’t really taxes and are mainly a tool of foreign policy, Mr. Sauer said “these tariffs, these policies, it is clear that these policies are most effective if nobody ever pays the tariff. If it never raises a dime of revenue, these are the most effective use of these—of this particular policy.”

He added later that “So they’re clearly regulatory tariffs, not taxes. They are not—they’re not an exercise of the power to tax.”

But wait. If tariffs are most effective if no one ever pays them, then how are they going to raise the revenue Mr. Trump needs to pay those rebates? The truth is tariffs are taxes, but Mr. Sauer didn’t want to admit this lest the Court conclude that Mr. Trump is usurping a core constitutional power of Congress. Which he is.

Mr. Trump is essentially promising to repay Americans $2,000 of the border taxes they’re paying in higher prices. But if tariffs are a free economic lunch, and their benefits abound, why offer a rebate? Shouldn’t voters be thrilled about tariffs even without a rebate?

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Mr. Trump is trying to dull the public’s tariff pain with direct payments that he can take credit for. This is a new version of the age-old income redistribution game of taxing people too much but then trying to appease them with tax credits or one-time cash payments. Democrats do this all the time with child tax credits and other favors to special-interest groups.

Brent Skorup dives deeply into the seizure by the White House – White Houses occupied by both Democrats and Republicans – of legislative powers from Congress. Two slices:

The key question for the Supreme Court’s upcoming term is whether its recent pushback on presidential authority will continue. For 50 years, the court has steadily decided fewer cases, and Chief Justice John Roberts’ court now issues the fewest decisions in modern history. A newer trend is its growing reliance on its “emergency docket” to issue terse, sometimes cryptic guidance. Meanwhile, the Trump administration — governing largely through executive orders on tariffs, birthright citizenship and more — appears poised to test the court’s skepticism of sweeping presidential power.

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From Franklin Roosevelt’s sweeping emergency orders during the Depression and World War II to today’s late-night emergency docket rulings, the American government has wrestled with the same problem: How far can a president go when acting alone? Each generation has confronted the temptation of “government by executive order” as courts struggle to balance energy in the executive with constitutional limits.

For decades, the pattern has been one of drift. Congress, finding lawmaking cumbersome and politically perilous, has delegated many of its lawmaking powers to the president. Courts, reluctant to wade into political disputes, have too often deferred. The result is a one-way ratchet: Powers asserted in crisis become permanent tools of the presidency.

The Editorial Board of the Washington Post is rightly wary of Trump’s discretionary use of executive power to bargain down some drug prices. A slice:

Creating a federal system to market cheaper drugs is a surefire way to make CEOs bend to the will of politicians. But Republicans will come to regret their party’s attempt to further centralize commerce. It’s easy to imagine a future Democratic president using the TrumpRx precedent to force companies to adhere to their own ideological agenda. That could be a disaster for innovation and consumer choice.

If Trump wants to stamp his name on something, let it be on a piece of legislation that cements incentives for companies to drop their prices, rather than a website that empowers him to pick and choose corporate winners.

Wall Street Journal columnist Allysia Finley rightly blames ‘higher-education’ subsidies for the dumbing down of highly ‘educated’ Americans. Two slices:

Palantir CEO Alex Karp attributed Zohran Mamdani’s election as New York mayor to a reverse class warfare: “I think the average Ivy League grad voting for this mayor is highly annoyed that their education is not that valuable, and the person down the street who knows how to drill for oil and gas, who’s moved to Texas, has a more valuable profession.”

He has a point. Colleges are graduating a surfeit of young people who lack hard or even soft skills. Even as employers complain about a dearth of qualified workers, a growing college-educated proletariat can’t find jobs they want to work. They believe their degrees aren’t being adequately rewarded by the free market and blame capitalism.

The real culprit is enormous government subsidization of higher education, which has distorted the labor supply. More than seven million bachelor’s degree recipients have entered the labor force since January 2020. Meanwhile, the number of workers without college degrees has declined by about 200,000 and those with associate degrees has shrunk by 1.1 million.

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It’s understandable that grads might feel indignant about employer demands after having earned stellar GPAs for little effort and mediocre work. A recent Harvard report found that A’s account for about 60% of grades, compared with 25% two decades ago. Some 80% of grades awarded at Yale in 2023 were A’s or A-minuses.

It almost requires an effort to get a C. In a Substack essay, Johns Hopkins political scientist Yascha Mounk observes: “In one of the oldest jokes about the Soviet Union, a worker says, ‘We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.’ To an uncomfortable degree, American universities now work in a similar fashion: Students pretend to do their work, and academics pretend to grade them.” Parents and students who pay $80,000 a year expect high marks in return.

Eased academic standards and resulting grade inflation recall how credit raters, which were being paid by banks, slapped AAA ratings on subprime mortgage-backed securities in the lead-up to the 2008-09 financial crisis. Markets seized up as foreclosures rose and buyers of the mortgage bonds realized they couldn’t trust the ratings.

Similarly, employers are figuring out high GPAs aren’t a reliable indicator of merit. Even Ivy League schools are starting to worry that their top students are becoming a dime a dozen in the labor market.

[DBx: Although my lifetime income has been vastly inflated by government subsidies to “higher education,” I wish that these subsidies had never existed and that they would end immediately.]

Michael Sobolik, in this letter to the Wall Street Journal, rightly criticizes Tucker Carlson:

Ben Shapiro is right that “if Republicans cower before Nazi apologists and their popularizers, the GOP will lose—and deserve to” (“The GOP Mustn’t Give the ‘Groypers’ an Inch,” Letters, Nov. 5). Nick Fuentes’s antisemitism, which Tucker Carlson largely ignored on his podcast, indicates a broader rot that could infect conservative circles: an affinity for Communist China.

Beyond his pro-Hitler screeds, Mr. Fuentes has mused about the Communist Party invading cities in the U.S. “What if they did to Harlem and the South Side of Chicago what they’re doing in Xinjiang to the Uyghurs?” Mr. Fuentes once asked on his show. “Is that not ideal?”

That rhetoric is vile, but it signals that elements of the far right are sympathetic to America’s enemies. Mr. Fuentes isn’t alone in his cheerleading for people like Joseph Stalin and Xi Jinping. As Mr. Shapiro wrote, Mr. Carlson has “defended Vladimir Putin, massaged Iran’s dictatorship [and] praised Venezuela’s.” In 2024 he hosted Jeffrey Sachs, an academic who has played down China’s treatment of the Uyghurs and urges the U.S. to abandon Taiwan.

Mr. Carlson’s choices aren’t new. During a broadcast in 2020, he praised China’s national unity as something we “could actually learn from,” and in 2021 he lauded the Communist Party for doing “something virtuous,” namely restricting housing speculation, curbing celebrity idolization and limiting access to video games. Never mind the authoritarianism that underlies each.

Americans shouldn’t pine for the intimidation, surveillance and violence that the Chinese people endure daily. Beijing is rooting for the groypers. Conservatives should give them no space in their movement.

Alan Dlugash rightly decries “Heritage’s misguided path from Reagan’s sound principles to irrational MAGA.”

Michael Fragoso rightly criticizes J.D. Vance for supporting an end to the Senate filibuster. A slice:

The vice president stated, “Many of my friends (and former colleagues) in the Senate are against eliminating the filibuster because they don’t think the Democrats will do it.” That’s just not right. The Senate’s filibuster ultras know perfectly well what Democrats intend to do because they were around last time Democrats tried to do it. Not only were they around, but senators like Mitch McConnell, John Thune, Thom Tillis, Shelly Moore Capito, and even the vice president’s predecessor, Rob Portman, were instrumental in assisting Kyrsten Sinema’s efforts to preserve it — and with her efforts, Joe Manchin’s continued support. It was a near-run thing, and they were in command.

Saying McConnell or Thune doesn’t understand Democratic intentions on the filibuster is like saying Wellington underestimates Napoleon. They know perfectly well what Democrats will try to do.

The issue isn’t that they think Democrats won’t do it; it’s that Democrats doing so is a remote, contingent hypothetical. Republican senators are responsible for their actions, not those of future Democrats.

“Even the FBI thinks masked ICE agents are a bad idea.”

My GMU Econ colleague Alex Tabarrok is correct: “The 50 year mortgage is just the Republican version of subsidizing demand.”

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… is from page 11 of William Easterly’s hot-off-the-press Violent Saviors: The West’s Conquest of the Rest:

Trade allows everyone to make their own choices, not have others choose for them. Each side to an exchange decides on their own wants, [Adam] Smith says, and then both sides benefit.