Tweet

… is from page 580 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:

Every doctrine to become popular, must be made superficial, exaggerated, untrue. We must always distinguish the real essence from the conveyance, especially in political economy.

Tweet

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy, presents further evidence of the failure of industrial policy. Two slices:

Industrial policy is failing, and not just in Washington. Across America, officials promise to engineer the right economic outcomes by intervening in the market in just the right ways. Most people know that under Presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump, the idea has exploded. Less appreciated is how enthusiastically governors and state legislators are embracing their own versions.

They repeat the same claims: With the right mix of subsidies, protection, and political direction, one government or another can revive strategic industries and deliver durable economic strength. The results tell a different story.

Wherever it’s found, industrial policy is producing wasted resources, distorted incentives, and fragile outcomes that collapse the moment political support shifts or market realities intrude. Just look at the similarities between Georgia’s famous film-industry tax credits and a few of the federal government’s favorite projects.

A recent Wall Street Journal investigation into Georgia’s experience reads like a textbook example of how the model fails. Film–tax credit schemes are sold as investments in business “ecosystems” and middle-class jobs. In reality, they are either a subsidy to production companies to do what they would have done anyway, or they are bribes to highly visible, highly mobile capital that can leave as quickly as it arrives. Georgia was the latter.

…..

This helps explain why a promised auto-manufacturing renaissance hasn’t materialized. Automakers and suppliers have so far absorbed much of the tariff shock through smaller profit margins, restrained pricing, and selective job cuts. This is not sustainable. Investment decisions are now being reconsidered, and some manufacturers, like Volkswagen, warn that new U.S. plants no longer make sense.

Tariffs did not restore competitiveness or pricing power. They jacked up costs and made American production less attractive at the margin.

These cases all differ in detail but share a common logic: Industrial policy tries to engineer outcomes while ignoring processes. It assumes that political favor can substitute for market incentives. That innovation and customer demand won’t suffer. That shielding firms from competition will make them stronger. Instead, we get fragile industries that are dependent on even more political support.

Jeff Turnbull’s letter in today’s Wall Street Journal is correct:

I enjoyed Cole Murphy’s Cross Country about the Georgia film tax incentive (“Georgia’s Film Tax Incentive Bombs at the Box Office” Jan. 24). I had first hand knowledge of the excessive costs for labor in several Savannah, Ga., area film productions during 2022. I was merely a “background actor” along with hundreds of others, driven to the many set locations in the Savannah area by (spoiler alert) highly paid unionized Teamster workers.

When money is poured into an industry from a government handout, there will always be people ready with buckets to catch it.

The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal decries the economic hubris and hypocrisy of Hungarian strongman – a man admired by the clueless Tucker Carlson – Viktor Orbán. Two slices:

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán portrays himself as an opponent of European Union overreach. But he’s made a big state bet on electric vehicles, and he’s now relying on the EU’s green mandates to ensure it pays off.

Hungary has long subsidized car makers, and EV-focused German firms are the primary recipients of more than $871 million in subsidies for the automotive industry since 2004, according to Andrea Éltető of the Institute for World Economics, a Budapest-based think tank. She tallied more than $2.57 billion in paid or pending subsidies since 2018 for EV battery factories, with South Korean and Chinese multinationals the top beneficiaries. That comes to more than $3.44 billion in state support for green cars and their parts, in a country with a GDP of about $223 billion.

Mr. Orbán needs EU regulators to manufacture demand for made-in-Hungary electric cars and batteries.

…..

This is an industrial-policy warning for Mr. Orbán’s admirers in the Trump Administration. He needs the same EU he derides to keep his economy running.

Jeffrey Miron – always sensible – argues that the deeper problem exposed by the dispute over the name of the Kennedy Center

is that the federal government should never have created this center in the first place. No effective argument exists for government funding of artistic activity, since private actors consistently produce cultural institutions in response to demand. In fact, private art museums (such as the Museum of Modern Art and the J. Paul Getty Museum) have experienced a significant global boom in recent years. Cultural production more broadly also exists without federal funding, including commercial theaters like Broadway’s Imperial Theatre, film studios like Disney, and symphonies like the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

The way to avoid polarization over the naming or staffing of an artistic center is for government to exit.

Peter Suderman reports what all decent people ardently hope to be true: “Stephen Miller’s hardline immigration tactics are backfiring.” A slice:

Miller isn’t just seeking dutiful immigration enforcement. And he’s not just spouting ugly rhetoric on social media. He just doesn’t want the public to believe that immigration policy is equivalent to a war on America’s streets, he needs them to, because that’s the only way to justify the sort of wartime tactics he favors on American streets.

Trump’s second-term raids are not merely designed to sweep up immigrants for deportation; they are designed to act as shows of force, a dangerous and occasionally deadly form of political theater. And while Trump bears ultimate responsibility for the immigration sweeps and their consequences, it is Miller who has most clearly shaped their operational character. The masks, the menace, the militarism—these are all direct manifestations of a cruel and apocalyptic worldview, in which force is the only real governing power, illegal immigration represents a form of “invasion,” legal immigration mechanisms like birthright citizenship are “destructive and ruinous policies aimed at the heart of the Republic,” and public protest of deportation raids that turn violent is tantamount to “insurrection.”

Vladlena Klymova calls on the wolves of antitrust to leave Netflix alone. A slice:

By integrating horizontally, Netflix and WBD could both deliver direct savings and expand the assortment of content available through a Netflix–HBO bundle. Disney’s acquisition of Hulu in 2019 made it possible to package Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+ for $13—down from nearly $18 if purchased separately. To remain competitive, Netflix would likely adopt the same consumer-friendly strategy. Besides, as consumers grow increasingly dissatisfied with the fragmentation of streaming services, bringing multiple services under a single platform would likely prove a long-desired benefit.

Even under a narrow market definition, the streaming-service market includes at least six major rivals. The Netflix–WBD deal would not presumptively render the industry uncompetitive. Antitrust enforcers should bear the burden of proving otherwise. Moreover, platforms such as YouTube also vie for consumers’ screen time, alongside cable and broadcast television, leaving a combined Netflix–WBD with roughly 10.4 percent of what might be called the all-screen viewing market. Bizarre claims that “Netflix has long been a monopoly under even the most generous market definition” completely ignore the fact that there are lots of things on television to watch and plenty of ways (e.g., cable, YouTube TV, DirecTV, Netflix, Disney+) to watch them. This is the case now and will continue to be the case if the deal goes through.

Frank Stephenson is understandably unimpressed with Michael Lind’s 2023 book, Hell to Pay.

GMU Econ alum Daniel Smith warns against the allure of “the policy button.” A slice:

In Bill Cotter’s beloved children’s book series, Don’t Push the Button! a mischievous monster named Larry presents young readers with a tantalizing big red button, sternly warning them not to press it. Of course, the allure proves too strong for toddlers, who gleefully ignore the advice, unleashing a cascade of silly chaos – turning Larry into a polka-dotted elephant or summoning a horde of dancing bananas. The books’ humor lies in the predictable disobedience, but the underlying lesson is clear: some temptations are simply too powerful to resist.

This whimsical analogy holds a sobering truth for the world of economics. Far too many economists, in their policy recommendations, unwittingly craft similar “big red buttons” for policymakers. They design sophisticated interventions intended to fix specific market imperfections with the caveat that these tools should be used judiciously – only when necessary, and with precision. Yet, politicians, driven by electoral pressures, find these buttons irresistible in off-label uses and abuses. The result? Not playful pandemonium, but real-world economic distortions such as deficits, inflation, and moral hazard that often exacerbate the very problems the policy was prescribed to solve.

Economists often position themselves as impartial social scientists, perched in ivory towers far removed from the messy arena of politics. They deploy intricate models to pinpoint “optimal” policy response. For instance, during a recession, they might calculate the exact multiplier effect of a fiscal stimulus package, advocating for targeted government spending to boost aggregate demand. Or they may recommend an “optimal” tax rate or an exactly tailored tariff that can generate slight efficiency gains under rare conditions. In monetary policy, they endorse tools like quantitative easing or financial bailouts to stabilize banking systems. These recommendations stem from a genuine desire to mitigate harm and promote efficiency, rooted in the observation that markets aren’t perfect: externalities, information asymmetries, and behavioral biases can lead to suboptimal outcomes.

However, by blessing these expansive toolkits, economists inadvertently empower policymakers with levers that beg to be pulled in ways and contexts well beyond what the economists intended.  Even if the advice comes with implicit disclaimers, such as “use sparingly,” “monitor side effects,” or “phase out promptly,” these are as effective as Larry’s warnings to a curious child. Policymakers operate in a high-stakes environment where incentives skew toward action over restraint. Re-election hinges on visible results: cutting ribbons on pork-barrel infrastructure projects funded by stimulus or touting low unemployment figures propped up by easy money. Long-term consequences, like mounting public debt, systemic financial risk, or bubbles, are conveniently deferred to future administrations.

This oversight isn’t just a minor flaw; it’s a fundamental methodological error. As Nobel laureate James Buchanan, a pioneer of public choice theory, demonstrated, economists cannot claim scientific neutrality while ignoring the incentives of those who wield power.

Former Virginia governor Doug Wilder, a Democrat, offers wise advice to the new governor of Virginia and her fellow Democrats in Richmond. A slice:

The temptation of new leadership aligned in policy and purpose is to move quickly and expansively. Yet the first question must always be the same: Who will pay? And can they afford it?

Members of the General Assembly have rushed to introduce bills eliminating mandatory minimum sentences for numerous crimes, raising taxes and expanding spending. Each of these proposals deserves debate, but discussion without discipline becomes indulgence.

Will raising taxes shift the burden primarily to those with the greatest ability to pay, or will it squeeze working families already stretched thin? Will increased spending result in measurable improvements in public services, or will it drive the state toward deficits that future generations must repair? Will eliminating sentencing standards improve justice and public safety together, or produce unintended consequences that communities later regret?

Good intentions do not replace careful judgment. Every policy choice carries consequences, financial and otherwise. Gov. Spanberger must demonstrate that she is willing to exercise discipline and resist excesses that extend beyond the mandate voters entrusted to her.

Tweet

… is from page 260 of Thomas Sowell’s 1999 book, Barbarians Inside the Gates:

It used to be said that taxes are the price we pay to live in a civilized society. Today, taxes are the price we pay so that politicians can buy the votes of those who are feeding at the public trough.

DBx: I’ve one amendment: Despite the frequently encountered claim, taxes were never the price anyone has paid to live in civilized society. Taxes – however necessary you believe them to be – are taken by force in order to fund the use of force. This reality means that taxes are the price we pay for the existing shortfall of our society from being fully civilized. (I believe that I first encountered this refutation of the claim that ‘taxes pay for civilization’ from Ed Crane.)

Tweet

Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal.

Editor:

You rightly criticize Pres. Trump’s enthusiasm for a weak dollar (“The Perils of a Falling Trump Dollar,” January 29).

Any American determined to defend Mr. Trump should answer this question: Do you think that a weaker dollar is good for you – you, a typical American, who in exchange for your weaker dollars would receive fewer goods, services, and investment options? If you answer “Yes,” please explain how your life is improved by a reduction in your purchasing power.

If you answer “No,” please explain how that which isn’t good for you individually – and, by implication, that which isn’t good for each of countless other typical individual Americans – nevertheless somehow becomes good for Americans collectively. By what mysterious arithmetic can a series of negative numbers be added together into a positive sum?

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

Tweet

The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal calls out Trump for his economically clueless endorsement of a weaker U.S. dollar. Two slices:

President Trump this week said he thinks a weaker dollar is “great,” but he should be careful what he wishes for. Many politicians over the years have contemplated a weaker greenback as an economic miracle cure. They often discover that a weak dollar is a liability.

Mr. Trump made his remark Tuesday amid dollar weakness that is contributing to instability in global foreign-exchange markets. The WSJ Dollar Index, which compares the greenback to a basket of currencies, has fallen about 8% over the past year, and gold’s steady ascent, to above $5,300 per ounce this week, sends its own signal about dollar weakness. The dollar-euro exchange rate is among the most important in the global economy, and the greenback has lost about 14% of its value relative to the euro over the past year.

…..

Some economists in Mr. Trump’s orbit have updated old exchange-rate theories to comport with their protectionist instincts on trade. The idea is that “too much” foreign financial investment into the U.S. overvalues the dollar, which kills exporting industries and creates America’s large trade deficit.

Here, too, evidence of actual harm is hard to spot. This so-called problem exists only because so many foreigners are investing in American economic growth. Worse, the so-called solution is to deter that investment, such as with a withholding tax on interest paid to foreign holders of Treasurys.

Arnold Kling, as usual, is insightful and wise:

I fear that humans desire the moral license to hate other groups of humans. Society works better when we overcome that desire. For much of our history, Americans have succeeded in suppressing large-scale hatred of other Americans. That is no longer the case, and the polarization regarding mass deportation reflects that.

Also wise is Scott Winship, who tweets: (HT Scott Lincicome)

If there were a finite amount of work to be done, I’d be more worried about LLMs and labor demand (though not that worried). LLMs ultimately lack inspiration or motivation to create without someone prompting them.

If you want to know why the price of beef has risen – hint: the reason isn’t “corporate greed” – consult Jack Nicastro.

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy, argues that economic growth “is not a luxury or an abstraction. It is a moral obligation to those with the least power, the fewest assets, and the longest futures.” A slice:

This is where the decline in total factor productivity (TFP) becomes illuminating. TFP is often treated as a mysterious residual, a black box labeled “technology.” But it is better understood as a measure of institutional performance: how efficiently a society converts labor, capital, and knowledge into real output. When institutions work — when rules are clear, timelines are predictable, and compliance costs are reasonable — new ideas emerge. When institutions degrade, TFP falls not because people are “so rich they no longer benefit from innovation,” but because society has become worse at enabling innovation.

The work of Eli Dourado, now at the Astera Institute, is particularly clarifying because it is grounded in experience rather than abstraction. His account of technology policy, from aviation to energy, shows how productivity losses accumulate through procedural drag rather than explicit bans. The binding constraint is often not engineering or science, but layers of veto points, open-ended reviews, and regulatory uncertainty that stretch deployment timelines beyond any plausible investment horizon.

The consequence is an economy that looks technologically sophisticated yet struggles to scale. The innovators exist. The capital exists. Even the prototypes exist. What fails is diffusion. Fewer factories are built. Fewer homes are permitted. Fewer energy projects come online. Fewer breakthroughs are commercialized. The result is a steady erosion of TFP and a growing gap between what is technically possible and what actually gets done.

If the growth problem is institutional, then a serious agenda for 2026 must focus less on outcomes and more on process. The question is not what Republicans or Democrats want the economy to look like, but what needs to be done to allow productive activity to scale.

Adam Michel makes clear that the evidence against taxes on wealth “is stronger than ever.”

GMU Econ doctoral candidate Josh Rowley is closely reading Adam Smith’s Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.

Speaking of Adam Smith, GMU Econ alum Harrison Searles joins with my GMU Econ colleague Dan Klein to explore the likelihood that Smith and David Hume were proto-Darwinists. [DBx: See also here.]

Tweet

… is from pages 433-434 of Johan Norberg’s splendid 2025 book, Peak Human: What We Can Learn from the Rise and Fall of Golden Ages [footnote deleted; link added]:

The other requisites for inclusivity are free markets and free minds. To bring something new into the world, people must be allowed to experiment with and exchange new theories, arguments, goods and services. Every major technological innovation is an ‘act of rebellion against conventional wisdom and vested interests’, explains the economic historian Joel Mokyr, and if conventional wisdom and vested interest are in positions to command what can and can’t be pursued, the result is stagnation.

DBx: Pictured above is one of the many wonderful fruits of human creativity unleashed in an open, free economy. This particular fruit of human creativity isn’t a marvel of technological brilliance; it’s a box. Yet this box – and the logistical innovations that complement it – make it one of the most momentous inventions in human history. These productive innovations are forever under threat from rent-seekers, the economically ignorant, and the arrogant who (whatever their particular reason) oppose change.

Tweet

Tom Palmer explains that “zero-sum thinking creates a negative-sum world.” A slice:

We trade with our neighbors. We trade with people on the other side of town. We trade with people we will never meet from hundreds of miles away in our own countries. We trade with people we will never meet in countries on the other side of the planet. We trade with people whose languages we do not understand. We trade with people of different religions, customs, and sports passions. The fundamental economic and moral principles of trade are not affected by distance, language, religion, customs, or sports. They rest on mutual advantage. When a Vermonter exports maple syrup to a Floridian and imports oranges from the Floridian, there is no essential difference between that exchange and one between a Canadian and a Floridian.

Trade creates intertwined interests. Complex and prosperous societies are those in which people depend on each other in myriad ways—for food, clothing, entertainment, transportation, medical care, teaching, and more. That mutual dependence is a source of harmony, not a loss of autonomy. As Frédéric Bastiat, one of the greatest champions of freedom who ever lived, noted, “The one thing that people overlook is that the sort of dependence that results from exchange, i.e., from commercial transactions, is a reciprocal dependence. We cannot be dependent upon a foreigner without his being dependent upon us.”

A Tax on Imports Is a Tax on Exports

A sales tax imposed on Floridians who purchase Canadian maple syrup may please the Vermont producers (unless they are serious about principles), but it is still a tax imposed on Floridians. It will likely raise the price the Vermont maple syrup producers can charge. In the end, the Floridians will pay more. What’s more, however, it will restrict the Canadian market for Florida oranges, even if the Canadians are rational and refrain from “retaliating” by imposing such a tax on themselves. Why? Because a tax on imports has in the aggregate the same impact as a tax on exports. Exports are what you have to send to get imports. After all, what you want are the imports, not the exports, which you have to send away in order to get the imports.

It’s possible — at great cost — to produce oranges up north and maple syrup in Florida, but it’s a lot better for people to exchange Florida oranges for maple syrup from Canada or Vermont. When the Canadians find that Floridians are not buying their now more expensive (price paid to Canadian producers + the tax taken by Uncle Sam) maple syrup, they will not have the U.S. dollars to buy those oranges, meaning that the Floridians are less able to sell to the Canadian market. The market for oranges has just shrunk, which means lower income for Florida orange producers. The country as a whole is not better off. Taxing imports is, in effect, quite like directly taxing exports. (In economics, that’s called the “Lerner Symmetry Thesis.”)

George Will sensibly argues that Trump’s “loutocracy” has abandoned any claims that it might otherwise have had to the benefit of the doubt. Two slices:

Minneapolis is today’s Birmingham. Citizens with smartphones are supplementing journalists in gathering facts. It is infuriating, yet grimly sublime, that the current national administration, which will not stop banging on about how it is restoring America’s greatness, is incessantly embarrassing (about Greenland, vaccines, and much else). The administration requires an addition to the typologies of government: loutocracy.

…..

Trust, including trust in government, is the glue that gives successful societies the cohesion requisite for collaborative dynamism. It is calamitous when government forfeits the public’s trust. But when, as today, such forfeiture occurs, assume the worst.

Today, it is more than prudent, it is good citizenship to assume that everything ICE says, and everything the administration says in support of its deportation mania, is untrue until proved to be otherwise. Or, as Noem might say, until it has been “adjusted.”

Some administration louts have said that the most recent (as of this writing) person killed in Minneapolis by a federal officer was a “would-be assassin” and, of course, a “domestic terrorist.” Because Republicans control congressional committee gavels, and because today’s president controls congressional Republicans, there will be no oversight of ICE’s rampages. The Senate, which disgraced itself by confirming Noem and others unqualified for cabinet positions, is especially unlikely to suddenly acquire the inconvenience of a conscience.

So, expect more killings, and more political smearing of the victims. That ICE’s disgraces will continue is, in its revolting way, a promise kept: loutocracy.

Yuval Levin makes a powerful case that the Trump administration continues to recklessly destroy its legitimacy with the public. Two slices:

The Trump administration is facing a serious and justified political backlash to the brutal excesses evident in its immigration enforcement operations in Minnesota. But even more than that, President Trump and his team are beginning to pay a price for their willful blindness to both the dynamics of American public opinion and the logic of the American constitutional system.

…..

Americans do not generally share the dark, bitter, vindictive hostility toward immigrants and immigration that characterizes the views of some of Trump’s senior aides. And so most voters are not encouraged but alarmed by the thuggish and fascistic tone of much of the administration’s rhetoric on the subject. The militant ICE recruitment ads, the nativist DHS tweets, the mendacious White House press statements, and the callous reactions of senior officials to the killings of protesters in the course of immigration enforcement operations all convey a hunger for confrontation (if not a lust for blood) that is not only grossly unbecoming of the government of a free society but also extremely unappealing as a way of talking to the country.

The result has been evident in measures of public opinion. About 20 percent of the voters who approved of Trump’s immigration policy a year ago now disapprove of it. Immigration remains among Trump’s strongest issues, because the public trusts him even less to manage the economy, but he is at roughly 40 percent approval now, and falling, regarding immigration. That fall did not begin with the killings in Minneapolis, but it has been exacerbated by them and is probably not over.

The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal warns of the damage that Trump’s hostility to immigrants is doing to America’s economy. A slice:

The Census Bureau also projected that net international migration will fall to 321,000 this year. That’s about three-quarters lower than during the first Trump term. If current “trends continue, it would be the first time the United States has seen net negative migration in more than 50 years,” the bureau says.

Restrictionists in the White House will rate this as a success—a sign of progress on the way to Stephen Miller’s goal of zero immigration for many years. But declining immigration—legal and illegal—is notably occurring against a backdrop of falling fertility rates and an aging population. Natural population growth last year was a paltry 519,000, down from 1.1 million in 2017 and between 1.6 million and 1.9 million during the 2000s.

Conservatives say Americans should churn out more babies, but regardless of the virtues of child-rearing, government can’t force people to procreate. Slowing immigration and an aging population present serious workforce challenges, as any employer will tell you. Artificial intelligence and robots can increase productivity. But America will still need workers for all kinds of vital jobs—from health services, to plumbing and electrical repair, to building homes or working in biotech labs.

The Cato Institute’s Marian Tupy, writing in the Washington Post, makes clear that the ultimate source of prosperity is creative ideas rather than atoms and molecules mashed together into different physical forms by nature. Two slices:

In the long run, nations do not become rich and safe by hoarding rocks. They become rich and safe by building the rules and habits that turn knowledge into production, and production into strength. They become rich and safe through ideas.

That is how the United States rose. America had plenty of natural endowments. So did Russia, Venezuela and Congo. What made the U.S. exceptional was a system that rewarded discovery, experimentation, entrepreneurship and scale. When that system works, resources stop being fixed constraints and become problems to be solved. When Santa Barbara, California, suffered from prolonged drought, for example, it built a desalination plant to increase its fresh water supply.

American economist Julian Simon said it plainly: The ultimate resource is people. Scarcity is not mainly a story about nature’s endowments. It is a story about human ingenuity unleashed under good institutions. If markets are allowed to work and innovators are allowed to profit, scarcity gives rise to substitution, efficiency and new supply.

…..

Trump is right to care about the supply side. He is wrong to think the path to greater productivity runs mainly through controlling more stuff. America’s durable advantage is its capacity to generate and apply ideas under a relatively free and flexible business environment.
That is the strategic resource that compounds.

Robby Soave is correct: Katie Miller – wife of White House’s ardent nativist Stephen Miller – is wildly mistaken to think that classical liberalism is woke leftism. A slice:

Classical liberalism is the forerunner of modern libertarianism: It is a philosophy that emphasizes individual rights, including civil rights and property rights. Classically liberal thinkers such as John Locke helped establish the notion that government should be accountable to the people. Economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo used classical liberalism as a guiding principle when arguing in favor of free markets and free trade. In the realm of government, the political leaders associated with classical liberalism and laissez faire economic policies are people such as former President Calvin Coolidge, former U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and Argentinian President Javier Milei. Note that these figures are not exactly defined by their love of wokeness. To the extent that “wokeness” is even a coherent set of views, it emphasizes collective rights for various identity groups instead of the individual-rights framework of classical liberalism.

Leftists tend to agree with classical liberals and even most conservatives on some broad principles, like the notion that people should elect their leaders. But modern liberals, progressives, and leftists tend to disagree sharply with classical liberals and libertarians on economics: They want much more government regulation, taxation, and centralized government control of the economy. On these issues, leftism bears a closer resemblance to the version of conservatism advocated by Stephen Miller—who supports tariffs and extreme restrictions on immigrant labor—than it does to classical liberalism.

Christian Britschgi examines Trump’s executive order that foolishly restricts corporate ownership of homes.

Marcus Witcher reviews historian David Beito’s new book on Franklin Roosevelt. A slice:

Further, FDR rejected calls from Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins “to admit the maximum combined quota for the next three years (82,000 in all).” Most tragically, when the German liner, the SS St. Louis, arrived off the coast of Florida carrying over 900 Jewish refugees, the administration not only did not admit them, the Coast Guard ensured that none of the refugees would be able to swim to freedom. Even after evidence of mass genocide in Europe reached Roosevelt, “the administration’s stance toward refugees showed no sign of shifting.” Beito concludes that “while FDR and his advisors certainly viewed the Nazis as international gangsters, the plight of the Jews was never a priority.”

The Washington Post‘s Editorial Page reports on France’s self-inflicted fiscal woes. Two slices:

France has budget problems, so politicians reached for a politically popular solution: Tax the rich.

Never mind that France already had the second-highest tax rate in Europe for its top bracket at 55.4 percent. Or that it already had surtaxes on income over 250,000 euros and income over 500,000 euros.

…..

The unsustainable welfare state also means France cannot afford its ambitions to build a self-sufficient military or fully support Ukraine as it fends off Russia.
The bleak conclusion: Politicians in Paris have made promises they can’t keep to a people who are now dependent on government for their livelihoods.

Charismatic socialists keep trying to sell Americans on the European model. Look under the hood, and it’s clearly a lemon.

Tweet

… is from page 332 of Columbia University law professor Philip Hamburger’s brilliant 2014 book – whose title poses a question to which the book’s lengthy text gives the answer “yes” – Is Administrative Law Unlawful?:

A fundamental advantage of the separation of powers is that it institutionalizes specialized decisionmaking and thereby allows Americans to enjoy all of the advantages of distinct exercises of judgment, will, and force. A breakdown in the distinctions among the three powers was a fundamental part of what traditionally was understood as arbitrary or irrational decisionmaking. From this point of view, specialized decisionmaking is valuable for avoiding a type of arbitrary governance – a type encouraged by the administrative consolidation of powers.

Tweet

There are nits that I’d pick with this new column by the Wall Street Journal‘s Gerard Baker, but he here hits an important nail squarely on its head:

The far left and its mainstream Democratic enablers want us to abandon all efforts at immigration enforcement. But their efforts to undermine the process are nothing compared with the public unease that is being generated by the methods ICE is using. The images of platoons of armed, masked men, seemingly equipped for street warfare, descending on parking lots and shopping malls; the spectacle of grandmothers and children being seized by agents; the reports of U.S. citizens being detained — all repel most decent Americans.

Now that these activities and the protests they have engendered have resulted in multiple deaths, the administration and its allies are further undermining trust by their public response to the incidents.

Calling the two protesters killed in Minneapolis “domestic terrorists” is an insult to the intelligence. Whether or not they were responsible for their own deaths, as in law they might have been, the implication that their killing should be treated as some sort of condign execution is simply loathsome. Lying about what we all can actually see on our screens adds injury to the insult. While no one can say with confidence exactly what unfolded in Minneapolis on the basis of cellphone video, we can be confident that the description offered by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was mostly fiction. If the words of our top government officials can be so easily disproved by the evidence of our own eyes, faith in the policy is destroyed.

Worst of all, by instantly defending and even praising every act by an immigration officer, however dubious, the administration is actively enabling escalation. Such instant exoneration increases the likelihood that worse will happen next time. The message from the administration that every one of these officers hears after these episodes: Whatever you do, whatever the circumstances, we will support you and denounce anyone you harmed as an enemy of the state. Officers may not have “absolute immunity” in law, but the government is encouraging them to act with absolute impunity.

The Editors of The Free Press decry what they describe as “Kristi Noem’s reckless lies.” A slice:

It’s true that [Alex] Pretti had a 9mm handgun on his person. But he did not brandish his weapon. Less than a second after a federal officer discovered the gun, another officer fired the first of at least 10 shots into Pretti, according to a detailed analysis of the incident from The Wall Street Journal. What’s more, Pretti was already on the ground and surrounded by agents when he was shot.

The Journal’s reporting was based on videos posted to social media. Anyone with an internet connection and a few minutes could see that the federal agents in Minneapolis had fired at a man already prone and on the ground. Indeed, the aggression against Pretti began as he placed himself between them and a fellow protester who had been violently pushed to the ground by another agent.

All of this demands—at the very least—an investigation. The facts may, in the end, prove to be more complicated. But the facts as they are known now are at odds with the Trump administration’s version of events. “This looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement,” read a post from the Department for Homeland Security’s official account on X. Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller actually claimed on X that “an assassin tried to murder federal agents.” Assassin? Pretti was a nurse with a concealed carry permit. He was exercising his Second Amendment rights. There is no evidence he was trying to kill federal officers; he was pinned down at the time of his killing.

This has been a pattern for the Trump administration. After the fatal shooting of Renee Good by an ICE agent in Minneapolis on January 7, Noem gave an account of the incident soon contradicted by video footage and called Good a “domestic terrorist,” despite zero evidence that she fit that description. And surprise, surprise, Noem is now saying that Pretti is also a “domestic terrorist,” because he brought a gun and ammunition to a protest.

This is a bizarre argument for anyone in a Republican administration to make. The GOP is supposed to be the party that defends the Second Amendment, which enshrines the rights of Americans to bear arms.

Eric Boehm is correct: “Democrats plan to block DHS funding after Minnesota killing. Republicans should join them.”

The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal reports relevant numbers regard the ICE crackdowns. A slice:

Syracuse professor Austin Kocher, who tracks official ICE data, finds that between Sept. 21, 2025, and Jan. 7, 2026, single-day ICE detentions increased 11,296. But only 902 of those were convicted criminals, 2,273 had pending criminal charges and 8,121 were other immigrant violators. ICE arrests have been trending upward since January 2025, but criminal arrests have plateaued.

All of which means that the Trump Administration’s rhetoric about deporting criminals doesn’t match its current much broader policy of mass deportation. As ICE agents target businesses, schools and homes, scenes of arrest involving mothers, children and long-time U.S. residents become more common. This explains why immigration enforcement is becoming a political liability for Republicans.

Ending migrant chaos at the border was necessary after the Biden Administration. But White House aide Stephen Miller’s undisciplined mass deportation and zero-immigration policy is building distrust, and the White House pitch that public safety justifies its enforcement is losing credibility.

Alvaro Vargas Llosa sings the praises of María Corina Machado. Two slices:

As is well known, the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to María Corina Machado, the leader of Venezuela’s freedom movement. Her merits? She has fought the Chavista dictatorship ever since Hugo Chávez came to power in 1999 and started dismantling the country’s institutions. At first, she did so through an NGO focused on monitoring electoral processes, then through political participation. Rather than go into exile, this woman, who comes from a well-known family and was trained as an industrial engineer, chose to risk everything for the pursuit of liberty.

She was beaten up, harassed, kidnapped, prosecuted in Chavez’s and Nicolás Maduro’s (his equally despicable successor) kangaroo courts, barred from leaving the country, and prevented from seeing her children—who had to settle abroad, graduate, launch their own careers, get married and have children—and was disqualified from holding public office—first by being expelled from the National Assembly and subsequently by being prevented from participating in any election. Because she was a woman, because she was uncompromising, and because she had classical liberal convictions, she was poo-pooed even by the opposition, who did not take her seriously. Gradually, at an ant-like pace, she earned the respect of the voters. A quarter of a century later, she became a widely admired national figure and her country’s only hope.

…..

This is the heroic woman who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2025—a symbol of her people’s endurance in the face of one of the most tragic stories of the 21st century. She said it belonged to the Venezuelan people and promised to bring the medal to them.

Until Trump stepped in—and practically forced her to “share” it with him, as she did recently during her visit to the White House. Forget that the Nobel Prize cannot be transferred or shared, as the Norwegian Nobel Committee recently said. What kind of leader would take away from a woman like Machado and the Venezuelan people the Nobel Prize? The Donald Trump kind.

The U.S. president has held a gun to Machado’s head since the day she got it by using all sorts of tactics—diminishing her role, ignoring her, then insulting her, and finally leaving her out of the transition process underway in Venezuela under the leadership of the entire Chavista apparatus except Maduro, who was captured and transferred to a U.S. prison. A man who presides over a $1 trillion military budget, controls more than three thousand nuclear warheads, has declared himself the ruler of Venezuela and the owner of its oil, and has twelve warships and the USS Gerald R. Ford carrier group in the Caribbean, put Machado in an impossible position. Either she “shared” the prize with him, or she and the overwhelming majority of Venezuelans who see her as the country’s true leader would be indefinitely bypassed until such time as Trump decides that elections should be held with other “more palatable” candidates.

Meanwhile, she swallowed her pride, kept her eyes on the endgame, cajoled him, and played into his ego by “sharing” the Nobel Prize with him despite criticism from many Venezuelans and others, in the hope that by massaging the U.S. president’s vanity, she would achieve her lifelong pursuit—the liberation of the Venezuelan people. Because, in the end, these small humiliations are nothing compared to the ones she has suffered in Venezuela for the cause of freedom.

Suzanne Clark counsels us Americans to regain our confidence in free markets. Here’s her conclusion:

It’s easy to underestimate what small increases in annual growth rates can accomplish. According to an analysis by the organization I lead, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, if sustained over the next 50 years, 3 percent annual growth would triple living standards, increase per capita GDP from $69,000 today to nearly $250,000 and boost average household income from $150,000 to more than $528,000 annually.

America faces many challenges, from the cost of living to the rapidly changing nature of work, but the greatest risk is this: in trying to fix what is broken, breaking what already works.

And there is much that works in the U.S. economy. The nation’s capital markets are the strongest in the world. Global talent continues to choose America. It leads the world in cutting-edge innovation, and many of the most complicated products are domestically made. Household net worth is at a record high. Consumers have more choices, more conveniences and more leisure than ever before. Diseases have life-changing treatments and lifesaving cures, thanks in large part to American innovation.

Free enterprise is not flawless, but it remains the most effective system for generating opportunity, innovation and prosperity — and for improving itself over time. If America in 1976 had chosen state control over free markets, the decline of the preceding years would have accelerated. There’s no telling what the country, and the world, would look like today, but it would almost certainly be poorer, less dynamic and less free.

Richard Ebeling reveals “the delusions and dangers of the new mercantilism.” Three slices:

With autocratic caprice, arrogance, crudeness, and rudeness, Trump has assumed the powers of a near absolute monarch to decide when, why, and against whom he will arbitrarily raise and lower and raise again tariffs on the importation of goods into the United States from all the other countries on the planet. Like the French king Louis XIV (1638–1715), who is reputed to have said, “I am the State,” Trump acts as if his mere word, changeable on a nearly daily basis, is the law of the land under the rationale of “national security.” He uses this term with such elastic generality and ambiguity that the importation of the most trivial, everyday consumer item can be declared a threat to the political and economic wellbeing and “greatness” of America, resulting in prohibitive import taxes being imposed on it.

But it is not only Donald Trump who sees America’s future dependent upon government management and direction of the economic affairs of the United States vis-a-vie the rest of the world. Many of those who, no doubt, find the president repugnant for a variety of reasons, also desire and rationalize the essentiality of government oversight and direction of America’s trade relations with other countries.

…..

[Left-leaning Harvard economist Dani] Rodrik seems to believe that because government policies can influence the direction and form of investments and production activities, this somehow disproves the logic and essential nature and workings of the free market. It would be difficult to find any free-market economist over the last 250 years who denied the impact of government policy in bringing about economic outcomes different than if the market had been left unrestrained to determine the best use of resources, given consumer demands and the market-based opportunity costs of applying the scarce means of production in one direction rather than another.

…..

We are confronted with the necessity to compare, weigh, and choose between the advantages of different jobs and places to work and the relative incomes we might earn from accepting one instead of some other. In other words, we each engage in trade-offs between our dual roles as consumers and producers. The crucial question is, should each of us make these decisions for ourselves and our families, or should such neomercantilists as Dani Rodrik take this out of our hands and decide these things for us, when the values and trade-offs they wish to impose on everyone may be very different from how each individual sees such things?

Both the national and global marketplace bring changes that modify the locations where things might be most cost-efficiently produced. The economic world of today is noticeably different than that of, say, 200 years ago. Our world is different than in the past precisely because over the last two centuries, many countries, including the United States, moved away from the heavily intervening hand of the government that prevailed under the older mercantilism.

If those mercantilist controls, regulations, restrictions, and prohibitions had remained more or less in place for the last 200 years, many if not most of the comforts, conveniences, and “necessities” of modern everyday life might never have come into existence. It would have been stifled and repressed due to central planners and social engineers asserting that they know best how we should live and where we should work and with what methods of production. Economic progress would have been restrained to what the mercantilist planners considered good and desirable.

Samuel Gregg reviews Philip Pilkington’s The Collapse of Global Liberalism. Three slices:

Like most postliberal commentators, Pilkington identifies some real problems in Western societies. He notes, for example, the degree to which doomsday environmentalism has, until recently, successfully stigmatized even the mildest criticism of draconian climate change policies. Likewise, the dysfunctional effects of easy money policies upon the economy underscored by Pilkington are real. However, blaming these and other evils on a hegemonic liberalism is a stretch, not least because such a liberalism does not exist.

…..

It is true that the number of manufacturing jobs has declined in countries like America since the 1970s. Manufacturing as a proportion of developed economies’ output has also fallen. Yet, as has been pointed out ad nauseam to proponents of the deindustrialization thesis, neither of those things means that an economy has deindustrialized or that manufacturing output has fallen. It simply means that the service sector and service sector jobs have grown, and that technology (as Pilkington concedes) has replaced many manufacturing jobs. That adds up to a different economy from that of, say, 1950s America or 1890s Britain, but hardly one that has deindustrialized.

Social and cultural problems likewise loom large throughout Pilkington’s description of the wreckage purportedly left by liberalism. He highlights pervasive drug use, for example, as symptomatic of liberalism’s capacity to drain people’s lives of meaning. But individuals have been destroying their lives by foolishly ingesting vast quantities of stimulants of one form or another for centuries, and long before anyone used words like “liberal” or “liberalism.” I doubt, for instance, that the rampant alcoholism that marked Czarist Russia for centuries had much to do with liberalism.

…..

These observations underscore the deeper problem with postliberalism. It is riddled with unconvincing accounts of the history of ideas, dubious economic arguments, suspect cause-and-effect claims, and tendencies to ignore or demagogue anyone who questions the postliberal agenda’s underlying coherence. These features also cripple postliberals’ capacity to accurately diagnose—let alone resolve—the very real social, cultural, and economic challenges we face. Indeed, they further accelerate the decline that postliberals lament. Postliberalism, it turns out, is not a solution. It is, in fact, part of our problem.