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Here’s a letter to a relatively new correspondent.

Mr. W__:

Thanks for your follow-up email.

Contrary to your charge, I do not believe that I misled anyone when I earlier described Ronald Reagan as a free trader. Former senator Phil Gramm – whose commitment to free trade is deep and rock-solid – tells me (as he’s said publicly) that he witnessed first hand Ronald Reagan agreeing to protectionist measures reluctantly and only as a means of steering Congress away from imposing even worse protectionism.

This essay from earlier this year by David Hebert and Marcus Witcher further clarifies the reality that Reagan was indeed opposed to protectionism.

As for China, the well-established national-security exception to the case for free trade might well apply in this case. But the desire to strengthen America’s (or the West’s) national security against a Chinese military threat cannot not explain Trump’s tariffs.

If Trump were truly intent on using trade measures to strengthen the U.S. relative to China, he would not have imposed baseline tariffs on imports from nearly all countries, along with additional tariffs on 67 others (not counting China). He would seek to deepen commercial ties with Canada, Mexico, Japan, and other allies rather than antagonize these countries, as he’s done with his indiscriminate tariff-rattling. Not only do tariffs on imports from friendly countries deny to us important inputs from these countries – inputs that bolster our military abilities – by antagonizing our friends Trump makes them less eager to help us and more open to increasing their commercial ties with China.

I’m open to a serious argument in support of thoughtfully crafted trade restrictions narrowly targeted to reduce a military threat from China. But what we’re getting from the Trump administration is anything but such thoughtful policy. What Trump serves up as justification for his tariffs is rank economic ignorance – for example, his insistence that U.S. trade deficits are a problem – splattered about, as are the tariffs themselves, with all the discretion and discipline of a toddler throwing a temper tantrum.

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

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Rachel Lu – inspired by a 1964 book written by George Mosse – reviews some of the “second-rate thinkers who paved the way for Nazism.” (HT Arnold Kling) A slice:

From the opening pages of Mosse’s work, one is immediately struck by two defining features of Volkish thought that are in tension with our usual vision of Nazis. It was profoundly anti-modern. And it was deeply rooted in nineteenth-century romanticism, spurning philosophical rationalism and classical economics, and embracing instead an ideology that glorified nature, rootedness, idyllic visions of pre-industrial peasant life, mystical experience, rose-tinted nostalgia for feudalism, and the promise of greater meaning and a revitalized sense of community.

Ben Shapiro is correct: “Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and others make vile accusations through vague insinuations. Beating their distortions requires honesty and clarity.” Two slices:

Why does this matter? Because today, the conservative movement is in serious danger. It is in danger not just from a left that all too frequently excuses everything up to and including murder. The conservative movement is also in danger from charlatans who claim to speak in the name of principle but actually traffic in conspiracism and dishonesty, who offer nothing but bile and despair, who seek to undermine fundamental principles of conservatism by championing enervation and grievance. These people are frauds, and they are grifters. And they are something worse: a danger to the only movement capable of stopping the left from wrecking the country wholesale.

…..

Emotive accusations, conspiracy theories, and “just asking questions” is lazy and stupid and misleading. None of them are a substitute for truth. So when Candace Owens says, “I don’t know know, but I know,” that’s retarded, and we are all more retarded for having heard it. When Steve Bannon, for example, accuses his foreign policy opponents of loyalty to a foreign country, he’s not actually making an argument based in evidence—he’s simply maligning people with whom he disagrees. Which is par for the course from a man who was once a PR agent for Jeffrey Epstein.

Fiona Harrigan reports on how Trump’s mass deportations inflict harm not only on the innocent individuals who are deported (or who now live in terror of being deported), but also on native-born Americans. Two slices:

Entrepreneurship is in Alejandro Flores-Muñoz’s blood.

Back in his birthplace of Guadalajara, Mexico, his mother and other relatives sold whatever they could—hair products, food products—to make ends meet. After Flores-Muñoz’s mom brought him to the U.S. as a child, she got a nine-to-five job but kept her entrepreneurial streak alive. “From me just having to watch her figure out how to make a large batch of cheesecakes and flanes” to observing her develop “her selling points” and participate in pop-up events, Flores-Muñoz says, “that entrepreneurship spirit was instilled in me.”

He was inspired to become an entrepreneur himself in 2012 after receiving Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), a status established by President Barack Obama’s administration that delays deportation for people who were brought to the U.S. without documentation as children. That gave him a way to get a Social Security number and the ability to earn the licenses and certifications he needed to become a full-fledged business owner who employs others. He launched several hustles throughout his 20s before becoming part owner of a food truck in 2018. He now owns a catering company.

…..

Those businesses provide the products and services that Americans enjoy every day, and they also contribute to the national economy in big ways. “Most immigrant entrepreneurs own the types of businesses that populate Main Street,” noted Laura Collins, director of the George W. Bush Institute–Southern Methodist University Economic Growth Initiative, in 2019. They “start more than a quarter of all ‘main street’ businesses—retail, neighborhood services, and accommodation and food service.” Immigrants have also founded some of the country’s biggest companies: Over a fifth of all Fortune 500 companies were started by immigrants, and about a quarter were founded by the children of immigrants. Those companies employ 15.5 million people globally, according to the AIC.

Here’s a new empirical study the results of which, although utterly unsurprising to economists, will be ignored by the likes of Zohran Mamdani, with the cost of this ignorance being paid by lower-income people: rent control reduces the availability of residential rental units. (HT Scott Lincicome)

Norbert Michel and Christian Kruse detail the good and the not-so-good of the INVEST Act, which was just passed by the U.S. House of Representatives.

Steve Chapman appropriately criticizes the selling of one’s soul in exchange for political position. A slice:

[Kevin] Hassett’s time in the White House confirms that there is no principle or insight of economics that he is not willing to discard to please his boss. When Trump spouts nonsense, Hassett is always there to offer a smiling, expert gloss on it. Last summer, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics revised its May and June calculations of job growth—a perfectly normal event—Trump fired the commissioner and claimed the report was “​​RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.” The NEC director promptly went on TV to back him up. Hassett asserted that the revision was the biggest since 1968, which was false, while offering no evidence of deception by the agency. He went on to say, “The president wants his own people there so that when we see the numbers, they’re more transparent and more reliable”—as if Trump had the slightest fondness for valid data.

Hassett is not above lying about the most basic and verifiable facts. Gasoline prices, he said recently, are “below $2 a gallon in a lot of places.” In fact, as AAA documented, there is and was no state where gas prices averaged as low as $2.

What is so remarkable about Hassett, though, is that he was once, in his own words, “an unabashed free-trader.” In 2008, he went so far as to praise Bill Clinton for his “aggressive pursuit of free trade.” In 2003, he wrote that “liberalized trade” is “a key ingredient in the recipe for prosperity.” But you can’t sup at Trump’s table without swallowing your convictions. Hassett had an epiphany that revealed to him the cruel unfairness of our free-trade agreements and the importance of reducing the trade deficit—which he, in a flight of fantasy, holds responsible for “hundreds of thousands of deaths from fentanyl.” Trump’s tariffs, he suggests, are the antidote. Any reputable economist can attest that tariffs will not necessarily reduce the trade deficit, which is merely the other side of our massive capital surplus, the result of foreigners investing in American assets. What could reduce it is the economic slowdown the tariffs threaten to cause, something that a man who was once a free-market economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute understood perfectly well.

Indeed, in his 2021 book, The Drift: Stopping America’s Slide to Socialism, Hassett recounts how he battled Peter Navarro and other trade hawks over tariffs, a contest he lost. But he stayed on nonetheless, and when research indicated that the duties on washing machines created only a few jobs, and at an exorbitant cost, he insists that Trump “watched the evidence closely and adjusted his game accordingly.” Oh? The tariffs stayed in place till the end of his first term—and beyond, because Joe Biden extended them before letting them expire in 2023. And if you believe Trump cared about the evidence, I have a White House East Wing to sell you.

National Review‘s Jeffrey Blehar decries this decry-able reality: “Instead of draining the swamp, Trump starts renaming it after himself.”

Understand that the Kennedy Center was named by statute. It is patently illegal for it to be renamed by a “board of directors,” by presidential diktat, or by anything except legislation. But that doesn’t matter to Donald Trump! What does the law mean to our Dear Executive Leader? Trump has contempt for the very idea that he might restrained by either Congress or the law, as is abundantly clear by the way he has conducted his second term to date.

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… is from page 2 of the manuscript of Edward Tower’s, Thomas Willett’s, and John Gilbert’s paper “Mr. Trump’s Tariff War on the World” – a paper forthcoming in the Journal of International Commerce, Economics and Policy:

Apart from the economic damage that Mr. Trump’s unilateral actions are generating, they have already dealt a major blow to the fabric of international cooperation and the rule of law that had been painstakingly developed over the postwar period. His actions have violated the provisions of international institutions and agreements, and bilateral treaties, as well as U.S. domestic law. They have caused financial turmoil, strained relations with U.S. allies, and have seriously damaged the international reputation of the United States.

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Here’s a letter to Forbes.

Editor:

Ken Roberts writes that U.S. trade deficits represent America’s “ability, willingness and desire to buy more than it produces” (“Trump’s Failing Effort To Tackle Trade Deficit Puts Him In Good Company,” December 20). Not so.

Any entity that consistently buys (spends) more than it produces (earns) must necessarily suffer reduced net worth. But over the course of the now-half-century uninterrupted run of annual U.S. trade deficits, the inflation-adjusted net worth of the average American household has risen spectacularly: The average American household’s real net worth is today (second quarter of 2025), 240 percent higher than was the average American household’s real net worth in 1975, the last year that America did not run an annual trade deficit.*

This net increase in Americans’ real wealth simply could not, and would not, have occurred if trade deficits represent America’s “ability, willingness and desire to buy more than it produces.”

Several examples can be given of how the pernicious accounting artifact “trade deficits” creates false impressions of the sort that misled Mr. Roberts. Here’s one: All purchases by foreigners of American real estate are classified as foreign investments in the U.S. (rather than as foreign purchases of American exports). So suppose that Jack is a home builder in Jacksonville. Jack builds a new house in Jacksonville that he sells for $1M as a vacation home to Juliette, a Jamaican living in Kingston. Although in this case an American profitably produced something purchased for consumption by a non-American, this transaction is not recorded as an American export; instead it’s recorded as incoming foreign investment in the U.S., thus raising the U.S. trade deficit by $1M.

But suppose that Jack had built that very same house, at the very same cost, and then loaded it onto a boat and shipped it to Juliette in Jamaica, where she bought it for $1M. In this case the sale of the house is counted as an American export, and thus doesn’t cause a rise in the U.S. trade deficit.

The economics in the second case are essentially identical to those in the first, yet in the first case the U.S. trade deficit rises while in the second case it doesn’t. Clearly, the accounting artifact called “the trade deficit” must be used with far more understanding and care than most reporters (and pundits and politicians) bring to discussions of trade and trade policy.

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

* To get the latest figures, I updated the data from this March 2025 blog post.

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Here’s the final episode of Juliette Sellgren’s excellent podcast, The Great Antidote. In it, she talks with her mother – my intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy – about the podcast’s history and production.

Billy Binion praises the great Jimmy Lai.

Outgoing NYC mayor Eric Adams does this good deed for Gotham’s residents: He moved to delay incoming socialist mayor Mamdani’s ability to further restrict the availability of rental housing in that city.

Speaking of Metropolis, Jack Nicastro reports on some of the many other ways that that city’s government artificially raises costs. A slice:

Short-term rental sites such as Airbnb—which hosted 38,500 units in the city in 2023—could have provided tourists with an affordable substitute for these asylum seeker–occupied hotel rooms. However, in September 2023, the city passed Local Law 18, which forbids “renting [out] units for less than 30 days.” While the law failed to make housing more affordable, it succeeded in reducing rooms available to tourists: As of September, there were only “about 3,000 short-term rentals operating legally,” per The Wall Street Journal.

Scott Lincicome tweets:

New @GitaGopinath @BrentNeiman paper:
1) The actual US tariff rate is ~1/2 the announced rate bc of exceptions/delays
2) US companies/consumers are so far bearing ~94% of tariffs’ costs (w/ foreigners paying the rest)
3) Bc of 2, US tariffs are a ~1% tax on US manufacturing

And here’s the abstract of the paper, by Gita Gopinath and Brent Neiman, that inspired Scott’s tweet:

In 2025, statutory tariff rates on U.S. imports rose to levels not seen in over one hundred years. What are the implications for prices? On the one hand, shipping lags, exemptions, and enforcement gaps have kept the actual implemented rates at only half of the statutory rates, moderating the tariffs’ impact. On the other hand, tariff pass-through to U.S. import prices is almost 100 percent, so the United States is bearing a large share of the costs. We study the incidence of the 2018-2019 and 2025 U.S. tariffs and discuss implications for U.S. sourcing, domestic manufacturing costs, and the dollar.

David Henderson argues persuasively that “nothing fails like prohibition.”

Andrew McCarthy of National Review makes clear what shouldn’t – but, alas, what nevertheless today does – need to be made clear: “Trump has no authority to categorize fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction.” A slice:

Law school is a three-year grind. But 40 years later, while I couldn’t tell you a thing about, say, the “rule against perpetuities,” I did internalize the most valuable lesson, which came in the first three hours. It wasn’t a precedent or a statute, just a bit of folk wisdom you mightn’t think would need teaching. But it does, now more than ever.

It’s this: If you hang a sign that says “horse” on a cow, that doesn’t make it a horse.

Get it? If you do, then you’ll quickly grasp that a Latin American dope dealer is not an alien enemy combatant. The Defense Department, a creature of statute, does not become “the Department of War” by a presidential decree that sends Pete Hegseth to the front of the Pentagon with a plaque and a screwdriver. A foreign terrorist organization does not, by the abracadabra of “designation,” become an authorization for the use of military force — even if we generously assume that a drug gang is the same thing as a terrorist organization. Lindsey Halligan is not the United States attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. Riots are neither patriotic nor mostly peaceful. The congressionally established John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is not, by dint of wand-waving by a crony committee, the Trump . . . anything.

And fentanyl is not a weapon of mass destruction, even if the “horse” sign in this instance happens to be an executive order.

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… is from pages 132-133 of Norbert Michel’s superb data-filled 2025 book, Crushing Capitalism: How Populist Policies are Threatening the American Dream:

The truth is that industrial policy will lead to a government-planned economy, which – as history has shown repeatedly – is doomed to fail because it seeks to impose the will of a few on everyone else. It rejects the benefits of economic freedom and the free-enterprise system. Industrial policy does not merely redirect the market economy, it takes it over, even if in small steps. Government coercion to achieve the preferred economic outcomes of those in power has demonstrably and repeatedly failed to life the common people’s fortunes. Industrial policy is not a recipe for improving people’s lives; it is a way to impoverish them.

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Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal.

Editor:

Joseph Epstein describes Pres. Trump as a “borax man” – a mid-20^th-century term for, in Mr. Epstein words, “an especially slick salesman, aggressive and relentless” (“Donald Trump Is a Borax Man,” December 19).

There’s much to be said for this description. But a more current characterization of the president also comes to mind: He’s a peddler of “one weird trick” – namely, tariffs. This single policy will fuel a manufacturing boom, raise wages, strengthen families, attract loads of foreign investment, eliminate U.S. trade deficits, halt all unfair trade practices, flood our government’s coffers with unprecedented revenues, and secure our national defense. It’ll even stop the flow of fentanyl! In short, the one weird trick of tariffs will solve all of America’s problems and make us great, glorious, and the envy of the world. Easy-peasy!

In reality, of course, Mr. Trump’s one weird tariff trick is as credible as are the one weird tricks promising fast and easy weight-loss and men lasting longer in the bedroom.

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

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The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal reports how Lina Khan – a darling of the Biden administration and expressly admired by J.D. Vance – used her powers as an antitrust enforcer to kill an innovative American company (with the final lethal stroke perhaps being delivered by Trump’s tariffs). Two slices:

The maker of the Roomba vacuum cleaner, iRobot, filed for bankruptcy Sunday after 35 years in business. An obituary might describe it as a victim of government assassination. Overzealous antitrust cops egged on by Sen. Elizabeth Warren stuck in the knife. President Trump may have dealt the death blow with his tariffs.

We explained at the time how Ms. Warren and progressives in the Biden Administration thwarted Amazon’s attempt to buy iRobot in 2022. They claimed the $1.7 billion acquisition would unfairly augment Amazon’s lead in robotics and home devices. They also said the Roomba would enable Amazon to hoover up data and spy on Americans.

…..

In January 2024, Amazon and iRobot called off the deal amid opposition from Ms. Khan’s FTC and Europe’s antitrust regulators. The Biden FTC issued a statement saying it was “pleased.” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy quipped that regulators trusted Chinese firms “more than they do Amazon.” Less pleased are the U.S. workers who subsequently lost their jobs.

After the deal collapsed, iRobot said it would cut 31% of its workforce and send overseas “non-core engineering functions to lower-cost regions.” Even then, the Bedford, Mass.-based company continued to struggle against Chinese competitors. Amazon’s backing might have helped it innovate into new robotics fields that Chinese firms hadn’t penetrated.

Mr. Trump’s tariffs may have been the fatal punishment. The company had shifted production to Vietnam to minimize its trade exposure to China. It was smacked all the same by Mr. Trump’s 46% Liberation Day tariffs on Vietnam. Mr. Trump later cut the tariffs to 20% in a deal with Vietnam, but iRobot said the trade uncertainty made it hard to operate.

The ironic culmination to the story: iRobot will now be taken over by its Chinese contract manufacturer Picea, which also makes competing household devices. By scuttling the Amazon acquisition, antitrust regulators have strengthened Chinese robotic competitors and driven jobs overseas. Will Ms. Khan and Ms. Warren take a bow? Probably not.

Politicians worry about robots and artificial intelligence killing jobs. The far bigger threat is clumsy government interventions that make a mess out of markets.

Reacting to Trump’s prime-time national address on Wednesday, National Review‘s Noah Rothman is understandably mystified by Trump’s mindless attachment to tariffs. A slice:

Indeed, Trump attributed his economic record in its entirety to trade barriers — not that voters need much convincing there. “Much of this success has been accomplished by tariffs,” Trump said, “My favorite word, tariffs, which for many decades have been used successfully by other countries against us. But not anymore.”

That confidence was betrayed by the president’s gimmicky attempt to establish an emotional connection between the public and trade protectionism — a bond Trump himself maintains with religious conviction.

“Because of tariffs,” he said, “tonight I am also proud to announce that more than 1,450,000 service members will receive a special warrior dividend before Christmas” to the tune of precisely $1,776 in honor of next year’s semiquincentennial. “And the checks are already on the way,” Trump smiled, “nobody understood that one until about 30 minutes ago.”

This is the Republican equivalent of raiding the treasury for the benefit of teachers, for example — a deserving demographic, the plight of whom on an individual level tugs at your heartstrings. Maybe you object to the underlying economic policies that render that sop necessary as a political maneuver, but you can’t argue with the results — not unless you want to be demagogued into next week for your callous disregard for the selfless Americans who make this country work.

Trump is wise to enlist the public in his foremost economic project. He should have done that in April. It’s too late now. The effects of tariffs are today thoroughly known and equally resented. Trump has scaled his trade barriers back from their maximalist iteration, but quietly — never letting the public know that the policies they despise are in retreat.

Nerdy – but Brian Albrecht here offers an insightful and important explanation of why sound price theory instructs us to be wary of the headline “China Shock” numbers. Here’s his conclusion:

Markets connect people through prices. That’s what makes them so good at coordinating activity. It’s also what makes them so hard to study in pieces.

GMU Econ alum David Hebert explores the cronyist Jones Act.

Phil Gramm and John Early make clear that “something is profoundly wrong with the U.S. welfare system—a problem that runs far deeper and is more dangerous than the shocking fraud in Minnesota that has been making headlines.” A slice:

Across the past half-century, America has seen what in any other country would be considered a golden age, in which lower-income households have made incredible progress. Despite the end of our postwar economic dominance around 1975, the country’s real per-capita gross domestic product grew by 142% from 1974 to 2024. More than two-thirds of U.S. households have inflation-adjusted incomes today that would have put them in the top one-fifth of households in 1967. Sixty-two percent of the children who grew up in the poorest fifth of all households in the ’70s and ’80s worked their way up to a higher income bracket as adults, some all the way to the top quintile.

Yet even as our economy has experienced broad-based growth, real federal welfare spending has soared by 765%, more than twice as fast as total federal spending, and now costs $1.4 trillion annually. Were that money simply doled out evenly to the 19.8 million families the government defines as poor, each household would receive more than $70,000 a year.

The source of this dramatic mismatch is a fraud built into how various programs determine welfare eligibility: The government doesn’t count any refundable tax credits or benefits that aren’t paid in cash as income to the recipients.

Some claim this is appropriate because the beneficiaries aren’t free to spend noncash benefits on whatever they like. But that is a specious argument, because money is fungible. Receiving Medicaid, for example, frees up cash that would otherwise be spent on healthcare, allowing the recipients to spend the newly freed cash on other things. Noncash benefits aren’t in the end that different from income—except that salaries are taxed while government benefits aren’t. And individual welfare programs often don’t even count benefits paid in cash as income for the purpose of gauging eligibility.

David French takes an accurate shot at trying to explain why MAGA people mistakenly believe that, pre-Trump, America was in a death spiral. A slice:

Americans live longer, enjoy higher median wages, live in larger and more luxurious homes, and enjoy more civil liberties and greater access to justice than even the recent past. The starter homes of the 1950s — tiny places that often lacked central air and other modern utilities — would be considered poverty-level accommodations now.

Violent crime is much lower than in decades past, the divorce rate has decreased from its highs in the early 1980s, and the abortion rate (despite recent increases) is far below its early 1980s peaks.

But even as I type these words, I realize their inadequacy. You cannot fact-check a person out of a feeling, and without question, the people I talked to felt — deep in their bones — that something had gone fundamentally wrong in the United States of America and in their lives. And a dry recitation of contrary facts not only did nothing to assuage this feeling of fear and loss; it was positively enraging — cringe, in a word.

To use an example wielded against me time and again, “How can you possibly say that America is better than it’s been when drag queens are reading to kids in public libraries?”

To that I say, as my friend Kevin Williamson put it in a recent piece addressing the new right’s nostalgia, “More drag queens, sure, but fewer slaves — the moral trajectory of Western civilization is not entirely in the direction of failure, you know.”

One disadvantage of your teenage and early adult years is that you tend to experience adversity without perspective. It’s hard to place your own experience in a larger context when you haven’t yet experienced that context.

And that’s exactly where we — the older generations — have failed. When I see young people radicalizing on the left and right, including through their greater tolerance for political violence, I see the fruit of our own intolerance and polarization.

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy, is appalled by the U.S. government’s penchant for taxing the poor in order to give to the rich. A slice:

American heads of households younger than 35 now have a median net worth of about $39,000 and an average net worth of more than $183,000. Those over 75 have a median net worth of roughly $335,000 and an average net worth exceeding $1.6 million. As a group, today’s seniors are the wealthiest we’ve ever had.

Many own their homes outright in markets younger families cannot afford to enter. Seniors enjoy higher rates of stock ownership and have benefited enormously from decades of rising asset values. Meanwhile, younger Americans face soaring housing costs, student loan debt, delayed family formation, and a labor market shaped by slower growth and higher federal indebtedness.

Some of this reflects natural wealth accumulation over time, and there is nothing wrong with that. But why does the modern welfare state magnify the disparity? As [Russ] Green explains, “retired millionaires have become the greatest recipients of government aid,” as Social Security can redistribute up to $60,000 a year to an individual and $117,000 to a household. “Meanwhile,” Green notes, “Medicare programs are paying for golf balls, greens fees, social club memberships, horseback riding lessons, and pet food.”

Younger Americans are also on the hook for about $73 trillion in unfunded obligations projected over the next 75 years, making now the time to act. Some defenders of the status quo argue that higher taxes will fix the problem, but it would again fall on younger earners to continue redistributing benefits to the same affluent seniors, worsening the generational imbalance. The problem is not a lack of revenue; it’s a benefit structure that ignores modern demographics, modern wealth patterns, and basic fairness. Paying less to seniors who don’t need the money is the only fair reform to this dilemma.

Every time someone points these facts out, defenders respond reflexively: “But seniors paid in. They earned it.” No, not all of it. Not in any meaningful, actuarial sense.

Matt Yglesias urges his fellow Americans on the political left to quit their unwarranted hostility to oil and gas. A slice:

This won’t be popular with everyone on the left. But President Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico, Prime Minister Mark Carney in Canada and the labor parties of Norway and Australia have done it. It’s not just about votes; it’s also a realistic path toward a cleaner environment.

Start with the politics. It wasn’t that long ago — in 2012, for Barack Obama’s re-election — that the Democratic Party’s national platform argued that “we can move towards a sustainable energy-independent future if we harness all of America’s great natural resources.”

Since then, the party has pivoted toward hostility to oil and gas. In a 2020 debate with Mr. Trump, Joe Biden vowed to focus on a green economy and “transition from the oil industry,” and sought to halt new oil and gas leasing early in his term (though ultimately the industry, after defeating the leasing pause in court, thrived). The animus is often invisible to participants in factional arguments because so many of them are based in coastal metropolises that lack major natural resource industries. But from the standpoint of formerly blue or purple states like Pennsylvania and Ohio — or a place like Texas, where Democrats were once optimistic that a growing Hispanic population would deliver them a vast trove of voters — the change is notable.

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… is from page 172 of the 1996 Liberty Fund collection of Frank Meyer’s essays, In Defense of Freedom (William C. Dennis, ed.); specifically, it’s from Meyer’s June 6th, 1956, National Review article titled “Conservatives in Pursuit of Truth”:

Truth withers when freedom dies, however righteous the authority that kills it; and free individualism uninformed by moral value rots at its core and soon surrenders to tyranny.