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Arnold Kling rants justly. Two slices:

Who gave you the right to tell someone that they cannot put up a data center?

I thought that this country was founded with a belief in property rights. That means an absolute right to decide what to build on your property, as long as it does not harm anyone else.

The alleged harm of data centers is that they use water and electricity. If you cannot use water and electricity without losing your property rights, then voters can steal your property at a whim. That is where we are.

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Because gas prices are higher than they were before the Iran war. So gas prices are now the entire economy as far as people are concerned. Well, they are visible.

In the 1970s, to try to fight the energy shock, many states passed laws mandating that gas stations prominently display their prices. This was supposed to make competition more effective at holding down the price. Fifty years later, it means that everybody can see the price of gas.

What about the price of government subsidies for health insurance, the price of government subsidies for education, or other government spending?

Imagine if every day you drove past signs showing what the government pays for subsidies to Obamacare, Medicaid, and Medicare. That is where the cost increases really bite.

Imagine if every day you drove past signs showing the cost per student in college, and forcing colleges to compete openly rather than use secret discounts. Imagine you drove past signs showing the cost of K-12 education in public schools, and imagine forcing public schools to compete on equal terms with private schools.

Imagine if every day you drove past signs showing how much government is spending that day. Imagine every day the sign changed to highlight a different government program, including all of the subsidies to interest groups and partisan groups.

From a libertarian perspective, I see the public being kept woefully ignorant.

Scott Lincicome explains that “there’s nothing special about factory jobs.” A slice:

A September study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland compares manufacturing wages with those of similar workers (same age, education, etc.) in other industries. It finds that the premium US manufacturers paid in the 1980s had turned negative by the early 1990s and, save a blip around 2015, has stayed there. Workers with a high-school diploma or less have faced an even bigger penalty since the late 1980s, excluding only an aberrational pandemic surge. Only college-educated factory workers consistently come out ahead versus their non-manufacturing peers.

The study’s findings are consistent with previous research showing that the long-standing “manufacturing wage premium” has essentially disappeared. For well over a decade, in fact, average hourly earnings for blue-collar (aka “production and nonsupervisory”) workers in manufacturing were significantly less than the same workers in the services sector.

The Cleveland Fed report also deflates the assumption that factory work is much the same today as it was decades ago, when a sole breadwinner with a high-school diploma could count on lifetime job security to support his family and retire comfortably. That may have been true in the early 1980s, when the manufacturing wage premium was positive and almost 80% of industrial workers lacked any college education. By June 2025, however, the US manufacturing workforce had become far more educated: Employees with at least some college outnumbered those without it by a 60.6% to 39.4% margin, and the share of workers with a college degree or higher rose from 10% to roughly 35%.

Here are David Henderson’s thoughts on the 2026 U.S. midterm elections.

Wall Street Journal columnist Matthew Continetti fears that “conservatives who believe in the Constitution, limited government, the rule of law and the Declaration of Independence’s principles of liberty and equality confront a dire prospect: Nov. 3 may foreshadow a period of progressive governance in both parties that would leave Americans poorer, weaker and less free.”

Kate Andrews isn’t buying J.D. Vance’s lame excuse that the GOP’s electoral shellacking was due exclusively to the war in Iran. A slice:

The administration has repeatedly favored indulging conjecture over evidence and flirted with the darker fringes of the American right. Unlike Trump, though, Vance often forgets to wink and nod when he ventures beyond the pale — a device the president has used to great effect, forcing even his fiercest critics to concede that he has a sense of humor. The vice president simply seems sincere when embracing the ugliest elements of MAGA ideology. That includes at times hesitating to condemn far-right streamers, defending the president against accusations that he has used the government to get richer, and referring to Renée Good — the 37-year-old woman that ICE agents killed in January — as “part of a broader left-wing network” targeting officers. Whatever his strategy, Ohio voters revealed it to be fruitless. Fifty-six percent told CBS’s exit poll that ICE had gone too far. Ninety percent said corruption played a considerable factor in their vote for Congress.

Before Tuesday, sensitivity to aggressive and abnormal politicking had been shrugged off as the product of the “blue-pill establishment.” Critics were told they didn’t know “what time it is.” Ohio said otherwise. It showed that Americans are still hungry for decency and normality in their politics. Ramaswamy eventually pulled his ad against Acton. Before its release, her lead was within the margin of error. In the end, she won by eight points. CBS’s exit poll showed that Vance and Ramaswamy each had a 47 percent “strongly unfavorable” rating in Ohio compared with 37 percent for Acton.

Ted Nordhaus remembers his late uncle, the Nobel-laureate economist William Nordhaus. (HT Tyler Cowen)

GMU Econ alum Paul Mueller describes “the French revolt against fiscal reality.” A slice:

There are good reasons to be optimistic and pessimistic about China’s economy. On the plus side, China’s people have strong families, high literacy, and superior savings rates. On the downside, the government is autocratic, the economy is based on state-sponsored investment which will not sustain, entrepreneurship is weak, IP theft is severe, and nobody wants to immigrate there.

Tim Kane argues that the Chinese economy will not grow larger than the U.S. economy. A slice:

There are good reasons to be optimistic and pessimistic about China’s economy. On the plus side, China’s people have strong families, high literacy, and superior savings rates. On the downside, the government is autocratic, the economy is based on state-sponsored investment which will not sustain, entrepreneurship is weak, IP theft is severe, and nobody wants to immigrate there.

Richard Ebeling briefs us on Bastiat.

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… is from pages 26-27 of GMU Econ alums Scott Burns’s and Caleb Fuller’s forthcoming (in February 2027) book, Trade Wars: Why Freedom Trumps Tariffs:

When Americans buy clothing from Vietnam, the dollars we send overseas do not evaporate. Foreigners who receive dollars use them to buy American goods and services, to invest in American businesses and real estate, or to purchase American financial assets such as Treasury bonds. Every dollar that leaves the country to pay for imports creates a corresponding inflow of foreign demand for American exports, American assets, or American investment opportunities.

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Here’s a letter to the Washington Sun.

Editor:

You report that White House trade shaman Peter Navarro insists that tariffs played, in his words, “no role in the inflation and affordability issue” (“Republicans’ Midterm Wipeout Reignites the War Over Tariffs,” November 6).

This statement only further confirms the appalling economic ignorance of Trump’s trade advisers.

Just last month, Navarro boasted that “the Trump tariffs are a protective wall.” Indeed they are – for privileged industries. But this wall dispenses its protection only by raising the prices of those industries’ outputs. If tariffs don’t raise these prices, there is no wall to protect domestic producers from foreign competition.

Navarro might respond – as do some economically misguided pundits – by asserting that, once domestic producers fully scale up behind this protective wall, the prices of their outputs will fall back to where these prices were before the tariffs. This outcome is imaginable, but only barely – for if these producers can achieve these low prices by scaling up, why didn’t they scale up before the tariffs?

But even if we grant this barely imaginable outcome, it doesn’t salvage Navarro’s assertion that Trump’s tariffs did not raise Americans’ cost of living. The reason is that protected American producers increase their outputs only by drawing workers, resources, and capital away from other American producers, reducing the resources available to these other producers and thereby lowering their outputs and raising their prices.

Navarro’s denial of the inescapable reality that tariffs raise prices is an inadvertent admission that the protectionism he peddles – and that the Trump administration shoves down Americans’ throats – is economic snake oil. Fortunately, most Americans, having now choked on this nasty concoction, are aware of this fact.

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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David Henderson exposes some of billionaire Nick Hanauer’s economic cluelessness. A slice:

Second, he tells us that with his preferred Market Humanism, markets are servants, not masters. Well, yes. But he says that as if it’s new. It’s not. In 1776, Adam Smith famously wrote that we get our dinner from the butcher, the brewer, and the baker, not out of their benevolence but out of their self-interest. In short, they are our servants.

Hanauer’s error of omission is that he never gets around to telling us the pro-market ways to improve the situation. He praises anti-market regulations such as increases in Seattle’s minimum wage to $21.30 but doesn’t mention that the increase cost jobs. He settles instead for assuring us that “the restaurant industry didn’t collapse.” He could have mentioned reducing the requirement for people get government permission before entering one of over 800 occupations. He could have proposed massively deregulating housing construction, so that more people could afford to buy or rent nice houses. But he didn’t.

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy, informs newly elected U.S. senators that they cannot avoid dealing – in one way or another – with the looming fiscal reckoning of Social Security. A slice:

The headline item from Tuesday’s elections is that Democrats wiped out Republicans in the House and the Senate. Congratulations. But do our newly minted senators, with their terms ending in January 2033, realize that they will be the cohort of legislators who face the exhaustion of Social Security’s retirement trust fund in 2032?

Each official will choose between letting a 22% automatic cut to benefits go through, finally making the program’s math work by reforming its outdated design, or letting Washington borrow trillions more to prevent any cuts. Few, if any, of the candidates said a substantive word about it while campaigning.

In fact, fiscal sustainability was remarkably absent all election season. During the 2010s, powerful politicians openly championed “austerity.” As late as 2018, according to AdImpact data reported by The Wall Street Journal, 140 political ads mentioned the debt or budget deficit. During this cycle, only 30 did, putting the subject 52nd among campaign topics.

That’s beyond crazy. It has been widely reported that in the fiscal year that just ended, government debt held by the public reached 100% of GDP, a level last seen following World War II. The deficit is nearly $2 trillion, or 6.2% of GDP. Interest payments have more than doubled in only four years, surpassing the United States’ bill for military spending.

And because the Treasury kept the debt’s average maturity short, high interest rates are hitting the budget very quickly. About one-third of the marketable debt — more than $10 trillion — must be refinanced in the next 12 months. This debt must be rolled over at the new rate, so interest payments will continue to explode.

Here’s the Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board on yesterday’s huge market sell-off. A slice:

Investors this week also picked up on the hostility to data-center construction evident throughout the midterm election campaign. Thursday’s big losers included chip manufacturers, cloud companies, and anyone else involved in building data centers. The tech-heavy Nasdaq fell 5.52% and shed some $2.5 trillion in market value.

On Wednesday investors bid up stocks on seeming hope that political gridlock in Washington might be good for the economy. On Thursday they noticed Democratic control of so many state governments, and towering majorities in Congress, might not be great for business, especially tech. Investors have to figure out where to land after such a seismic election with uncertain policy consequences.

Notably, Thursday’s selloff spread beyond tech, marking the first time in months that every sector represented in the S&P 500 index declined. And steeply so, this time. Consumer stocks that previously became a refuge for investors taking tech-stock profits also fell.

This could mark merely another painful step in the repricing of financial risks. Or it could signal a new degree of liquidity stress in the market as investors sell to take profits and raise cash to hedge against what they see as new political and economic risks.

Logan Tantibanchachai explains that markets build both wealth and trust.

Arnold Kling reflects on the recent trouncing of the GOP.

Also reflecting on the recent trouncing of the GOP is AEI economist Michael Strain. Two slices:

As Republicans seek to learn lessons for their post-Donald Trump future, it is important for both the party and the conservative movement to recognise that the distinctly Trumpian elements of the president’s agenda have failed to achieve their objectives and to advance economic prosperity. Of the policies that have been motivated by populism and economic nationalism — marking a sharp departure from the traditional GOP consensus — the most prominent has been the trade war. Its two main goals were to increase manufacturing employment and reduce the trade deficit. Each of these goals is wrong-headed, and neither has been met.

…..

Trump’s push for a sharp reduction in immigrant inflows to the US during his current term has been another signature nationalist-populist policy. The goal was presumably to boost the economic outcomes of native-born Americans. But, according to my calculations, employment rates for the native-born population have fallen since January 2025, while rates for the foreign-born have increased. Comparing September 2026 to September 2025 shows a similar trend, as does comparing economic outcomes among native and foreign-born Americans aged 25 to 54 over that period. Nor have native-born workers seen their earnings grow faster than immigrants during Trump’s current term.

At $2tn, the budget deficit for 2026 is the largest outside a war or recession in US history. While the GOP’s fiscal record leaves much to be desired, Trump’s lack of concern about fiscal responsibility is a departure from the norm. Past Republican administrations have pursued — with and without success — cuts to social security and Medicare spending, the main drivers of projected structural deficits.

These failures have hurt the GOP’s political fortunes. In an economy with high prices and above-target inflation, Trump’s trade war was a political liability. Exit polls showed that nearly two-thirds of midterm voters think Trump’s tariffs have hurt the economy.

And although Trump’s success at securing the southern border is popular, his deportation and enforcement efforts have been more divisive. Meanwhile, his fiscal policy has put upward pressure on politically salient interest rates, including on home mortgage loans.

Trump’s approach has shown a disregard for the rule of law and the principle of limited government. His willingness to weaponise the criminal justice system in order to bend the Federal Reserve to his will eroded a foundation of prosperity and made the US look like a banana republic. Taking equity stakes in private companies, notably Intel, is another threat.

Phil Magness isn’t buying J.D. Vance’s self-serving explanation for the GOP’s enormous midterm electoral loss. A slice:

The scale of the defeat is hard to overstate. Democrats took both chambers of Congress, flipping Senate seats in places like Iowa, Kansas, Ohio, and Texas. The exit polls overwhelmingly confirm why. In the NBC News exit poll, 66 percent of voters said Trump’s tariff policies hurt the national economy, and 64 percent said they hurt the economy in their own area. Just 21 percent said tariffs helped. The economy was the top issue for 39 percent of voters—ahead of the state of democracy at 33 percent, immigration at 14 percent, and far ahead of foreign policy issues, Iran included, at just 4 percent. In another set of questions, 49 percent of the electorate ranked the cost of living concerns as a “crucial” factor in determining their vote. This compares to 36 percent for immigration enforcement, 34 percent for the Iran war, and 23 percent for data centers. The only other issue that matched it was a parallel concern about corruption, which 55 percent of voters flagged as crucial.

These figures should not come as a surprise to anyone. We’ve had almost two years of warning in the polling data. Tariffs have never been popular with the public, save for a tiny hardcore MAGA base. Among the remainder of the electorate, opposition to trade protectionism is strong and growing. The tariff issue has steadily eroded Trump’s economic performance rating since he launched a trade war against the rest of the globe on “Liberation Day” in April 2025. The Economist/YouGov tracker tells the story. In Trump’s first term from 2017 to 2021, his economic ratings remained generally high. In the second, his economic approval began at the same level as his first term, then plummeted as the tariffs rolled out—and it never recovered. It sank to a net  minus-36 by October 2026. The unpopular war in Iran and its accompanying strains on gasoline prices accelerated the decline, certainly, but the data show it was already well underway because of the tariffs.

Quite simply, the White House miscalculated on the issue. And it miscalculated badly.

Reem Ibrahim writes that the trouncing of the GOP in the U.S. should be a warning to the right in the U.K.

The Editorial Board of the Washington Post decries the growing authoritarianism imposed by the thugs in Beijing on the people of Hong Kong. A slice:

Pro-democracy activist Joshua Wong, who recently spent his 30th birthday behind bars, was sentenced on Thursday to another 10 years in a Hong Kong prison under China’s national security law. First arrested for protesting at age 17, Wong was accused in the current case of “collusion” with “foreign forces” because his advocacy prompted a government crackdown that helped trigger U.S. sanctions.

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… is from page 344 of Edward Younkins’s 2008 book, Champions of a Free Society: Ideas of Capitalism’s Philosophers and Economists:

There is a critical distinction between the legitimacy of a right and the morality of exercising that right. The government should only be concerned with questions such as the domain of rights, the proper role of violence, and the definitions of aggression and criminality. The government should not be concerned with all personal moral principles. There is a huge difference between establishing the permissibility of an action and the goodness or morality of it. The state should be concerned with the rights of men and not with the oughts of men.

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Wall Street Journal columnist Matthew Hennessey is a good man analyzing the results of the 2026 U.S. midterm elections. A slice:

After taking a coast-to-coast pulping like the Republican Party took last night, any team led by a competent coaching staff would take stock. Losing is a learning opportunity. Getting publicly and completely rebuked by the American people in hundreds of small elections is the Harvard Ph.D. of losing.

The GOP should get a mirror, hold it up and say: “Look at you now. You got whipped. And by a bunch of nerds.” That is unlikely to happen, which is a testament to how deformed the institution has become under the totalizing leadership of President Trump—although “leadership” surely isn’t the right word for what he’s done.

Leadership implies thoughtfulness, strategic vision, stewardship and paternal care. Mr. Trump possesses none of those qualities in any measure. He has never demonstrated any interest in advancing or preserving the Republican Party’s traditional commitments to free markets, free trade, individual responsibility, fiscal thrift or the sanctity of life. He is sometimes OK on national security. Give him that.

Across his decade as the nominal leader of the GOP, Mr. Trump has often been as hostile to its members and representatives as he has been to the members and representatives of the other party. Now, at long last, the reckoning. Live by the ego maniac, die by the ego maniac.

With no real leader, no real change is possible. When the GOP looks in the mirror it should see a starving, malnourished loser with two black eyes and a bandage around its head. If it does a slow turn it should see a sign that says, “Kick me.” Looking lower it should see another sign that says, “Go ahead and kick me again. Nobody’s going to stop you, because nobody cares. I deserve this.”

The only course of treatment is the application of time, in the fullness of which the American people will grow tired of the arrogance and incompetence of the Democratic Party. It, too, will get a pulping one day, and the Republicans will get another turn behind the wheel. We can only hope it has learned a thing or two by then.

Also insightfully reflecting on the outcome of the 2026 midterm elections is Yuval Levin. A slice:

But these have been overwhelmed by the broader tenor of this administration, which has utterly lacked any public-spirited vision or direction and has allowed itself to be defined by Trump’s own vapid impulsivity and thuggish narcissism, and to descend into shameless personal corruption. The president’s uses of power have tended to involve starting risky and complicated ventures that he has had neither the patience nor the strategy to finish and then moving on from them, as if it hardly matters how they might end up, and any bad news that results can just be overwhelmed by the next big thing. This has often been his path through life, of course, but the stakes of failure are awfully high when what’s at issue is a war or trade policy rather than an ill-conceived casino project. And at this point, the president just seems to have grown tired of his job, seeking escape from its burdens in ridiculous vanity projects while real problems (often of his own creation) fester.

In fact, sheer exhaustion now defines the public’s responses to Trump, too. Many Americans who had a lot of tolerance for him and once found his antics entertaining are tired of it all. His silly nicknames and his petty whining haven’t gotten any dumber — they were always this dumb. But many people who thought they were funny have grown sick of them, and Trump’s sheer unseriousness now strikes some of his former supporters as inadequate to the office and the moment.

If American voters handed a mandate to Democrats in the 2026 midterm elections, George Will says it’s this: “Stop the rampant egotism, corruption, recklessness and incompetence.” Three slices:

How much did the masked marauders of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement contribute to making one of Trump’s two most salient issues in 2024, immigration, into a negative for him? How much did his tariffs nullify another winning issue of 2024, inflation?

The importance of money in politics is more asserted and deplored than measured. In Texas, Elon Musk, the most overrated dabbler in U.S. politics, perhaps did something useful with his estimated $224 million money geyser for Republicans. He unintentionally demonstrated that there is a point at which the utility of political dollars not only declines steeply, but actually becomes negative. Senator-elect James Talarico prospered politically while saying, “Texas is not for sale.”

…..

Our parties are primordial. So, the Republicans’ recovery is as predictable as what will cause it — excesses by Democrats. They will misread the largely negative nature of the voters’ mandate to them, which is: Stop the national embarrassments, the rampant egotism, corruption, recklessness and incompetence.

Congressional Democrats will rightly try to investigate, publicize and discourage all of this. Trump might inadvertently give Congress a spine transplant by spurning its subpoenas. By a political version of Newton’s third law of motion (for every force or action in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction), his obduracy might prompt, on Capitol Hill and in the public, an overdue reaction against presidentialism — the overbearing primacy of the chief executive — that has poisoned politics for decades.

…..

Euphoria about the smashing to smithereens of his degraded party — a necessary act of civic hygiene — should be tempered by some facts: The president has learned how much latitude a president has if he acts fast and breaks things because he has no constitutional conscience — no allegiance to the spirit of the document. He has learned this from executive branch enablers masquerading as conservatives.

And the most important fact we have learned this autumn is never mind his ballroom and his gigantic arch-cum-sniper’s-nest. The president’s rhetorical streams of semiconsciousness have made something patent: He is not well. There might be dark, dangerous days ahead.

About the results of the 2026 midterms, Nick Gillespie sensibly remarks that “there’s no reason to think the state will shrink, which is really bad news.”

The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board rejects – quite correctly – J.D. Vance’s self-serving yet absurd assertion that the only reason the GOP got clobbered in the 2026 midterm elections is the war in Iran. Two slices:

“The real reason we lost is obvious,” Mr. Vance wrote. “The reason we lost is the war.” Corruption? He didn’t mention it, though 90% in the national exit poll rated it of crucial or major importance to their vote.

He also had nothing to say about tariffs, even as cost of living placed second at 89%. On immigration, which scored even with the Iran war (73% vs. 74%), and which the Trump team managed to turn into a political weakness with its harsh enforcement, Mr. Vance set up a straw man by warning against “establishment” calls for “amnesty” that no Republican is calling for.

The selective blame is no accident. While the Vice President has become a true believer on tariffs and hard-line immigration restriction, unidentified leakers to the press throughout the Iran war have suggested he opposed it. When Mr. Vance now writes, “To the people who are pissed off and want to say, ‘I told you so’: you’re right, you did tell us so,” he’s thinking of himself.

Citing unlisted data from an unnamed friend, Mr. Vance wrote that the Republican voters who strayed claim they could be won back if the GOP would “1) End the war.” He also praised the “political advice” that counseled a “diplomatic resolution to the conflict”—his own position, which dragged out the war after its initial six weeks with a worthless April cease-fire and June deal that Iran immediately violated.

It could be honorable to speak up internally about the need to end a war. But to post it on social media is to tell the Iranians they now have the upper hand in nuclear and Strait of Hormuz negotiations.

…..

The war is unpopular: 63% in the exit poll say attacking was the wrong decision and 37% the right decision. But that’s better than tariffs, which 66% say hurt the economy and only 21% say helped. Fifty-eight percent also say Trump immigration enforcement went too far.

Nothing on Mr. Vance’s list of ways to win back Trump 2024 voters gives evidence of any self-reflection, least of all “4) Change our relationship to Israel.” That’s the message of the Jews-on-the-mind podcast ecosystem promoted by Mr. Vance and led by his friend and ally Tucker Carlson. The exit poll shows only 4% of voters rank foreign-policy issues first.

“How Did Republicans Lose This Badly? Voters Turned Against Trump’s Tariffs” – so reads the headline of a new report by Eric Boehm.

The Editorial Board of the Washington Post puts the matter this way: “Trump taxed imports. Voters sent Republicans the bill.” A slice:

The Iran war certainly contributed to Republicans’ defeat. The conflict has driven up energy prices, and more than one-third of voters in the Post-sponsored NORC survey listed the war as one of the country’s three biggest issues. More than 6 in 10 of them voted Democratic.

But the economy ranked as a substantially larger worry. According to a separate Fox News Voter Poll, which had a sample of about 80,000 people, 66 percent of midterm voters said Trump’s tariffs have hurt the national economy and 64 percent said tariffs have hurt the economy in their area. Eighty-nine percent said the cost of living was a crucial or major factor in their congressional vote, and 63 percent blamed unusually high prices more on Trump’s policies than on factors outside his control.

Republican candidates saw the danger coming. Five battleground Senate nominees avoided mentioning tariffs at the party’s September convention in Dallas. So did Vance. Trump, on the other hand, boasted that tariffs were “making us much richer than we ever thought.”

As Election Day approached, the administration’s own actions suggested otherwise. Trump suspended tariffs on certain ground beef imports to lower grocery prices. After Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) appealed to administration officials, the White House exempted nine categories of Canadian products important to agriculture in her state. Collins lost anyway.

As red states in the Midwest such as Kansas and Iowa turned into competitive battlegrounds, farmers received some protection from protectionism. Tariffs raised equipment costs while trade wars reduced foreign markets for American crops. Instead of removing those costly distortions, the administration compensated farmers. A promised $8 billion bailout shortly before the election brought projected direct federal payments to farmers this fiscal year to about $55 billion.

GMU Econ alum Paul Mueller ponders, with public-choice analysis, the midterm results.

Kevin Madden tweets: (HT Scott Lincicome)

“This election was a lesson in political gravity. When voters’ top concerns are inflation and affordability, and you answer those concerns with tariffs, a trade war, and a war with Iran that exacerbates those worries, you lose elections.”

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… is from page 74 of Stephanie Slade’s superb new (2026) book, Fusionism: Liberty, Virtue, and the Future of the American Right [original emphasis]:

[Frank] Meyer’s position was not, of course, that individuals do not need help pursuing moral excellence. But he was convinced that attempts to use state force to make people virtuous were likely, in reality, to achieve the opposite, all while inviting tyranny by concentrating too much power in a single institution.

DBx: Frank Meyer (1909-1972) was, and remains, correct. He is pictured here.

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I’m happy that American voters yesterday expressed, in such a fulsome way, their disapproval of the circus act that is the Trump GOP. But I am not happy that the circus act that is today’s Democratic party has won. Just as Trump mistakenly interpreted Americans’ votes against Kamala Harris as votes for him and his economic-nationalist (and otherwise unprincipled) ‘agenda,’ the Democrats will interpret Americans’ votes against Trump and his lackeys as votes for their economically illiterate ideas and policies.

The GOP must be purged of the MAGA curse. Hopefully, the 2026 midterm slaughter of that party will prove to be the bitter medicine that achieves this exorcism. But no friend of liberty – no economically literate person – no one who understands and is committed to the liberal tradition that gave birth to the American nation – is pleased that the crop of illiberal (and indeed, in some cases openly anti-semitic) economic imbeciles who yesterday were voted into office will soon exercise power.

Disgust with Trump is understandable; I share it. But this disgust does not preclude disgust for what the Democrats will soon try to inflict upon us.

Here’s what I just wrote at my Facebook page:

Far from saving Americans from socialism and the whackadoodle, economically illiterate left, Trump has fueled their ascent to power – an ascent so quick and full that it was unimaginable just two years ago. Trump achieved this remarkable, horrible outcome not by doggedly promoting free markets and constitutionally limited government but, instead, in part by revealing repeatedly to the American people that he has no use for such principles – or, indeed, for any principles at all.

The other part of Trump’s contribution to America’s jolt toward collectivists-in-power is his obvious immaturity. No ordinary American would welcome such a clown as a neighbor. Every ordinary American cursed to have such an infantile bully for a neighbor would treat that neighbor as a curse, someone to avoid and to hope will soon move to another town – hopefully one far away.

So, yes, in 2024 Trump ‘had the libs.’ But he, in his juvenile brain, didn’t ‘have the libs’ in order to return America to a principled policy of limited government and free markets. He ‘had the libs’ as a sort of reality-show host selfishly interested only in getting a rise out of people with his ridiculous antics and schoolyard ‘humor.’

If America fifty years from now is as economically moribund as is today’s Europe – not an unthinkable prospect – with property rights held in contempt and bureaucrats intruding into every aspect of Americans’ lives and the Constitution a dead letter, a chief spark for this terrible fate will have been Trump. Fortunately for me, I’ll not be around to witness this calamity.

But, hey, despite the collectivism enabled by Trump – and in no small part practiced by him – Americans in 2076 will have a gargantuan arch at which to gaze. So there’s that.

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… is from page 137 of Steven Landsburg’s 2007 book, More Sex Is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics [original emphasis]:

When [gasoline] prices spike sharply upward, economic illiterates everywhere are quick to see evidence of collusion or monopoly power among oil companies. In fact, big price spikes are evidence of exactly the opposite. Colluders and monopolists don’t have to wait for changes in supply and demand to hike their prices; they squeeze us to the limit all year round. Sure, changes in demand and supply give them a little more leeway, so prices still fluctuate – but only a relatively small amount.

A monopolist always has price-sensitive customers – because if they’re not price-sensitive, he’ll keep raising his prices until they are. Therefore, even when market conditions change, a monopolist can rarely afford to raise prices very much. Big price fluctuations are evidence of competition.

DBx: Yes. And of course, the same economic reality holds for the prices of other goods and services, including those that spike in the aftermath of natural disasters and wars.