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… is from page 40 the late Richard Posner’s 1981 book, The Economics of Justice:

Bentham never studied systematically any social or legal institution, English or foreign, contemporary or historical. He never tried to master the working principles of the institutions he sought to reform. Instead he deduced optimal institutions from the greatest-happiness principle and then tried to work out the details of their implementation. This is a mode of social research that breeds utopianism and its bitter cousin radicalism. Lacking an understanding of the real world to which his reforms must be fitted, the utopian reformer grows increasingly impatient at society’s failure to implement his ideas and proposes increasingly radical measures to force a refractory world into his imagined mold.

DBx: Yes. And such hubris isn’t monopolized by individuals conventionally classified as being on the political left. ‘Progressives,’ of course, are indeed slathered in this hubris – consider, for example, the dirigiste itch to seize tax the wealth of American billionaires. But such hubris is on the rise also on the political right. An example is Oren Cass’s belief that government (following Cass’s guidance, of course) can and should restructure the U.S. economy in order to make it appear and operate as Oren Cass has somehow divined it ‘should’ appear and operate.

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A monster captures Townville and, possessing a cruel sense of humor, conducts a plebiscite in which the citizens of Townville can ‘choose’ – by majority rule – how they will all be killed: Burned alive at the stake or garroted. (“Remaining alive and unmolested” isn’t an option.) Not everyone votes, but many people do. When the ballots are all counted, garroting has 54.3% of the votes.

Naive enthusiasts for democracy proclaim that the people of Townville demand to be garroted!

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Richard Posner – a giant in the field of law and economics – has died at the age of 87. Ilya Somin of GMU’s Scalia School of Law remembers him.

Also remembering Richard Posner is Dan McLaughlin. A slice:

Second was Posner’s fantastic capacity for work and talent for writing. He carried a workload much larger than the typical federal appellate judge, getting himself more writing credits as a result, while simultaneously writing more than 50 books and producing a nearly endless stream of scholarly articles, magazine articles, blog posts, and just about every other form of communication known to man. If he had lived longer, he might have joined TikTok. One of my favorite Posner rants was his 2003 book review of a biography of Justice William O. Douglas, whom he described unsparingly as:

one of the most unwholesome figures in modern American political history, a field with many contenders . . . a liar to rival Baron Munchausen. . . . Apart from being a flagrant liar, Douglas was a compulsive womanizer, a heavy drinker, a terrible husband to each of his four wives, a terrible father to his two children, and a bored, distracted, uncollegial, irresponsible, and at times unethical Supreme Court justice who regularly left the Court for his summer vacation weeks before the term ended. Rude, ice-cold, hot-tempered, ungrateful, foul-mouthed, self-absorbed, and devoured by ambition, he was also financially reckless — at once a big spender, a tightwad, and a sponge — who, while he was serving as a justice, received a substantial salary from a foundation established and controlled by a shady Las Vegas businessman.

The third, unfortunately, was Posner’s own conviction that he knew best. He was a genuinely great common-law judge, capable not only of producing concise, clear rules of law that made sense of the general drift of prior law even in areas with vast and sometimes apparently contradictory precedents, but also of situating them within a framework that encouraged commerce and human liberty. But the longer he sat on the bench, the more Posner grew unduly dismissive of a judge’s most fundamental duty in constitutional and statutory cases to follow the written law enacted by the people’s representatives. His mostly one-sided broadsides against his former Chicago colleague Antonin Scalia reflected poorly on Posner, who often wrote of Scalia in the same tone that Salieri used toward Mozart in Amadeus. Posner had gifts to equal those of Scalia, save for one: Scalia’s humility in the face of legitimate democratic authority and its traditions. There is more to law, as Scalia understood, than homo economicus.

Here’s one of my favorite observations made by Richard Posner.

Tosin Akintola reports this good news: “4th Circuit rebukes Trump administration for asking LinkedIn to turn over info on critics in the news media.”

The Editorial Board of the Washington Post tells of how Comrade Mamdani’s rent-control is already further depleting New York City’s supply of housing. A slice:

Roughly 1,600 buildings in New York with rent-stabilized apartments now have expenses exceeding rental revenue, according to the city’s Rent Guidelines Board. Meanwhile, the financing that keeps such properties functioning is becoming harder to obtain. Mortgage originations for buildings in which at least half the apartments have regulated rents fell from $27.6 billion in 2019 to $11.3 billion in 2025. Signature Bank collapsed during that period, and other lenders retreated as interest rates rose and government policies made owning regulated housing less attractive.

Iain Murray reminds us that U.S. history is filled with big tariff hikes quickly followed by big electoral losses for the hikers.

Jonah Goldberg rightly criticizes Oren Cass’s attempt to escape blame for damage that he and his economically clueless movement have helped to inflict on Americans. (HT Scott Lincicome) Two slices:

In Cass’ telling, the Reaganites and the new right are both “distancing” themselves from Trump as if this were some kind of reverse-jump ball, with both players plausibly equidistant from the line between them. “Success for either side,” he says, “will depend on finding a way to shed Mr. Trump’s toxic political baggage” as if both sides are carrying equal portions of that toxin.

This is political and philosophical nonsense. The political part is easy enough to demonstrate. The Reaganites, with a few convoluted and contorted exceptions, never claimed Trump. The new right carried him around like a frickin’ golden calf.

…..

And that points to the philosophical problem. Cass talks about Reaganism as if the ideas that broadly defined it were little more than a program of political necessity. He assumes that because his “ideals” change with political reality, everyone else’s ideals are equally mercenary, mercurial, and malleable. But Reagan’s ideals drew on something more than political expediency. We know this in part because he was espousing those ideals when they weren’t to his political advantage. We know this because he expressed these ideals privately in his diary. But most importantly, we know this because the ideals of limited government—personal and economic liberty—didn’t start with Reagan. They’re found in the seminal documents of this country going back to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. They’re on display in the lives of Lincoln, Coolidge, and Taft, and in the works of generations of conservative scholars, journalists, and philosophers. Reagan didn’t invent that stuff, he drew from it. Reagan was a political giant, but intellectually he stood on the shoulders of greater giants.

Cass’ theory of politics is his theory of policy. He thinks experts—like him—can design the economy on a grease board, pick winners and losers, and be smart enough to Kobayashi Maru Hayek’s knowledge problem. Obviously, government can do important and useful things. Reagan believed that. Hayek believed that. Adam Smith believed that. But they also believed there were limits to what good the government could do and trade-offs even in the areas where government could do good. One rarely hears anything like that epistemic humility from Cass—or Trump. Of course, Trump is far cruder and dumber than Cass, but they both share the fatal power-of-positivity conceit that you can create the economic and political outcomes you want through will and rank assertion.

The story the new right folks used to whisper, but now increasingly shout, is that Trump was never anything more than the political equivalent of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man in Ghostbusters—the form of the destructor they could use to smash the status quo so that they could claim dominion over the rubble. In the interim they thought they could guide their orange golem for their own ends. But Trump proved unguidable, so now they want to point at the wreckage they midwifed and proclaim: The Reaganites did it!

Wall Street Journal columnist Barton Swaim reflects on the recent electoral drubbing of Republicans. A slice:

Writing in these pages in 1985, Irving Kristol alluded to the political scientist Martin Diamond’s dictum that American democracy “is based on one key assumption: that the people are usually sensible, but rarely wise.” Readers can judge if the people acted either sensibly or wisely by licensing one form of chaos to restrain another, but that is what they did on Nov. 3.

The incoming Democratic majority gives no signal that it’s ready to play the part of rational, grown-up opposition. In ordinary times, an electoral victory by a minority caucus like the one congressional Democrats achieved last week would ensure the elevation of its leadership. Yet restive factions in both House and Senate hint at coming confrontations. In the House, the size of the far-left “Squad,” now dubbing itself the “Bloc,” has more than doubled, to 16 members, and has additional allies on specific radical items.

For his part, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, the only rational candidate for speaker, doesn’t seem inclined to waste time and votes pursuing an all-for-show agenda set by the Democratic Socialists of America—Medicare for All, a “transgender bill of rights,” abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement and so on. A pointless and bruising fight for the speakership, of the sort Republicans staged three years ago, may not happen in January, but the ideological and attitudinal differences are wider on the Democratic side than they were in the GOP in 2023. Don’t expect a display of sanity and cohesion.

George Will warns that reality will soon slap Democrats in the fact – and that Democrats will resist. Here’s his conclusion:

Climate change as a menace has been exaggerated, and as a political issue has never been salient. Fifty years of Supreme Court rulings have insulated political campaigns from speech-restricting regulations. The popularity of Medicare-for-all varies inversely with the understanding of it. Racial considerations in voting are rapidly receding.

Progressives should acknowledge all this. That will not happen.

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… is from page 48 of GMU Econ alums Scott Burns’s and Caleb Fuller’s forthcoming (in February 2027) book, Trade Wars: Why Freedom Trumps Tariffs:

Economists don’t argue that we should abandon manufacturing. In fact, we don’t argue economies “should” do anything; we think that question is best left to the decentralized decisions of millions of Americans. And their decisions have the US manufacturing sector producing as much output as ever, so it is at no risk of going extinct. We merely suggest that we shouldn’t throw good money after bad by way of subsidies or restrictions to keep manufacturing jobs in America if other nations can do them more efficiently.

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GMU Econ alum Dave Hebert writes, here in the Wall Street Journal, insightfully about Trump’s tariffs punitive taxes on Americans’ purchases of imports. A slice:

The last defense of tariffs is the manufacturing renaissance, but we should check the dates. Of the roughly 72,000 manufacturing jobs added this year, some 57,000 came after May, when the Court of International Trade ruled against the Section 122 tariffs the president implemented immediately after the Supreme Court struck down his International Emergency Economic Powers Act tariffs in February. The last time this pattern happened, businesses found themselves eligible for tariff refunds. In June, Mr. Trump walked back tariffs on steel, aluminum and copper. The job growth credited to “tariffs” happened as the tariff agenda was being dismantled by courts and abandoned by the president himself. And the growth in manufacturing is concentrated in areas that face the lowest tariffs, while the most protected industries grew little or even shrank, as Cato’s Scott Lincicome found.

Republicans will spend the next two years arguing about what went wrong. They could start with their failure to listen to what they were told. Economists spelled out the cost of tariffs in advance, and voters paid for them with every purchase. The only people who missed the warnings were the ones who preferred not to look.

My GMU Econ colleague Vincent Geloso makes clear that “many complaints about immigration are really byproducts of state interventions elsewhere in the economy, preventing markets from responding to new arrivals.” A slice:

Introductory Economics students likely remember, for example, that demand for labor depends on the productivity of labor. When labor is more productive, employers are willing to pay more (raise wages). But what boosts productivity? Most notably, task specialization! And specialization depends to a great degree on how big the market is. The more economic participants there are, the more we can support specialization and upskilling, raising the productivity of each hour of labor, whether immigrant or native-born. By increasing the market’s size, immigration can increase specialization in ways that make the demand for labor shift more. But that requires open markets and low barriers to entrepreneurship, so people can rapidly move to invest in their own productivity and comparative advantages.

Chris Freiman calms the fears of those people who worry that wealth inequality gives the rich excessive political power in democratic societies.

Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins has an interesting and plausible take on the Jensen Huang honeypot episode. A slice:

One lesson, though, maybe hasn’t been learned well enough, even despite the education that Vladimir Putin’s Russia has put us through. Much of what authoritarian states consider worthwhile intelligence activity has nothing to do with information-gathering. It has nothing to do with recruiting agents. It has everything to do with sowing social-media and news-media confusion, exploiting our algorithmically compliant publics and politicians to create turmoil in Western societies.

AI technology has exited the barn irretrievably, rendering many flavors of AI doom academic. The job of humanity is to keep stepping forward with all the care and foresight it can muster in the name of civilization, which at last report is known to exist on one planet. Mr. Trump and Nvidia’s board may well decide the next job is saving Mr. Huang’s CEOship. Unfortunately he doesn’t have an Al Gore on his board. Mr. Gore, at a crucial moment, intervened with a whitewash report in late 2006 to save Apple’s Steve Jobs from the options-backdating furor then taking down many less-protected or more-dispensable CEOs.

The U.S. press is in full-tilt hysteria. Congressional members of both parties clamor for a chance to bank TikTok-ready clips of themselves grilling Mr. Huang about his connections to China and Mr. Trump, as if this would somehow advance U.S. national interests. Don’t overlook the possibility that China’s government, whatever it intended when starting out, will consider this a useful outcome from its Jensen Huang caper.

John Puri argues that “the China-Nvidia chip deal is even dumber than you think:

Dan Foster writes about how the president’s possibly extortionate “deal” with Nvidia has allowed ostensibly commercial Chinese firms to acquire the company’s advanced AI chips. Spoiler alert: These ghost firms are almost certainly fronts for the Chinese military and its contractors.

Trump’s agreement, which I fully lambasted last year, allows Nvidia to sell its H200 semiconductor to companies in China — circumventing U.S. export controls also imposed by the Trump administration — in exchange for the federal government’s receiving 15 percent of the sales revenue. Sounds like a horrible deal to me, but at least we’re getting something out of it, right?

Except maybe we aren’t. While the formal regulations needed to green-light Nvidia’s exports have been finalized, no regulation implementing the revenue-sharing agreement has been codified — probably because it’s so unheard of that no one knows how to write such a rule that could withstand scrutiny. So the government has not been receiving 15 percent of Nvidia’s China sales after all.

Instead, the administration has imposed a 25 percent tariff on advanced AI chips, and mandated that Nvidia’s H200 chips be routed from Taiwan to the United States to pay the duty before going to China. Whether this tariff revenue equates to 15 percent of ultimate sales is unclear.

Here’s what we do know: A “policy” that needs to jump through such ridiculous hoops to be implemented is one that mocks itself.

David Rose is right: “America would not exist without our strong culture of entrepreneurship.”

Here’s yet another account of the use in the U.S. of the banana-republic practice of civil asset forfeiture.

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… is from page 136 of Stephanie Slade’s important 2026 book, Fusionism: Liberty, Virtue, and the Future of the American Right:

Mainstream commentators sometimes describe today’s conservative movement as “more extreme” than in the past. There are ways in which that is the case, but there are also ways in which that is misleading. It helps to distinguish between the rhetorical and substantive dimensions, and to realize that the two are not always correlated. Republicans in the Trump era certainly have adopted a rhetorical extremism – a posture of cruelty toward outsiders and a ratcheting up of the stakes of political disagreement in order to whip their base into an emotional froth. But on substantive policy issues, MAGA conservatism is supremely flexible, even mushy. It has no strong commitment to streamlining government by cutting spending and devolving power from Washington. Quite the contrary.

DBx: Yes.

To the ears of people – left and right – who mistakenly think that American conservatism is about being bullyboy tough and rejecting nearly all tenets of liberalism, MAGAistas do sound “conservative.” But in fact, as Ms. Slade makes clear, MAGAistas have almost nothing in common with American conservatism of the sort embraced by Ronald Reagan and George Will. This genuine American conservatism seeks to conserve the classical-liberal foundation and sensibilities of the American founding. MAGAistas, in contrast, care almost nothing about these foundations and principles. Their ‘principles’ are very much akin to the ‘principles’ of progressives: an unprincipled mish-mash of intolerance, economic cluelessness, distrust of ordinary people left free of government-issued prescriptions and proscriptions, and the hubris that springs from ignorance.

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Mary Anastasia O’Grady writes insightfully about the calamity that is Cuban communism. Two slices:

Take the island’s energy crisis. Regime talking points, repeated ad nauseam by the international media, blame it on Washington sanctions. But major power outages across Cuba have been a recurring nightmare for decades. The worsening situation this year is the death rattle of an electric utility that is never going to be functional without a change in management.

Cuba’s thermoelectric power plants provide some 60% of the country’s installed electricity capacity, according to Jorge Piñon, an energy expert at the University of Texas at Austin. Those plants are powered by Cuban heavy crude, which means their fuel supply isn’t affected by U.S. sanctions policy. Distributed-generation plants around the country provide another 20% of capacity, according to Mr. Piñon. They rely on diesel. But with one-third of those plants inoperable due to poor maintenance and a lack of capital investment, fuel shortages affect only about 13% of generating capacity. They can’t explain the darkness.

It’s true that fuel shipments are down, but that isn’t all about sanctions. Cuba has run out of friends willing and able to underwrite its kleptocracy. Hugo Chávez, who led Venezuela from 1999 until he died in 2013, sent oil to Cuba in exchange for platoons of communist teachers and medical personnel to indoctrinate his nation. The regime in Havana would resell a good part of the oil to other countries and rake in the cash. That practice continued at a reduced pace during Nicolás Maduro’s rule from 2013 through 2025. Now it’s no more.

…..

Get ready for television specials promoting the regime narrative that the country is on the brink of a humanitarian disaster because of U.S. policy. Cue the images of dying babies in broken-down hospitals that can’t keep the lights on. Never mind the more than 800 political prisoners rotting in Cuban dungeons and the goon squads that have plenty of gasoline to patrol the streets.

Expect also to hear that Cuba is pursuing economic “reform.” Don’t buy it. Cuba’s version of change is reminiscent of the Soviet elites who moved in and got rich as the Bolshevik experiment disintegrated. The island needs new rules that provide investors with certainty. That’s not going to happen as long as the Castro family and its inner circle remain in power.

John Puri tells how “a lifelong carbon-taxer,” the late Nobel-laureate economist William Nordhaus, “helped discredit climate policy.” A slice:

Nordhaus may be remembered by the left as a carbon taxer, but his true contribution was bringing rigorous cost-benefit analysis to a policy field that was sorely lacking it. In doing so, he showed that a net-zero policy failed the assessment worse than doing nothing at all, and that tolerating a good deal of global warming would be better in the long run for human welfare than overreacting today.

Kyle Smith remembers with great fondness William Nordhaus’s teaching. Three slices:

Here’s the thing: Nordhaus, who died of brain cancer at 85 on Oct. 30, was one of the most effective and memorable teachers I ever encountered. He wasn’t one of the song-and-dance men who try to charm the students. With his out-of-time horn-rimmed glasses and dry, deadpan attitude, he was like an unusually slender owl. He didn’t care whether we liked him; he cared whether we learned. His course wasn’t entertaining. It was merely life-changing.

…..

This was our introduction to the concept of scarcity, and the related question of value. Nordhaus walked us through supply and demand—why the one curves up (the higher the price you can get, the more you will make) and the other curves down (buyers want things to be cheap). He was the first person I ever heard explain trade-offs, or the phrase “guns or butter.” Pick one or the other. But you have to pick. Difficult choices are everywhere.

…..

Politicians, those masters of telling people they can have something for nothing, distort prices in their own interest but at everyone’s peril, and are the natural enemies of economic thinkers. Nordhaus’s course implicitly showed us how to think about political claims: What are the trade-offs Sen. Fantasyland isn’t mentioning? What is the actual cost? What is the actual benefit? Is “doing something” potentially worse than doing nothing?

Underlying his lectures was an appreciation for how markets create wealth with a never-ending cycle of innovation. This innovation often seems disorienting in the short term but makes us unimaginably better off in the long run. Jobs get destroyed, new and better jobs get created. Inefficiency gets wrung out of the system. In 1900, thanks to Thomas Edison’s light bulb, workers could purchase 10 days of reliable light for only a single 60-hour week of work. This was miraculous at the time. By 2017, Nordhaus noted, that same amount of light could be purchased with a fraction of a second of labor.

Prices do their work. The market adjusts. Resources are allocated, and re-allocated, and re-re-allocated, ever more efficiently—albeit forever dogged by governments interfering with prices and creating their own, often misshapen, incentives.

Voters hated Trump’s tariffs – a proposition for which Jon Miltimore and Laura Williams offer evidence. Two slices:

So Vance is not wrong that the Iran war was unpopular and contributed to the GOP’s defeat. But an abundance of data show the second item on his tweeted list — “focus on the cost of living/inflation” — is the reason, as he said “Our voters showed up. And…many of them voted for Democrats.”

Voters clearly despised the impact of this administration’s tariffs. In a nationwide ABC News poll, about one in three voters said the war in Iran was “crucial” to their vote, while fully half said the same about the cost of living — and government corruption.

Despite Trump’s populist rhetoric around their launch, tariffs were unpopular with voters. Writing at the Cato Institute prior to the election, Alfredo Carrillo Obregon explained that tariffs had become bad politics, as well as bad economics. The bipartisan conventional wisdom in Washington that protectionist policies win electoral votes was turned on its head as voters linked tariffs to affordability.

“Concerns about affordability sit at the top of most voters’ minds these midterms, and thus, high and sweeping tariffs promoted by the White House have understandably become a culprit behind increases in Americans’ cost of living,” Obregon wrote. Polls, and likely the final vote tally, proved him correct.

While Vance framed the disconnect as a messaging failure, voters were right to identify tariffs as a threat to an affordable American life. Last month, economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York published a paper finding that tariffs had raised the cost of goods in 67 categories in 2025. The typical American household is paying at least $1,000, and perhaps several times that, more to maintain the same standard of living under the new tariff regime.

Economists have always understood that, contrary to the President’s promises, taxes on imported goods are paid by American consumers, not by foreign governments or overseas manufacturers. Rising prices on imported varieties of a good account for about 64 percent of the tariff’s bite, according to the Fed paper, but another 36 percent comes from higher-priced domestic producers, who are either paying more for the imported inputs to their products, or were able to raise prices when foreign competitors were penalized.

Making goods more expensive, some have argued, is exactly the point of a successful tariff. Americans now pay 75 percent more for aluminum and 64 percent more for steel than the rest of the world. The trade deficit indeed seems to be contracting. And manufacturing jobs are rising again, but only after cratering during the first year of Trumpian tariff theatrics. As our colleague Dave Hebert pointed out recently, the administration is now claiming a job-creation victory for partially filling the hole it dug. Tariffs have done little to nothing to return manufacturing to the US.

…..

But tariffs became broader and harder to avoid, and businesses were relatively transparent about having to pass those costs on to American buyers. Amid an affordability crisis driven by dollar debasement and falling real income, Americans reacted. Fed research showed Americans cut their consumption of tariffed goods proportionally more than the price rose, suggesting a behavioral backlash.

The 2026 election suggests Americans are no longer willing to pay the price of protectionism.

Cullen Hendrix reports that “Santa’s sleigh will be weighed down by tariffs.” (HT Scott Lincicome)

Daniel Hannan reflects on the midterm election results. A slice:

Indeed, it is hard to find any ruling principle behind MAGA beyond the convenience, at any given time, of Trump.

Except one. The President has been a lifelong opponent of free trade. “I am a tariff man,” as he likes to say. Well, all the other tariff men, which is to say everyone in his administration, are now tainted by that association.

They must have known that Trump’s trade policy would fail, for they are not fools. They must have grasped that it would not reshore jobs or raise revenue.

They must have understood that tariffs would fall on American consumers, not foreign governments – which is why no foreign governments are queuing to get their money back following the Supreme Court’s decision that the tariffs were illegal.

Above all, they must have realised that trade deficits, which so obsess Trump, don’t matter. The United States has been running them solidly since 1975, and has outperformed the rest of us.

Basic economics would have told them trade deficits are matched by investment surpluses (or vice versa) and that Trump’s demand for both surpluses and simultaneous increased investment was mathematically impossible.

But, ambitious, obsequious or frightened of the MAGA voting bloc in Republican primaries, they never objected. Instead, they flattered and amplified Trump, like so many eunuchs around a vicious child emperor.

They will surely pay a political price. JD Vance, who had previously been the bookies’ choice to succeed Trump, has seen his stock plummet.

National Review‘s David Bahnsen shares his wise reflections on the GOP’s electoral drubbing. A slice:

The debate over the Iran war’s role in this Republican debacle would be comical if it were not so maddening. With virtually no one operating in good faith or making a serious argument, a whole cabal of people have claimed, all statistical evidence and voter polling to the contrary, that the sole reason for states like Texas, Kansas, and Mississippi flipping is the Iran war. Inversely, no one who disputes that monocausal theory of the case denies that the Iran war is unpopular, and that its unpopularity was a contributor to the decline of approval for President Trump and to the results Republicans suffered all over the country Tuesday night. That voters detest the state of prices, and that they believe (with obvious basis in fact) that tariffs are connected to this, is not disputable by credible people. That the bizarre handling of the Iran war led to a Strait of Hormuz debacle, and to significant problems for fuel prices and a downstream impact from diesel prices, is also obvious. Reasonable people can disagree as to how much of the Iran war contribution was related to opposition to de-nuclearizing Iran versus the way in which it all went (e.g., a failed MOU negotiated by the vice president, repeated claims of victory that were obviously untrue, and a sustained period of time with no clear resolution). But all advocates of a multi-causal explanation of the midterms recognize the significant role Iran played.

While those who predicted the economic pressures tariffs would create (yours truly included) and others who are more focused on Iran (some due to strong anti-Israel obsessions) socially post to their heart’s content about those two issues, it seems to me that the framework of Burkean conservatism is under assault in this new right, populist, Trumpian, Vanceguard moment, and the election results reflect this internal right-wing implosion. My contention is that a lack of focus on the free and virtuous society cost the GOP dearly in 2026 and will cost the GOP dearly until that framework is recovered.

Advocates of a free society have never called for central planning as a tool for economic growth. The anti-constitutional, discretionary, imperialistic, arbitrary wielding of tariffs has been a sight to behold, but not nearly as much of a sight as watching people try to defend it. From “Canada is ripping us off” claims to “this will restore manufacturing jobs” to “we must protect our national security interests” to “tariffs are making us rich” — the statist dogma embedded in all of this was trumped only by the intellectual incoherence. Tariffs have been put on, then taken off, and applied so randomly and inconsistently, it has caused the few honest pro-tariff people out there to admit this has been an unmitigated disaster even for so-called economic nationalists.

But the heavy hand of counterproductive and imperialistic tariffs has hardly been the only policy priority undermining a free society. The first two years of this Trump administration created 40 times the quantity of something President Obama did just one time — the taking of an ownership interest in a private U.S. company. If you had told me that in 2026 the United States government would have 41 companies on its balance sheet, I would have told you that neither the Republicans nor Democrats won in 2024, but rather that the CCP did. Generational critique of state-owned enterprises has been muted in exchange for indefensible government equity positions, making a mockery of cogent defense for optimal capital allocation and repudiation of cronyism.

Add to the mix an economic agenda that has pushed deficits to record levels (unashamedly), suggested paying married women taxpayer money for being home with their kids, promoted the idea of blocking private ownership of private property, advocated for price controls in credit cards, and made demands of private businesses repeatedly around their own priorities of investment and resource allocation, and what we have seen is a rhetorical opposition to the DSA movement of the left that is accompanied by DSA-light policies on the right. This is political malpractice, in that it has never worked in history to offer a weak and limp echo to the worst policies of progressivism, but it is also an ideological heresy for conservatives. Those who say voters were only motivated by prices in this election are wrong and miss the point that some of the administration’s policies heavily exacerbated high prices, but they also underestimate the role that a potent opposition to left-wing policies represents. The strongest talking point the GOP had this election was that the Democrats seem to be increasingly radicalized. They spent two years taking that opposition off the table by an unending game of footsie with these populist embraces of government interventions in the economy.

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… is from pages 262-263 of Samuel Gregg’s excellent new book, The Civilization of Commerce:

For, “to give” requires some degree of other-regarding, minimally expressed through an awareness of and even sympathy for someone else’s needs and wants. That necessitates a willingness to put yourself in another person’s place, even if briefly and temporarily. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith devotes many pages to describing how this occurs. “To take,” by contrast, demands no substantive reflection on another person’s ambitions or needs, let alone the conditions under which other people find themselves.

DBx: Yes.

The taxman, like the thief, need know nothing about the persons whose property is taken other than the fact that those persons possess property that can, with force, be taken. The merchant, in contrast, can profit only by knowing what his or her customers want.

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… is from page 116 of Stephanie Slade’s excellent 2026 book, Fusionism: Liberty, Virtue, and the Future of the American Right [original emphasis]:

Soon enough, the [Berlin] wall would indeed come down. That is often thought of as the first domino to fall in Eastern Europe, but in fact, it occurred a few months after Poland held its first semi-free parliamentary elections in June 1989. Solidarity claimed 99 percent of the open seats, and Lech Walęsa went on to become president of a democratic Poland.