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The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board warns of the economic damage to Americans that is the unavoidable consequence of the Trump administration’s insistence on expelling from America that most valuable of resources: human labor. Two slices:

Restrictionists in the White House claim that deporting illegal immigrants will improve economic opportunities for U.S.-born workers. But job growth has slowed amid the Administration’s mass deportations, and a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research finds they are harming American workers.

Economists at the University of Colorado, Boulder, examined employment changes in areas most affected by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests—i.e., states and regions in which arrests doubled relative to their non-citizen population—in comparison to the rest of the country between January and October 2025.

First, they found a 4% decline in employment of undocumented workers, which comports with employer reports that raids have prompted immigrant workers to stop showing up. Some 28% of construction firms said in an industry survey last summer they were affected by the President’s stepped up immigration enforcement. “For every ICE arrest, 6 male likely undocumented workers stop working,” the NBER study estimates.

…..

It’s possible to support mass deportation on legal grounds, or in order to deny Democrats success in flooding the U.S. with illegal migrants every time they take power. But the claim that this helps American workers and the economy doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

John Stossel argues persuasively that the war on data centers “doesn’t add up.”

Scott Lincicome declares intellectual victory for those of us who oppose the Jones Act. Two slices:

For more than a century, the Jones Act has survived on purported economic and security grounds. Its waiver by the Trump administration for Operation Epic Fury reveals serious flaws in both rationales.

…..

President Donald Trump’s most recent waiver of the law has substantially undermined the pro-Jones Act case. Issued for 60 days on March 17, 2026 – right after the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed – and subsequently extended for another 90, the waiver covers all US territories and more than 659 product categories. That makes it the longest and broadest waiver since 1950. The law also requires that any operator using the waiver file a compliance report on their activities. Here’s what the data thru May 6 show – and what they don’t.

First, the waiver exposes flaws in the law’s national security rationale. The Jones Act ostensibly exists to ensure the US isn’t dependent on adversaries to move critical supplies in times of crisis. Yet, even leaving aside that this “national security” law keeps getting waived when a genuine security emergency arrives, the waiver data tell a benign story. None of the foreign vessels moving millions of barrels of gasoline, diesel, crude oil, and fertilizer between American ports have been owned or operated by Chinese firms or have flown the flag of China. Russia is similarly absent.

The White House has called these vessels’ availability “incredibly effective” for stabilizing US energy markets. Thus, when a real crisis hit, allies and neutral registrants, not adversaries, filled the gap – a gap created by a withering Jones Act fleet of just 93 oceangoing vessels (only 55 tankers) and a moribund commercial shipbuilding industry that recently got bailed out by the South Koreans.

This letter by George Thomas in today’s Wall Street Journal is excellent:

Mr. [Joseph] Sternberg correctly observes that American-style productivity and entrepreneurship produce more prosperity than European welfare states can manage. He wonders whether Europeans will “have to confront their failure to generate enough growth to pay for social benefits.” Might they move toward the American model then? The movement, I fear, will be in the other direction. If Democratic socialists win U.S. elections, we will move to the European model with its lack of prosperity.

Robby Soave is right and Elizabeth Warren is wrong about Jeff Bezos’s tax payments. A slice:

Bezos’ wealth largely consists of the stock he owns in Amazon. When he cashes in shares of stock, he pays taxes. That’s how it works for everyone. It doesn’t make sense to tax people based on the theoretical value of the stock they own; that would mean taxing unrealized gains, i.e., the projected value of the asset before it’s sold. Even Rep. Ro Khanna (D–Calif.), a progressive and supporter of heavier taxation on billionaires, at one point understood that such a tax would discourage entrepreneurs from investing in their own companies and instead force them to sell off assets to private equity firms.

Mark Jamison writes wisely about the economically and factually ignorant thinking that fuels the new enthusiasm for active antitrust interventions. A slice:

For years, government officials, academics, and journalists have repeated a simple story. Antitrust enforcement weakened beginning in the 1980s, mergers surged, industries consolidated, and competition declined. That story now underpins much of antitrust.

Former President Barack Obama embraced it. His Council of Economic Advisers warned of rising concentration and declining competition. Biden went further, declaring decades of evidence-based antitrust policy a failed “experiment” that allowed large firms to accumulate excessive power. His adviser Tim Wu explicitly called for turning the page on the consumer-welfare framework associated with the Chicago School.

Even business journalism has echoed the theme. Reporting in The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere has frequently treated the mantra of rising concentration as established fact—sometimes suggesting that mergers, even small ones, are quietly eroding competition.

But there’s a problem: The empirical foundation for this narrative is deeply flawed.

One flaw is the use of the wrong data. Widely cited studies purported to demonstrate rising concentration often rely on census or other data that was never designed to measure competition. These studies group firms by production categories. But competition occurs in markets, not categories.

That distinction is not simply academic. As economist Carl Shapiro points out, under census definitions, all metal cans are grouped together, regardless of use. Yet paint cans and soda cans do not compete with one another. Meanwhile, glass and plastic soda bottles are placed in entirely different industries, even though they are direct substitutes. The result is a measure of “concentration” that often bears little relation to reality. Resulting studies treat shifts in firm size as evidence of market power, even when those shifts reflect efficiency gains and productivity growth.

Pete Earle explains that “AI won’t make money obsolete.”

National Review‘s Dan McLaughlin remembers the late Ted Turner.

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… is from page 30 of Timothy Sandefur’s 2014 book, The Conscience of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence and the Right to Liberty [original emphases]:

The characteristic difference between rights and privileges is that rights are not held at the mercy of another person, or of the state. We deserve rights; we cannot be made to pay for them, and are not answerable to our neighbors or to the state when we exercise them. But privileges are given to us by one in a superior position, who retains authority to restrict or to eliminate those privileges. One cannot deserve a privilege, and one can be required to pay for it. To obscure this distinction and contend that rights are permissions issued by the state is to reject the basic proposition of equality articulated in the Declaration, and to presume that some people are fundamentally entitled to decide how much freedom others should enjoy.

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GMU Econ alum Julia Cartwright, writing in the Washington Post, explains that Spirit Airlines’s rise and fall is an example of the healthy process of market experimentation and creative destruction. Three slices:

By stripping fares to a bare minimum, Spirit routinely undercut legacy carriers, at times offering base rates 30 to 50 percent lower on comparable routes and forcing competitors to follow suit. That was the “Spirit Effect.” The company compelled incumbents to introduce “basic economy” tiers and restructure offers to compete for price-sensitive travelers. One Delta executive even referred to the company’s basic economy option as the “Spirit match fare.” When Spirit exited a route, fares jumped 5.7 to 22 percent, according to an analysis by TD Cowen.

Yet disruption doesn’t guarantee durability. Spirit struggled financially for years, and by its first Chapter 11 filing in November 2024, it had lost more than $2.5 billion since 2020. A second bankruptcy followed last August.

There were moments when intervention might have changed the outcome. In 2022, JetBlue offered to acquire Spirit for $3.8 billion, offering a potential lifeline. Yet the Biden administration’s Justice Department sued to block that merger, and in January 2024, a federal court agreed. U.S. District Judge William G. Young reasoned that the deal would harm cost-conscious travelers. Ironically, the antitrust action meant to protect budget travelers from higher fares eliminated the budget airline entirely.

…..

It’s tempting to consider Spirit’s demise as a failure requiring correction; in truth, it is evidence of a system working as intended. The event tracks what economists call “creative destruction,” a phenomenon central to the work of Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt, whose research was awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in economics. Their central insight is that economic growth depends on the continuous cycle of innovation, transition and reallocation. Firms must be free to succeed and fail. Losses show resources are misallocated; profits show they’re well used. When governments block failure, they blur these signals, trapping capital and labor in less productive uses and slowing the growth that underpins rising living standards.

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If the United States wants to remain competitive, especially in such emerging sectors as artificial intelligence and advanced manufacturing, it ought to protect the environment that allows for experimentation and failure. Prosperity depends less on preserving specific companies than on sustaining the conditions that allow new ones to emerge.

Hannah Cox understandably isn’t thrilled with what Lina Khan will likely teach students at Columbia University’s School of Law. A slice:

As the youngest FTC chair to ever serve, Khan rose to prominence early in her career thanks to her 2017 Yale Law Journal article “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” which argued that Amazon should be targeted for monopolistic practices despite the fact it wasn’t a monopoly at all. In Khan’s mind, the legal jurisprudence that had governed antitrust law for decades, known as the consumer welfare standard, was outdated. The consumer welfare standard asks, “Is a company a monopoly, and if so, has it used its power to harm consumers?” Only if that standard is met does the government have the right to take up antitrust actions against a company. The consumer welfare standard was a desperately needed bit of guidance in the early 1980s. Up until then, the government had wreaked havoc in the market, frequently targeting companies due to political bias or for simply being popular.

Khan’s contrasting theory was essentially that a business being big is inherently a sign that the organization in question is bad, and that the internal practices they use to maintain their market advantage should be grounds for action against them. Like most progressives, Khan sees success as proof of immorality.

The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal wisely urges repeal of the cronyist and economically destructive Jones Act. A slice:

President Trump has temporarily called off America’s legal blockade of its own ports, and the White House says the results are positive. Under the 1920 Jones Act, waterborne cargo between two U.S. points must travel on ships that are built, crewed, and owned by Americans. Because that constricts supply and raises costs, Mr. Trump waived the law after attacking Iran.

So far, about two dozen waiver voyages have been reported complete as of April 30, according to the Maritime Administration. A ship flying the Singapore flag took 322,000 barrels of gasoline blend stock from Texas to California. A Maltese-flagged tanker brought 300,000 barrels of Bakken crude oil from Texas to a refinery in Pennsylvania. A second Singaporean vessel carried 300,000 barrels of gasoline from Louisiana to Florida. Useful commerce, amid Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.

Mr. Trump’s initial suspension of the Jones Act was for 60 days, but late last month he extended that for another 90 days, with the White House calling it a great success. “New data compiled since the initial waiver was issued revealed that significantly more supply was able to reach U.S. ports faster,” a spokeswoman said. “This extension will help ensure vital energy products, industrial materials, and agricultural necessities are maintained.”

Funny, it also sounds like a good argument for permanent Jones Act relief. In a crisis, such as a hurricane in the Caribbean or a menacing in the Persian Gulf, the archaic law becomes an acute problem, because it limits the flexibility of American supply chains to respond. Yet the Jones Act is always an economic drain, since it increases shipping costs and distorts markets for all sorts of products.

Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley bids good riddance to racial gerrymandering. Two slices:

The fainting spells on the left after last week’s Supreme Court ruling in Louisiana v. Callais were probably to be expected. Democrats these days reject colorblind public policies that they championed in a previous era and scoff at clear evidence of America’s racial progress. A court decision that reins in racially gerrymandered voting districts checked both boxes, so it is no wonder that Democratic elites from Barack Obama on down are outraged.

…..

What nonsense. The case before the court concerned Louisiana’s 2024 decision, under pressure from the courts, to draw a congressional map that included a second majority-black district. Supporters said the racial gerrymander was necessary to comply with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which bars the use of qualifications, standards or procedures that make it harder for minorities to cast a ballot. Opponents contended that the map violated the Constitution’s equal-protection clause by sorting voters based on race. In a 6-3 ruling, the justices sided with the challengers and said Louisiana unlawfully discriminated by race when it created a second majority-black district.

Mr. Obama is pretending that the decision somehow threatens the black franchise, but it didn’t touch Section 2 protections against efforts to restrict black voting. All the court did was scale back a judicially created doctrine based on the assumption that most white voters would never support black candidates. The former president, of all people, should appreciate that this is no longer the case.

Richard Morrison reasonably tries to nudge us away from reading the new book by Nick Chater and George Loewenstein. A slice:

But the success of nudge behavioralism, after a first flush of success, yielded disappointing long-term results. Upon wider reading and investigation, Chater and Loewenstein grew so disenchanted with their own specialty that they turned against it entirely with the vengeance of the betrayed. They now attack nudge interventions as not just ineffective but actively harmful, in part because people who are concerned about societal problems can be seduced by the supposed effectiveness of nudges, thus eroding support for more aggressive interventions.

And their preferred alternative is a bold one indeed. They claim that the major problems of the day can only be solved by flushing away any pretense of voluntary inducement and going full speed ahead on banning (or mandating) the behaviors and outcomes they want abolished (or to see more of). They now consider it absurd and unjust to expect anyone in America to actually manage how many calories they eat, decide how their retirement nest egg is invested, or pick which health plan they pay for.

Everything must be federally mandated to ensure the just outcomes that the co-authors have already helpfully decided upon. Liberating Americans from the tyranny of making their own choices will leave them, readers are helpfully reminded, with ample leisure time for hobbies and entertainment.

Emmanuel Maggiori exposes the whackadoodleness of “Modern Monetary Theory” (MMT).

My Mercatus Center colleague Henry Oliver writes beautifully about Samuel Johnson.

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… is from page 74 of the late Daniel Dennett’s magnificent 1995 volume, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea:

Time and again, biologists baffled by some apparently futile or maladroit bit of bad design in nature have eventually come to see that they have underestimated the ingenuity, the sheer brilliance, the depth of insight to be discovered in one of Mother Nature’s creations. Francis Crick has mischievously baptized this trend in the name of his colleague Leslie Orgel, speaking of what he calls “Orgel’s Second Rule: Evolution is cleverer than you are.”

DBx: Yes – and this lesson about the evolution of natural processes applies with no less force to the evolution of market processes. The only real difference is that biologists by and large are more genuinely scientific than many economists.

Too many mainstream economists who are baffled by some apparently futile or maladroit bit of bad design in the market economy leap to the conclusion that the market economy is “failing” and, therefore, the government must intervene to force observed features of the market economy to appear to conform more closely to textbook models. The attitude is this: “If I – a professional economist or think-tank head – don’t understand what I observe, then what I observe must be causing harm. I will help to make the real world look more like the theoretical model that is so pretty in my imagination!”

These mainstream economists (and pundits who are influenced by them) reject the understanding that drove and drives the work of wise economists such as Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises, Joseph Schumpeter, F.A. Hayek, Ronald Coase, Armen Alchian, Donald Dewey, Harold Demsetz, Israel Kirzner, Thomas Sowell, Dominick Armentano, Deirdre McCloskey, and Robert Higgs – the understanding that the market is a never-ending process of trial and error that discovers extraordinarily creative ways to satisfy human wants. This discovery process is never “perfect” (whatever such a standard might mean), but it works over time to improve human well-being.

Unlike biologists who appreciate the unfathomable complexity of the phenomena they study, typical mainstream economists mistake the necessary simplifications of their models as being full-enough descriptions of economic reality – and when not fully enough descriptive, then prescriptive of what government should do.

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I repeat here an example that I perhaps turn to too often: an ‘ordinary’ American supermarket. Walk into your neighborhood Kroger or Safeway or Walmart or Whole Foods. Pick any aisle at random – say, the aisle with laundry detergent. Who dealt with the logistics to ensure that jugs of Tide detergent wound up undamaged on the shelf? What process is at work that results in that shelf almost always being filled with detergent that you are free to purchase or not to purchase? Who designed the barcode and the software that lets you scan a jug of that detergent at the self-checkout lane? Who designed the jug itself so that it holds the detergent without leaking? Now ask the same questions about the dishwasher detergent and paper towels. Move on to other aisles and ask about toothpaste, aspirin, peanut butter, corn flakes, milk, yogurt, orange juice, crushed red pepper, cumin, fresh broccoli, fresh corn, canned corned, olives, ground beef, lamb chops, gluten-free pasta, coffee. The list is very long.

And who pays that store’s electricity bill? Who supplies that store’s liability insurance? Who put up the capital that makes that supermarket possible?

Ask the following question to anyone who fancies that he or she knows enough to recommend how government coercion should be used to ‘redesign’ or change existing market processes and outcomes: “Can you recount in sufficient detail all the information and knowledge that is used today to ensure that that Kroger or Walmart operates as a supermarket in a manner that all Americans now take for granted?” If they cannot – and they certainly cannot – offer a respectable answer, ask this follow-up question: “Then by what miracle will you have enough knowledge to re-engineer the larger economy in a way that improves overall human well-being?”

You’ll get an answer, for such interventionists are intoxicated with their own superiority and imagined intellectual genius. But if you pay close-enough attention to that answer, you’ll notice that it is little more than a stew of abstractions and aspirations. Nothing in the answer will give you confidence that that person should be trusted to intervene coercively into market processes. The market is cleverer than that person.

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Here’s a letter to Fortune. (I thank my friend Ross Kaminsky for sharing this Fortune article with me.)

Editor:

Interviewed by Sasha Rogelberg, Eswar Prasad says many sensible things about America’s economy, but he inadvertently sows confusion by saying that the reason that the recent spike in oil prices isn’t inflicting more damage on America’s economy is because “the U.S. is not the manufacturing powerhouse it once used to be” (“America is lucky it’s no longer a manufacturing powerhouse—it’s what’s protecting the US economy from the worst of the oil shock, top economist says,” May 4).

Of course the U.S. produces a smaller share of global manufacturing output today than in the past. In 2024 the U.S. produced ‘only’ 17% of global manufacturing output – a smaller share than the 25% to 30% that we produced in the mid-1970s, and much less than the nearly 50% that we produced just after the second world war. But this smaller share is due not to a decline in U.S. manufacturing but, instead, to an increase in manufacturing in other countries. U.S. manufacturing output is today just shy of the all-time high that it hit in late 2007. U.S. industrial output – a broader category of non-services and non-agricultural production – hit its all-time high in September 2018 and is today also just shy of that all-time high.

The bottom line here is that U.S. manufacturing output today is second only to that of China – and on a per-capita basis the U.S. produces 156% more manufacturing output than does China. To describe the U.S. as “no longer a manufacturing powerhouse” is incorrect.

As for why rising oil prices aren’t inflicting more damage on America’s economy, the chief reason surely is that U.S. manufacturing is today far more energy-efficient than it was in the 1970s. According to EBSCO, “US industry has been making significant strides in energy efficiency, reducing the amount of energy used per dollar’s worth of goods (energy intensity) by 50 percent between 1970 and 2003 (from 9.13 to 4.32 thousand Btu). Energy use per dollar’s worth of goods produced has continued to fall.

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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Now that 30 days have passed since the Wall Street Journal published Phil Gramm’s and my piece assessing the first year of Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs punitive taxes on Americans’ purchases of imports, I can share our piece here in full and without charge. It’s beneath the fold.

[continue reading…]

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Bill Colton’s letter in today’s Wall Street Journal is excellent:

Phil Gramm and Michael Solon provide both evidence and clarity regarding the consumer harm done by the administration’s disastrous tariff fixation in their op-ed “The Trump Tax Increase of 2026” (April 29).

In my lifetime, I have voted Republican because of the party’s reliable pursuit of policies based on economic fundamentals: open markets, free trade, cost-effective regulation and minimum government intervention. President Trump’s trade policies clearly fail any reasonable test of economic reason—so where are sensible Republican voices in the House and Senate? Asleep at the switch it seems.

It’s particularly discouraging because the damage done by tariffs isn’t a complicated topic in economics. God help us if both parties choose now to ignore economic fundamentals.

Eric Boehm is correct: “Trump’s new European car tariffs demonstrate why his ‘deals’ are worthless.” A slice:

When President Donald Trump struck a trade deal with the European Union in July, officials on both sides stressed how it would ensure long-term stability to trans-Atlantic trade.

The Trump administration called the deal a “generational modernization of the transatlantic alliance.” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said it “restores stability and predictability” by locking in 15 percent tariffs on most European goods exported to the U.S., while most American imports to Europe would be exempt from tariffs.

In other words, Trump got what he wanted out of that deal: A reduction in tariffs on American exports and the establishment of a new, permanent baseline tariff on European goods. European leaders also felt like they’d won something: the 15 percent tariff was lower than the 25 percent tariff Trump had threatened, and the deal would stop Trump from hiking tariffs the next time he was in a bad mood.

So much for that.

On Friday, Trump announced that he would raise tariffs on European-made cars to 25 percent. (Those tariffs are authorized by Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, so they are not affected by the Supreme Court’s ruling in February that limited some of the president’s power to impose tariffs unilaterally.)

Responding to U.S. trade representative Jameison Greer’s economically ignorant defense of U.S. tariffs on Americans’ purchases of imported pick-up trucks, Adam Ozimek tweets: (HT Scott Lincicome)

I think if you believe domestic truck manufacturers can’t compete but we want to guarantee small truck production stays here at a cost to consumers just say that. There is no world where this is boosting global competitiveness or helping them “perfect their model”.

National Review‘s Charles Cooke understandably is flabbergasted by Elizabeth Warren’s dishonesty. A slice:

What fun it must be to play poisoner and physician.

In 2024, after the Biden administration successfully blocked a merger between JetBlue and Spirit Airlines, Senator Elizabeth Warren was elated. “This,” she tweeted out excitedly, “is a Biden win for flyers!”

Last week, however, as Spirit prepared to close its doors, Warren struck a different note. “The Big Four airlines (American, Delta, Southwest, United),” she lamented, “control 75% of the U.S. market. Fewer choices = higher prices for you.”

Well, then.

Aware, perhaps, that her supposed “win for flyers!” has been seamlessly transmuted into “fewer choices,” Warren is now helping the police look for the real killer. “Spiking fuel prices from Trump’s war,” Warren wrote on Saturday, “was the nail in the coffin for twice-bankrupted Spirit airline. FWIW, JetBlue merger failed because a judge, appointed by Ronald Reagan, said the deal was illegal.”

Superficially, both of those statements are true. It is, indeed, the case that the “nail in the coffin” was “spiking fuel prices,” and that prices spiked because of “Trump’s war.” It is also the case that “a judge, appointed by Ronald Reagan,” endorsed the government’s brief. But neither of those facts comes close to justifying the position that Warren took in 2023, or to letting her and the politics she espouses off the hook. As Warren herself notes, Spirit was in bad shape. It had been “twice-bankrupted,” it was heavily in debt, and both its fleet and its routes had considerably diminished in size. That phrase that Warren used — “nail in the coffin” — ineluctably implies that, by the time the fatal action occurred, there was already a corpse, and that it was inside a coffin that had been almost perfectly sealed. And so there was. Spirit, by April of this year, was such a mess that any noticeable disruption — be it a jump in costs, a strike, or even a period of terrible weather — was liable to drive it into the ground. Which is why, seeing this coming, the airline had tried earlier to merge with JetBlue. If Elizabeth Warren wishes, we can all point at Donald Trump and agree that his decision to invade Iran drove in the final nail. And then, having done that, we can ask about all the others.

Jimmy Alfonso Licon explains that “the knowledge problem dooms municipal grocery stores every time.” Here’s his conclusion:

Mamdani’s grocery store will fail. Even if shoppers save a dollar over Food Bazaar, that pound of apples will include appropriated tax dollars, food waste, labor distortions, and a thousand other costs that will make it wildly more expensive than the sticker would indicate. The real price is far more expensive than a market competitor’s, even if the shelf price doesn’t show it.

The price of apples is a secret language, the communication of a billion bits of dispersed, organic, intuitive knowledge of costs, trade-offs, and alternatives. All that information, over time and geography, quietly working away in the minds of Washington apple growers and migrant fruit pickers, beekeepers and cider makers, interstate truck drivers and NYC shelf stockers, is infused into the price sticker on a pound of apples in a market-driven grocery store. And Mamdani, like hubristic dreamers before him, thinks he can wipe all that away, slap on a price that looks like success to the voters, and hide all the rest in your tax bill.

Samuel Abrams reflects on the upbringing of “faculty brats” such as Zohran Mamdani and Katie Wilson, each the child of prominent academics – and each now mayors of big American cities. Two slices:

The term faculty brat isn’t an insult. It is a description of formation. Plenty of faculty children learn to be rigorous and humble. A growing number doesn’t; they instead emerge confident, articulate, ideologically coherent and almost entirely insulated from the consequences of being wrong.

I first encountered the type as an undergraduate at Stanford and later as a graduate student at Harvard. The faculty brats were at home with the buildings, the rituals, the language, the professors. Classmates and professors alike described them as the most privileged students on campus. Elite preparatory schools produce faculty brats, too. The category has migrated upward over the past generation, into the highest reaches of finance, technology and now city government. The fluency is the same. So is the insulation. And so, I now realize, is the unearned authority.

…..

The pattern extends beyond finance. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani is the son of Mahmood Mamdani, a professor of government at Columbia and one of the most prominent postcolonial theorists in the American academy, and noted filmmaker Mira Nair. The future mayor attended Bank Street, then Bronx Science, then Bowdoin. By his own description, his upbringing was “privileged.”

In Seattle, mayor Katie Wilson is the daughter of two Binghamton University biology professors, David Sloan Wilson and Anne Barrett Clark. Her parents helped pay for her years at Oxford. They were still paying her bills, including child care, into her 40s. She’s 43. When it became a campaign issue, Ms. Wilson defended the arrangement as “relatable.”

Both mayors are intelligent. Both are well-versed in the moral vocabulary of the institutions that produced them. Both now govern cities full of people who live inside the exact constraints—rent, payroll, trade-offs, consequences—from which they have been spared. The heart of the problem isn’t that they’re unqualified. It’s that they’re unacquainted.

The deeper issue is the monoculture that produced them. On campus, trade-offs can be abstracted away. Policies are often debated for their symbolic meaning rather than their practical effects. Moral clarity becomes a substitute for empirical testing. Dissent is treated as ignorance or bad faith. That works inside a seminar room. It fails in a city. And it produces leaders who mistake the applause of their peers for evidence that they are right.

None of this is inevitable. Universities still have the capacity to form serious, grounded citizens. But doing so requires reintroducing friction. It means real engagement with economics, scarcity and the unintended effects of well-meaning policy. It means time spent outside the academic bubble.

The Editorial Board of the Washington Post tells how Transportation secretary Sean Duffy – thankfully – won out over Commerce secretary Howard Lutnick to prevent a U.S. government bailout and takeover of Spirit Airlines. A slice:

When President Donald Trump suggested that the federal government “just buy” Spirit Airlines, Duffy stood up for taxpayers. “There’s been a lot of money thrown at Spirit, and they haven’t found their way into profitability,” he said on April 21. “If no one else wants to buy them, why would we buy them?”

Phil Magness is a fan of Stephen Macedo’s and Frances Lee’s book, In Covid’s Wake. A slice:

Macedo and Lee’s investigation of the COVID era surveys multiple similar incidents in the United States and abroad. They recount how Scott Atlas, a dissenting member of the US COVID task force who opposed lockdowns, was censured and pilloried by the Stanford faculty senate for his stance. They walk the reader through the debate over COVID’s origins, showing how political considerations privileged a natural outbreak at a Chinese wet market and discouraged investigation into a possible lab-leak incident at a nearby Chinese government facility that studied bat coronaviruses. They explore how scientific journals overstated the evidence for masks, following months of contradictory claims by health officials and an ambiguous scientific literature behind them. The resulting study paints an alarming portrait of scientific collapse during the worst pandemic in a century – one where the normal mechanisms of hypothesis testing, peer review, and, at an even more fundamental level, the ability to voice scientific dissent succumbed to intense political pressures to maintain a uniform professional “consensus” behind a pro-lockdown, pro-mask, pro-mandate policy response.

The book itself is part history of how this policy response came to be, part diagnostic analysis of its failures, and part warning about the dangers that the COVID response portends for a democratic society in future public health emergencies. The authors approach these subjects as political scientists who started from different sides of the COVID issue – one began the pandemic with reservations about the emerging lockdown policies, while the other acquiesced to the initial alarm of “two weeks to flatten the curve.” Both began to notice that something was amiss with the scientific response, particularly as it privileged and embraced an aggressive COVID containment policy that eschewed Western democratic norms and resembled China’s authoritarian governance structure.

My Mercatus Center colleague Rebecca Lowe is well worth listening to.

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… is from page 316 of Thomas Sowell’s 2002 collection, Controversial Essays:

Has anyone ever asked what a full professor is full of? In some trendy new fields, the title “empty professor” would be more appropriate.

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Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal.

Editor:

Gerard Baker displays his usual impressive wisdom in decrying President Trump’s second-term pursuit of a misguided and extreme ideological agenda (“What Happened to the Pragmatic Trump of the First Term?” May 4). But Mr. Baker himself inadvertently grants the validity of one of the premises that fuels that extremism when he writes of “the elevation of international capital that ravaged communities at home.”

The correct name for “the elevation of international capital” is “free trade.” Why not use this term? It better reveals the innocent increased freedom of ordinary people to spend their incomes as they choose, while avoiding the mistaken suggestion that a lowering of trade barriers benefits Davos-vacationing capitalists at the expense of the masses.

And where are these “ravaged communities at home”? Politicians and pundits incessantly talk about these communities, but serious attempts to locate them encounter difficulties. The economist Jeremy Horpedahl studied the ten metropolitan statistical areas in the U.S. that suffered the largest negative hits during the infamous “China Shock” of a quarter-century ago. According to Horpedahl, “all of the MSAs hit hard by the China Shock still managed to have significant and positive real wage growth across the distribution since 2001…. Wage gains in several of these places, in fact, are better than the national trends.”

Whenever economic change occurs, some particular workers lose jobs, and some particular locations lose business and population. Economic growth requires economic change and adjustment. It always has and always will. But the story of America is that ordinary people not only recover over time, but become wealthier. It’s an error to single out the freer trade of the past few decades as a unique source of economic change that justifies greater skepticism of globalization.

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