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Here’s wisdom from the Washington Post‘s Editorial Board about the dollar’s role in global commerce. A slice:

A former French president once referred to the dollar’s global status as America’s “exorbitant privilege” because it allows lower borrowing costs. It achieved this special status organically because of trust in U.S. institutions, stable governance and open markets. That comes from history and experience, not an autocrat’s edict. The U.S. can squander those assets faster than China could ever seize them.

Robby Soave is correct: “The Epstein files are becoming a witch hunt.” A slice:

The best thing that can be said about the release of the Epstein files is that it sheds light on the incredibly poor discernment of several individuals who are influential in public policy. This is useful information that the public has a right to know.

But the release of the Epstein files has also meant that millions of documents containing thinly-sourced accusations, misleading information, and outright falsehoods are now flooding social media, giving a veneer of confirmation to rumors, gossip, and lies. This is very much by design, since Congress—by a vote of 427–1 in the House—opted to disclose everything, including transcripts of investigations, and reports that were never deemed truthful.

Andrew Follett makes a good case that the United States needs “a private-sector overhaul of U.S. space exploration.” A slice:

The problems with the government-run space program are baked into the program’s very design. In order to achieve political buy-in, NASA built SLS in a manner which essentially bought-off every political group involved in space exploration. It was effectively designed by a committee to maximize political efficiency with contractors spread across all 50 states, essentially every major government Prime Contractor, and NASA Center. As I’ve previously written, achieving such buy-in increases the total costs of the program via de facto bribery, risking the program’s future from “sticker shock” as well as huge delays in mission design, as everyone’s pet technology gets deemed mission critical in order to buy their support. If any of these many pet technologies go wrong, the mission will be delayed, as occurred with Artemis in 2021 when NASA’s Inspector General released a report deeming Moon plans unfeasible because of significant delays in developing the mission’s spacesuits, which the agency had more than a decade to do.

This is an inherent feature of government contracting: prioritizing political payoffs to constituents over achieving the mission. SpaceX’s Elon Musk has rightly noted that NASA has “too many cooks in the kitchen.” This is why increased government funding seems to be, if anything, inversely linked to progress in science, because it takes money from more efficient private sector firms and gives the cash to political graft. Inflation-adjusted annual federal research funding exploded from $2 billion in 1953 to $60 billion today — a factor of 30. This is roughly equivalent to the cost of two inflation-adjusted Manhattan Projects going to federal research funding, but to be sure, we aren’t getting 30 times the scientific breakthroughs today as we were in 1953, when a series of revolutionary space technologies were literally rapidly taking off.

The Artemis delay is the latest reminder that the turning to the private sector offers us a better chance of maintaining our space superiority. Private ventures, such as Musk’s SpaceX, are exponentially more efficient since they have no incentive to inflate costs by including their own pet technologies as their own money is at stake. People spend their own money more carefully than they spend taxpayer dollars collected from others.

Wise words from Warren Coats.

Jeffrey Miron calls for cuts to entitlements rather than to immigration. A slice:

America’s fiscal issues don’t arise from the impacts of new immigrants; rather, they stem from existing, overly generous transfer programs. A recent financial report by the Bureau of the Fiscal Service warns that entitlement spending, particularly Medicare and Social Security, is on an unsustainable path. Indeed, the CBO projects that spending on Medicare and Social Security as a percentage of GDP is increasing at a far higher rate than federal revenue growth due to aging demographics.

It is important to clarify that the unsustainable nature of such transfer programs is independent of the participation of immigrants. According to this study, legal immigrants consumed “24% less welfare and entitlement benefits than native-born Americans” in 2023. This is largely because immigrants arrive young, thus entering entitlement programs later, and take many years to naturalize.

Moreover, the same legal immigrants actually reduce the strain on transfer programs as their tax contributions far outweigh their fiscal burden. A 2024 study states that “legal immigrants increase natives’ welfare [because their] tax contributions … greatly exceed the benefits they receive, thereby reducing the tax burden on natives.” Quantitatively, this study examining the net fiscal effect of immigration found that in 2023, immigrants paid $1.3 trillion in taxes while only receiving $761 billion in benefits. In fact, over the 30-year period from 1994 to 2023, immigrants had a positive net fiscal impact of $14.47 trillion. Even after considering second-generation immigrant children, the figure remains positive at $7.93 trillion.

Here’s another reminder that the goons in charge in Beijing are evil (not that any such reminder is now necessary).

Also decrying the evil of the overlords in Beijing – an evil recently manifest in the formal sentencing of the heroic Jimmy Lai – is the Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal . A slice:

Monday’s sentencing of Jimmy Lai to 20 years in prison is a profound injustice to the publisher, but it also marks a symbolic end of an era. It confirms that Hong Kong, which was promised autonomy for 50 years after 1997, is now firmly under the iron boot of Beijing.

The sentencing marks the end of the 26-month trial of the owner of Apple Daily on trumped up charges of sedition and conspiracy to collude with foreign powers. But it also marks the end of the larger dream that Hong Kong could—under Chinese rule—preserve the freedoms that had transformed it from a barren rock into a beacon of hope and opportunity.

This was the question hanging over Hong Kong’s future when Britain and China issued a Joint Declaration in 1984 laying out the terms of Hong Kong’s return to Chinese sovereignty. Would China’s Communist Party uphold the rights and freedoms a free-market society requires? Sad experience said no, and we expressed our doubts at the time.

“The essence of the declaration,” we wrote more than 40 years ago, “is that five million largely free people will soon have their futures determined by a totalitarian government not known for tolerance or stability.” That editorial was headlined “Promises, Promises.”

With Jimmy Lai, our fears have been realized. The 20-year sentence might as well be a death sentence for the 78-year-old newspaper man. He is in ill health and has spent most of the last five years in solitary confinement, the lone window fixed to block sunlight. Along the way, the Hong Kong government denied him his choice of lawyer and stole his newspaper without a court order. Six former Apple Daily executives also received multi-year sentences on Monday.

This isn’t the way Hong Kong operated under Britain. It isn’t the way a world trade and financial center operates. But it is the way of Hong Kong under Chinese rule.

James Pethokoukis makes clear “how regulation helped break US homebuilding.”

Yair Rosenberg tweets: (HT Scott Lincicome)

I think it’s awesome that American Olympians, unlike those from authoritarian police states like China and Iran, can say smart/dumb/political/other things about their country in public without fear of government sanction. That freedom beats every gold medal on the planet.

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… is from page one of Georgetown University business-school professor John Hasnas’s 2024 Oxford University Press book, Common Law Liberalism: A New Theory of the Libertarian Society:

Since early in my career, I have been a skeptic of the conventional approach to political philosophy, which focuses exclusively on the actions of government. Invariably, this approach traces back to the thinking of Hobbes and Locke, who view government as the necessary cure for the ills of the state of nature. This approach views the world as one in which human conduct is regulated by the conscious actions of those invested with government power or is not regulated at all. Since my first year of law school in which I encountered the impressive edifice of the common law – law that evolved without conscious human direction – I have regarded this model of the world and its corresponding conception of political philosophy as deeply flawed.

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John Sailer reports on how the Mellon Foundation is doing exactly what Joseph Schumpeter predicted: Using the fruits of capitalism to attack capitalism (in this case, by funding anti-intellectual ‘intellectuals’ at universities). Two slices:

The University of Virginia launched a hiring spree in 2020 as it pledged to become “a racial-equity-focused university.” A special initiative promised to recruit 30 postdoctoral fellows and “open the gateway” for them to fill tenure-track jobs. One current fellow’s specialties include “transfeminisms” and “genderqueer life writing.” Another researches how Filipino nurses resist “racial capitalism.”

The program owes its existence to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which funded it to the tune of $5 million. With a $7.7 billion endowment, the Mellon Foundation is the nation’s largest supporter of the arts and humanities. Its annual giving has long dwarfed that of the National Endowment for the Humanities. In recent years, it has been refashioned as a tool for advancing an identitarian vision of social justice. For academia, the consequences are far-reaching.

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Students who specialize in intersectional neologisms will be well prepared for Mellon-funded faculty jobs. In 2023, Ohio State put out a job ad for an “Assistant Professor of Black Sexualities,” noting a recent $2 million Mellon Foundation gift that funded 10 new faculty positions. Zalika Ibaorimi, the professor hired for the job, lists “Black Porn” and “Black Sexual Logics” among her areas of expertise.

Mellon has bankrolled many professors notorious for their activism. At the Socialism 2025 conference, Assistant Prof. Eman Abdelhadi referred to her employer, the University of Chicago, as “evil” and a “colonial landlord,” but conceded that working there was useful for political organizing. Ms. Abdelhadi came up through the University of Chicago’s Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, a longstanding Mellon-funded hiring program. A few months after the conference, she was arrested at an anti-ICE protest and charged with two counts of aggravated battery to a police officer. She has pleaded not guilty.

Mellon’s funding has amplified a bleak trajectory for the academy. Today, a young person drawn to traditional fields like military history or classics should think twice before entering academia. A young scholar who “advances an anti-capitalist, prison abolitionist agenda,” as one Ohio State professor puts it, can find abundant support, especially from the Mellon Foundation. Higher education reform will only succeed when this unfortunate trend is reversed.

GMU Econ alum Paul Mueller talks with AIER’s president Sam Gregg about “why the battle for free markets has shifted from a technical argument to a deeply moral one.”

Dominic Pino tweets: (HT Scott Lincicome)

Contrary to the popular narrative about the “globalist” Americans and Europeans, it has consistently been the U.S. and the EU that have opposed trade liberalization in agriculture, while Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South American countries have supported it.

J.D. Tuccille describes the Trump administration’s “conflicted relationship with the Second Amendment.” A slice:

The Trump administration has a problem when it comes to the Second Amendment. A large part of its base consists of people who firmly believe in the right to keep and bear arms. But that right, as protected by the Second Amendment, empowers the individual and stands as a challenge to the authority of the state.

This creates an awkward situation for a president and his coterie who don’t like being challenged or even criticized. That’s why we see administration officials arguing in favor of self-defense rights one moment while challenging the right to keep and bear arms at another.

Here’s David Henderson’s new biography, for the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, of the great trade economist Jagdish Bhagwati. Two slices:

Economist Jagdish Bhagwati has made fundamental contributions to the studies of international trade, tariffs and quotas, and of industrial development. One of his most important contributions on tariffs was to show that when markets suffer from distortions or government policies cause distortions in a domestic economy, tariffs are never the best solution; for any given distortion there is always a domestic policy that is more efficient than tariffs in correcting the distortion. Another important contribution was to show that tariffs and quotas on imports are equivalent only under restrictive assumptions. Bhagwati has written numerous thoughtful defenses of free trade and critiques of protectionist policies. He wrote the entry titled “Protectionism” for this Encyclopedia.

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Bhagwati often identified arguments for restricting trade that could be misused by advocates of protectionism. For instance, in discussing economist Laura Tyson’s claim that the U.S. government should protect industries that produced positive externalities, Bhagwati wrote, “But the problem with this is that it is very hard for policymakers, and very easy for lobbyists, to decide which industries have the externalities.” Bhagwati quoted Robert Solow’s statement that although he knew there many industries where there were four dollars’ worth of social output to one dollar’s worth of private output, he didn’t know which ones they were.

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… is from page 201 of the original edition of volume III (“The Political Order of a Free People,” 1979) of F.A. Hayek’s Law, Legislation, and Liberty:

Unfortunately, techniques of research can be readily learnt, and the facility with them lead to teaching positions, by men who understand little of the subject investigated, and their work is then often mistaken for science. But without a clear conception of the problems the state of theory raises, empirical work is usually a waste of time and resources.

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Phil Magness traces the “postliberal” war on economics to one especially prominent postliberal ‘thinker’ being duped by outlandishly apocalyptic claims about the environment. Three slices:

In 2007, a prominent conservative academic predicted civilization would collapse within months. The culprit: peak oil. The collapse never came but the philosophy he built around it—postliberalism—is now in the White House.

The growing influence of postliberals is undeniable, but liberals on the left and right seem taken aback, confused about an ideology that marries extreme social conservatism with a hostility to mainstream economics, the latter a conventionally left-wing position.

In recent years, a large focus of my work was explaining how the 1619 Project made big, provocative claims about the nation’s founding and was forced to backpedal once actual historians began checking the receipts. I find myself again in a similar role as I engage with the postliberal right.

This is a series that will help liberals understand this Frankenstein ideology and where its weak points are. This first installment will focus on the postliberal right’s war on economics.

The postliberals’ master explanation for why everything feels off is to blame free markets, libertarianism, liberalism, “neoliberalism,” or even just plain economics. To hear them tell it, everything is the fault of liberalism: declining birth rates, fentanyl addiction, family breakdown, environmental degradation, cultural decay, illegal immigration, the 2008 to 2009 financial crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, a reported wave of angry, listless young men … the list goes on.

But postliberalism’s critique of economics is intellectually shallow — its proponents don’t understand the discipline they attack, and their anti-market philosophy originated in a failed prediction that they’ve quietly abandoned while keeping the grievances.

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The explosion of economic prosperity from the 18^th-century stirrings of the Industrial Revolution to the present day depended upon fossil fuel in the literal sense. In [Patrick] Deneen’s reasoning, that fuel came from a limited resource that would soon be depleted. The Great Enrichment of the modern era, and indeed humanity’s escape from the multi-thousand-year Malthusian Trap of hunger and stagnation, only came about through artificial means that elevated humanity’s economic consumption beyond its “natural” state.

Modernity borrowed from the planet’s future to give itself material comforts. Liberalism functioned as a rationalizing ethos for this resource extraction, but with it came a cultural degradation that supposedly eroded ancient social bonds of family and community. And the entire liberal economic façade, Deneen predicted, would soon come crashing down as nature’s hard constraint of Peak Oil enforced itself upon a society under the spell of rapacious libertarian prophets of consumption.

Except the Peak Oil-induced collapse, said to be only months away in 2007, never happened.

Deneen quietly abandoned Peak Oil Theory, and with it a draft academic paper entitled “Peak Oil and Political Theory: The End of Modernity?” that he presented at several conferences in the late 2000s. He simply swapped in a different set of crises rooted in less tangible claims about an accelerating cultural collapse.

By 2021, he had found another target by turning his sights on the American Founding itself. “We must see this jointly created, invented tradition of America as a fundamentally or solely liberal nation as a recent innovation,” he declared in a keynote address at the National Conservatism conference. Using language lightly cribbed from his Peak Oil musings a decade earlier, Deneen denounced the individualist, free-market, and liberty-minded legacy of 1776 as “an invented tradition that has been launched in the service of a rapacious ruling class.”

No matter the occasion of the problem, free markets and economic libertarians were somehow always its underlying cause.

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JD Vance, for example, described his conversion to Trumpism at the 2019 American Conservative gala by crediting the president for “explicitly attacking the libertarian consensus that I think had animated much of Republican economic thinking.” No other candidate, he claimed, had been willing to confront this alleged source of Vance’s social grievances. Vance is personal friends with Deneen and [Gladden] Pappin, and he has credited both for guiding him on his own conversion to the postliberal movement.

Postliberals are now in a position to test their theories. If they’re wrong — as the historical and developing modern record suggests — Americans will pay higher prices for the privilege of watching a tiny minority view of the “common good” fail to materialize. The economists they’ve spent two decades scapegoating will be the least of their problems.

Dan Hannan reports bad news: “the kids are alt-right.” A slice:

Young men are turning to fascism. I don’t use that word lightly. Hypochondriac leftists apply it to everything they dislike, from farmers’ markets to air travel. Still, when I see the combination of antisemitism, white nationalism, hostility to markets, and apologias for actual, literal Nazism (notably through the elevation of Adolf Hitler’s legal apologist, Carl Schmitt), I don’t know what other word to use.

George Will applauds a federal judge’s rebuke of Kristi Noem. Two slices:

Shrill but useful — useful because she is so shrill — Kristi Noem has elicited from a federal judge a valuable 83-page tutorial. The secretary of homeland security, her mind as closed as a clam, will not benefit from Judge Ana C. Reyes’s explanation of immigration law. Other Americans will.

On Dec. 1, Noem shared on X this thought: “I am recommending a full travel ban on every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies” who “slaughter our heroes, suck dry our hard-earned tax dollars, or snatch the benefits owed to AMERICANS. WE DON’T WANT THEM. NOT ONE.” This was three days after Noem officially “determined” that she would terminate, effective Feb. 3, temporary protected status for about 353,000 Haitians who have found refuge here.

Last Monday, Reyes, of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, the nation’s second-most important court, blocked Noem’s order. Reyes said the process that produced it was so riddled with lawlessness that the plaintiffs would likely prevail in a trial.

The five Haitian plaintiffs include a neuroscientist researching Alzheimer’s disease, a national bank’s software engineer, a laboratory assistant in a toxicology department, a college economics major and a full-time registered nurse. No leeches joined the suit.

Here’s Jason Willick on Tucker Carlson. A slice:

One lesson of the past 10 years of Carlson’s career is that the political establishment’s ability to erect a firewall against certain ideas has collapsed. Advertisers boycotted Carlson’s Fox News show over his abrasive racial commentary; now that same kind of communication is the lingua franca of a presidential administration that won the popular vote. Carlson is a force to be reckoned with in the GOP, and curbing the influence of his most toxic ideas will require more than declaring them beyond the pale. It will require a politically successful Republican presidency, which, Carlson’s trajectory reminds us, the country hasn’t experienced for decades.

Richard Epstein and Max Raskin correct the historically ignorant (alas, she’s not alone) Billie Eilish. Two slices:

Billie Eilish brought the house down at the Grammy Awards on Sunday when she declared, “No one is illegal on stolen land.” While the first half of the statement was a fan favorite aimed at President Donald Trump and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the second half was a throwback evoking popular land declarations this past decade that consider all land stolen if not derived from an original indigenous title. But it’s time to put Eilish’s theory of property out to pasture: Americans are not thieves who built on stolen land.

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All disputes must come to an orderly legal end because life, commerce, and even the Grammys must go on. Statutes of limitation and doctrines such as adverse possession clearly provide that you must sue by a certain date or your title is gone, no matter how maliciously acquired. So while “pure” theory has said since Roman times that “prior in time means higher in right,” in the real world of rough and tumble conflicts and imperfect records, matters of proof and reliance cut back on these theoretical rights. Put concretely: Do Anglo-Saxons take England back from the Normans? That would be civilizational suicide.

Noah Rothman warns against embracing AI pessimism. Two slices:

The populist temptations to rush to the head of this ongoing parade are obvious and alluring. But is it in the interest of this administration to foster more of the economic anxiety that has bedeviled this presidency from almost the outset of Trump’s second term? Is it wise for the governing party to go hammer and tongs after an innovation that is responsible for much of the productivity growth in this economy, or the investments in it, which contributed substantially to surprisingly robust GDP growth in 2025?

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“Government programs have provided a cushion to displaced workers, but they have also impeded the transitions,” the Hudson Institute’s Michael Solon and former Senator Phil Gramm wrote in the Wall Street Journal this week. The authors came armed with a variety of examples of well-meaning efforts to shelter the public from technology-fueled economic dislocation. Ultimately, those initiatives were to the detriment of the workers who were displaced (as they invariably would have been) for longer than they might have been in the absence of public sector interventions. Indeed, hamstringing AI would not just cripple America in its geopolitical race with its adversaries abroad. It would also deprive the public of the instruments of their salvation.

Just as electrification displaced millions of workers but also produced new productivity gains and more capital to invest in services and industries that became the vocations into which those workers later settled, AI will be the cause of and the solution to economic displacement. The alternative is sclerosis and stasis, as Gramm and Solon write:

A feel-good expansion of our existing programs to address AI transitions could idle tens of millions of workers, squander much of the economic benefit we hope to derive from AI, and foster a dangerous “bread and circuses” political system in which those who have chosen to remain outside the labor force demand an increasing share of the benefits created by those who have chosen to work.

Even the most dogmatic techno-pessimist should not dismiss the extent to which AI doomsayers are engaged in a campaign of special pleading that is designed to grease the skids for a big-government solution to the “problem” of AI. Elsewhere in the Journal this week, Barton Swaim makes an excellent case for skepticism toward AI apocalypticism, much of which is coming from the technology’s developers themselves.

The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal observes this about Florida: “The state passed an E-Verify law. Job growth quickly declined.” Two slices:

The Sunshine State’s job growth was consistently among the highest in the U.S. during the pandemic and the prior decade thanks to low taxes and a pro-business environment. Covid lockdowns in progressive states supercharged Florida’s population and workforce growth. But in May 2023, Florida Republicans passed legislation aimed at countering Joe Biden’s porous border policies.

The law’s centerpiece requires private employers with 25 or more employees to use the federal government’s E-Verify system to confirm the work authorization of new hires. Violations could result in $1,000 daily fines and suspension of a business’s license. Gov. Ron DeSantis claimed to be “fighting back against reckless federal government policies.”

There’s no doubt the migrant surge burdened some communities. But the E-Verify mandate makes it harder for migrants to work to support themselves, and it adds a burden on employers. E-Verify can also be unreliable because it relies on federal records that aren’t always up to date. That means it can disqualify some immigrants with valid work permits.

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There’s little evidence that undocumented migrants are taking jobs from Americans. The reality is that employers can’t find enough Americans willing to work in the fields or hang drywall, even at attractive wages. Farm hands in Florida who work year-round earn roughly $47,000, which is more than what some young college graduates earn.

The Editorial Board of the Washington Post explains that “Bad Bunny is a free-market success story.” A slice:

Americans threatening to boycott Super Bowl XL because they disagree with the headliners’ political views are missing the point. The halftime show is about entertaining millions of Americans, and the NFL chose Puerto Rican singer Bad Bunny to perform because he is extremely popular with the massive global audience that will be tuning in.

It’s also worth noting that Bad Bunny represents a triumph of American capitalism: he went from bagging groceries and uploading songs on SoundCloud to global stardom because he has produced a product that millions of people are willing to pay for. His album “Debí Tirar Más Fotos” made him Spotify’s top artist in 2025, the fourth time he earned the distinction. His songs were streamed nearly 20 billion times last year.

“Most Americans hate Trump’s tariffs” – so reports Reason‘s Jack Nicastro.

National Review‘s Editors point out that Jeff Bezos isn’t ethically, economically, or legally obliged to subsidize losses at any business that he owns, including the Washington Post. A slice:

Without a doubt, it is deeply unfortunate when people lose their jobs — particularly in an industry where there are fewer than ever to go around. But Jeff Bezos is a businessman. He is not required to absorb limitless financial losses, particularly to maintain an institution whose ideological focus he feels to be misplaced. Demanding that he act otherwise reeks of entitlement.

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… is from page 10 of Robert Higgs’s excellent May 2005 study “Fear: The Foundation of Every Government’s Power” as this study is expanded, revised, and printed in Higgs’s 2007 book, Neither Liberty Nor Safety (link added):

Karl Marx famously declared that religion is the opiate of the people. Not so famously but equally correctly, Raymond Aron (1957) called collectivism, especially in its Marxist variant, “the opium of the intellectuals.”

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Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal.

Editor:

Barton Swaim wisely cautions against swallowing any of the many predictions that AI will cause massive unemployment (“Is AI the Next Climate Change?” February 5). Such predictions have been commonplace at least since British hand-weavers – led by the fictional Ned Ludd more than 200 years ago – warned that labor-saving power looms spelled doom for ordinary workers.

The value of economic activity is in its ability to satisfy human wants. As long as humans have wants that AI, machines, and other nonhuman processes cannot fully satisfy, there will be a demand, in market economies, for human labor to help to satisfy those wants. AI will cause massive “unemployment” only when it satisfies human wants so massively that most of us will experience heaven on earth. That day, unfortunately, will never come.

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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My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy, reminds us that wealth taxes are failures. A slice:

When government grows to dominate ever-larger shares of the economy, and when politicians refuse to be responsible about what they spend, there’s a predictable next move: Insist that the problem is “the rich” not paying enough. Never mind that high earners already shoulder a disproportionate share of the tax burden. Never mind that relying on a small and mobile group of people for the bulk of your revenue makes public finances more volatile, not more stable.

No, once spending is treated as untouchable and restraint as politically impossible, it’s only a matter of time before politics demands more, more, more. More taxes and more distortion. This helps explain why wild new forms of wealth taxes are popping up.

California voters are heading toward a November ballot fight over a so-called one-time 5 percent tax on billionaires’ net worth, tied to residency on a date that’s already passed. Illinois lawmakers recently flirted with a tax on unrealized gains—think of stocks yet to be sold at fluctuating prices that only exist on paper—before retreating. And New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani wants a wealth tax to help close the city’s roughly $12 billion budget gap. Prominent progressive Democrats have explicitly endorsed national wealth taxes (e.g., proposals from Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren).

Different places, same impulse: Avoid hard fiscal decisions by squeezing a narrow group harder.

A wealth tax is not like the income or consumption taxes we’re used to. In theory, it’s a cut of a person’s entire stock of assets (less their liabilities). In its classic form, a wealth tax is assessed annually. Newer examples in the U.S. appear as onetime levies or use a “mark-to-market” system to tax unrealized gains, treating appreciation as income. However it’s packaged, the economic logic is the same.

Wealth taxes are also a uniquely blunt and damaging instrument. Across advanced economies, they have repeatedly been narrowed or even repealed after delivering disappointing revenue, tax avoidance, capital flight, and costly administrative battles. The international record is decisively negative no matter what convoluted arguments their supporters want to use in America.

Phil Gramm and Mike Solon wisely counsel resistance to the use of government to ease AI-caused job transitions. A slice:

A consensus has formed that while artificial intelligence may create new and better jobs, its threat to current job holders requires massive new government training programs, unemployment assistance, income supplement programs and even a guaranteed minimum income. Missing from this rush to expand the government’s social safety net is any recognition that previous efforts to cushion the transition from jobs of the past to jobs of the future have done little to benefit those making the transition—and have raised the cost for society as a whole.

Societal gains from technological change come from what the economist Joseph Schumpeter called “the wave of creative destruction.” The lost jobs and investments rendered unprofitable by new technology free up labor and capital that can be redeployed to produce new and higher-valued goods and services. The more seamlessly the transition from the old to the new, the greater the gain from the new technology. “American exceptionalism,” our ability to generate and sustain higher living standards, has come in part from developing new technology and benefiting from being the first to implement it, and in part from our ability to move labor and capital dislocated by the wave of creative destruction efficiently into higher and better uses.

On average, every month since 2000 some 5.1 million American workers were separated from their jobs or were laid off and more than 5.2 million new jobs were created. In 2025, three times as many Americans changed jobs as did workers in the European Union. So inefficient is the Chinese economy in dealing with creative destruction that most industrial subsidies in China are used to sustain noncompetitive businesses. In short, the U.S. channels the wave of creative destruction through the economic system more efficiently than any other country in the world, and we are constantly enriched by it.

Government programs have provided a cushion to displaced workers, but they have also impeded the transitions. The 1962 Trade Adjustment Assistance program, which provided training, job-search and income support to workers harmed by foreign trade, has provided benefits to more than five million people. Numerous public and private studies have highlighted TAA’s failure by comparing the transition of TAA beneficiaries with workers who lost their jobs during the same period but didn’t receive TAA. Studies by the Government Accountability Office, the Labor Department and the U.S. International Trade Commission agree that TAA is insufficient in supporting dislocated workers to re-enter the labor market. It didn’t improve earnings. Benefits were used mostly as income support, and nonparticipants were re-employed faster than those who participated in TAA.

The Washington Post‘s Editorial Board reports on the much-anticipated release of the Cato Institute’s American Abundance Index. A slice:

The resilience of the American worker is one of the most underreported stories of the 2020s. From red tape to import taxes, successive governments have erected barriers to success. Yet America’s workers have persevered and figured out ways to prosper.

A new American Abundance Index illustrates this. The project from Human Progress, an arm of the Cato Institute, reveals the steady rise of the average worker’s purchasing power. The premise of the index is simple: how many hours do you need to work, compared to the month or year before, to be able to afford the “basket of goods,” which is a standard set of household items and services that comprise the Consumer Price Index used to calculate inflation.
The “time price” is how many hours of work it takes to purchase the basket of goods. The “abundance” is how much of the basket one hour of work can buy. The story told by the index is a very good one: since recordkeeping began, “abundance” for average private sector workers comes out to a net increase of 13.8 percent.

Scott Lincicome, Clark Packard, and Alfredo Carrillo Obregon report on a lawsuit that “exposes how opaque enforcement compounds the US tariff complexity problem.” A slice:

First, as complex as the US tariff system in 2026 may seem from a 30,000-foot view—Cato’s tariff complexity flowchart below should give you an idea—it’s even more impenetrable for the companies and, especially, the small businesses that must interpret or navigate the system daily. The ambiguity and obscurity of the system’s rules amplify these costs, especially when applied to complex imports or, as the Express Fasteners case shows, when interpreted in a surprisingly protectionist way by CBP. If a company’s interpretation of these rules doesn’t align with CBP’s version, that compnay can face unexpected—and inflated—tariff liabilities and maybe even penalties for noncompliance.

Trump’s call to nationalize elections has the Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal understandably wonder if Democrats might now see the wisdom and prudence of federalism. Two slices:

Republicans spent four years under President Biden opposing a Democratic push to nationalize elections, so naturally President Trump is now calling on the GOP to nationalize elections. Thankfully, Senate Majority Leader John Thune has a memory that begins before 2025 and foresight that extends past 2028.

“The Republicans should say, we want to take over, we should take over the voting in at least—many, 15 places,” the President told a podcast on Monday. “The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.” Mr. Trump claimed illegal aliens are casting ballots in vast numbers, and that not only was 2020 stolen, but he won Minnesota three times. Minnesota is a reliably blue state that not even Ronald Reagan carried in 1984.

Voter fraud happens, and the price of freedom is vigilance, but the idea that noncitizens are swaying national elections isn’t borne out by the evidence. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger ran an audit in 2024 of the state’s 8.2 million registered voters. It found 20 noncitizens, 11 of whom never cast a ballot, plus another 156 people whose status was unclear and who were sent for investigation.

“This is the most comprehensive citizenship check ever conducted in the history of Georgia,” Mr. Raffensperger said. As a reminder, Mr. Biden won the state in 2020 by 11,779 votes, which is a big enough number that if it were phony Mr. Trump’s campaign ought to have been able to find real evidence.

…..

Mr. Trump’s call to nationalize elections is a mistake for the GOP, since Democrats will be only too eager to try again, on their terms, the nanosecond they regain power. Instead Democrats should thank their lucky stars for America’s decentralized system. They say Mr. Trump is a budding authoritarian, yet the Constitution gives him little power over the 2026 midterms that could be a Republican wipeout.

On this, the 115th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s birth, Daniel Rothschild wonders if hope remains for Reagan’s call for “informed patriotism.” A slice:

The phrase “informed patriotism” was a considered one: President Reagan’s call was not for cheap jingoism but for love of country “grounded in thoughtfulness and knowledge” and informed by an “appreciation of its institutions.” This is consistent with his lifelong view of American exceptionalism as something materially different from American superiority; our exceptionalism stems from the righteousness of our cause and integrity of our institutions, not anything inherent in the American soil.

Regrettably, the national pride of Reagan’s era has dimmed considerably. In 2025, the percentage who said they were “extremely” or “very” proud to be Americans dipped to an all-time low in the 25 years that Gallup has been asking this question. A third of Americans told pollsters that seeing the American flag makes them feel bad. The patriotic recession is acute among the young: One in three of those under 35 report they are only a little or not at all proud of their country, and Millennials and Zoomers are far less likely than their elders to believe that America is exceptional among nations.

Nor are Americans particularly well informed. A 2024 survey by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni found majorities of undergraduates ignorant of such basic questions as when the Constitution was written, the substance of the First Amendment, and what’s included in the Gettysburg Address. Last year, a U.S. Chamber of Commerce study found that Americans could only answer about half of a battery of basic civics questions. A 2018 report found that most American adults lacked basic knowledge of American history from the Revolution through World War II.

How did we get here? Much of the fault for today’s waning patriotism can be placed at the feet of the American left. A generation ago, the left generally advocated a “warts and all” approach to teaching American history and inculcating informed patriotism; teaching the treatment of Native Americans, slavery, Jim Crow, nativism, and empire was inherent to teaching the story of America. This narrative spent more time dwelling on America’s blemishes than conservatives would prefer, but it placed those deficiencies in the context of a creedal (though few on the left would say covenantal) nation with great aspirations.

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… is from pages 150-151 of the 2005 Liberty Fund edition, edited by Bettina Bien Greaves and translated from the original German by Ralph Raico, of Ludwig von Mises’s 1927 book, Liberalism:

Liberalism is no religion, no world view, no party of special interests. It is no religion because it demands neither faith nor devotion, because there is nothing mystical about it, and because it has no dogmas. It is no worldview because it does not try to explain the cosmos and because it says nothing and does not seek to say anything about the meaning and purpose of human existence. It is no party of special interests because it does not provide or seek to provide any special advantage whatsoever to any individual or any group.