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Reason‘s Katherine Mangu-Ward has a wonderful piece in the New York Times, a core point being that Trump’s continuing abuse of executive power will be abused also by the Democrats when they return to power. Although Trump, of course, is not the first U.S. president to abuse executive power, he is unquestionably and inexcusably accelerating that abuse. The precedent is ominous.

As noted a couple of weeks ago by Daily Kos,

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wants to adopt the Republican interpretation of power. Apparently, she’s not the only one. It also appears Sen Elizabeth Warren wants to be a Republican as well or, perhaps more accurately, another Donald Trump. In a recent piece done by NOTUS , Sen Warren, Rep Ocasio-Cortez, and other leaders (and potential Presidential candidates) in the Democratic party “…expressed a willingness to use the new tools Trump has carved out, saying that if Republicans can do it, Democrats can too.”

Here are two slices from Mangu-Ward’s essay:

On immigration, speech and trade, Americans are living in a libertarian’s nightmare. Masked federal officials are swarming areas far from the border, shooting American citizens and whisking away children in the name of immigration enforcement. Armed National Guardsmen walk the streets of several cities under the banner of vague emergency mandates to maintain law and order. Legal visa holders are being deported for expressing their opinions on Gaza and Charlie Kirk. Tariffs on China have been set at 10, 20, 54, 145 and 30 percent in just the past few months. TikTok, Intel, U.S. Steel and their ownership have become matters in which the president has taken a personal interest — and threatened dire consequences if his wishes are not taken into account.

These stories are examples of a terrifying pattern and an undeniable vindication of the long-held libertarian view that the steady growth in the size of the federal government and executive power would lead to precisely this kind of runaway authoritarianism.

Libertarians have argued that the only way to prevent such abuses is to reduce the power of the federal government — abolish unaccountable federal agencies, scale back the administrative state, cut spending — and to restore the balance of powers by reining in the executive. This path has generally been treated as hopelessly naïve at best and morally suspect at worst.

The major parties have pulled away from the libertarian elements of their coalitions (small-government, free-market types for the Republicans and civil libertarians for the Democrats), preferring instead the instant gratification of grasping power and wielding it as aggressively as possible for the period they hold it. Libertarian voices have gradually gone quiet in the halls of the capital — bullied into silence, primaried out or resigning in despair.

Yet it has never been more obvious that the grab-and-grow approach to power is a destructive and self-defeating way to conduct politics.

…..

But the project of growing executive power has been bipartisan. On speech, officials in the Biden administration leaned on social media platforms to take down what they deemed Covid and election misinformation without explicit action from the F.C.C. The Supreme Court disposed of a case, Murthy v. Missouri, challenging this jawboning, as it is called, leaving the possibility of backdoor censorship wide open.

The executive’s discretionary economic powers — subsidies, stakes in corporations and tariffs — have proved irresistible, too. The administration has spent billions of dollars to take ownership stakes in private companies like Intel and U.S. Steel.

And Mr. Trump’s tariffs — leveled and removed at will and without the participation of Congress, where the Constitution places the primary power — have disrupted and destabilized the global economy and undermined America’s role in it.

While libertarians were hardly alone in championing free trade, what we have been hollering for years is that tariffs are and can only ever be taxes on Americans. To treat them as leverage, war by other means or simply a sign of the president’s displeasure is to fundamentally misuse and misunderstand the nature of a tariff.

Yes.

Trump & Co. are hostile to genuine liberalism – and, hence, hostile to the institutions and norms that promote social cooperation, peace, and prosperity. This reality is plain as day to all but the most MAGA-benighted. But also hostile to genuine liberalism and its fruits are people on the progressive left (whose policy preferences are not as different from those of the MAGA right as partisans in either camp suppose them to be).

It’s not uncommon nowadays to encounter people who criticize libertarians and classical liberals for reminding the world that many of the political enemies of Trump are also enemies of liberalism and the open society. But such reminders – as offered by Mangu-Ward – are necessary lest in our urgency to rid the body politic of one malignant tumor we replace that tumor with another malignant tumor.

Exposing the many misdeeds and dangers of Trump and MAGA is an important task. No less important is exposing the many misdeeds and dangers of the progressive left. Even if we could be certain that the latter is the lesser of these two terrible evils – a possibility to which I’m inclined but not at all sure of – it is a strategic and tactical mistake to suppose that the only task worthy of friends of liberalism today is to criticize Trump and MAGA while treating the progressive political enemies of our MAGA enemy as, if not our actual friends, our trustworthy allies. To criticize the progressive left is not to praise MAGA, to prop-up Trump, or to otherwise support the current administration.

Anyone who is so certain that the likes of Zohran Mamdani, AOC, Ilhan Omar, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Kamala Harris pose a significantly lesser danger over the long-run to liberalism than does MAGA as to justify muting criticisms of today’s Democrats and their media cheerleaders in order to focus criticism exclusively on MAGA is, I submit, naive.

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Arnold Kling reflects on his first five weeks of teaching at UATX.

David Bahnsen is understandably unimpressed with Oren Cass’s economically uninformed criticisms of the U.S. financial sector.

Also understandably unimpressed with Oren Cass’s naivete about finance is Judge Glock. A slice:

On Friday, the writer Oren Cass published an essay in the New York Times claiming that the “financialization” of the American economy has ruined lives and businesses. His use of the term is at times vague, but he argues that financialization is the process of “making financial markets ends unto themselves,” with no positive impact on the “real economy.”

These arguments parrot those of decades of Marxist theorists, which have gained surprising heft and breadth in recent years. They emerge from a basic confusion about what finance does and how money circulates in an economy. At root, theories about financialization are another way to attack investors and businesses earning money—in other words, capitalism.

Finance has been around since the dawn of history. It just means providing or lending money that one expects to be paid back later, with some extra income for the trouble. Starting in the 1990s, however, Marxists such as Giovanni Arrighi claimed that under modern capitalism, traditional finance had been replaced by more esoteric and less fruitful types of financial engineering. In recent years, writers including David Graeber and Matt Stoller have claimed that the financial industry focuses on practices such as debt refinancing and stock buybacks that create no real wealth.

The economist Thomas Sowell once said that the most important question an economist could ask is, “And then what?” After a debt refinancing, does the money disappear into the ether? No: it goes back into a business that can then reinvest the money into developing new products, typically at better terms and rates. When a company buys back its stock, what happens to the money? It gets deposited in someone’s brokerage account, where it can be invested in other stocks and bonds. And then what? The money gets put into businesses that use it to develop new products. There is no separate “financial” economy that does not ultimately connect back to the so-called real one.

Critics of financialization lament that financial firms like hedge funds lend money to one another instead of to the “real” economy. But again, a thoughtful observer must ask: And then what? Those firms then lend to businesses or to consumers who buy products, as they have done from time immemorial. Banks have always borrowed money to lend money. Since the earliest days of the United States’s economy, they have also borrowed money from other banks. Financial chains involving more than one transaction are not new, and they do not destroy wealth or make it disappear.

Alan Reynolds reports that “Trump’s first-term tariffs crushed US manufacturing.” A slice:

Trump’s first year, 2017, ended on a promising note with a bold reduction of the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% and a minor trim of the top personal rate to 37%. The prospect of growth-friendly taxation was already anticipated in the last quarter of 2017, with a 4.6% rate of GDP growth. In 2018, unfortunately, Trump’s attention shifted to nasty, unpredictable tariffs, which had a paralyzing effect on business plans and world investors.

US GDP growth gradually slowed to 3.3% in the first quarter of 2018, 2.1% in the second, 2.5% in the third, and 0.6% in the fourth.

The S&P 500 stock index fell from 2789.8 in January 2018 to 2567.3 by December, with most of that loss in the last quarter.

Meanwhile, USTR Lighthizer’s relatively painless recommended tariffs on washing machines and solar panels in late January escalated to a serious trade war by August.

The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal calls out Trump for his “crony Canadian Bridgegate.” A slice:

With President Trump, anything that isn’t nailed down might be grabbed and used as potential leverage. Amazingly, that includes a badly needed international bridge financed by Canada and almost finished. Threats by Mr. Trump to block traffic are bad for business, shoddy treatment of an ally, and bad politics too.

The Gordie Howe bridge will soon connect Detroit, Mich., with Windsor, Ontario. It’s crucial for commerce and will alleviate congestion at the nearby Ambassador bridge and the Windsor tunnel. Another transit link is a clear improvement, since Detroit-Windsor is a major North American commercial ecosystem, including for auto makers. Canada and Michigan will jointly own the bridge. This was negotiated a decade ago, and everyone accepted it, including Mr. Trump in a 2017 joint statement with Canada.

Yet the President suddenly intervened on Monday in an internet post. Mr. Trump complained that the bridge didn’t use enough U.S. steel and that Ontario reacted to his trade wars by boycotting American alcohol. He suggested China is conspiring to “terminate” Canadian ice hockey and “permanently eliminate” the Stanley Cup. “I will not allow this bridge to open until the United States is fully compensated,” Mr. Trump said, demanding that Canada show “the Fairness and Respect that we deserve.”

Then came news that shortly before Mr. Trump’s social post, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick had met Matthew Moroun, whose billionaire family runs the privately owned Ambassador bridge. Will it shock readers to learn Mr. Moroun isn’t a fan of the competing Gordie Howe project? The Journal reports, citing an anonymous official, that Mr. Lutnick came away skeptical of the new bridge, and he “made that clear” to Mr. Trump.

The intervention is another illustration of the Administration’s governance by cronyism.

Jeff Jacoby is right that FDR was right about the hazards to the public posed by public-sector labor unions. A slice:

In negotiations with the unions that represent public school teachers or other government employees, who represents the interests of the people paying the bills? The taxpayers who are required to fund public education and municipal services through their dollars don’t get a seat at the bargaining table. Instead, government officials negotiate with powerful and organized unions over how to allocate public funds. That institutional arrangement — one that blurs the line between those claiming public resources and those who are supposed to be their custodian — deserves a lot more scrutiny than it gets.

In the private sector, collective bargaining brings together parties with genuinely opposing interests. Workers seek higher pay and better benefits; management seeks to control costs and keep the enterprise viable. Each side knows it has something to lose by overreaching. If labor demands too much, jobs can vanish. If management refuses to compromise, strikes disrupt operations, customers are lost, and profits suffer. The discipline of the market imposes limits on both sides — and harshly enforces them.

None of that discipline exists when government bargains with public employees. There are no profits to share, no competitors to steal market share, no risk of bankruptcy if costs spiral out of control. There are only taxpayers’ dollars — dollars provided by people who have no voice at the bargaining table and no direct say in how those dollars are allocated. When government managers negotiate wages, benefits, and work rules with unions representing government workers, the state is effectively negotiating with itself over how to spend other people’s money.

That imbalance is compounded by politics. Public-sector unions are not passive participants in the democratic process; they are among its most sophisticated and ruthless players. They mobilize votes, fund campaigns, and make clear which officeholders are friends and which are adversaries. Officials on the government side of the bargaining table know that generosity today can be rewarded at the next election — while resistance can carry steep political costs. The incentives all run in one direction.

GMU Econ alum Romina Boccia makes the case that “to save Social Security, stop subsidizing wealthy retirees.”

Bob Levy remembers the Cato Institute’s co-founder and long-time president, Ed Crane. A slice:

Ed’s stewardship of Cato—as co-founder, visionary, energizer, policy expert, and source of inspiration—was flavored and enriched by his droll wit. No one but Ed could advise our donors to visit the Cato website to “greatly enhance the enjoyment of your otherwise drab lives.” And only Ed could recommend our Twitter feeds for those of our donors who have attention deficit disorder; or describe Wolfgang, the Crane family dog, as “a philosophical anarchist who believes there is no role for government in our dog-eat-dog world.”

On the other hand, when Ed wanted to make a serious point, he wasted no words. I recall a galling article some years ago in the New York Times admonishing Steve Jobs for not giving more of his money to charity. Ed’s caustic response: “Good point, what has Jobs ever done for mankind?” It’s that kind of trenchant commentary—coming from a truly talented writer—that was an Ed Crane trademark.

And yet style and delivery were just lubricants. Ed’s true legacy is his advocacy for a free society—from his days as a Berkeley student to his work on the Goldwater campaign, his efforts to reform Social Security and establish term limits, his voluminous writings and speeches and media appearances, and his prodigious fundraising capabilities, without which the success of the Cato Institute would not have been possible.

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… is from page 186 of my late, great colleague Walter Williams’s 2015 book, American Contempt for Liberty, which is a collection of many of Walter’s columns and essays; this quotation specifically is from Walter’s March 5th 2014, syndicated column, “Black People Duped“:

The cultural problems that affect many black people are challenging and not pleasant to talk about, but incorrectly attributing those problems to racism and racial discrimination, a need for more political power, and a need for greater public spending condemns millions of blacks to the degradation and despair of the welfare state.

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Excellent news conveyed in this Wall Street Journal headline: “House Rejects Speaker Johnson’s Effort to Block Tariff Votes.” A slice:

House lawmakers on Tuesday rejected an attempt by Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) to block votes on resolutions disapproving of President Trump’s tariffs—a stinging blow to his leadership that paves the way for lawmakers to potentially rebuke Trump’s signature economic policy.

The procedural step failed with 217 opposed and 214 in favor, with three Republicans joining all 214 Democrats in voting against the measure, enough to sink it in the narrowly divided chamber.

The no votes came from Republicans across the ideological GOP spectrum: centrist Reps. Don Bacon of Nebraska and Kevin Kiley of California, as well as libertarian Rep. Thomas Massie (R., Ky.). The vote was kept open for about an hour as leadership looked to flip votes, but none of the defectors budged. Rep. Greg Murphy (R., N.C.) didn’t vote.

The vote means that Democrats will be able to bring resolutions challenging Trump’s tariffs to the House floor, setting up a series of high-profile votes that could begin as soon as Wednesday. Though Trump could veto any measure that reaches his desk, any successful vote would be a public repudiation of his tariff policy and would likely draw a furious reaction from the White House.

“Big step forward for Americans tired of paying more because of Trump’s tariffs,” said Rep. Suzan DelBene (D., Wash.) after the vote.

The Editorial Board of the Washington Post decries Trump’s threat to block the opening of the Gordie Howe bridge – a new bridge connecting Canada to the United States. Two slices:

President Donald Trump is always on offense, and now he’s directed his ire at … a bridge. It’d be funny if the consequences weren’t so serious.

On Monday, Trump threatened to block the opening of the Gordie Howe International Bridge as he escalates his trade war against America’s northern neighbor. He vaguely demanded America be “fully compensated for everything we have given them,” but it’s unclear what the president really wants out of this fight.

…..

The bridge is an uncontroversial way to ease congestion, and in 2017, Trump enthusiastically supported the project. But for the president who is always seeking leverage, this no-brainer infrastructure project suddenly seems worth blowing up. He also warned recently that the Chinese will “terminate” ice hockey in Canada and eliminate the Stanley Cup if their trade partnership grows.

Also from the Washington Post‘s Editorial Board is this correct assessment: “EPA is right to reverse Obama overreach” on executive-branch ‘regulation’ of greenhouse gasses. A slice:

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin on Thursday is expected to announce what he describes as the largest deregulatory action in U.S. history. It’s about time.

Congress passed the Clean Air Act in 1963 to regulate local pollution around the country, and regulators did that for decades. Then, in 2009, the EPA decided it would treat greenhouse gases like other pollutants, despite their damage being global rather than local.

That declaration, called the “endangerment finding,” has been used by bureaucrats ever since to dramatically expand the federal government’s power over cars. Now, the EPA will rescind it.

Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley is correct: “Voters no longer blame Joe Biden for the state of the economy, and Trump’s policies haven’t delivered.” Two slices:

Give us time, the White House pleads. We’ll tackle the elevated costs of food, energy, medicine and other necessities that gobble up middle-income wages. We’ll address those housing prices—up more than 50% since 2019—which have made owning a home so difficult for first-time buyers. Stop all the grousing already. President Trump’s tariff strategy will work its magic any day now. We promise.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has been telling anyone who will listen that things are already much better than people realize. “It’s been a great year on the economy,” he said in December, “but the best is yet to come.” Mr. Bessent predicts that 2026 will be a “blockbuster” year for economic growth once tax refunds arrive, more illegal immigrant workers are deported and the bells and whistles of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act kick in. The administration has “set the table,” he insists, and “Main Street is about to prosper.”

Give Mr. Bessent credit for acknowledging the problem, however indirectly. His boss, meanwhile, has been shouting from the mountains of Switzerland to the plains of Iowa that “affordability” is a fake issue invented by Democrats and perpetuated by the press. “This has been the most dramatic one-year turnaround of any country in history in terms of the speed,” Mr. Trump insisted in January. “It’s amazing. And it’s because of tariffs.”

…..

The president’s MAGA base seems to want every single illegal alien banished from the country, no matter the circumstances or impact on U.S. labor markets. But that base isn’t large enough to keep Democrats from taking back Congress in November, and mass deportation could cost Republicans the additional support they’ll need from independents and moderate Democrats.

Were the White House to heed these warnings and pivot to an emphasis on economic growth and affordability, it still isn’t clear that the policies it favors would get the job done. Banning institutional investors from purchasing homes may be politically popular, but it will do little to address a housing shortage that results from, among other things, zoning regulations and environmental mandates that drive up prices. Institutional investors are responding to the problem, not creating it.

Collin Levy isn’t swallowing the fallacies peddled in Texas to justify the suspension of H-1B visas for that state’s agencies. A slice:

Yet the claim that work visas take jobs from American citizens doesn’t hold up. The Texas unemployment rate was 4.3% as of December, and in Austin—where high-tech jobs cluster—it was just over 3%. Foreign workers in the U.S. typically fill gaps in the labor market that aren’t met by American citizens. A 2020 study by the National Foundation for American Policy found that an increase in H-1B visas within a profession was associated with a decrease in the unemployment rate in the profession.

Mr. Abbott’s pause affects state agencies and universities, not private companies. But the change will be felt acutely in research and medicine. The University of Texas’ Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas and its MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston each employ more than 100 H-1B holders. They are a small percentage of the overall workforce but fill specialized roles.

Reason‘s Jacob Sullum reports on a court ruling upholding freedom of speech in the U.S. A slice:

Tufts University graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk, who was targeted for deportation nearly a year ago because she had co-authored an anti-Israel op-ed piece that appeared in a student newspaper, can remain in the United States thanks to a recent decision by an immigration judge. In that ruling, which came to light this week after Ozturk’s lawyers mentioned it in federal court, Judge Roopal Patel, who works for the Justice Department, concluded that there was no legal basis to deport Ozturk.

National Review‘s Dan McLaughlin warns of “the coming political-process armageddon.” A slice:

While our constitutional system is built to assume that politicians will seek to maximize their power, American politics is constrained in part by rules and in part by norms of behavior. While some rule violations can be policed by the courts, many of our rules and norms are enforced only by a combination of personal honor and decency, fear of voter backlash at overreach, and fear that the gains from breaking taboos will be outweighed by the costs of partisan retaliation in kind. All three of those checks have been systematically eroding, as politicians and voters alike convince themselves not only that the other side started it but, increasingly, that one may as well go first because the other side is about to start it. This is essentially the mindset of the median European general staff circa June 1914.

GMU Econ alum Adam Michel shares a case study “on how the tax code gets more complicated.”

The Cato Institute’s co-founder and long-time president, Ed Crane, has died.

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… is from page 338 of the “Random Thoughts” section of Thomas Sowell’s 2010 book, Dismantling America:

Some of the biggest cases of mistaken identity are among intellectuals who have trouble remembering that they are not God.

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Writing in the Washington Post, my intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy, encourages Democrats to abandon their far-left looniness in order to take advantage of Trump’s penchant for antagonizing moderate and independent voters. Two slices:

After President Donald Trump’s first year back in office — marked by battered institutions, executive overreach and contempt for basic constraints on presidential power — Democrats would be wise to unify around an alternative message rooted in competence, restraint, affordability and institutional repair. There is no shortage of voters uneasy with Trump’s behavior and eager for a credible counterweight.

And yet, the party’s loudest message is an aggressive push for confiscation camouflaged by the rhetoric of moral clarity and fiscal responsibility. Democrats may have something to offer to voters caught in the middle, but how many will notice with large states like New York, Virginia and California pushing to punish the wealthy?

…..

A handful of Democratic state leaders understand that endless soak-the-rich politics undermine growth, revenue stability and long-term affordability. Colorado’s Gov. Jared Polis has pushed income tax cuts and openly argued that lower, broader taxes better serve workers and innovation. In Pennsylvania, Gov. Josh Shapiro has focused on regulatory reform and supply-side growth rather than new tax grabs.

If Democrats want voters to believe they are an alternative to political excess, they should elevate voices that champion a return to rule-bound governance, stable tax policy and fiscal restraint. They would advance a national affordability agenda by expanding housing and energy supplies and dismantling the other bottlenecks making everyday life more expensive.

Alas, the party’s message setters seem to hope that voters mistake confiscation for compassion (e.g., Mamdani on the “warmth of collectivism”). Don’t be surprised if they convince fewer people than they hope to.

“Trump’s tariffs cost American households $1,000 last year.” (HT Matt Krogdahl) A slice:

President Donald Trump’s tariffs cost the average American household $1,000 last year, according to new research from the nonpartisan Tax Foundation.

The cost is set to go even higher this year to $1,300 per household, assuming the existing tariffs stay in place, the research said.

Scott Lincicome asks how is Trump’s threat to refuse to allow the opening of a bridge connecting Canada and the U.S. not parody.

Wall Street Journal columnist Gerard Baker is correct in this:

What’s happened to the [Washington] Post is, in part, what’s happened to most traditional news organizations in the past 20 years with a glowing exception or two (thank you, dear subscriber): business models upended by the loss of advertising revenue, the proliferation of alternative sources of news, increasing specialization in audience choice. The idea that the market still has room for dozens of large newspapers offering similar soup-to-nuts products in an age of personalized taste and atomized content is as anachronistic as the thud of a thick daily printed paper on a doorstep at 5 a.m.

But the role journalists themselves have played in the collapse of trust among news consumers is most important. Wherever these people gather (believe me, I have been to more such therapy sessions than I can count), the keening is loud and outwardly directed. They lament the factors they say have led to their abandonment: social media “disinformation,” right-wing propagandists, Donald Trump.

Now they warn that the diminishment of the Post—and many other, less famous news sources—is a direct threat to our freedom, another ominous surrender by timorous bosses to Mr. Trump’s menace.

The president’s attacks on the media are indefensible and troubling. But it never seems to occur to his targets that the primary reason he gets away with them is that faith in the honesty of these institutions has already been devastated by their own tendentious work.

The list of recent media distortions—from the Russia-collusion hoax to Covid and Black Lives Matter—is long. But the most important form of bias, more insidious because it is necessarily hard to measure, isn’t what the news reports. It is what it chooses not to report. Investigative reporting is vital for accountability, but for most journalists the people and institutions that need to be held accountable are only those that fit into their selective demonology: corporations and their leaders, the rich, right-wing politicians. Labor unions, bureaucracies, academic institutions? Not so much.

GMU Econ alum Peter Jacobsen takes issue with some of Pope Leo’s statements about the modern economy.

Chelsea Follett makes clear that “claims that characters in ‘A Christmas Carol’ were better off than modern Americans are pure humbug.” A slice:

There has been substantial progress in living conditions since the 1840s. We’re much better off than the Cratchits were. In fact, most people today enjoy far greater material comfort than did even Dickens’s rich miser Ebenezer Scrooge.

Notes by Arnold Kling from Austin.

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… is from page 423 of the 2010 Liberty Fund edition of Alexis de Tocqueville’s 1835 work, Democracy in America (James T. Schleifer, translator):

As for me, I believe that in all governments, whatever they are, baseness will attach itself to strength and flattery to power.

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In the Washington Post, Phil Gramm and I compare the performance of America’s economy in 2025 (the first year of Trump’s second term) to the performance of America’s economy in 2017 (the first year of Trump’s first term). By most measures, America’s economy performed better in 2017 – the year before Trump imposed his first round of tariffs – than it performed in 2025.

Trump’s claim that his second-term tariffs are working wonders for America’s economy is, shall we say, dubious.

Here’s a slice from our piece:

The Dow Jones Industrial Average finished last year 15 percent higher than its close on election day 2024, but its close at the end of 2017 was a whopping 35 percent above its close on Election Day 2016. The same can be said for the S&P 500 (15 percent compared with 25 percent) and the NASDAQ (26 percent compared with 33 percent).

DBx: By the way, even if we extend the comparisons through the latest close of each index (on Friday, February 6th, 2026), the financial-markets’ from election day 2024 through February 6th, 2026, performed less well than they did from election day 2016 through the final trading day of 2017. When the market closed this past Friday, the DJIA was then 19% above its election-day 2024 close, the S&P 500 was 20% above that election-day close, and the NASDAQ (which is very slightly down in 2026) was 25% above that election-day close.

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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.