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Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal.

Editor:

Patrick Walsh is right that Alexander Hamilton was more of a protectionist than Andrew Langer made him out to be (Letters, September 7). But this reality doesn’t imply that Hamilton would support Trump’s tariffs. As Phil Gramm and I noted in these pages, Hamilton defended protection largely as a means of helping nascent American manufacturers overcome established European competitors. Because many of Mr. Trump’s tariffs protect mature, and in some cases world-leading, American industries – including steel, automobiles, and pharmaceuticals – it’s illegitimate for Mr. Walsh to leap from Hamilton’s support for infant-industry protection to the conclusion that Mr. Trump’s tariffs are Hamiltonian.

Mr. Walsh, however, is correct on another point – namely, that “Messrs. Trump and Vance, like Hamilton, scorn ideology. They are interested in what Hamilton called the ‘particular situation.’” Sad but true, for a name for people who scorn ideology in order to judge only each “particular situation” is “unprincipled.” Although Mr. Walsh regards this lack of principle in American leaders as a feature to cheer, wiser people recognize it as a bug to fear.

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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The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board reports on Teamsters’ Union violence. A slice:

The Teamsters have a long history of bullying that often becomes violent, and its campaign to organize Amazon workers resulted in a bloody confrontation last week in Riverside, Calif.

The protest at Amazon’s facility has followed a familiar Teamsters playbook. First, the union claimed Amazon workers had signed cards showing support for the union. Then the Teamsters demanded that Amazon bargain with the union, though a secret ballot election was never held and the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) hadn’t certified the union.

When Amazon refused to bargain, the Teamsters accused the company of committing an unfair labor practice. Last Wednesday the union launched what it called a one-day “unfair labor practice strike” in which labor organizers—most of whom weren’t employed by Amazon—blocked vehicles from entering and exiting the facility.

Amazon says it notified the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department several times throughout the day of “hostile acts by the picketers and blocking the ingress and egress of the site.” Law enforcement declined to respond until people were hurt.

Video footage we’ve seen shows Teamsters blocking a motorcyclist who worked for an Amazon contractor from entering the facility. The worker circled around and tried to bypass their blockade, but in the process knocked down two protesters and crashed on his bike. Teamsters then beat him up as he lay on the ground.

The motorcyclist and the two protesters who were knocked down were hospitalized. It may have been imprudent for the worker to try to circumvent the protesters, but he was trying to make a living by showing up for his job. The Teamsters were denying him that ability, and their blockade made it more likely that someone would get hurt. Yet the union claims it is the victim. Irony alert: The Teamsters claim joining a union improves worker safety, yet their protests are resulting in hazardous work and road conditions.

[DBx: When, to achieve your goal, you must coercively interfere with people voluntarily engaging in commercial activities, your goal is wicked.]

About labor-union membership, the Editorial Board of the Washington Post reports this encouraging fact: “Membership has plummeted across the developed world, and workers are making more money than ever.” A slice:

As Americans have fled unions, workers themselves are making more money than ever. The average American worker made $86,977 in wages in 2025. Adjusting for purchasing power, only the average worker in Iceland, Luxembourg or Switzerland made more.

A high union approval rating with a low union membership rate is another case of the disconnect between Americans’ opinions of their own financial situations (pretty good) and their opinions of the economy in general (pretty bad). Americans think unions are a nice idea — for other people. And the gap between what they imagine unions could be and what they actually are does not compel them to sign up to these relics of a bygone economy.

[DBx: Even workers in the bygone past were generally harmed, not helped, by labor unions, for unionized-workers’ win their advantages only by artificially shrinking employment opportunities for other workers – and also, of course, by raising prices of final outputs.]

Charles Cooke warns of misguided nostalgia. A slice:

Consider how common it is at the moment to hear people on both the left and the right talk of a given period within the recent past as if it represented Eden before the Fall. On the left, the period in question might be the New Deal, or any time “before Reagan,” or perhaps any day up to and including the one before Donald Trump became president. On the right, the period might be the 1920s, or the 1950s, or the week before Richard Nixon took the United States off the gold standard. Pick an epoch; the details don’t especially matter. What matters is that, for whatever reason — be it the latest cost of housing or health care or burritos; the existence of billionaires; a sense that there are insufficient opportunities for the young; the decline of religious belief — millions of people have decided that the past was preferable to the present, and those millions of people do not sort into neat left/right groups.

That alone sets this predictor apart from the others. One would expect self-described conservatives to be more prone to nostalgia, and yet polling shows that, in 2026, self-described Democrats are more likely to take a backward glance than self-described Republicans. Asked earlier this year by Pew whether America’s best days were “ahead of us” or “behind us,” only 34 percent of Democrats answered “ahead of us,” compared with 46 percent of Republicans. Historical polling suggests that this gap is a by-product of the incumbent president’s being a Republican and that it will be reversed when a Democrat is next voted into the White House. But this underscores rather than diminishes the point — which is that within both parties, a majority of voters are of the view that modern life is inferior to what preceded it.

This matters, for just as a man who has been given two weeks to live will make profoundly different choices from those of a man who expects to live for another 60 years, so an American who is comfortable with contemporary life — and who expects to remain so — will behave differently than one who is not. Among other things, those two individuals will adopt differing opinions about the integrity of their civic institutions, about the virtue of their regnant culture, about the wisdom of their fellow citizens, and more. One will become habitually pessimistic, the other habitually optimistic. One will be open to change; the other will feel perpetually in danger of losing his national inheritance. One will be more likely than the other to have children, build a business, and otherwise engage with what Edmund Burke described as the “little platoon we belong to in society.”

GMU Econ alum Erik Matson reminds us of the wisdom of John Witherspoon and Pelatiah Webster. [HT my GMU Econ colleague Dan Klein]. A slice:

Witherspoon and Webster supported the ratification of the Constitution against Anti-Federalist dissidents, and they sympathized with Hamilton’s emphasis on the importance of sound money and public credit. But their political–economic visions were ultimately more liberal than his, rooted as they were in a deep appreciation of the beneficial order that obtains when the state concerns itself with enforcing the sacred rules of commutative justice—and relatively little else.

Witherspoon was widely recognized by his colleagues in the Continental Congress for his knowledge in matters pertaining to public finance and economic policy. He was consulted by George Washington about aspects of Washington’s personal finances and frequently by Hamilton and Robert Morris about economic policy. In addition to his clerical and academic obligations, he served on 126 committees in the Continental Congress in the late 1770s and early 1780s, mostly pertaining to public finance.

Bob Graboyes ponders improbable events.

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… is from page 273 of Joseph Epstein’s December 2019 Commentary, “Susan Sontag, Savant-Idiot,” as this essay is reprinted in the 2020 collection, titled Gallimaufry, of some of Epstein’s essays and reviews:

An idiot savant, as is well-known, is a person with serious learning disabilities but gifted in a peculiar and extraordinary way, often mathematically or musically. A savant-idiot, as is not well-known, since I have only just now coined the phrase, is a person who is learned, brainy, even brilliant, but gets everything important wrong.

DBx: The modern world has quite a few savant-idiots.

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The Washington Post‘s Editorial Board decries Trump’s economically clueless demand for easy money – and his lunatic threat to pressure the Fed to comply by preventing Americans from buying any imports from any country with which the U.S. has a meaningless bilateral “trade deficit.”. A slice:

President Donald Trump’s preferred monetary policy is simple. Is the economy sluggish? Cut interest rates. Is it heating up? Also cut interest rates. Now there’s a new addendum: If his handpicked Federal Reserve chair won’t play ball, hold the economy hostage.

At least, that’s what Trump threatened on Friday on Truth Social. He wrote that if the Fed doesn’t “get smart” and lower rates, he will halt trade entirely with any country that maintains a trade deficit with the United States. That would include China, Mexico, Canada, Vietnam, South Korea and dozens of others — in short, many of America’s top trade partners.

If Trump thinks elevated interest rates slow the economy, wait until he sees what cutting off trade would do.

Wilfred Reilly rightly ridicules the doomsaying of Bill Gates and other panic peddlers. A slice:

The world is not coming to an end — again.

In October 2025, Microsoft’s Bill Gates — long the worst sort of climate doomsayer — published a lengthy memo explaining that, while global climate change is real, “it will not lead to humanity’s demise.” According to Gates, the “doomsday view of climate change” that says it “will decimate civilization . . . is wrong. . . . People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future.”

The desktop baron argues for reevaluating temperature targets, writing that strict focus on near-term temperature and emissions goals is an imperfect measure of progress. Most important, he now advocates a policy shift toward maximizing “human welfare” and human flourishing — shifting much of the absurdly inflated climate budget toward projects fighting disease, famine, and poverty itself. In summary, the climate problem exists, but the cutting-edge view today is that it is fairly minor in comparison with other issues and can best be combated by human initiative.

Gates’s memo had a familiar ring to it. As I note in my upcoming Broadside/HarperCollins book Confidently Wrong, one of the defining features of upper-middle-class life during the past 50–60 years has been scientists, activists, and public intellectuals making the most horrifying kind of doomsday predictions — which invariably fail to come true. Remember the Club of Rome and the Limits to Growth report?

Back in 1972, a group of top academics used then-advanced regression analysis to argue that the planet at some poin must run out of key resources. Quite specific dates were provided for this global near-apocalypse. And then not one of the predictions came true. As the American Enterprise Institute’s Mark Perry noted 40 years later, in his teasingly titled “Time Has Not Been Kind to the Limits to Growth,” the report “got it so wrong because its authors overlooked the greatest resource of all: our own resourcefulness.”

Because of the so-called Green Revolution in agriculture and horticulture, humanity’s food supplies have not collapsed. In fact, Perry reports, “malnourishment has dropped by more than half,” from well over 30 percent of the world population to about 15 percent. “Nor are we choking on pollution,” as electric, hybrid, and even hydrogen vehicles have replaced many of the high-dollar gas hogs of the past. In fact, the annual risk of pollution-caused death has shrunk from one in 500 to one in many thousands since 1900. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given their think tank’s focus, the AEI boys argue that the real solution to environmental problems is innovation, driven by “economic growth.”

Who needs the likes of Bernie Sanders, Zohran Mamdani, Katie Wilson, or The Squad when Trump & Co. are in charge?

Ilya Somin, a GMU colleague over in the Scalia School of Law, writes in USA Today of the awful similarities that unite MAGA with leftist collectivists. A slice:

Democratic socialism is a terrible ideology. If implemented, its agenda would cause grave harm and imperil democracy itself. And in seeking massive state control of the economy, today’s socialists ironically have much in common with the MAGA nationalists they claim to oppose.

Both promote government control over the economy, and both paths undermine liberty, prosperity and democracy. Socialists do not control the Democratic Party in the way MAGA largely dominates the Republicans. But their influence is growing.

My GMU Econ colleague Vincent Geloso tells “what critics keep getting wrong about capitalism.” A slice:

There is nothing wrong with criticising capitalism, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman or classical liberalism. The problem is that much of the discussion does not pass even a modest ideological Turing test. An ideological Turing test asks whether one can state an opposing position so accurately that its proponents would recognise the argument as their own before one proceeds to criticise it. Here, too often, they would not.

This points to a common reflex in debates over ‘capitalism’ and ‘neoliberalism’. The vocabulary is often not used to define but rather rationalise already-held ideological priors. The characteristics one dislikes are incorporated into the definition of the system, after which those same characteristics are rediscovered as criticisms of it. The conclusion has, in part, been smuggled into the premises. But these end up being recycled over and over as one scholar states it before another regurgitates it back as fact and so forth.

Trump is right to support data centers, but his tariffs work in the opposite direction.

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… is from Samuel Gregg’s excellent July 2024 paper, “A Free, Prosperous and Secure America”:

Certainly, trade liberalization should not be regarded as ushering in the type of perpetual peace envisaged by Kant. Nonetheless, we ought to resist the temptation to imagine that, in a world in which states remain the essential building-block of international relations, economic nationalist policies are more likely to help realize national security objectives.

Through trade liberalization, America accentuates its economic growth and helps to create relationships with other states that gives them some interest in America’s ongoing economic prosperity and overall well-being. These benefits contribute significantly to America’s national security in a world of growing geopolitical rivalries. The prospect of liberal international order may be fading. But continuing efforts to liberalize America’s trade relations with other states and steadily diminish barriers to cross-border exchanges of goods and services will serve US national security interests in ways that neo-mercantilist and economic nationalist policies cannot.

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George Mason University Econ grad students are generous – as recounted at Facebook by Ilya Somin:

Some studies indicate that economists are more selfish than people in other fields (e.g. – they are more likely to defect in the prisoner’s dilemma). I have always had some reservations about these studies. Now, I believe them even less.

Recently, I was involved in helping “Bob,” a graduate student from an authoritarian state, who has been blacklisted by his government, for speaking out against the dictator’s human rights violations and other repressive policies; if he returns to his home country, he faces further persecution and possible imprisonment (I won’t say which one, so as to avoid attracting further attention to him from his government). He needed to find housing here, while looking for a graduate program in the West, where he can continue his studies (which he can no longer do in his home country), and finding a way to adjust his visa status, so he can work. And, at the moment, he has virtually no resources.

I asked George Mason University econ professor Bryan Caplan for help with the housing issue. Bryan sent an e-mail message to the GMU economics department grad student e-mail list. Within a few hours, we had multiple offers to house Bob for free! All from econ grad students, most of whom aren’t exactly living in palatial accommodations. Bob accepted one of the offers, for which we are very grateful. All thanks to the generosity of economists!

You might ask, why couldn’t I house Bob myself? The answer is that I’m out of town much of the time this semester, as a visiting professor at U of Virginia, and I thought it would be unfair to burden my wife and kids at a time when they already have an extra burden on days when I have to be away. But I was able to provide some other types of assistance.

John Puri reacts to two recent Trump Truth Social posts – posts so arrogant and economically clueless that the English language, for all of its richness, cannot quite adequately describe them. A slice:

Two, what do you mean by “fear” of inflation? (Sorry, I mean Inflation.) It exists right now, and Americans are not exactly thrilled about it.

Three, no, “growth” doesn’t cause inflation. Excessively loose monetary policy, which is what the president demands of the Fed, causes inflation.

Four, our GDP growth should not be at 15 or 20 percent, because that is verifiably ridiculous. And GDP growth isn’t currently at 4, 3, or even 2 percent. It’s at 1.5 percent.

Five, our debt would not be paid off if interest rates were lower. We would barely cut our annual deficit in half if interest rates on every federal bond went to zero.

Six, yes, each percentage-point increase in Treasury bond interest rates does cost the federal government a whole lot of money. Unfortunately, the rate on Treasuries is not legally tied to the Fed’s benchmark rate and is, in fact, free to rise much higher should bond markets think it appropriate — as the last month has demonstrated. Seems like a good reason to get our fiscal house in order. (But we won’t.)

Not that any more is needed, but here’s yet another recent piece of evidence that Trump understands absolutely nothing about trade: (HT Scott Lincicome)

Trump: We could do tremendous good for ourselves by just not trading with countries.. We lose with Mexico $195 billion a year. They have nothing that we have to have, I mean. Hot tamales, tomatoes, a couple of things

Trump, of course, has no monopoly on peddling economic lunacy. Another such peddler is Gavin Newsom – as reported here by the Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal. A slice:

Mr. Newsom last week issued a press release claiming the state is leading the country in job growth and “boosting productivity and delivering higher wages for workers.” The state’s $16.90 an hour minimum wage—set to rise to $17.40 in January—helps “ensure workers share in that growth,” he said. Where to begin?

It’s true the AI boom is boosting business productivity, driving investment and turbocharging earnings for tech workers. The average weekly wage for information workers in Silicon Valley’s San Mateo County near San Francisco increased to $16,242 during the first quarter of this year (equal to $846,904 a year), up from $15,792 in the prior year and $6,187 in early 2019.

But in recent years the state has added few jobs outside of government, healthcare and social assistance. One reason is that its high minimum wage has raised costs for employers, which in turn are cutting back on unskilled labor. These trends have been exacerbated by California’s $20 an hour minimum wage for fast-food workers.

The Employment Policies Institute reports that California’s restaurant employment has declined for three consecutive years between March 2023 and March 2026—a total of 12,600 job losses in food services and drinking places—according to the Labor Department’s most recent payroll data, while employment in the industry increased nationwide by some 151,700.

Average weekly hours for workers in all industries in California declined to 33.1 hours in July from 34.5 hours three years earlier, while remaining flat nationwide at 34.3. Teen unemployment in California has risen to 22.1% from 11.3% in January 2023, a significantly bigger increase than in the rest of the country (12.1% in July from 10.6% in January 2023 nationwide).

More teens in the Golden State are also dropping out of the workforce. Labor participation has fallen by five percentage points for teens in California, versus 2.3 percentage points nationwide since early 2023. More unemployed youth is a recipe for social problems and a less prepared future workforce.

Meanwhile good news arrived Friday about the national job market as the Labor Department reported 162,000 new jobs in August. That exceeded expectations and is higher than the 31,000 average in the last 12 months. The best news was a 683,000 increase in the civilian labor force and a bump in the labor participation rate to 61.6%. Falling participation has been a growing worry.

The national jobless rate held steady at a low 4.1%, while California’s in July was 5.1%. That’s the fourth highest in the country, after Oregon and Connecticut’s 5.2% and the District of Columbia’s 5.9%.

Clemson University’s – and my former GMU Econ colleague – Tom Hazlett tells of how broadcasters in the U.S. put their free-speech rights at risk in a devil’s deal for ‘free’ access to the electromagnetic spectrum. Two slices:

While most media operate in a laissez-faire regime, terrestrial radio and television broadcasting are licensed, and their airwave access has sometimes been deemed a privilege, not a right. Harvard Law’s Laurence Tribe traces the anomaly to a technical error: “a profound fallacy about spectrum scarcity.” Or as comedian George Carlin put it, “radio and television [are] the only two parts of American life not protected by the free speech provisions of the First Amendment to the Constitution. I’d like to repeat that because it sounds vaguely important.”

Whose cockamamie idea was this? Why, the broadcasters’ own.

The 1927 Radio Act’s “public interest” language was written by the National Association of Broadcasters, as the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Clarence C. Dill (D., Wash.), explained in his 1938 book, “Radio Law.” From the start, Dill saw that “the ‘twilight zone’ between censorship and the refusal to renew a station license because of the service rendered, is undetermined.”

The broadcasters traded freedom for free licenses and a lucrative, protected market. Upstart rivals—the DuMont Television Network in the 1940s and ’50s, then cable TV and satellite in the 1960s—were suppressed, while only a handful of viable stations were assigned to more than 80 TV channels. In return, regulators gained clout over an industry and influence over content.

…..

When Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.) and Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R., Kan.) argued that the 1996 Telecommunications Act should sell TV stations their new digital broadcasting licenses at market prices—and liberate both their content and their spectrum—the industry again rallied to block deregulation.

ABC now feigns shock that a president could advance his political animus into official determinations of “public interest.” Welcome to the modern era. First Amendment compromises via “regulation by raised eyebrow,” as Nixon’s FCC chairman put it, have long been the currency of the realm.

Leave it to Donald Trump to up the ante radically and tweet out his worst. The list price of censorship just blew the budget, and broadcasters are suing to reclaim their constitutional rights.

Best of luck, ABC. May free speech soon, finally, be yours.

GMU Econ alum Paul Mueller talks with Reason‘s Stephanie Slade about how conservatism lost its way.

Eric Boehm explains what shouldn’t – but, alas, what nevertheless today does – need explaining: As Trump seizes more power for the executive branch (a seizure to which Congress cowardly complies), “Democrats are already eyeing the new tools.” [DBx: As Arnold Kling says, “Have a nice day.”] A slice from Boehm’s essay:

President Donald Trump has greatly—and, in many cases, quite recklessly—expanded the executive branch’s power over private businesses.

The Trump administration has invoked claims of “national security” to levy higher tariffs on everything from steel to musical instruments. It has used the same argument to seize equity shares in more than two dozen private companies, including a so-called “golden share” in U.S. Steel that grants the president the authority to veto future attempts to relocate headquarters or make changes to its production facilities.

And if you think a future Democratic administration will try to stuff those executive powers back into their proper, constitutional boxes, well…don’t hold your breath.

Take California Gov. Gavin Newsom, widely regarded as a serious contender in the 2028 presidential race, for example. Last week, a Canadian journalist asked Newsom to give assurances that a future Democratic administration would roll back the massive tariffs Trump has imposed on goods from Canada.

“I cannot guarantee that,” Newsom said. “But I can guarantee you nothing like this, the level of disrespect, talking past people, talking down to people, talking past and down to you.”

In other words: a kindler, gentler tariff regime, delivered with carefully chosen language.

That might be an improvement, in some ways, over the haphazard nature of Trump’s various trade wars. But it would not be a win for free trade, and it would not help Americans who are struggling to afford the cost of higher tariffs.

Christopher Snowdon also explains something that shouldn’t – but, alas, what nevertheless does – need explaining: “You cannot tax and borrow your way to prosperity.”

Here is at least some good news about the goings-on in the Potomac Swamp.

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… is from page 394 of the 2016 second edition of Thomas Sowell’s Wealth, Poverty and Politics:

Most notable economic, technological or intellectual achievements involve multiple factors – beginning with a desire to succeed in the particular endeavor, without which all the ability and opportunity mean nothing, just as desire and the opportunity mean nothing without the ability. What this implies, among other things, is that an individual, a people, or a nation may have some, many or most of the prerequisites for a given achievement without having any real success in producing that achievement. And yet that individual, that people or that nation may suddenly burst upon the scene with spectacular success when whatever the missing factor or factors are finally get added to the mix.

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My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy, explains that “Trump’s beef tariff cut accidentally makes the case for free trade.” Two slices:

Take the most recent paper by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Columbia University. Mary Amiti, Sebastian Heise, and David Weinstein looked at who shoulders the cost of the tariffs, examining which part of the tariff reaches consumers through higher prices versus which share of the price hike is due to other factors. The group estimates that a 10 percent tariff on all imports will raise U.S. consumer prices by about 2.6 percent. Roughly two-thirds of the increase comes quickly and directly from the tariff being passed on to customers at the border. The remaining third of the price hike shows up more slowly in American-made goods.

…..

If you want cheaper houses, do not make Canadian lumber more expensive. If you want more affordable cars and appliances, do not tax steel and aluminum inputs. If you want American manufacturers to compete, do not make them pay more for intermediate goods. And if you want American exporters to prosper, do not repeatedly provoke America’s trading partners into retaliating against them. In short, remove the tariffs.

Alfredo Carrillo Obregon, Clark Packard, and Scott Lincicome applaud new efforts in Congress to rein in the executive-branch’s abuse of its delegated power to set tariffs punitive taxes on Americans’ purchases of imports.

Stuart Anderson and Mark Regets warn that “Trump is set to mark a dangerous first for the labor force.” Two slices:

Donald Trump is on track to become the first president in a century to oversee a U.S. labor force that will be smaller when he leaves office than when he entered. Since the start of his second term, the number of people in the United States who are either employed or looking for a job has dropped by 1.6 million — and it’s largely because of Trump’s immigration restrictions. Unless those policies change, a shrinking workforce will cause slower economic growth and lead to more expensive public debt.

This is an anomaly in U.S. history. The civilian labor force has increased by the end of every president’s term, with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln’s because of the number of people who left the workforce to fight in the Civil War.

Growth accelerated in the decades following World War II largely thanks to the baby boom, increases in female workforce participation and a spike in immigration after 1965. The labor force increased by 6.7 million during Ronald Reagan’s first term and by 8.7 million during his second. Similar growth occurred under Bill Clinton. Falling birth rates slowed the expansion of the U.S.-born labor force after the early 2000s but thanks to immigration the number of total workers still rose by 1.6 million during Barack Obama’s first term and by 3.9 million during his second.

…..

Removing immigrants from the labor force reduces the domestic market for goods and services. Immigrants are not only workers, but also consumers. As immigrants are expelled and the labor supply shrinks, economic growth diminishes and employers have fewer opportunities to invest in their businesses. That discourages employers from developing their employees’ skills or taking a chance on lower-skilled workers.

The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board reports that “jobs and wages are booming in counties that welcome AI.” Two slices:

President Trump has drawn condemnation for suggesting that communities that block data centers will end up “backwards and poor.” His remark was hyperbolic, but he’s right that areas embracing data centers are enjoying more jobs and faster wage growth.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics last week published industry-level data on state and county employment and wages through March of this year. We compared growth in Loudoun County, Va.—known as Data Center Alley—with other Washington, D.C., suburbs since early 2020 before the pandemic. The disparities are striking.

Loudoun has long been a hub for data-center development because of its easy zoning, relatively low-cost energy and geographical proximity to telecom network exchanges. It’s an exurban county with more land for growth than older suburbs closer to D.C. But it has also embraced growth, unlike those older suburbs. Construction growth has accelerated amid the AI boom, with permitted data-center space increasing by some 150% between 2020 and 2025. Jobs have followed.

Most counties surrounding the capital have experienced little job growth since the pandemic. Loudoun is the exception, with employment surging 17.4% since early 2020. Jobs increased by 1% or less in Fairfax County, Va., and Prince George’s County, Md. Virginia’s Arlington County (-7.3%) and Maryland’s Montgomery County shed jobs (-5.6%).

…..

Data centers can help to spread prosperity without government intervention and income redistribution. Could that be the real reason America’s political class is turning against them?

Eric Zwick and Owen Zidar share the results of their research that reveals that, in America, the people who get richer than most of their fellow Americans earn their success through entrepreneurship, risk-taking, and hard work – effort that also enriches their fellow Americans. Three slices:

Dick Portillo opened a hot-dog stand in 1963 without knowing how to cook a hot dog. Half a century later he sold the company for $1 billion. The proceeds bought a Chicago-area mansion, a private jet and a 12,000-square-foot waterfront home in Naples, Fla., with its own dock to moor his 130-foot yacht, Top Dog.

“I came from a poor family and at one time thought I didn’t have anything to offer the world,” Portillo wrote in a memoir. The youngest of three children, he was born in Chicago to immigrants from Mexico and Greece and raised partly in one of the city’s most notorious housing projects.

By 2014, the stand he’d built with $1,100 had become the Midwest’s largest privately owned restaurant company with 4,000 employees and no franchises or outside investors. A single Portillo’s could bring in $9 million a year, roughly three times a typical McDonald’s.

Stories like Portillo’s rarely make the news. His business was private. He sold hot dogs, not some shiny new technology. His success grew slowly over decades and in the upper Midwest away from the coasts.

But Portillo’s story is hardly unique. Across America, such business owners—we call them Everywhere Millionaires—have built extraordinary fortunes running ordinary businesses. Some launched their own ventures, working long hours and reinvesting the profits to stay afloat and grow. Others inherited a family firm and built upon the success of prior generations.

Pop culture portrays the rich as an elite few, akin to the Rockefellers and Carnegies of the Gilded Age. But rich private business owners are now so plentiful that we’re living in America’s first Age of Millionaires.

…..

Indeed, the typical path to $10 million and up comes from owning a company. That path is open in every town, in unglamorous industries, to people without top test scores, fancy degrees or rich parents.

And you don’t need to be a genius to be a successful entrepreneur. The relationship between starting a star business and SAT scores is, in fact, quite weak. The top 10% of test scorers become founders of businesses only 1.3 times as often as those at the median. What matters more is real experience in the working world or early exposure to a family business.

Portillo, for example, didn’t go to college. He enlisted in the Marine Corps seven days after graduating high school in 1957, and he considers his two years at Camp Pendleton among the most important of his life. They taught him teamwork, organizational planning and a deep appreciation for proper training, all of which he later used in building his business.

And increasingly, the opportunity of “unsexy” businesses is drawing elite graduates away from the traditional big-city jobs.

…..

Unlike the transformational innovation central to economic growth, the innovations of Everywhere Millionaires are often more incremental. Dick Portillo learned to steam buns by watching someone else do it. From that, he built a billion-dollar hot dog behemoth. His business grew because he sold a product that people wanted.

Fifty years later, so did the founders of Dave’s Hot Chicken. Three friends started it in a Los Angeles parking lot with $900 and a passion for Nashville-style hot chicken. Eight years later, they had more than 300 locations and sold the business in 2025 for $1 billion. Several generations removed from Portillo, their success shows that the path from limited means and no fancy degrees to fabulous wealth remains open today.

Casual dining is the poster child of free competition, with businesses opening and closing all the time. We consumers benefit from that churn, as does the economy. Incremental product improvements by one business force its competitors to respond with their own improvements if they hope to keep pace and not lose customers.

Phil Gramm and Mike Solon tell how Ronald Reagan led the way in making Social Security solvent for several decades.

Michael Pakaluk writes with enormous good sense and knowledge about the use and – increasingly – the abuse of the concept of “the common good.”

Philip Klein is right to pay close attention to J.D. Vance’s clever evasiveness and duplicity.

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… is from page 213 of Menzie Chinn’s and Douglas Irwin’s superb 2025 textbook, International Economics:

The past few decades have been an era of globalization. Most countries have moved to reduce trade barriers and take advantage of growing world trade. How have they done so? One way a country can reduce its tariff and non-tariff barriers is simply to act unilaterally. A unilateral tariff reduction occurs when a government decides to reduce its import duties on its own, independently of other countries. In recent years, many developing countries have chosen this path. When China, India, Vietnam, and other Asian countries opened up to world markets, they did so based on domestic political changes in favor of economic reforms, including a more open trade policy.

DBx: Yep.

Contrary to the claims of many protectionists, these Asian economies did not grow because of protectionist measures but, rather, only when they, largely on their own, reduced their protectionist measures. Nor did the growth of these countries’ economies occur at the expense of the United States. Americans grew richer as the people of these countries grew richer.