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… is from page 170 of my GMU Econ and Mercatus Center colleague Tyler Cowen’s 2019 book, Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero:

Trump in some key regards likes to favor crony businesses, but it is hard to avoid the suspicion that he does not really know business works, in spite of having spent his whole life in this vocation.

DBx: Case in point: Trump’s obsession with protective tariffs – tariffs that in the U.S. fall on imports well over half of which are inputs used by American businesses to produce. Indeed, a strong case can be made that nearly all imports are inputs into production processes in the U.S.

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We Americans are not as free as we should be. Not even close. But our economy is freer than most, and it still largely embraces entrepreneurship. And the results prove to the world that ordinary people love material prosperity (even if they too frequently do not understand its causes). Enjoy this new song by Jason Stills.

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George Will looks at America in 1876 looking at America through the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. Two slices:

The exhibition foretold the mechanization of agriculture, which produced urbanization and industrialization. Hitherto, a farmer’s scythe could harvest only an acre a day. Machines would make the vast Great Plains bountiful, and send farm labor to higher-productivity factory jobs.

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In 2026? Today, Americans’ low pain threshold is the result of unimagined reductions in life’s discomforts. Improvements in material, legal and moral conditions have been accompanied by national hypochondria and irrational anxieties.

Unlike in 1876, there is gloominess about new technologies. Pessimists exhort Americans to fear a jobs famine caused by artificial intelligence. Yet as the Economist notes, “never in modern history has technological progress hurt the overall demand for human labour.”

Optimists, equally speculative, say AI will so dramatically boost economic growth, hence government revenue, that we can continue forever our comfortable infantilism. Last week, the government announced that in just the first eight months of fiscal 2026, its spending exceeded revenue by $1.2 trillion.

Fear of AI might be symptomatic that Americans, bored by a surfeit of improvements, have a thirst for the excitement of future dangers from disruptive developments. They should remember this:

In terms of social and political upheaval, no subsequent technology has equaled Johannes Gutenberg’s 15th-century invention of movable type. In time, it democratized literacy, leading to democracy and freedom’s unending turmoil that we should not want to end.

John Hillen celebrates the space and embrace that Americans give to entrepreneurship. A slice:

The most revealing measure of U.S. competitive power isn’t found in military operations against Iran or a looming $1.5 trillion defense budget. It’s in our private economy.

SpaceX closed with a market cap larger than the gross domestic product of most nations on June 12, its first day of public trading. In the prior two weeks, Anthropic and OpenAI filed to go public, both chasing $1 trillion valuations.

These aren’t the closed deals of an insider class. SpaceX set aside nearly a third of its offering for retail buyers, and millions of Americans now own a sliver of it through index funds and 401(k)s. The spoils of the most dynamic companies on earth are spread among schoolteachers and retirees.

Nothing like this is happening in Europe or China. The U.S. drew about 64% of all venture capital worldwide in 2025, up from roughly 47% a few years earlier, and captured about 85% of global funding for AI.

Almost 80 countries run space programs, yet a single U.S. company, SpaceX, flies more than 10,000 satellites, about two-thirds of everything active in orbit. AI commands the ambition of governments on every continent, but the firms setting its pace are almost all American. In both arenas, the breakthroughs come not from a state ministry but from the inventiveness of private enterprise.

The gap between the U.S. and others is widening, not closing. In the 2024 European Union report on European competitiveness from Mario Draghi, the former central banker noted that not a single European company worth more than 100 billion euros had been built from scratch in the past 50 years. Of America’s dozen or so trillion-dollar companies, half were built during that exact span.

In the past 250 years, a nation once so fragile that it might have been strangled in its cradle has risen above all its major competitors and established itself as the world’s pre-eminent power. How a republic not built around martial genius or government planning did that is the central question of American strategy. The answer is the spirit of enterprise: free markets and free people.

Clare McHugh talks with Tom Holland – the historian, not the actor – about history, including the American Revolution. Two slices:

“It’s very unfashionable, I think, to attribute the success of the revolution to the remarkable qualities of the Founding Fathers,” Holland says, then pausing a beat. “So what? Their quality was recognized at the time, even by their enemies. And it’s rare for people who have been defeated to acknowledge the stature of those who have defeated them.”

Holland notes how stupefied King George III was to learn that Washington had given up the presidency and, like Cincinnatus, returned to his plow. But America’s founders consciously emulated the Romans, he explains, because as members of the transatlantic British elite they were steeped in classical history. “There are multiple lessons that can be applied from classical history — that’s the joy of it,” Holland says. “If you are in rebellion against a king, you can look back at the palmy days when the Romans expelled a monarch and established a republic.” They knew how that project ended, of course, “so there’s an immense emphasis in the early decades of the American republic on the virtues of the early Romans as they are properly understood.”

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Asked to name his favorite Founding Father, Holland fulsomely praises Franklin for lining up the French on the colonists’ side — “the great diplomatic achievement in the whole of American history” — before admitting that no colonial leader surpasses Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence. “The genius of the Declaration is that it draws on what are clearly Christian ideas of the inherent dignity of mankind — life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” he says. “But there is no overt Christian framing of it, which is brilliant, because it allows all kinds of people to buy in.”

What of the current antipathy for Jefferson, owner of 600 slaves, a man who sired children with his late wife’s enslaved half sister, Sally Hemings? Holland responds passionately: “Jefferson knew in his marrow that slavery was a moral abomination. He knew this because he had read the New Testament, because he was steeped in the liberalism of the English Enlightenment, because for him the ideal of liberty was the most vivid ideal he had.”

And yet the historian admits “it’s such a mystery” that Jefferson lived in conflict with his own values. “My solution is he basically wants to be Cicero; he wants to retire to enjoy otium cum dignitate, as the Romans call it, leisure with dignity, but he needs the slaves for that. All the Virginian aristocracy is going bust at that time. If he frees his slaves, he will lose Monticello, and Monticello is the great love of his life.”

Reason‘s Christian Britschgi applauds George Washington. A slice:

In the final days of the American Revolution, Continental Army soldiers gathered in Newburgh, New York, to demand that Congress fund their back pay and promised pensions. Anonymous letters circulating among the troops suggested that they might refuse to disband, and might even overthrow Congress, if their benefits weren’t forthcoming.

Some of the generals and politicians egging the soldiers on hoped that George Washington would take up his men’s cause and in doing so replace a weak Congress with a powerful new federal government. Instead, Washington ended the mutiny with a few words and some brilliant political showmanship.

In the middle of an address to the restive soldiers in which he urged them to respect Congress, the aged general conspicuously reached into his pocket for his glasses.

“Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in the service of my country,” he said to the assembled soldiers. There wasn’t a dry eye left in the house after that.

The so-called Newburgh conspiracy collapsed instantly. American history did not begin with a military coup; instead, Washington gave the new nation a powerful image of republican self-restraint and a tradition of military submission to civilian authority.

That’s a lot to accomplish just by putting on one’s glasses.

Libertarians can certainly find much to criticize in George Washington. At the beginning of the War of Independence, some wanted to use voluntary militias to fight the redcoats. Washington demanded instead that we stand up a European-style army, which in turn necessitated European-style martial discipline, taxes, and inflation. After the war, he agitated for replacing the decentralized government established by the Articles of Confederation with a stronger federal government with its own robust powers to tax. As the first president under the new Constitution, Washington was hardly a small-government man. He supported a permanent standing army and put down a tax revolt at the point of a sword.

Despite all that, the highlights of Washington’s military and political career show him time and again walking away from power when he had every opportunity to seize or retain it. The Newburgh conspiracy is a prime example.

George Leef looks at two reports on the decline of American higher education.

The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal warns that “the Faster Labor Contracts Act is a progressive trap for Republican supporters.” A slice:

The Trump Administration is campaigning against racial preferences in hiring, but watch out or they could arrive through the back door—with the help of Republicans. The vehicle is the Faster Labor Contracts Act (FLCA), which would aid Big Labor in imposing its progressive agenda on American business.

The House recently passed the FLCA with the support of 20 Republicans, and Josh Hawley of Missouri is promoting it in the Senate with Bernie Moreno (R., Ohio) and Roger Marshall (R., Kan.) as co-sponsors. Teamsters President Sean O’Brien has called Mr. Hawley “labor’s biggest ally in the Senate Republican caucus.”

These Republicans are promoting much more than the FLCA’s mandated arbitration after 120 days of collective bargaining. The bill gives the whip hand to unions in negotiating labor contracts, and along with that comes the left-wing cultural agenda that unions like the Teamsters and the SEIU have adopted.

Take DEI—diversity, equity and inclusion—which unions have made part of their social-justice mission and collective-bargaining agreements. The General Teamsters Local Union No. 174 made DEI a feature of its negotiation with the Port of Seattle. The Writers Guild of America, East, included DEI targets for the hiring process and a formal diversity committee in its bargaining with Vox Media.

The Screen Actors Guild and American Federation of Television and Radio Artists 2025 National Board resolution calls DEI a “moral imperative” and says that “systemic barriers to full and fair inclusion, equal employment opportunity, and accessibility persist, requiring continued vigilance and advocacy.”

Or how about anti-Israel policies? In June, the United Auto Workers in Michigan voted to divest from Israel. The resolution cites the “billionaire class” and Israel’s contribution to “undermine global worker unity by furthering settler colonialism, apartheid, dispossession, and genocide.” Who knew the UAW had a Gaza policy?

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… is from page 186 of Thomas Sowell’s 1994 book, Race and Culture: A World View:

Slavery was “peculiar” in the United States only because human bondage was inconsistent with the principles on which this nation was founded. Historically, however, it was those principles which were peculiar, not slavery.

DBx: Thomas Jefferson, George Mason, George Washington, and other slave-holding American founders are and ought by right to be criticized for engaging in the heinous practice of human bondage, as well as for their hypocrisy. Yet for their many words and actions in support of the principles of liberty, they deserve also much praise. Regardless of the judgment that you personally choose to pass on each such founder, the indisputable fact is that the liberal ideology that they espoused and risked their lives to further was the acid that finally dissolved the unquestioned acceptance that most human beings for the previous 10,000 years had for slavery.

As we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, let that celebration be for the institutional triumph, however imperfect, of the liberal creed – a creed that eventually destroyed slavery.

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… is perhaps the most perfect string of 35 words ever written or uttered, words that were officially declared 250 years ago today:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

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Hans Eicholz reviews two books on the Declaration of Independence. Two slices:

Among the best ways to gain perspective on any topic is to read different treatments in tandem. In observance of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, I did just that with two books that pair well: Bradley Birzer’s The Declaration of Independence: A Radical Experiment in Liberty and Michael Auslin’s National Treasure: How the Declaration of Independence Made America, both hot off the presses this year.

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There was a time when Americans trusted the states to serve as bulwarks for the protection of rights and liberties. Federalism, as a check on distant and impersonal power, was as central to the Declaration’s structure as its assertion of universal natural rights. Indeed, the suggestion that these two dimensions of the Declaration might stand in conflict with one another would have surprised most patriots at the time. These aspects were originally regarded as highly compatible, even complementary, parts of limited government under law.

Peter Earle explains how “the American Revolution redefined freedom itself.”

Allen Guelzo makes clear the important role played by Abraham Lincoln in defining July 4th for Americans. A slice:

No wonder Lincoln was so jubilant in 1863 when news of the Union triumph at Gettysburg (on July 3) and the surrender of the Confederate citadel of Vicksburg (on July 4) clustered around the Fourth. The rebellion that denied “all men are created equal” had now “turned tail and run,” as Lincoln said during his July 7 speech. But the ultimate vindication of the Fourth of July would come four months later, at the dedication of the national cemetery at Gettysburg for the Union dead of the battle. No longer did he speak in the offhand style of “80-odd years.” Lincoln smoothed it out to the eloquent and almost biblical words we know so well today: “Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

From the moment of the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln made it clear that Americans trace their origin not to a race, a heritage or a religion, but to the creed enunciated on the Fourth of July—that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The close of the Civil War was, in large measure, Lincoln’s victory. But it was also the victory of the Fourth of July, and that victory is with us still.

Clark Packard and Tad DeHaven report on Trump & Co.’s “self-dealing in US trade and investment policy.” Here’s their conclusion:

These private profits for Trump administration officials and their family members sit downstream of specific US international trade and investment practices, including efforts to mitigate China’s chokehold on tungsten, other rare earths, and semiconductor export controls. None of these policy goals are necessarily illegitimate on their own terms, but the means pursuing those goals are transforming ordinary policy into family enrichment schemes.

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy, decries this unfortunately unsurprising reality: “The new transportation bill puts special interests above safety.” A slice:

Fiscal conservatives, assuming there are still enough of them to be heard in Congress, should be particularly concerned about a package that authorizes roughly $580 billion in spending while doing little to address the long-term insolvency of the Highway Trust Fund. Legislators are instead choosing to promise more spending while avoiding the structural reforms necessary to put transportation funding on sustainable footing.

Ilya Somin responds to “the ‘birth tourism’ objection to birthright citizenship.” A slice:

Moreover, birth tourism isn’t actually a bad thing at all. It’s a positive good. Presumably, “birth tourist” parents want their children to be born US citizens so they could live a life of greater freedom and prosperity than would be possible in the parents’ countries of origin. That’s obviously a good outcome for the children and their families. And it’s good for the US economy and society, as well, because native-born US citizens benefit from the enormous economic and social contributions of immigrants. Indeed, immigration restrictions undermine the economic freedom and prosperity of native-born US citizens more than any other government policy.

David Henderson is always worth listening to.

“Zohran Mamdani goes full commie on air conditioning.“

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… is from page 51 of John Barry’s excellent 2012 book, Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty [emphasis original to Coke]:

Then [Sir Edward] Coke took Parliament further. Among Parliament’s traditional rights was bringing “grievances” to the king’s attention. Coke chaired the Committee on Grievances, an odd position for a privy councilor. And he lashed out at the king’s claim that “reason of state,” i.e., the national interest and particularly national security, could justify extraordinary action.

“Reason of state is often a trick to put us out of the right way,” Coke said, “for when a man can give no reason for a thing, then he flieth to a higher strain and saith it is a reason of state.”

DBx: This warning is wise, and every bit as relevant today as it was when the English crown was worn by the Stuarts.

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Unlike most people who reference – usually in support of protectionist schemes – Alexander Hamilton’s 1791 Report on the Subject of Manufactures, I’ve actually read the entire document, carefully. At around 33,000 words, it’s long, but certainly not a terribly heavy lift. And while Hamilton had little of Adam Smith’s or Thomas Jefferson’s talent for composition, his writing style isn’t half-bad.

No one who reads this Report can help but be impressed with Hamilton’s deep intelligence and learning. The reader also encounters several glimpses of a talented economist at work. Alas, though, these are only glimpses. On the whole, Hamilton put more trust in government officials than in market forces to allocate capital and resources in ways that will best industrialize a fledgling economy. He didn’t adequately understand the role of prices, profits, and losses at allocating capital and resources – or, perhaps instead, he understood the logic, but mistakenly supposed that that logic is weak in economies not yet industrialized.

I quickly add that, nevertheless, there is very little in Hamilton’s Report that supports the case for protectionism or industrial policy in the America of the 21st century. Were Hamilton alive today, he almost certainly would not only oppose, but oppose vigorously, Trump & Co.’s case for Trump’s tariffs. Worth noting explicitly is that Hamilton welcomed net inflows of foreign capital (which cause trade deficits) while Trump & Co. insist that these net inflows are a national emergency.

Here two slices of my latest AIER column, which is on Hamilton’s Report.

Hamilton relied on Adam Smith (also without naming him) to expose the errors of physiocracy — that is, the belief that net economic value is produced only by agriculture. Yet Hamilton went further, arguing that manufacturing can be more productive than agriculture. In making this argument, Hamilton was impressive; one might even sense in it an anticipation of some insights revealed by economists’ marginal revolution of 80 years later.

Regardless of how much or little Hamilton intuited of marginalism, he deserves credit for emphasizing the reality and significance of opportunity costs. To produce some increment of agricultural output requires that some increment of manufacturing output not be produced. And that increment of agricultural output is worthwhile to produce only if its value exceeds that of the foregone manufacturing output. Thus did Hamilton defuse the arguments of persons who believed that, to establish the case for keeping America an agricultural nation, it’s sufficient to point to the positive market value of agricultural output.

In this way, and some others, Hamilton revealed a keen ability to think insightfully about economic matters. Nevertheless, on a full assessment, Hamilton in the Report got more wrong about economics than he got right. Not content to support only the removal of artificial barriers in the US against domestic manufacturing, Hamilton argued strenuously that the government must actively promote American manufacturing. That promotion should consist chiefly of subsidies (“bounties”) supplemented by protective tariffs.

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Not only was Hamilton’s case for protection confined to the need to stimulate industrial capacity in a country lacking such capacity, he also preferred subsidies over tariffs (because tariffs, unlike subsidies, reduce supplies of targeted goods), and he welcomed, rather than bemoaned, net inflows of foreign capital.

Nevertheless, Hamilton ultimately had too little confidence in free markets. The late Gordon Wood’s assessment of Hamilton-as-economist is accurate:

Hamilton was so wedded to a hierarchical view of society that he could only imagine industrial investment and development coming from the top down. Thus he was incapable of foreseeing that the actual source of America’s manufacturing would come from below, from the ambitions, productivity, and investments of thousands upon thousands of middling artisans and craftsmen who eventually became America’s businessmen. Hamilton’s historical reputation as the prophet of America’s industrial greatness therefore seems somewhat exaggerated. He certainly wanted a powerful and glorious nation, but he was no more capable of accurately foretelling the future than the other American leaders.

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George Will expresses eloquently his wise objections to the new U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Trump v. Slaughter. Two slices:

On Monday, the Supreme Court enlarged presidential power far beyond its already menacing dimensions, which are beyond anything the Founders could have imagined. Self-described “originalist” justices did so in the name of assuring the president’s democratic “accountability.” The original originalists, the Constitution’s framers, would have winced.

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The unitary executive theory says what the Constitution nowhere says: that any governmental activity with an executive aspect must be controlled by the president. Furthermore, Kagan correctly insists that much of what the independent agencies do — making, within parameters set by Congress, rules that have the force of law — is mischaracterized as executive. Congress delegated this obviously legislative function on the assumption — true for decades, until Monday — that the agencies would not be under presidential domination.

Why, exactly, cannot Congress carve out, by laws, exceptions to the president’s removal power, exceptions that Congress thinks serve the public interest? The president should be duty-bound to take care that those laws are faithfully executed. Never until Monday has this been declared constitutionally forbidden.

The court has made the congressional power exercised over multimember independent agencies irrecoverable. Any president will veto Congress’s attempt to claw back its power. So, it will be nearly impossible for congressional supermajorities to pass legislation reestablishing the bargain it struck when, in the 19th century, it began creating independent agencies.

My Mercatus Center colleague (and also my former student) Liya Palagashvili has this excellent piece in today’s Wall Street Journal. It’s on one of the happy effects of AI on employment. Two slices:

Most debates over artificial intelligence begin with the same question: Which jobs will AI destroy? But the first labor-market shock may not be mass job loss. It may be worker migration from traditional firms.

AI is making it easier for one worker to do tasks that once required a small team. In industries where AI can handle research, drafting, coding, editing and analysis, the result isn’t necessarily unemployment. It may be independence.

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The firm isn’t disappearing, but for some knowledge work, the advantages of being inside one are. Labor-market institutions have yet to adjust. Unemployment insurance assumes one employer, a clean separation, and a search for another job. Health insurance remains heavily tied to employment, and many retirement plans, leave benefits, and tax advantages are organized around the employer.

The most immediate question isn’t whether AI will eventually replace workers. It is whether AI is already making workers less dependent on the firm while policy remains anchored to it.

Ilya Somin applauds the ruling in Trump v. Barbara.

Karl Rove is rightly repulsed by the notion of “heritage Americans.” Two slices:

The historian Gordon Wood put it well. The Revolution that the Declaration announced “radically and thoroughly transformed” American society. It “destroyed aristocracy,” made “the interests and prosperity of ordinary people . . . the goal of society and government,” and released “powerful popular entrepreneurial and commercial energies.”

America wasn’t built by the rich and powerful but in large part by discards, rejects, losers and throwaways who made their way here. “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore” Emma Lazarus wrote in her 1883 sonnet, later inscribed on the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal.

Inspired by the Declaration, people have come over the centuries hoping life could be better. Abide by its principles and the Constitution written to secure them, the promise went, and you and America can flourish.

We have. What began as pioneers huddled on a narrow coastal strip, an ocean away from the civilization they knew and facing an immense, unknown land is now a mighty nation that spans a continent.

America has become the most prosperous, compassionate, innovative, open society the world has known. Despite our challenges, doubts and divisions, America still demonstrates every day what a free people can achieve—for their families and the nation—if we strive to make the Declaration’s words real.

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One in seven American residents is an immigrant. For the other six, this Saturday should be a day for special gratitude. Through no action of our own, we were born here, and—alongside all who made their difficult way to America—enjoy the blessings of what happened in Philadelphia in the summer of 1776. Happy Fourth, to every American.

The great Bruce Yandle talks about the economy.

Writing at the Independent Review, my intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy, ponders declining birth rates and America’s aging population.

Scott Atlas makes a powerful case for abolishing the National Institutes of Health. Three slices:

In 1980, economist Milton Friedman said the National Institutes of Health should be abolished. Friedman said the same about another government research agency, the National Science Foundation. And when he was asked what the NSF should be replaced with, he replied: “Nothing.”

Whistleblower documents highlighted in a recent report showed what happens when private billions meet a public agency that can be influenced: Bill Gates’s foundation spent two decades steering the NIH research agenda toward its own priorities — with agency officials as willing partners. The NIH has become a government entity captured by special-interest groups — just as Friedman feared 46 years ago.

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This financial exploitation is compounded by political agendas, regardless of party. President Ronald Reagan’s administration delayed AIDS research funding; Reagan did not address the epidemic publicly until 1987, after more than 36,000 Americans had been diagnosed and nearly 21,000 had died. President George W. Bush restricted embryonic stem cell research on religious grounds. President Barack Obama reversed that ban by executive order. His administration created the NIH’s ideologically driven Sexual and Gender Minority Research Office in 2015.

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The NIH has funded valuable science. But it’s also a governmental monopoly with a roughly $48 billion budget subject to political influence, fiscal abuse and suppression of scientific dissent — one that has diverted billions from actual science to academic operations, racial set-asides and ideological mandates. It is what government agencies always become: an instrument of whoever holds power, and one that escapes accountability. Friedman asked the fundamental question: On whom should the burden of proof rest — on those who force taxpayers to fund government research, or on those who challenge its necessity? Abolishing the NIH is not a case against science. It is a case for science itself.

The video here exposes some of the destructiveness and injustice of rent control.

Thomas Massie tweets this about Trump: (HT Scott Lincicome)

Imagine if Biden or Obama had bragged about shaking down a private company for 10% public ownership.