Tweet

Ilya Somin, a colleague over in GMU’s Scalia School of Law, makes clear that “court packing is a dangerous gambit best avoided.” Two slices:

Court-packing has once again become a major focus of political contention, with many on the political left advocating it in response to what they believe are badly flawed and illegitimate decisions by the Supreme Court. In a recent article for The UnPopulist, Andy Craig provides reluctant support for court-packing, but with a twist he argues will minimize the danger: combining court-packing with a constitutional amendment imposing term limits on Supreme Court justices that would—if enacted—reverse the packing. The term-limit system would give every president two appointments per term, thereby potentially producing more ideological balance on the bench.

Craig’s proposal is clever and a cut above more conventional defenses of court-packing. But I remain unpersuaded. His argument falls short in multiple ways. He overrates the negative aspects of the current Supreme Court majority and underrates their positive contributions, including on the very issue of combating incipient authoritarianism, the main focus of his concerns. He also overestimates the supposed inevitability of future court-packing and the feasibility of his compromise plan. Finally, there are good alternative fixes for many of the problems that (rightly) concern Craig.

…..

Liberal Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan is no fan of much of the conservative majority’s jurisprudence. But, in a recent speech, she rejected the charge that they just “rubber stamp what the current administration does.” The truth is “quite the opposite,” she said. “I think that that is a bad rap.” To back up her point, she cited several recent cases, including the tariff case, the National Guard case, and more. She emphasized that “[t]ariffs is probably the key policy issue for this president … something he campaigned on … he cared an enormous amount about. … I don’t think that there are all that many decisions in the recent times, where a court strikes down such an important policy to a sitting president.” She’s not wrong.

The court’s earlier rulings in “anti-commandeering” and Spending Clause cases have played an important role in protecting “sanctuary cities” against Trump’s efforts to force them to aid in his cruel mass deportation policies. In both his first and second terms, these decisions—mostly written and supported by conservative justices—have been repeatedly cited by lower-court judges as crucial precedents curbing Trump’s power to directly coerce state and local governments and to pull federal grants from them. Lack of state and local support significantly constrains deportation efforts.

The Roberts Court is also probably the most speech-protective Supreme Court majority in all of American history. Most notably, it has issued a series of decisions prioritizing freedom of political speech over campaign finance restrictions (although, I understand, many of my progressive friends are less enthused by it), governments’ ability to indirectly pressure speakers, and impose restrictions on social media. When it comes to the latter issue, the court’s ruling came in a case involving two red states’ efforts to restrict social media moderation.

David Simon is correct: “Now is the time to address the emerging socialism of JD Vance.” Two slices:

The Nobel Prize-winning economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek dedicated his great book, The Road to Serfdom – which opposes excessive governmental power – “to the socialists of all parties,” because socialism is not limited to the left.

Republicans should take this point to heart. They regularly attack Democrats for their strident support for socialist economic policies, but to protect our free market economy from government’s heavy hands they need to address the emerging socialism of their leading 2028 presidential election contender, JD Vance.

Vance enthusiastically approves of the view that the government should “seize the equity of the AI companies.” Government ownership of parts of, or entire, businesses – “the means of production” in Marxist and socialist economic writings – is a foundational principle of these ideologies. Government ownership means more government direction of, and control over, private economic activity and distortion of market processes that make the economy work efficiently.

…..

And then there is Vance’s flirtation with antisemitism and his related hostility to Israel. Before unpacking that, however, it is important to understand the connection between antisemitism and socialism.

As perhaps best explained by George Gilder’s 2009 book, “The Israel Test,” those who hold antisemitic views generally also hold socialist views, and vice-versa, because antisemitism and socialism share the false conception that free market capitalism is a zero-sum process. Socialists assert that businesses make profits and people become wealthy through free markets by exploiting workers and otherwise impoverishing others. Antisemites make the same claim regarding wealthy Jews and their businesses.

Selina Xu wisely warns against U.S. AI protectionism. A slice:

Imagine this: The U.S. is a digital walled garden where foreign software is banned, and everyone depends on a handful of domestic incumbents for costly artificial-intelligence access. Meanwhile, the rest of the world builds AI economies on a base of Chinese open models that can be freely downloaded, customized and distributed.

Sound familiar? It is the inverse of China’s “Great Firewall,” a sprawling regulatory and technological system that has stifled foreign competition and restricted the Chinese public’s access to information for more than two decades.

Instead of championing competition and openness, the U.S. is inching toward tech protectionism. Washington is considering restrictions on Chinese open-source AI models after Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 model sparked accusations of distillation—the use of one model’s outputs to train or improve another. The idea sounds like economic toughness: deny a competitor access to the U.S. market and protect sensitive technology. But a ban would give more power to a handful of incumbents, raise startup costs, and weaken the open-model ecosystem necessary for American innovation.

Open-source is a crucial part of the AI supply chain for U.S. companies. When some OpenAI models recently hacked another company, the victim—Hugging Face—had to turn to a Chinese open-weight model to defend itself. The safety guardrails of closed U.S. models blocked Hugging Face’s requests.

Arnold Kling is noticing a slow-down in the improvements to AI.

The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal assesses “the tepid Trump economy.” Two slices:

The Commerce Department’s GDP report for the second quarter on Thursday shows the economy continues to plod along and is shrugging off the war in Iran. But it’s also nothing to brag about.

The U.S. economy grew a tepid 1.5% during the second quarter, driven by consumers and AI investment. Consumer spending contributed 2.1 percentage points, while business investment added 1.2 points. Net exports subtracted a point from GDP, which is a statistical wash since imports flow into consumer spending and investment. A decline in government spending subtracted from growth in the quarter because of the way GDP is calculated, but less government helps the private economy over time.

Equipment purchases and intellectual property accounted for all of the uptick in business investment. AI hyperscalers, which plan to spend upward of $700 billion this year, are turbo-charging demand for computer chips, construction equipment, gas turbines and more. Businesses are also pumping tens of billions into frontier AI models.

Mr. Trump thinks that, with the stock market hitting records and the economy avoiding recession, his tariffs are working wonders. But based on Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s 3% GDP growth target, the economy is underperforming by half. Last year’s tax bill and deregulation would be driving faster growth if not for Mr. Trump’s border taxes that raise costs and uncertainty for business.

…..

Some of Mr. Trump’s most ardent fans tell us they wish he’d drop his tariff fixation and return to the supply-side policies that produced broad-based prosperity during his first term. Most Americans probably do too.

Trump & Co. continue to move the American economy closer to socialism. It’s doing so by having the government own ever-more of the means of production.

And Scott Lincicome tweets:

For those keeping score at home*, this means the US government’s equity portfolio now consists of THIRTY COMPANIES – up from ZERO just a year ago. (MP Materials was the 1st last July.)

Bonus: it’s all coming from the guy fighting “communism.”

Also writing about the Trump administration’s fondness for government ownership of the means of production is the Cato Institute’s Tad DeHaven. A slice:

Commerce says that these stakes enhance the return for taxpayers, but even a profitable portfolio would not resolve the underlying institutional problem. The federal government is now acting as regulator, customer, financier, and shareholder. Decisions involving contracts, trade restrictions, permits, and additional subsidies can affect the value of its holdings. Competitors have reason to question whether the playing field is level. And if a portfolio company falters, Washington will have an added incentive to protect its investment with more taxpayer support.

Calling the stakes “minority” and “noncontrolling” does not eliminate those conflicts. Public announcements often reveal little about valuations, shareholder rights, oversight, or exit plans. Meanwhile, future administrations will inherit the same tool and can use it to assemble portfolios reflecting their own political priorities.

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy, reveals “the real cost of turning away foreign talent.” A slice:

There are many ways to measure the health of a country. One way is growth of gross domestic product (GDP). Another is economic productivity. But there’s a less conventional measure worth watching: Do the world’s most talented and ambitious people want to immigrate here?

Throughout most of America’s history, the answer has been an emphatic yes. Scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, artists, and strivers from around the world have chosen the United States because they believed they could build something, discover something, or start a business while making a better life in this country.

We should worry about the day when this is no longer true.

Unfortunately, the Trump administration seems determined to make that day arrive sooner rather than later. Its destructive embrace of protectionism is not merely directed against foreign goods and capital. It’s not limited to low-skill immigrants, either. It’s also directed against in-demand foreign talent.

…..

alented people don’t merely fill existing jobs. They create them by inventing products, starting companies, conducting research, and making the people around them more productive. In the process, they create opportunities for other people that otherwise wouldn’t exist.

Giving a cold shoulder to foreign students is particularly absurd when you consider Washington’s obsession with competing against China. Politicians insist that America is engaged in an existential technological race. They spend billions of dollars subsidizing semiconductors and other favored industries. They develop elaborate industrial policies intended to make America dominant in artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and advanced manufacturing.

Then, when a potentially brilliant young scientist from India, China, or anywhere else earns an advanced degree at an American university and wants to stay and contribute to the American economy, our government says perhaps they should leave.

You can throw billions of taxpayer dollars at a semiconductor factory in Arizona. You cannot manufacture genius through an appropriations bill.

The Peterson researchers estimate that discouraging just one-third of international STEM graduates could leave the American economy 0.7 percent to 1.3 percent smaller, or roughly $200 billion to $400 billion in GDP over a decade—equivalent to losing the entire economy of Utah or South Carolina.

Tweet

… is from page 11 of Milton Friedman’s November 1991 Wriston Lecture:

The problem is not that government is spending too little but that it is spending too much. The problem in schooling is that government is spending too much on the wrong things. The problem in health care is that government is spending too much on the wrong things. The end result has been that government has become a self-generating monstrosity. Abraham Lincoln talked about a government of the people, by the people, for the people. What we now have is a government of the people, by the bureaucrats, including the legislators who have become bureaucrats, for the bureaucrats.

DBx: Milton Friedman was born – into a working-class immigrant family – in Brooklyn on this date (July 31st) in 1912. He became one of the most-accomplished economists of the 20th century, as well as one of history’s greatest champions of liberty and free markets.

Tweet

Edited by Richard Epstein, Mario Rizzo, and my Mercatus Center colleague (and former student) Liya Palagashvili, the Routledge Handbook of Classical Liberalism has just been published. In it, you’ll find chapters by (among many others) David Schmidtz and Jason Brennan (on the foundations of classical liberalism), Richard Wagner (on fiscal policy), Tom Hazlett (on price controls), Larry White (on banking and financial regulation), and Pete Boettke (on the future of classical liberalism).

I wrote Chapter 36 (“Liberalism and Trade”). Here are three slices from my chapter:

Liberalization of international trade—free trade—has been central to the liberal project from early on. Adam Smith’s 1776 Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations has at its core what remains an extraordinarily powerful and still‑relevant case for a policy of unilateral free trade. Smith made this case largely in the course of exposing as fallacious many of the key tenets of mercantilism and its associated plea for active government regulation of trade.

…..

Yet in the minds of many people mercantilism remains dominant today. For example, Donald Trump regularly interprets American trade deficits as evidence that America is losing money (see, for example, Kiely, 2019). Nearly all of Trump’s decades‑long pronouncements on trade, while foolish from the perspective of liberal economics, make perfect sense from the perspective of mercantilism.

This interpretation of international trade by a businessman is unsurprising. Businesses succeed economically by earning revenues greater than expenses. To the businessperson’s mind, therefore, it seems natural that countries succeed economically by doing the same. But this mercantilist mindset is not confined to businesspeople; it is widespread among the general populace. The skepticism evinced by Donald Trump to trade—skepticism in particular to imports—is not at all unique to Trump or to right‑wing populists. It is commonplace across the political and ideological spectra, consistently rejected only by liberals.

Yet as Adam Smith observed, mercantilists have matters exactly backward. Economic activity—including international trade—is valuable only insofar as it increases people’s access to goods and services that improve their standard of living. The value of international trade lies not in how much money it brings into the country but, instead, in how many goods and services it brings in as imports in excess of the goods and services that are exported in exchange. The greater the net amount of goods and services made available in the home country by trade, the better the trade. And individuals, not government officials, are the best judges of which goods and services are most likely to improve their standard of living.

Two key tenets emerge from the liberal rejection of the philosophical foundation of mercantilism. One is that a country is not akin to a company; a country is not an organization the goals of which citizens must be taxed, subsidized, or regulated to pursue. Free trade is normatively justified in part because individuals are not employees or agents of Country, Inc.

The second tenet, which follows from the first, is that the measure of trade’s value is its contribution to the well‑being of all the citizens—including the masses—of a country. Trade’s impacts on the government or on particular producer groups are relevant only insofar as these impacts affect the welfare of the country at large—a welfare that ultimately is measured by the material well‑being of the population at large and not by any “absurd” accounting figure such as the balance of trade.

…..

The most frequently encountered economic objections to free trade—such as that free trade permanently reduces either employment or real wages in the home country—have been addressed by economists for over two centuries and consistently found, both theoretically and empirically, to be unwarranted. In this chapter, I largely ignored these commonplace complaints about free trade, as refutations of these are by now practically countless (see, for example, Yeager & Tuerck, 1966; Boudreaux, 2008; Lemieux, 2018; Panagariya, 2019; Irwin, 2020). The liberal case for free trade of course includes trade’s pure economic benefits. But the liberal case extends beyond narrowly economic benefits to embrace trade’s integration of thousands, millions, and even billions of strangers into an extensive—today truly global—commercial society that, in addition to better providing the masses with the material means necessary for flourishing, promotes freedom, creativity, openness, toleration, and peace.

Tweet

Matt Ridley is right: An eternal battle is between those people who understand the reality of spontaneous order and those people who have difficulty believing that order can arise and be maintained without being consciously engineered. Two slices:

Spontaneous order describes many of the things that work best in the world: ecosystems, brains, bodies, cells, and genomes are built that way, self-assembling with no management. So are economies, markets, and languages. Nobody is in charge of the rules of the English language (thank goodness), even though it is man-made: everybody is. As the eighteenth-century Edinburgh philosopher Adam Ferguson said, “nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design”.

“On coming to Paris for a visit, I said to myself: Here are a million human beings who would all die in a few days if supplies of all sorts did not flow into this great metropolis,” wrote the nineteenth-century economist Frédéric Bastiat. Nobody is in charge of deciding how Paris gets fed every day, and it would be a mess if somebody was (see Union, Soviet or European). The lesson is that we are far too ready to reach for command and control rather than, as far as possible, setting the rules so that people can negotiate complex solutions among themselves through the magic of supply and demand.

…..

Conversely, we know that the Chinese economic miracle had a bottom-up cause, not a top-down one. It was not some brilliant piece of planning by the government. It was the accidental realisation by Deng Xiaoping that a bunch of farmers disobeying their collective farm rules and growing their own produce were getting results, followed by a decision to loosen the restrictions on other sectors too.

This is true of all economic miracles. When Bill Clinton asked Congress to allow e-commerce, he did not try to dictate what would happen: the Framework for Global Electronic Commerce he put forward in 1997 was one of the most libertarian documents in history. The rapid rise in living standards in countries like India, Vietnam, and Poland is not the result of good five-year plans but of government getting out of the way of entrepreneurs.

Jane Shaw Stroup puts the economic ‘problems’ of Gen-Z Americans into perspective. A slice:

So what can Generation Z do? Take all this lamentation with a grain of salt. Maybe a tablespoon of it. We older folks have seen this before.

In 1982, Fran Schumer wrote “Downward Mobility,” a classic New York magazine cover story. She interviewed 20- and 30-somethings about their financial woes, classifying them as the nouveau pauvre, or, as a well-known economist put it, “well-dressed paupers.”

Ms. Schumer spoke to a married couple in New York whose $70,000 joint income (about $240,000 today) placed them “squarely in the comfortable middle class” but didn’t “allow them even to own their own home.” The husband complained that “so many of the amenities that seemed almost a birthright when he was growing up now appear to be out of reach.”

“The economic realities of adult life have come as a rude surprise to Mark and Alison Kramer”—not their real names—“and many others whose childhoods coincided with the great boom time of the fifties,” Ms. Schumer wrote. “A house, a car, staples of middle-class life, now seem like luxuries. The mention of a large suburban backyard is likely to evoke the same nostalgia from people in Manhattan as madeleines did for Proust in Remembrance of Things Past.”

Ryan Stowers’s letter in today’s Wall Street Journal is excellent:

Many employers are learning that artificial intelligence creates the most value when it strengthens talent rather than replaces it (“Hiring Defies Forecast of AI Wipeout,” Page One, July 27). Rather than disproving AI’s potential, this hiring rebound suggests many employers misunderstood where AI creates value. Organizations that viewed AI primarily as a substitute for talent are now playing catch-up. That means investing in people, not just technology. It is almost always cheaper to retain and reskill employees than to fire and later rehire them. Employers should ask how AI can help individuals take on higher-value work. Companies that use AI only to cut costs will capture just a fraction of its value. Companies that treat AI as an investment in human potential rather than a substitute for it will be best positioned to compete.

My Mercatus Center colleague Alden Abbott describes a morass in U.S. antitrust.

Robert Bork, Jr., makes clear that “the FTC should have shucked the Biden antitrust playbook. It kept it instead.” Two slices:

The second Trump administration’s continuation of Biden-era progressive antitrust enforcement has been an unwelcome surprise.

…..

The administration’s rhetoric is not much better. Vice President JD Vance recently called for a shift from Milton Friedman’s defense of free-market capitalism to a Hamiltonian focus on big-government projects, adding that the aim of government policy should be to make the economy “a tool to service the dignity of the human person.” Trump’s FTC chair, Andrew Ferguson, said government intervention is necessary “to restrict the exercise of liberty when that exercise of liberty meaningfully diminishes other people’s flourishing.”

References to “flourishing” over freedom are scattered throughout the speeches of Ferguson and his colleague, FTC member Mark Meador. Now Trump regulators are picking up yet another progressive trope: blaming businesses for inflation.

That approach echoes President Joe Biden’s 2021 announcement of 72 antitrust initiatives, which attributed stagnant wages and inflation to capitalist greed rather than excessive government regulation or debt levels exceeding those at the end of World War II.

Vance Ginn argues that “Fauci’s silence cannot erase the COVID-policy catastrophe.”

Also writing about Fauci’s recent silent appearance before Congress is the Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal. Two slices:

It would be good to hear Dr. Fauci respond. We know from previous disclosures that Drs. Fauci and Collins tried to demean the authors of the 2020 Great Barrington Declaration that favored “focused protection” on the old and sick rather than wholesale lockdowns. The duo favored media censorship of those and other dissenting views.

Dr. Fauci might not be facing this tough scrutiny now if he and the press hadn’t worked so hard to stifle Covid debate at the time. The doctor’s recently released diaries reveal how much the media abandoned its skepticism and curiosity to elevate Dr. Fauci as the oracle who couldn’t be doubted on Covid.

…..

Journalists need sources, and friendships aren’t uncommon. But the conformist media idolatry of Dr. Fauci was a way of shutting off debate over Covid policy. It also became a way for the press to attack President Trump in an election year. Locking down debate over Covid was as damaging as the lockdowns.

Also on Fauci is National Review‘s Noah Rothman. A slice:

There’s a reason why, more than any other public health official under Trump at the outset of the pandemic, Fauci so quickly became a dashboard saint to the American left. No other figure in public life had the demonstrable power to convince the public to subordinate their financial self-interest to the state, severing the bonds of community and family that mediate the personal and the political.

Even as public officials with more propriety assured Americans throughout the Covid years that a return to “normalcy” was the goal — “or as normalized as you can be, post-Covid,” in former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s formulation — a segment of the American left convinced itself that returning to normal would be worse than the perpetuation of the pandemic.

Vox’s Sigal Samuel called it the kind of anxiety that “might be worth cultivating.” Theirs was a fear of returning to a world in which mental health was incompatible with “the rigidity of the modern workday,” a world of wealth disparities and racial inequity, a world defined by “harmful systems” and no collective will to alter them. “We shouldn’t go back to ‘normal,’” he admitted. “Normal wasn’t good enough.” That outlook was hardly exclusive to the far-left fringe. “There is no getting ‘back to normal,’ experts say,” CNN’s headline read. “The sooner we accept that, the better.”

This outlook was overrepresented in the Biden administration. His White House fast lost sight of its initial modest objective — putting “the nation back on a path to get closer to normal.” By the fall of 2021, Fauci told reporters in the first weeks of Biden’s presidency, he hoped only that America would “start approaching some degree of normality.” After all, “our lives are not going to be the same,” Barack Obama’s CDC director, Thomas Frieden, contended. If these were only prudent expressions of uncertainty, they wouldn’t have erred only in one direction — and there would not have been consequences for administration figures who diverged from that depressing pattern. And as 2021 drew to a close, Fauci abandoned normalcy as a goal in favor of advocating the pandemic’s anti-social practices indefinitely.

Ramesh Ponnuru reminds us that Fauci’s enabler during the covidian hysteria was President Trump.

“Why Capitalism Is the Most Moral Economic System.”

Tad DeHaven reveals evidence that relying on politicians to supply national defense has its downsides.

Tweet

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

A dynamic, competitive, and open economy is more likely to spark ongoing bottom-up entrepreneurship and innovation in every economic sector — including the defense industry — and thus produce genuine technological breakthroughs with potential military uses. In such conditions, military officials would be able to survey new, emerging technologies and assess which may give it an edge over its likely international opponents. Two welcome side-effects would be to diminish the cronyism problem and limit the understandable but also inhibiting preference on the part of military leaders and defense procurement specialists for what they already know.

Tweet

Wall Street Journal columnist William McGurn reveals a dismaying similarity of some of the attitudes of Comrade Mamdani with those of Chairman Mao. A slice:

Pity the landlord. In communist China in the 1940s and ’50s, landlords became “class enemies” and were publicly denounced in “speak bitterness” campaigns. An estimated one million to two million of them were murdered.

Today Chairman Mao has morphed into the friendlier face of Mayor Mamdani. Government isn’t murdering landlords, but even as Zohran Mamdani denies that the democratic socialism he champions is communism, he has embraced the same vilification and targeting of landlords.

In mid-July, the New York mayor released a report with 23 policy actions on everything from building inspections to combating mold. The report’s title gives away the game: the “Rental Ripoff Hearing Report.” Reading it, you would think there isn’t a single landlord in the city who treats his tenants decently and keeps his buildings in good repair.

There’s a method to Mr. Mamdani’s madness. Even the barest acquaintance with the record of rent control and other government efforts to keep housing costs down by subsidizing rents or artificially capping them shows they usually end in failure. The mayor will need to deal with the coming failure or distract attention from it.

Enter Saul Alinsky, the community activist in Chicago who wrote “Rules for Radicals.” For Mayor Mamdani, rule 13 offers a path forward: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”

Reason‘s Jacob Sullum explains that “Trump keeps pushing legally dubious tariffs.” A slice:

According to a lawsuit that the Liberty Justice Center (LJC) filed last Friday on behalf of the U.S. businesses that will have to pay the Section 301 tariffs, the findings underlying Greer’s list are woefully inadequate. By and large, they fail to specify exactly how each of these countries has fallen short, how their supposed failures burden U.S. commerce, or why the new tariffs, which make no distinction between forced-labor products and other imports, can be expected to ameliorate the problem that the administration claims to be addressing.

National Review‘s Jim Geraghty warns that Trump’s obsession with imposing tariffs punitive taxes on Americans’ purchases of imports – more than half of which, by the way, are raw materials or intermediate products used by producers in the U.S. – is inflicting such damage on the economy that the GOP will suffer in the 2028 elections. A slice:

Incumbent Republicans, you could have been running for reelection in a roaring economy, but a president addicted to tariffs wouldn’t let you.

Early voting starts in Minnesota, South Dakota, and Virginia on Friday, September 18, just 52 days from now. The cement is hardening in Americans’ perception of the economy, and that perception is negative. In fact, forget Democrats and independents for a moment; the most recent Pew Research survey found “the share of Republicans who say Trump’s policies have worsened conditions has risen from 18 percent to 28 percent, while the share saying they have improved conditions has fallen from 57 percent to 42 percent.” Overall, 60 percent of U.S. adults say Trump’s policies have made the economy worse, while just 20 percent say Trump’s policies have made the economy better.

Jessica Riedl tweets: (HT Scott Lincicome)

Notable that those churning out the “everyone was so much richer in the 1950s-1970s” oppression narrative overwhelmingly: 1) are too young to have experienced that era, and 2) have no serious economic or statistical qualifications to analyze that era. It’s empty rage bait.

The Editorial Board of the Washington Post rightly applauds this move by the U.S. Department of Education:

The department rescinded guidance last week that treated statistical disparities between racial groups as sufficient evidence to trigger civil rights enforcement, even if there was no evidence that any particular person was intentionally mistreated.

The approach has made schools across America less safe by deterring administrators and teachers from disciplining certain disruptive and violent students out of fear that they would be accused of racial discrimination.

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy, talks with Thomas Howes and James Patterson about their new book, Why Postliberalism Failed.

Rachel Lu reviews Howe’s and Patterson’s Why Postliberalism Failed.

Tweet

… is from page 11 of Craig Fehrman’s excellent 2026 book, The Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis & Clark:

Congress, of course, held the power of the purse, and Jefferson drafted a secret message asking them to fund an expedition. Lewis listened as the president talked through his motives. Exploring the Missouri-Columbia link was a big one, but there were others, including a motive the House and Senate would like: trade.

DBx: Meriwether Lewis’s and William Clark’s famous expedition (1804-1806) was not exploration only for the sake of exploration and science. It had political purposes (for example, to help prevent European powers from colonizing the American west) and also economic purposes – chiefly, the expansion of trade. Indeed, among Thomas Jefferson’s hopes was that Lewis and Clark would find a waterway clear through to the Pacific ocean in order to facilitate Americans’ trade with Asia.

This reality – reflecting Americans’ commercial culture – debunks the notion that the United States was from the start a protectionist nation. And it puts into further, unflatering context the express sentiment of Donald Trump that “Trade is bad.”

Tweet

Economists and historians who challenged this myth include Dominick Armentano, Rob Bradley, Tom DiLorenzo, Burt Folsom, and John McGee.

Editor, The Economist

Editor:

Thanks for explaining that most of today’s billionaires achieved their riches, not at the expense of their fellow human beings, but rather by improving humanity’s standard of living (“The rise of the deserving rich,” July 23).

Your argument, though, is marred by your calling Standard Oil’s John D. Rockefeller, Sr., “sketchy” and lumping him in with post-Soviet Russian oligarchs. Rockefeller earned every cent that he received.

What has come down in history as Rockefeller’s insistence on “predatory pricing” – what you likely mean when you say that Rockefeller “took advantage of weak competition laws” – was nothing of the sort. Standard Oil’s price cuts reflected Rockefeller’s ability to cut costs better than his competitors, who then falsely accused him of being predatory.

Powerful evidence that these price cuts were no monopolizing scheme is found in the falling price of Standard’s principal output, kerosene. As Phil Gramm and I explain in our book, The Triumph of Economic Freedom,

Between 1870, the year of Standard’s founding, and 1885, the nominal price of Standard’s main output, kerosene, dropped by 69 percent, from twenty- six cents per gallon to eight cents. The real price of kerosene over this fifteen-year span fell 60 percent faster than the general level of prices. Five years later, kerosene’s real price had fallen by another 8 percent. Even Sen. George Edmunds (R-VT) – the principal coauthor of the Sherman Antitrust Act – admitted in 1890 that “the oil trust certainly has reduced the price of oil immensely.”*

Monopolists raise prices. Standard Oil cut prices. Ironically, it was Rockefeller’s successful determination to cut costs and prices that led economically uninformed historians to cast him as a villain. He did indeed make life difficult for his competitors, but in the process he also made life better for millions of consumers worldwide.

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

* Phil Gramm and Donald J. Boudreaux, The Triumph of Economic Freedom (Rowman & Littlefield, 2025), page 30.

Tweet

Michael Chapman explains what shouldn’t – but, alas, what today nevertheless does – need explaining: Mao Zedong was a mass-murdering monster.

Matt Weidinger reports on the success of the 1996 welfare-reform legislation in the U.S.

Although it gets some history wrong, The Economist busts the myth that today’s billionaires do not earn their wealth. A slice:

More and more billionaires derive their wealth not from accidents of birth or from gaming the system, but by providing useful goods and services and by employing thousands of people.

Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch discuss the rising popularity of socialism.

Kyle Handley argues that the bond market is not counting on revenues from Trump’s tariffs punitive taxation of Americans’ purchases of imports. A slice:

Bond investors are not attached to customs duties as a line item revenue source. They care about the government’s overall fiscal position and about how policy affects economic growth, inflation, interest rates, and the cost of servicing the debt. Once those broader effects are considered, the market’s behavior over the past 18 months looks less like an addiction to tariffs than a response to the ever-changing size of the tariffs themselves.

Collecting tariffs from the pockets of US consumers and businesses has real, negative economic effects. It does raise some money, but relative to the government’s underlying fiscal outlook, tariff revenue is a side hustle. And the Trump administration has already promised to dole out the funds through schemes like tariff dividend rebates, farm subsidies, and pay-fors on tax cuts or other spending. The new tariff money, in other words, has already been spent several times over, not put towards deficit reduction.

Reem Ibrahim makes clear that the “‘AI Kill Switch Act’ won’t stop rogue AI, but it will slow down innovation.”

Unlike adults, children think no further than the anticipated immediate consequences of their actions. This reality is the major reason why society denies to children nearly all of the decision-making authority that it leaves available to adults. Anyone who calls for the Senate to abolish the filibuster in order to enact one particular piece of legislation reveals himself or herself to be, mentally and emotionally, a child. (This conclusion stands regardless of the merits or demerits of the particular piece of legislation at issue.) Thank goodness that mature voices, such as the Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal, warn the Senate not to heed this juvenile demand. Two slices:

Bad ideas are everywhere in Washington, but here’s one that belongs in a hall of fame: President Trump is again pressing Republicans to nuke the Senate’s 60-vote filibuster rule to pass the SAVE America Act. Or in other words, hand progressives the tools to pack the Supreme Court and create new states, in exchange for a voting bill that isn’t a clear political winner for the GOP.

“John Thune should not allow the United States Senate to ‘leave town’ until it passes The Save America Act or, far better still, TERMINATES THE FILIBUSTER, where Republicans can then quickly pass everything they ever dreamed of,” Mr. Trump wrote Monday online.

…..

One now daring to step up is Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman. He campaigned on killing the filibuster in 2022, but subsequent events have “vindicated” Ms. Sinema and Mr. Manchin, he wrote Monday in the Washington Post. Mr. Fetterman praised the filibuster for forcing compromise and urged voters who dislike Mr. Trump’s agenda to imagine a world without the 60-vote rule: “Republicans could fundamentally change the entire government and country with a simple majority vote.”

The same mental exercise, in the other direction, could benefit frustrated Republicans. If the filibuster went away, Democrats with a mere 50 votes, plus a Vice Presidential tie breaker, could wreck the Supreme Court, add new states, pass Medicare for All, prohibit right-to-work laws, codify Roe v. Wade, create a national gun registry, raise the minimum wage to $25 an hour, and so much more.

The GOP might hope to undo such policies while passing a wish list of its own when it next controls Congress and the White House. Yet the effect would be highly destabilizing, and progressives would have the clear advantage. If Democrats packed the Supreme Court with four new Justices who have life tenure, would Republicans unpack it later? Doubtful.

After Democrats passed new entitlements, year after year, would Republicans marshal the votes for repeal? They can’t even repeal the taxes in ObamaCare. Think how hard it was for Republicans to pass even modest Medicaid reform last year.

The filibuster benefits the country by ensuring stability, so national policy isn’t constantly flipping between polar extremes. This also happens to help the conservative party, because it makes radical change hard to enact. Breaking the filibuster would remove a structural check on the ability of temporary majorities to fundamentally reshape American society, which is what progressives want to do. Even if Republicans moved first, as Mr. Trump wants, the result in the long run would be a ratchet clicking steadily to the left.

Also writing wisely about the filibuster is U.S. Senator John Fetterman (D-PA). A slice:

It’s not often you hear someone in D.C. admit they were wrong, let alone horribly wrong — and the entire Democratic Party was, including me.

When Democrats had the presidency and a majority in both chambers, they were frustrated with the 60-vote threshold needed to advance legislation. Senate Democrats attempted to end the filibuster to push through President Joe Biden’s agenda — an effort I fully supported during my 2022 campaign.

Halfway through my first term, I now recognize how important the filibuster is and the state our country would be in without it.

I thought ending the filibuster was necessary to deliver results for working families. I thought it was unlikely for Republicans in the minority to find common ground on legislation Democrats were proposing. I thought Democrats were not being ruthless the way Republicans were, and we needed to be on that level if we were going to relieve the anger that voters were feeling.

Upon reflection, the pursuit of those short-term wins clouded the bigger picture and lasting impact of a Senate without the filibuster — a Senate that ignored the voices of the minority and everyday people.

The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board reflects on Anthony Fauci’s diaries. A slice:

Anthony Fauci made himself the public face of pandemic lockdowns in 2020, and now we have a glimpse of what was going on behind his eyes. Newly released diaries paint an unflattering portrait of a self-obsessed and not entirely honest bureaucrat, in contrast to the image of the careful scientist he cultivated in public.

The documents were released by Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who for years has dug into the Covid story to understand why the government response to the health crisis was so destructive. The excerpts Sen. Paul has published, which run to more than 1,100 pages, cover December 2019 just before the first reports of an outbreak in Wuhan, China, through Dr. Fauci’s retirement from government in December 2022.

The diary reads as if it was intended to be an aide-mémoire for an autobiography Dr. Fauci might write one day, so it pays to read with care. He might have shaded the truth with an eye (or two) on history. Yet that possibility makes what’s in it all the more remarkable.

One conclusion is that on important points Dr. Fauci was both wrong and dishonest. For instance, he and allies in the government-science industrial complex still cling to the theory that Covid-19 evolved naturally in animal populations before spreading to humans.

Yet on Feb. 1, 2020, his diary records a meeting with a dozen prominent virologists in which only two credited this “natural origins” theory. The rest suspected the virus might have been created artificially, not least because a leading scientist in Wuhan, Shi Zhengli, was known to engage in the sort of gain-of-function research that could produce such a result.

The diary suggests that by Jan. 26, 2020, Dr. Fauci believed the virus hadn’t originated in the Wuhan wet market, often identified as the source by natural-origin advocates. This didn’t stop him and allies from painting skeptics of the natural-origin theory as politicized cranks and conspiracy theorists. Previously released documents shed light on how Dr. Fauci orchestrated publication of a scientific paper to suppress the theory that Covid leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The diary also brags on Dr. Fauci’s influence persuading the likes of California Gov. Gavin Newsom and then-New York Mayor Bill de Blasio to shut schools and lock down large parts of the economy. Yet he later claimed in public that he never argued for locking anything down.