Zach Weissmueller reports that “Milei is defying Argentina’s powerful labor unions.”
The Orban-worship on certain elements of the right is almost as creepy as the Trump-worship. And Trump-worship is one of the creepiest things going in politics at the moment.
New York isn’t Venezuela, but its political system is going the way of Caracas. Whatever Donald Trump’s financial transgressions, they pale in comparison with Attorney General Letitia James’s desecration of the law in service of destroying a political opponent.
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Mr. Trump’s lawyers rightly argue that the state is trampling the rule of law by “unwinding complex commercial transactions between sophisticated parties” even when nobody has been harmed. What’s to stop the attorney general from doing the same whenever she disagrees with how a bank or business has valued an asset?
Ms. James says punishing Mr. Trump is necessary to preserve the integrity of the financial marketplace. But she’s doing more damage than Mr. Trump is.
People feel safer, which has boosted Mr. Bukele’s popularity. But he isn’t the world’s first politician to brand majoritarianism as democracy. Nor is he the first permitted to trample a constitution in exchange for promises of a better future. Cuba’s Fidel Castro, Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega come to mind.
Sanjai Bhagat and Marlo Oaks report that “Bidenomics is bad economics.” A slice:
Unfortunately, federal lawmakers have become far too comfortable with deficit spending, and with this unconstrained view of resources, they’ve embraced new ways for government to “solve” problems with taxpayer money. The Inflation Reduction Act is the most egregious example, more than a trillion in spending for what amounts to a social engineering experiment, but members on both sides of the aisle are guilty of “authorizing beyond America’s means.”
George Leef weighs in further on the poison that is the deeply illiberal ideology known as DEI. A slice:
What they demand is government coercion to ensure that “fair” percentages of people from each designated group (based on race, not on other things like religion, musical preferences, being right or left handed, having been adopted, or any other category) get into colleges (elite ones, anyway), get hired into good jobs, are chosen for orchestras, and so on. This calls for constant governmental favoritism toward some and discrimination against others. It utterly subverts the American commitment to individual rights in the name of a policy that must (probably forever) treat people unequally based on their ancestry, just so a few can pat themselves on the back and say, “We’re ending racism.”
I’d rather call it SGD — Selective Group Discrimination.
Paul Wilford and Ethan Cutler review Raymond Aron’s posthumously published Liberty & Equality. A slice:
Aron thus recalls the great French champion of liberal democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville, whose respect for philosophy was counterbalanced by an abiding wariness of general ideas. “An abstract word,” Tocqueville wrote, “is like a box with a false bottom: one puts in it the ideas one desires and one takes them out without anyone’s seeing it.” Aron was similarly attuned to the allure of such theoretical sleights of hand.
NPR shares good news on the housing front.
Reason‘s Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe talk with Congressman Thomas Massie (R-KY).
