John Hinderaker accurately identifies the greediest institutions in society as governments. (HT George Leef)
Florida relies on natural gas for 75% of its electricity, more than any other large state. That’s remarkable because of the five largest states, the other four—California, New York, Pennsylvania, and Texas—all have significant natural-gas reserves, while Florida has none. Yet compared with Florida, residential electricity is 27% more expensive in Pennsylvania, 60% more expensive in New York and 137% more expensive in California. Even pro-energy, GOP-controlled Texas has more expensive electricity than Florida, partly because of its large renewable energy sector, which makes its grid costly and difficult to operate.
Because it has avoided the misguided climate policies of other states, Florida is better positioned to weather the historic energy-scarcity crisis now bearing down on America’s electricity grid. Just as electricity demand is soaring across the country, driven by electric vehicles and artificial-intelligence data centers, a train wreck of federal policy failures is constraining the grid’s ability to meet the new demand.
Sheldon Richman understands just how very destructive would be Trump’s economic nationalism. A slice:
What’s foreign to Trump’s mentality is any notion of an unplanned, spontaneous market order built on individual freedom and choice, which is at the heart of sound economics. He must see himself as a hands-on CEO who can solve any problem. That’s the last thing we need. He should read Leonard Read’s “I, Pencil.” (The video version is here.)
In a word, Trump is an economic warmonger, a not-too-distant cousin of a regular warmonger. As the old free traders said, “When goods can’t cross borders, soldiers will.”
It would be one thing if Trump were promising to shrink the government so much that businesses everywhere wanted to flock to these hospitable shores. But his “New American Industrialism” is an old-fashioned industrial policy in which he or his team of experts would pick winners to carry out his glorious vision. Which firms and industries get protected or subsidized and which don’t? Those decisions would be made on a political, not an economic, basis. The problem is that Trump and his experts could not know what they would need to know to carry out their plan. Only the free market—through the unhampered price system—can produce that knowledge, which would be widely dispersed, often tacit, and therefore unavailable to a central bureaucracy. Even the great Donald Trump cannot defy the laws of economics.
Here’s GMU Econ PhD candidate Giorgio Castiglia on comparative advantage.
