Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberly Strassel introduces us to the arrogant busybodies who support RFK, Jr. Two slices:
“We have to tell people how to lead better lives.” Politicians have a duty to protect citizens from greedy industries, to stop corporations from poisoning our food, to steer us away from bad choices. America has a health crisis, and government must make us healthier.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.?
No, then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg nearly 20 years ago, as he became New York City’s nutritional nag, hectoring and mandating residents, inserting the public-health complex into grocery stores, restaurants and family kitchens. Republicans are now lumbering us with Bloomberg 2.0.
How did we get here? Mr. Kennedy in August bartered his small but potentially consequential vote share to Mr. Trump via endorsement, reportedly for a promise that the former Democratic contender would be given “control” of “public-health agencies.” Unable to justify 90% of Mr. Kennedy’s left-wing ideology or history, Republican senators are seizing on the least-offensive aspect of Mr. Kennedy’s repertoire (“Make America healthy again”) and elevating it to religion. Thus does the party that rails against Democratic paternalism embrace its own digestive elitism.
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This is the great con RFK Jr. is running on his GOP cheerleaders, the danger no one is talking about with his nomination. Mr. Kennedy’s disdain for vaccine mandates aside, his is the big-government, nanny agenda. He’s all in with the public-health complex. MAHA is the means by which public-health “experts” are fully unleashed on society, to dictate what Americans consume, use or produce.
Amar Bhidé writes informatively about DeepSeek.
Despite championing individualism, Rand generated a cultlike following. Though she was an atheist, some of her admirers have transformed her teachings into a rigid dogma that demands conformism—something of a religion. She was a human with contradictions, strengths and weaknesses—far from the flawless superhuman characters in her novels.
But we can still learn a lot from Rand. The historical evidence supporting capitalism is so convincing that it’s difficult to understand why some people view it so negatively. In 1820, during the early stages of modern industrial capitalism, about 90% of the global population was living in extreme poverty. Today that figure stands at less than 9%.
Modern criticism of capitalism persists because emotions rather than facts and figures tend to sway public opinion. That’s why Rand was so concerned about the negative portrayal of entrepreneurs in Hollywood films. She even wrote a 12-page guide for Hollywood producers in 1947 demanding that they avoid communist ideology and refrain from attacking “individual rights, individual freedom, private action, private initiative, and private property.” No one understood humans’ emotional urges better than Rand, the high priestess of reason.
Arnold Kling isn’t optimistic about what DOGE can and will accomplish.
Here’s more tax bootcamp from GMU Econ alum Adam Michel.
Mike Munger surveys Javier Milei’s first year in office. Two slices:
Around the world, there is growing impatience with the orthodoxies and condescension of the progressive left. In the past two years, right-leaning parties have outperformed electoral expectations in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Portugal, and countries such as Hungary, Poland, and — again — the US.
But the country with the most happening, and the least clarity, is almost certainly Argentina. Just over a year ago, Javier Milei won the presidency in what may be the most “out of nowhere” election ever. It is tempting to lump Milei’s success in with the general electoral tilt to the right, but that’s not correct; Milei is different. As a podcast produced by The Economist, put it: “Milei is above all a zealous believer in free-market economics. That is his absolute guiding understanding.”
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Incredibly, Milei’s central campaign goals, and his actual actions in his first year in office, included two things none of the other leaders have even said, much less actually done. The first is to cut spending; the second is to reduce state meddling in the determination of prices.
On a free market, every price is the result of “gouging” from both the suppliers and the demanders. It is in emergencies that we see this more clearly. The supply of some good or service (say housing) is suddenly reduced—by the fires in Los Angeles County. Consumers, whose demand has not changed, face fewer apartments for rent or houses for sale than they want. The ones who attach more value to housing in the affected market—say, people whose employment place is in the vicinity or who have children in a local school—will bid up rents and house prices. Others will prefer to move to a smaller place or with their parents or friends, or to move farther away. In the short run, the supply of housing is fixed, so a rise in prices is how, in a free market, the available supply gets distributed. The consumers are the ones who bid up the prices. The suppliers obtain a windfall, as consumers get one when building activity is high (or when economic conditions suddenly favor their own businesses).
GMU Econ alum Tyler Watts looks back on Jimmy Carter’s record as a deregulator.
Christopher Cox is no liberal, but a former Republican member of Congress and Chairman of the SEC. Nevertheless, his new book Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn may knock Wilson down a few more pegs. It is not so much a biography as a beautifully written brief against Wilson’s entire career. Cox provides ample evidence to back up the charges of racism, but he also shows that Wilson was no friend of women’s rights either, blocking the national suffrage movement and even permitting the imprisonment of suffragettes in extremely harsh conditions. He also argues that Wilson, the only president with a doctorate, was not much more than an intellectual mediocrity, who was elected and reelected president because of some lucky breaks.
Cox’s treatment is particularly comprehensive on Wilson’s shocking and entrenched racism. As a raconteur, Wilson was openly bigoted, constantly making fun of black people and mocking their speech. As a historian, Wilson was an apologist for slavery, stating that it was “not so darked as portrayed.” And as a eugenicist, he opposed programs to aid them, saying that “ to feed them was to increase their numbers.”
While the Democratic party opposed civil rights to satisfy Southern Democrats within its coalition, as a politician Wilson went beyond what was necessary to keep the partisan peace. Most notoriously, he segregated the civil service, although Grover Cleveland—the only other Democrat to hold the White House in the era of Republican dominance after the Civil War—had not seen the need to do so. He screened the racist, even if for his time cinematically brilliant, Birth of a Nation, at the White House and did so even after it had become the subject of national protest. Thomas Dixon, the author of The Clansman, a book that celebrates the Ku Klux Klan and on which the movie was based, was Wilson’s personal friend. And the president was even quoted in the movie, saying, “In the villages, the negroes were the office holders, men who knew none of the use of authority, except its insolences.”
