Letitia James campaigned on a pledge to get President Trump, accused him of lying about his assets to obtain favorable loan terms, and won a whopping financial penalty that was thrown out after appeal. Mr. Trump campaigned on a pledge to exact retribution, and now his Justice Department accuses Ms. James of lying on mortgage forms to obtain favorable loan terms, a case that could be thrown out before trial.
The mirror image of these two best of enemies is instructive. Ms. James’s case was destructive lawfare. So is Mr. Trump’s. The question is how to get the spiral to stop before we all go down the drain.
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Worried about Mr. Trump’s promises of retribution, President Biden issued blanket pardons on his way out the door. After taking his revenge, will Mr. Trump have to do the same on Jan. 20, 2029? This is madness.
The better path for the country is for both parties to conclude that the lawfare of recent years has been a historic mistake, and that nobody benefits from becoming a banana republic. Mutual assured legal destruction is no way to run a great nation.
Plenty of cities have eliminated bus fares, but it always comes at a cost. Olympia, Washington, did so in 2020 to avoid having to upgrade their fare-card readers but hiked the local sales tax. That means everyone pays, whether they ride or not. Other free systems have drawn criticism for becoming magnets of crime and vandalism, such as Portland, Oregon, where fare-free transit was discontinued in 2012.
New York’s experiment with delivery driver wage mandates hasn’t gone well. Pay went up after the 2023 rule kicked in, but so did prices—and many drivers left the market altogether. The city saw an 8 percent drop in its delivery workforce, while food delivery costs rose 10 percent, including a 12 percent jump in restaurant prices and a staggering 58 percent spike in app fees. Tips, meanwhile, plunged 47 percent. Platforms even started capping drivers—at one point, Uber Eats reported more than 27,000 New Yorkers were on their driver waitlist.
Ian Vásquez applauds the award of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize to María Corina Machado. A slice:
The Nobel Committee made an excellent choice. Maria Corina Machado is one of the world’s most admirable leaders. After a quarter century of opposing Venezuela’s Chavista regime, she emerged in the past couple of years as the clear leader of an opposition that, until then, had been internally divisive and ineffective in challenging the regime.
Maria Corina, a sophisticated classical liberal and longtime friend of the Cato Institute, achieved several important goals that took the regime by surprise and that make her unique among Venezuela’s opposition leaders. First, she united Venezuela under a single ballot during the presidential elections last July (as I wrote here). She had the overwhelming support of Venezuelans but was illegally disqualified from running for office, so she supported Edmundo Gonzalez in her place.
MIT alum Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) tweets: (HT Scott Lincicome)
The surest way to screw up the world’s best technical school is to let feds tell them how to run it.
Congrats to my alma mater for turning down a bribe to let the executive branch dictate what happens on its campus.
A lot of things are wrong in 🇺🇸, but MIT is not one of them.
Terry Anderson and my GMU Econ colleague Thomas Stratmann explore this: “Doing Business on Indian Reservations: Tribal Business Owners’ Perspectives on Entrepreneurship.” Here’s the abstract:
This paper reports insights from focus group discussions from Montana reservations, which provide insights and perspectives on the experiences of Native American entrepreneurs. The narratives from these discussions highlight the challenges the current regulatory context poses for entrepreneurial activities and their communities. The participants spoke of regulatory unpredictability and inefficiency, resulting in uncertainty faced by business owners and thus not impeding economic prosperity. The discussions also revealed a disconnect between tribal governments and community members, characterized by a lack of transparency and accountability. Judicial independence emerged as another significant concern. These insights from the focus groups suggest a path forward for more economic growth and prosperity for reservation communities.
Douglas Irwin’s remarkable 2017 history of U.S. trade policy – Clashing Over Commerce – is now available free on-line. (My hope is that tomorrow the Nobel Prize committee will announce that Doug and his teacher Jagdish Bhagwati have won the 2025 Prize in Economics. A three-way share with Arvind Panagariya would also be good.)
