When Americans can’t afford something, Washington loves to help buyers and ignore producers. Politicians might feel as if they are improving affordability, but the strategy creates a vicious cycle: lawmakers subsidize purchases, watch prices rise, blame corporate greed, and then subsidize purchases even more to compensate. The American taxpayer is left funding the entire cycle.
Consider the Affordable Care Act. The law expanded insurance coverage to millions through subsidies and mandates, dramatically increasing demand for healthcare. However, the ACA did remarkably little to increase the supply. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, healthcare employment has grown at roughly 2% each year both before and after the ACA was passed. As a result, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation’s annual employer health benefit survey, average family premiums increased by 96%, going from $13,770 in 2010 to $26,993 in 2025. Demand increases, supply doesn’t, and prices skyrocket.
The Trump administration is using the same strategy to address housing affordability. Instead of building houses, President Trump has suggested moving from 30-year mortgages to 50-year mortgages. The administration is also evaluating portable mortgages, allowing homeowners to bring their current mortgage rate with them when they move.
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If Americans want more access to healthcare and housing at lower prices, Washington must focus on expanding supply. For healthcare, this means reforming licensing to increase the number of medical practitioners. It also means reducing the regulatory burdens that make opening clinics difficult. For housing, it means zoning reform, faster permitting and a reduction of the regulatory barriers that prevent builders from meeting demand.
The government fueling demand will always raise prices. The only question is whether politicians will stop pretending otherwise—and how much Americans will pay until then.
Someone has to monitor the tariffs. Someone has to police the domestic-content rules. Someone has to approve the corporate decisions. And in the case of the Trump administration’s move to take a golden share in U.S. Steel, complete with veto power over major business decisions, someone has to sit in U.S. Steel’s boardroom and exercise that presidential veto.
That someone is always a bureaucrat.
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The Trump administration cannot credibly claim to fight the administrative state while expanding it. It cannot wage war on the “deep state” while designing an economic program that depends on it.
However, what is often overlooked, despite its widespread acknowledgment in other contexts, is the fact that China has a very large population. And when it comes to manufacturing, the numbers are simply staggering. In 2020, the year of China’s most recent census, over 120 million people were working in the manufacturing sector. Later, independent reports have the Chinese manufacturing workforce at over 212 million people. This means that the average Chinese manufacturing worker generates between $22,028 and $38,916 in value-added. By comparison, America employs just 12.7 million manufacturing workers, which is 6-10.6% of the number of manufacturing workers that China employs. On average, US manufacturing workers generate $229,133, which means our workers are between 6 and 10 times as productive as the average manufacturing worker in China.
This is absolutely incredible and underscores that those who claim “we don’t make things anymore” or that “China is destroying our manufacturing sector” are, in a word, wrong. Does China produce more raw output than we do? Of course. But this is not because they are an economic superpower. It’s because they have a significantly larger number of people employed in manufacturing than we do. In fact, they have about as many, if not more, people employed in manufacturing alone as the US has employed total. But on a per-capita basis, the US is by far and away the leader, and it’s not even close.
Martin Gurri notes that “entitled elites who think they deserve more are secret to Mamdani’s success.” (HT Arnold Kling) Two slices:
Both Trump and Mamdani aim to smash the structures that have organized American politics since the end of the Cold War. Their voters are those willing to follow them on that mission; hence the overlap.
Mamdani was fortunate to be running against Andrew Cuomo, a repellent specimen of the old regime. His victory signals the catastrophic collapse of the Democratic Party establishment, an outfit that only yesterday could foist a senile candidate for the presidency on the party’s ambitious young lions without eliciting a murmur of complaint.
Anyone who doubts that those days are over should walk a mile in Chuck Schumer’s shoes. The implications for the 2028 presidential race are, quite literally, incalculable.
Trump, however, is an America-first populist, whereas Mamdani is a DSA-style radical — that is to say, a Marxist who would be a Leninist if he could get himself organized. So mere repudiation of the system can lead to diametrically opposed positions.
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The opposite of capitalism, in other words, isn’t socialism but entitlement.
The most relentless enemy of the capitalist system isn’t the proletariat or the revolutionary vanguard but the entitled class.
That brings us back to Mamdani’s young, educated voters.
They belong to a generation that was coddled in childhood and pumped full of artificial self-esteem in school. They benefited from cheap government loans so they could pay college tuition and from grade inflation so they could graduate with straight A’s.
At every step, they were taught to despise their country as unworthy of their own exalted selves.
They had done nothing but expected everything. That’s practically the definition of entitlement.
Megan McArdle writes wisely. Two slices:
Normally, at this time of year, I dedicate a column to reflecting on the various innovations that have saved us from the normal human condition — which is to say, a life of frequent discomforts punctuated by even greater miseries. If you are tempted to rhapsodize about some imagined Edenic past, ask yourself whether you really have the fortitude to bury half your children before they finish puberty. I personally do not. I am soft and prone to melancholy. So I will be forever grateful that fortune delivered me to this place and this time, where I can wallow in peace and prosperity.
This year, however, I’ve been reflecting on another thing we ought to be more grateful for: America herself. We have been taking her too much for granted recently, assuming that she will keep showering her gifts upon us without so much as a thank-you note. We’re like trust-funders who slander capitalism and squander their incomes, secure in the knowledge that the checks will keep coming.
They will not, unless we once again start treating America as something we have to earn, rather than something we’re entitled to.
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Such inheritances do not last unless they are tended to. You can’t just assume everything will hold together. You have to be willing to some of the mending.
Unfortunately, that’s gone out of style among the elites who are supposed to be knitting together this improbable nation. Over the past couple decades, the people in charge of our great sense-making institutions — academia, the media, entertainment and the arts — decided that their main job was pointing out where the holes were and demanding that everyone else get busy fixing them. An emerging counter-elite of populist upstarts decided that it was much more fun to rip new holes than to figure out the boring work of governing.
Both groups tended to see their opponents as mortal enemies, rather than fellow Americans. Both spent a lot of time pointing out flaws in American-style free market democracy and little time reflecting on how pleasant, prosperous and free were their lives under that same system. And both groups were implicitly assuming that the work of keeping America in one piece belonged to someone else.
It doesn’t belong to anyone else. It belongs to all of us and each of us. No American can afford to be a lazy trust-funder, living off passive income. We have to be active stewards of our legacy.
Cranky Federalist offers some data that contradict one of the many fallacies spread by Tucker Carlson about Hungary and Russia. (HT Scott Lincicome)
