In other words, the middle ground in this controversy is evaporating. Either you oppose the campaign of summary killings of civilians allegedly running drugs in the Caribbean, or you endorse all of it. To endorse the policy but oppose its execution in this one instance is a politically thin reed. (Trump himself initially occupied that middle ground, saying he “wouldn’t have wanted” the second strike, but the White House has since flipped to full support of the operation).
Congressional oversight investigations often take the form of legal inquisitions. The allegations of illegality around the Sept. 2 strikes piqued Congress’s interest. But the military remains far more respected than politicians. Representatives second-guessing the good-faith judgment of men like [Adm. Frank] Bradley as to whether a particular target was legally legitimate seems like a dead end. Nor should the investigations prompt a tightening of the military’s rules of engagement. Efforts to make wars “humane” often fail, and can even extend conflicts. War should be fast and lethal — and rare.
The problem here is not any particular order in the chain of command. It’s that the Trump administration has defined war as something it isn’t. That rotten policy — that attack on common sense — needs to be the subject of any successful congressional response to what happened on Sept. 2.
Here’s GMU Econ alum David Hebert on housing.
How are these fraudsters allowed to get away with so much for so long? The truth is, unlike spenders in the private sector, bureaucrats administering tax dollars are often not incentivized to care whether the money they send out is used well or not.
As the Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman famously explained, “Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else’s resources as carefully as he uses his own. So if you want efficiency and effectiveness, if you want knowledge to be properly utilized, you have to do it through the means of private property.”
The Minnesota fraud cases are a good illustration of Friedman’s insight. The government bureaucrats who kept sending hundreds of millions of dollars to the fraudsters year after year had every indication of what they were enabling, but their incentives were to enable rather than prevent the theft.
Derek Thompson reports that, with respect to AI, the Trump administration (thankfully) is pursuing a policy of free trade. (HT Andy Morriss) A slice:
- The administration raised tariffs to their highest level since the 1930s. Import duties have been notably high on agricultural products (e.g., coffee and bananas)1 and manufacturing inputs (e.g., steel and some copper).
- The industries most directly affected by Trump’s tariffs are doing poorly. Farmers are hurting, and some have been promised a bailout. The manufacturing industry is in a hiring recession, with employment falling steadily over the last six months.
- But the administration has carved out huge tariff exemptions for AI. The largest of these exemptions covers $34 billion per month of imports for computers and parts that AI companies need to build data centers to train and run AI programs.
- As the economics writer and The Argument contributor Joey Politano reported, computer imports surged in 2025, and the AI companies have saved billions of dollars on additional import taxes thanks to these exemptions. “The current AI boom would simply be impossible if tech companies had to pay the same tariffs that car manufacturers or homebuilders currently face,” Politano wrote.
- The AI sector is by far the strongest industrial contributor to the U.S. economy. The growth in AI infrastructure spending contributed more to GDP than the growth of consumer spending earlier this year.
Trump is nominally pursuing a broadly protectionist agenda, but for the one industry the administration seems to really, really want to protect, it is not doing protectionism at all. At the very least, it raises the question of why, if globalism is so effective for AI, it’s apparently so bad for the rest of the economy.
Megan McArdle tweets to bust the zombie myth that over the past several decades the quality of goods and services abundantly available to ordinary Americans has fallen. (HT Scott Lincicome)
Tomatoes, raspberries, automobiles, televisions, cancer drugs, women’s shoes, insulin monitoring, home security monitoring, clothing for tall women (which functionally didn’t exist until about 2008), telephone service (remember when you had to PAY EXTRA to call another area code?), travel (remember MAPS?), remote work, home video … sorry, ran out of characters before I ran out of hedonic improvements.
