The way to truly empower workers isn’t to revive the old union monopoly but to give workers genuine options. That means giving workers the freedom to choose the representation they want and demand results. It means allowing workers who opt out of unions to negotiate their own contracts directly with their bosses.
Unions, meanwhile, can survive and thrive by reorienting toward training and certification, helping the workers they represent upgrade skills in industries reshaped by AI and global competition. They also could pioneer new, voluntary forms of representation for gig workers, including advocacy for things like portable benefits that would follow these workers from job to job.
William McGurn celebrates the insights and humanity of the late, great Julian Simon. A slice:
In Israel today, we can see one of Julian’s key principles at work. Population growth, he said, increases the most important driver of human flourishing and prosperity: the world’s stock of knowledge. Another of his key principles is that “the world’s problem is not too many people, but lack of political and economic freedom.”
David Simon, one of Julian’s sons, says his father would have thought Israel’s population growth would continue to fuel strong economic growth. He says Julian also would have emphasized the free-market reforms introduced, starting in 2003, by then-Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“More people and more freedom, my father would have said, means more hope—and will make Israel’s light to the world shine even brighter.”
I think that the belief that matters most to me is the belief that human society is too complex for anyone to understand well enough to know best how it should function. The more confidence that you have in your political opinions and the greater your commitment to your political tribe and its leaders, the less confidence I have in your wisdom.
Eric Boehm continues to expose Trump’s outlandishly false claims about tariffs. Two slices:
On Sunday, Trump revisited the $18 trillion claim while speaking to reporters at the White House. “Because of the tariffs, we’ve taken in more than 18—think of this—more than $18 trillion. There’s never been anything like it,” Trump said. Moments later, he repeated the claim, stating that “we took in more than $18 trillion in 10 months.”
That figure is utterly fantastical—and Trump’s explanation is more than a little confusing.
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Start with the facts: Over the first 11 months of this year, the federal government collected $236 billion in tariffs and duties. That number comes directly from the Treasury Department’s monthly reports. And even though it represents a huge increase in tariff collections—Trump’s tariffs are the biggest tax increase since 1993—it plainly does not amount to trillions in new revenue.
In fact, Trump’s tariffs are expected to generate about $2.3 trillion over the course of the next decade (if the Supreme Court doesn’t strike them down or Congress or some future administration doesn’t undo them), according to the Yale Budget Lab. That’s 10 years of higher tariffs and the total is still nowhere near $18 trillion.
Logically, getting $18 trillion in tariff revenue in a single year is impossible. The U.S. imported about $3.3 trillion of goods last year. You’d have to tax those imports at nearly 600 percent to get $18 trillion in new tariff revenue. Of course, if you taxed imports at that level, you’d end up with roughly the same amount of imports as tariff revenue: zero.
The Nvidia deal says something important about the relationship between business and government under President Trump. His regular intrusions into the boardroom—taking equity stakes, revenue slices or a “golden share”; prodding companies to lower prices or sell drugs through a federal website—are a sort of state capitalism, in which the state doesn’t necessarily own companies, but uses its substantial leverage to steer their behavior.
State capitalism is a two-way street. Many businesses, by aligning themselves with Trump’s agenda, elicit better treatment—in their ability to sell to China, the tariffs they pay, how they are regulated, and what mergers are allowed. In other words, state capitalism doesn’t just serve the interests of the state, but of favored capitalists.
The conditions for knowledge to be held in common seem stringent. Everyone (in the relevant group) knows p, everyone knows that everyone knows p, and everyone knows that everyone knows p, and so on ad infinitum. But the puzzle of this infinite regress can be solved by events that everyone sees, like the hissing of a dictator. Everyone sees that everyone is seeing it, and so on ad infinitum. Strictly speaking, however, much of what he analyzes is better described as common belief rather than knowledge in the philosophical sense, since the shared proposition need not be true—a point to which I return to below.
Pinker then demonstrates why common knowledge, in his sense, can have a galvanizing effect. Humans are a species marked by enormous intelligence. As a result, they can exploit many situations to their mutual benefit. But mutual gains often depend on shared expectations about the nature of the problem and what others may do in response.
Common knowledge enables the realization of such gains by aligning not only interests but also expectations. It is a big mistake to revolt against a dictatorship if one does not know that others are in the mood to join you. Hence, creating common knowledge is a prerequisite to revolution. Repressive regimes know this and ruthlessly suppress even small demonstrations, because they threaten to reveal the regime’s unpopularity. Pinker tells a penetrating Russian joke that captures this truth: A man on the street holds up a blank sign. The police immediately hustle him out. The evils of the regime are so well known that blank signs would begin the contagion of common knowledge.
In his 50-plus years as a top American entertainer, Reiner—like most major Hollywood figures—was a liberal. And like a solid percentage of the country, he did not care for Trump. But there is no indication this was an act of political violence, and it is obscene for the president to try to make it into one.
Many Americans have come to expect the president to be petulant and self-centered. We’ve become inured to his wild social media ramblings. Yet he still finds ways to shock us on occasion; his statement on Reiner is exceptionally beneath the office he holds. Rob Reiner was not a political figure. He was merely an outspoken supporter of liberal causes, which of course was his right.
After a horrific weekend that included a lethal shooting at Brown University, the killing of three Americans by ISIS in Syria, and the slaughter of 16 people celebrating Hanukkah on a beach in Australia, the leader of the free world should be looking to unite Americans and condemn bigotry and violence wherever they take place in the world. Instead, he is kicking the corpse of someone who made movies that brought Americans together.
The long-time and always-worth-reading Washington Post economics columnist Robert Samuelson has died.
