‘The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.” The words British Foreign Secretary Edward Grey spoke on the eve of World War I ring true a century later. But now gloom descends on Europe not from impending war but from its own institutions as an anti-Russian sanctions regime upends the rule of law.
On Dec. 15, the European Union added Jacques Baud, a retired Swiss army colonel and former intelligence analyst who lives in Brussels, to its sanctions list. His offense: appearing on media outlets Brussels dislikes and promoting what the EU calls “pro-Russian propaganda.” The official listing cites his (implausible) claim that Ukraine orchestrated its own invasion to accelerate North Atlantic Treaty Organization membership—which the EU labels a “conspiracy theory.”
Sanctions are designed to target state actors and their agents, yet Mr. Baud isn’t accused of being a Russian agent. No one has presented evidence of Moscow funding. He’s a private citizen who wrote books and gave interviews critical of Western policy on Ukraine. For that, the bloc has restricted his travel across its 27 countries and frozen all of his “funds and economic resources” in the EU, effectively prohibiting him from doing business there. All without a trial.
The rule of law requires that clear limits bind the government such that people can foresee how a state will use its legal authority and plan their lives accordingly. It requires limiting officials’ discretionary power to punish arbitrarily.
The EU’s sanctions flout both principles.
Also decrying the destruction of free speech in the E.U. and in the U.K. is Greg Lukianoff. A slice:
Free-speech advocates have long warned Americans about the dangers of adopting “hate speech” codes. If they became widely enforced, the result wouldn’t be the kinder society intended by such censorship; it would be an intimidated, even frightened one. Either you engage in mass arrests, or you enforce the rules selectively — which means targeting some viewpoints above others.
For an indication of where this censorious impulse can lead even in a democratic society, look no further than European Union nations and Britain, where the experiment in speech control is running not on university campuses but on national scales, backed by the state’s monopoly on force. The results are so extreme that American readers might assume they’re exaggerated. They aren’t.
Start with Britain, where “grossly offensive” communications can be a police matter. In 2023, British police made more than 12,000 arrests under two communications statutes. For comparison, during America’s first Red Scare, from 1919 to 1920, one of the worst crackdowns on speech in the nation’s history, the United States averaged about 2,000 arrests per year, when the U.S. population was more than 50 percent bigger than Britain’s today.
Behind the numbers are stories like that of Elizabeth Kinney, a mother of four who was arrested for having called a man who assaulted her a homophobic slur — not to his face, but in a private message to a friend. After the two fell out, the now former friend sent the messages to law enforcement. Kinney’s attacker wasn’t punished, but she was, under the Malicious Communications Act. Told she potentially faced 10 years in prison, Kinney pleaded guilty. She was sentenced to the British equivalent of probation and community service, and fined the equivalent of nearly $500.
My Mecatus Center colleague Jack Salmon exposes what Gabriel Zucman “gets wrong about Venezuela.”
Imagine for a moment that you have the misfortune to be elected president of some nation. A neighboring nation possesses valuable natural resources that you’d like to have. How to proceed?
You could seize those resources by force. Certainly that’s been a common method across much of human history. Hire some thugs to take what you want. Have them beat up the other guy if he gets in the way. Give your thugs uniforms and an internal hierarchy, and you might fool some people into believing the whole thing is more legitimate.
Alternatively, you could offer the other nation some of your own resources in exchange for the ones you want. Things go even more smoothly if you let the people in your country offer their resources in exchange for the stuff in the other country that they want. If you happen to be president of a country with the world’s reserve currency, this deal gets better yet: Instead of offering your own resources, your people can probably just trade money for the things they want, and the other country will be happy to accept.
Unfortunately, President Donald Trump does not seem to understand this on a fundamental level. Again and again, Trump has shown that he views free trade as a suckers game. Why should everyone end up better off when he could win while others lose?
The Trump administration’s renewed impulse to seize Greenland—on the heels of a military attack aimed at seizing Venezuelan oil production—is the latest example of this. It’s also perhaps the riskiest, given that Greenland is a part of Denmark (even though it has been semiautonomous since 1979) and Denmark is a member of NATO.
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Again, one of the glorious things about free trade is that no one points a gun (or the whole U.S. military’s terrifying arsenal) at you to make a deal happen. Individuals buy and sell things when and how it makes sense for them to do it. Yes, it is impossible to apply that logic to every aspect of international geopolitics, but presidents ought to nudge the world toward more trade and less war whenever possible. Trump is doing the opposite.
That is happening, at least in part, because Trump doesn’t understand the value of free trade. Everything happening with Greenland is downstream of that grievous problem.
Mike Munger tweets: (HT Scott Lincicome)
No sensible person EVER claimed tariffs cause “inflation.”
Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.
Tariffs cause enormous, and expanding, distortions in RELATIVE prices. That is literally their purpose.
By our definitions, using contemporary benchmarks, 36 percent of American families composed the core middle class in 1979, while just over half (54 percent) fell short of core middle-class status and only 11 percent received income that placed them above the core middle class. By 2024, the core middle class had indeed shrunk — to 31 percent of American families. But the better-off set had tripled in size, while the worse-off group had shrunk dramatically. For the first time in American history, more families in 2024 were above the core middle class threshold (35 percent) than below it (34 percent). If we combine the lower-, core, and upper-middle classes, their share of families has risen from 70 percent to 78 percent since 1979.
