Antón Chamberlin warns of the confusions caused by the careless use of language in matters economic. A slice:
Suppose that after a rainstorm, you make a literal mud pie. You have produced something in the everyday sense of the word: a tangible object that did not previously exist. But have you engaged in production in the economic sense?
Economic production is not solely defined by effort, creativity, or physical output. It requires the creation of value as demonstrated through voluntary exchange. If no one is willing to purchase your mud pie, then no economic production has taken place. What you engaged in instead was a form of consumption — you enjoyed the activity for its own sake. Either that, or it was merely a failed attempt at production. Any value created was internal to your experience, not reflected in the allocation of scarce resources across society.
This distinction becomes far more important when we move beyond childish examples. Governments are routinely described as producers of goods and services, including roads, schools, healthcare, and national defense. In a colloquial sense, this is understandable. Physical infrastructure is built, employees are hired, and services are rendered.
Economically speaking, however, production cannot be separated from profit and loss accounting. Market production requires prices for inputs and outputs that emerge from voluntary exchange. These prices enable producers to assess whether they are utilizing resources in ways that consumers value more highly than alternative uses.
Call it the Davos disconnect. The bien pensant political and business leaders who show up to these confabs espouse a “liberal order” of democracy and free markets. But they then rely on the U.S. to enforce their values around the world while also generating sufficient global prosperity to allow them to fund their growth-killing welfare states and climate pieties at the expense of their own militaries.
As Mr. Trump reminded them, European leaders required sustained U.S. prodding before they ramped up defense spending to provide for their own security. They depend on the U.S. to lead them in supporting Ukraine as it fends off a Russian invasion that Europe was unable to deter or end.
Mr. Trump harps to an unhelpful degree on this helplessness, and his insults and bullying threats over Greenland have alienated Europe to a needless extent. His Greenland threats also aren’t playing well in Congress or with American voters.
But the barbs hit hard among the Davos crowd because they know they depend on the U.S. more than they’d like, and they know it’s their own fault. Yet even now that Mr. Trump is calling into question American support for allies, many of them assume the only alternative is to cozy up to China, at least economically.
Trump tried to fire Lisa Cook, a Biden appointee to the Fed’s seven-member board, last August. The law says the president needs “cause” to remove Fed governors, so Trump pointed to unsubstantiated allegations of mortgage fraud dug up by one of his allies. There was no hearing, and Cook denies wrongdoing.
“What goes around comes around,” Kavanaugh observed in an exchange with Solicitor General D. John Sauer. If Trump can fire Cook, then all of his own Fed appointees “would likely be removed for cause on January 20, 2029, if there’s a Democratic president, or January 20, 2033,” the justice pointed out.
It’s hard to imagine a Democratic president acquiescing to a Fed stacked with Trump appointees if Trump prevailed in this case.When Sauer protested that “I cannot predict what future presidents may or may not do,” Kavanaugh responded: “Well, history is a pretty good guide. Once these tools are unleashed, they are used by both sides — and usually more the second time around.”
Jack Nicastro decries the Trump administration’s on-going antitrust harassment of Meta. A slice:
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced on Tuesday that it will appeal the ruling in its monopoly case against Meta. Legal and economic antitrust experts see no way the FTC can win on appeal, given the factual findings of the federal court in November.
While the actual appeal has not yet been filed, the FTC Bureau of Competition Director Daniel Guarnera said that “the Trump-Vance FTC will continue fighting its historic case against Meta to ensure that competition can thrive across the country to the benefit of all Americans and U.S. businesses.” The decision to appeal, coupled with Guarnera’s statement, is yet more evidence that President Donald Trump’s FTC has embraced the big-is-bad mantra of its Democratic predecessor.
Jeff Jacoby is understandably appalled. Two slices:
In just the past few weeks, the American president has threatened military action against Denmark, a NATO ally, if it doesn’t surrender Greenland to the United States. He moved to punish a US senator — a retired Navy captain and combat veteran — for reminding service members they must not obey illegal orders. He posted a grotesquely cruel message on social media jeering the deaths of director Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele. He sent his press secretary to warn CBS News that unless it broadcast a presidential interview complete and unedited, we’ll sue your ass off.” He deposed Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, then announced that the United States was now “in charge” of that country, and “we’re going to be taking oil.” He summoned Justice Department attorneys to berate them for not moving fast enough to prosecute his critics and opponents. And when an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis shot and killed Renee Good, an unarmed American citizen, the White House instantly pronounced her a “domestic terrorist” and refused to open an investigation into the shooting.
This is not normal political combat. It isn’t just more of the partisan roughness that Mr. Dooley had in mind when he remarked that “politics ain’t beanbag.” This is unabashed White House thuggishness, a vengeful aggressiveness that makes no effort to disguise itself by pretending to care about constitutional norms or democratic values. And all of it is cheered by tens of millions of Americans who cannot seem to get enough of President Trump’s cascade of gratuitous cruelty, insults, and threats.
When the president was asked in a recent interview whether he recognizes any check on his powers, he didn’t bother with euphemisms. “Yeah, there is one thing,” he said. “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
For anyone who takes the American constitutional system seriously, that statement is genuinely terrifying. Not because Trump is wrong but because — let’s face it — he’s right.
The British statesman William Gladstone praised the US Constitution as “the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man.” For more than two centuries, the self-correcting durability of the constitutional framework the Framers devised has rightly been regarded as a masterpiece of statesmanship.
But now the checks and balances on which that system depends are failing. For built into the constitutional architecture was an assumption of public virtue. It was not designed to contain a president who would openly declare himself restrained only by his own (nonexistent) morality and whose outrages would be endorsed by a major political party.
…..
The Trump phenomenon isn’t an aberration our constitutional machinery can correct. It is the failure the Founders anticipated when they warned what happens after virtue collapses and applause replaces judgment. The Constitution still exists on paper. What is disappearing is the public will to enforce its meaning. A republic does not fall when a strongman declares himself unchecked. It falls when millions hear him say it — and approve.
Noah Rothman tweets: (HT Scott Lincicome)
*Trump does an objectionable thing with no rationale save his interest in it.*
Trump fans: Brilliant and necessary!
*Everyone else freaks out, prepares for the worst, readies consequences, provides an offramp. Trump reluctantly takes it*
Trump fans: See? There was never anything to worry about. You guys just can’t exercise any discretion, can you?
Space does not even begin to permit a full recounting here of the ways in which Carlson, since moving his program to X/Twitter, has become steadily more extreme, paranoid, and detached from reality. This includes flacking for Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Hamas, and Qatar; hysterically predicting world war if the Trump administration hit Iran’s nuclear program; obsessing over Jews; arguing that we’d be better off as feudal peasants; and promoting World War II revisionism in which Churchill, not Hitler, was the real villain. But the provocation that really proved the tipping point in public attention to Carlson’s moral and intellectual descent was his choice to hold a sycophantic softball interview with notorious white nationalist and Hitler-loving and Stalin-praising antisemite Nick Fuentes a little over a week before Election Day 2025.
