Thomas Edison published an article in the North American Review in November 1889 with the headline “The Dangers of Electric Lighting.”
New York’s hurried electrification had filled its streets with overhead wires, uneven installation and high-voltage lines that could kill people. Safety had become a concern, and Edison argued that high-tension currents, particularly alternating current, posed an unacceptable danger.
AC also happened to be a threat to Edison’s business. Edison built his system on direct current. His competitor, George Westinghouse, was developing AC, which could transmit electricity economically over much greater distances than Edison’s low-voltage DC. Edison’s system required generating capacity relatively close to customers. AC could be stepped up for transmission and stepped down near where it was used. Amid the safety debate, the economics of electricity generation and distribution were at stake.
Edison favored restrictions that would have made high-voltage AC harder to deploy. His anti-AC publicity campaign worked to convince the public that AC was more deadly than DC. Electrical engineer Harold P. Brown, with assistance from Edison and his company, electrocuted animals using AC in public demonstrations. The use of an AC system for the first electric chair—which Edison actively encouraged—hardly hurt the message. In response to public concern, Westinghouse argued that the risks of his method could be managed through better engineering and safety precautions. He succeeded, and AC became the dominant U.S. electrical standard by the end of the 19th century.
It is easy in retrospect to turn Edison into a rent-seeking villain protecting his investment in DC. The history is less convenient. People really were being killed, and Edison seems to have believed the danger was severe. But the sincerity of his concern says little about the merits of the rules he wanted.
This is where public choice theory earns its keep. Rent-seeking doesn’t require corrupt businessmen scheming with corrupt politicians. Edison could have sincerely feared high-voltage electricity and preferred regulations that impaired Westinghouse. Safety and self-interest didn’t have to compete for space in his head.
The spectacle of artificial-intelligence executives traveling to Washington to warn government about the technology they’re building belongs to the same tradition as the so-called war of the currents.
The Editorial Board of the Washington Post wisely warns against a ban on diesel exports. A slice:
Disrupting the supply chain would risk increasing diesel prices in states with key Senate races, especially Maine and Alaska. The American Action Forum, a right-leaning think tank, notes that due to “pipeline bottlenecks” and insufficient domestic infrastructure, regions like Alaska rely on imports to top up their supplies. New England also “relies heavily on diesel imports” from Canada. Cutting U.S. exports would raise the global market price, which would be passed along to Mainers buying it from America’s northern neighbor.
Government interventions in energy markets never end well. Trump may not be thinking about 2029, but restricting diesel exports would give environmentalists a precedent to justify pushing the next Democratic president to do the same as a means of reducing emissions. Any perceived risk that government will block exports when it becomes politically convenient to do so would discourage capital investment in domestic refining capacity, which is desperately needed to achieve U.S. energy independence.
These are basic economic lessons that the U.S. should not need to learn anew. Trade makes us richer. Tariffs make us poorer. Price controls lead to shortages and, eventually, higher prices. Please, not another lesson.
Tariffs and other restrictions on trade do not, as Trump said, create a “tremendous good” for Americans. Quite the reverse. Think of all the wonderful benefits we get from open trade—the vast array of fresh fruits and vegetables we can now enjoy in January, the selection of products of every type from every corner of the world.
“The U.S. ran a $197 billion goods deficit with Mexico in 2025, but Mexico also supplies critical vehicles, machinery, electronics and agricultural goods to U.S. businesses and consumers,” explains FreightWaves, a transportation trade publication. If every one of those items had to be manufactured in the United States, it would take years to undo disrupted supply chains and lead to dramatic increases in consumer costs. Haven’t we had enough inflation?
The Financial Times reports this: “”Getting rid of de minimis was intended to clobber Temu, but it’s inflicted collateral damage on many thousands of [US small businesses].” (HT Scott Lincicome)
But the real case for markets rests on a problem he never confronts: local knowledge. Galbraith writes that when profit becomes “the accepted criterion of success,” the result is “pathological.” But prices — and profits — coordinate information about scarcities, technologies and wants, information that no central authority could assemble.
His alternative to markets is a strategic administrative state because “systems need managers.” How the managers are to know what to do raises the classic knowledge and calculation problems associated with economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich A. Hayek.
Hayek argued that the information needed to coordinate an economy is dispersed among many people and communicated through prices. His name appears nowhere in this book. Neither does the question of whether or not it is possible to incentivize the managers to achieve Galbraith’s stated economic goals. For a man who opens by declaring his profession a fraud, Galbraith is curiously silent about one of the most important bodies of literature challenging the sort of planning he proposes.
The ICWA has repeatedly been implemented not to serve “the best interest of the child” — the national standard regarding non-Indian children — but to serve tribal interests determined solely by the tribes. Hence a 6-year-old girl was taken from her adoptive family — the only family she had ever known — because a great-great-great-great-grandparent was Choctaw.
A California court has said that “children are not dogwood trees, to be uprooted, replanted, then replanted again.” But they often are so treated in obeisance to the ICWA’s race-based binary of “Indian” and “non-Indian” children. The former, subject to tribal jurisdictions less protective than states’ laws, are often more abused, and for longer.
