Mike Munger describes the American way of zoning.
Companies also have strong business incentives to pace and police themselves to avoid costly lawsuits and government enforcement actions. “I have a guardrail. You know what the guardrail is? The Department of Justice,” Mr. Trump said this week.
He’s right that new laws aren’t needed to punish wrongdoing or negligence. Companies know the government sword is hanging over them. To reinforce the point, Federal Trade Commission officials this week let it be known they have opened a probe of frontier AI models.
Democrats nonetheless want to put the federal government in charge of AI. That’s the real reason Senate Democrats on Wednesday blocked the Ratepayer Protection Act, which the House passed last month on an overwhelming bipartisan 417-3 vote.
The bill would require state public utility commissions to consider adopting a federal standard under which large data centers pay the incremental costs of new grid infrastructure to support their power loads. In our view, the legislation is unnecessary since most states are already doing this. AI companies are building their own power generation and paying for grid upgrades to connect data centers.
Yet Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer objected to the bill because it isn’t binding. “Senate Democrats want to make it mandatory for data centers to cover their own costs, by law, not by suggestion or hope or whim,” he said. No—they want to block data centers to put AI development under political control.
See Bernie Sanders’s bill, which would pause data-center construction until the government ensures they don’t “exacerbate the threat of climate change” and their models “do not threaten the health and well-being of working families, privacy and civil rights, and the future of humanity” or cause “job displacement.”
His legislation reflects the growing Democratic consensus. Had Kamala Harris won the 2024 election, it’s likely the federal government would have used its power to impose a de facto AI moratorium. When it comes to AI, Mr. Trump has superior intelligence.
Jason Sorens explains that “public sector unions undermine accountability.”
GMU Econ alums Caleb Fuller and Scott Burns keep the case for free trade simple (yet strong). A slice:
First, people reverse the logic of bargaining when they begin thinking of “nations,” instead of “individuals.” In our everyday exchanges, we all want to get as much as we can with the least sacrifice. Some might even call this “the art of the deal!” But in international trade, people’s rhetoric shifts, as if the objective were to “give, and not to get” — to produce and export (give) as much as we can while importing (get) as little as possible. That anti-import sentiment is the essence of mercantilism, the very doctrine Adam Smith set out to dismantle 250 years ago when he penned The Wealth of Nations.
If you slip into this first fallacy, you’ll inevitably fall into a second: treating cheap imports as bad news. In everyday life, it seems obvious that we are better off if we can sell our exports for very high prices and buy our imports at very low prices. We want to sell our output for a high price, and we hope to find “Always Low Prices” when we stroll through the sliding doors at Walmart. Protectionism teaches us to lament in foreign trade what we celebrate at our local checkout counter: low prices. American consumers rarely complain when domestic companies offer Black Friday or Cyber Monday discounts. So why should they object when foreign governments do the same?
It follows from this second point that foreign subsidies are not inherently injurious to us. For a government to subsidize, it must first tax. Suppose a foreign power taxes its own people, then subsidizes some domestic industry that, in turn, sells us cheaper goods. In effect, these foreign governments are taxing their citizens to sell cheaper goods to ours.
Justin Stapley makes the case that constitutionalism helped to fuel free markets.
Todd Zywicki, a GMU colleague over in the Scalia School of Law, warns that “Democrats are trying to politicize a process that has been apolitical: supervisory oversight of bank holding companies.” Here’s his conclusion:
Now is the time for the Fed to exercise the independence that the Supreme Court affirmed this summer by articulating clear, consistent standards for bringing innovative financial products under federal regulatory scrutiny. Otherwise, the success of this political pressure campaign will embolden activists to scuttle efforts to bring other innovative entities and products such as crypto issuers and payment processors within the regulatory perimeter. Several applications from a variety of nontraditional entities are currently pending with both the Fed and the Office of the Comptroller of Currency. If Messrs. Warsh and Gould don’t stand up for their agencies’ apolitical rule of law, it will rapidly erode.
