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Phil Magness traces the “postliberal” war on economics to one especially prominent postliberal ‘thinker’ being duped by outlandishly apocalyptic claims about the environment. Three slices:

In 2007, a prominent conservative academic predicted civilization would collapse within months. The culprit: peak oil. The collapse never came but the philosophy he built around it—postliberalism—is now in the White House.

The growing influence of postliberals is undeniable, but liberals on the left and right seem taken aback, confused about an ideology that marries extreme social conservatism with a hostility to mainstream economics, the latter a conventionally left-wing position.

In recent years, a large focus of my work was explaining how the 1619 Project made big, provocative claims about the nation’s founding and was forced to backpedal once actual historians began checking the receipts. I find myself again in a similar role as I engage with the postliberal right.

This is a series that will help liberals understand this Frankenstein ideology and where its weak points are. This first installment will focus on the postliberal right’s war on economics.

The postliberals’ master explanation for why everything feels off is to blame free markets, libertarianism, liberalism, “neoliberalism,” or even just plain economics. To hear them tell it, everything is the fault of liberalism: declining birth rates, fentanyl addiction, family breakdown, environmental degradation, cultural decay, illegal immigration, the 2008 to 2009 financial crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, a reported wave of angry, listless young men … the list goes on.

But postliberalism’s critique of economics is intellectually shallow — its proponents don’t understand the discipline they attack, and their anti-market philosophy originated in a failed prediction that they’ve quietly abandoned while keeping the grievances.

…..

The explosion of economic prosperity from the 18^th-century stirrings of the Industrial Revolution to the present day depended upon fossil fuel in the literal sense. In [Patrick] Deneen’s reasoning, that fuel came from a limited resource that would soon be depleted. The Great Enrichment of the modern era, and indeed humanity’s escape from the multi-thousand-year Malthusian Trap of hunger and stagnation, only came about through artificial means that elevated humanity’s economic consumption beyond its “natural” state.

Modernity borrowed from the planet’s future to give itself material comforts. Liberalism functioned as a rationalizing ethos for this resource extraction, but with it came a cultural degradation that supposedly eroded ancient social bonds of family and community. And the entire liberal economic façade, Deneen predicted, would soon come crashing down as nature’s hard constraint of Peak Oil enforced itself upon a society under the spell of rapacious libertarian prophets of consumption.

Except the Peak Oil-induced collapse, said to be only months away in 2007, never happened.

Deneen quietly abandoned Peak Oil Theory, and with it a draft academic paper entitled “Peak Oil and Political Theory: The End of Modernity?” that he presented at several conferences in the late 2000s. He simply swapped in a different set of crises rooted in less tangible claims about an accelerating cultural collapse.

By 2021, he had found another target by turning his sights on the American Founding itself. “We must see this jointly created, invented tradition of America as a fundamentally or solely liberal nation as a recent innovation,” he declared in a keynote address at the National Conservatism conference. Using language lightly cribbed from his Peak Oil musings a decade earlier, Deneen denounced the individualist, free-market, and liberty-minded legacy of 1776 as “an invented tradition that has been launched in the service of a rapacious ruling class.”

No matter the occasion of the problem, free markets and economic libertarians were somehow always its underlying cause.

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JD Vance, for example, described his conversion to Trumpism at the 2019 American Conservative gala by crediting the president for “explicitly attacking the libertarian consensus that I think had animated much of Republican economic thinking.” No other candidate, he claimed, had been willing to confront this alleged source of Vance’s social grievances. Vance is personal friends with Deneen and [Gladden] Pappin, and he has credited both for guiding him on his own conversion to the postliberal movement.

Postliberals are now in a position to test their theories. If they’re wrong — as the historical and developing modern record suggests — Americans will pay higher prices for the privilege of watching a tiny minority view of the “common good” fail to materialize. The economists they’ve spent two decades scapegoating will be the least of their problems.

Dan Hannan reports bad news: “the kids are alt-right.” A slice:

Young men are turning to fascism. I don’t use that word lightly. Hypochondriac leftists apply it to everything they dislike, from farmers’ markets to air travel. Still, when I see the combination of antisemitism, white nationalism, hostility to markets, and apologias for actual, literal Nazism (notably through the elevation of Adolf Hitler’s legal apologist, Carl Schmitt), I don’t know what other word to use.

George Will applauds a federal judge’s rebuke of Kristi Noem. Two slices:

Shrill but useful — useful because she is so shrill — Kristi Noem has elicited from a federal judge a valuable 83-page tutorial. The secretary of homeland security, her mind as closed as a clam, will not benefit from Judge Ana C. Reyes’s explanation of immigration law. Other Americans will.

On Dec. 1, Noem shared on X this thought: “I am recommending a full travel ban on every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies” who “slaughter our heroes, suck dry our hard-earned tax dollars, or snatch the benefits owed to AMERICANS. WE DON’T WANT THEM. NOT ONE.” This was three days after Noem officially “determined” that she would terminate, effective Feb. 3, temporary protected status for about 353,000 Haitians who have found refuge here.

Last Monday, Reyes, of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, the nation’s second-most important court, blocked Noem’s order. Reyes said the process that produced it was so riddled with lawlessness that the plaintiffs would likely prevail in a trial.

The five Haitian plaintiffs include a neuroscientist researching Alzheimer’s disease, a national bank’s software engineer, a laboratory assistant in a toxicology department, a college economics major and a full-time registered nurse. No leeches joined the suit.

Here’s Jason Willick on Tucker Carlson. A slice:

One lesson of the past 10 years of Carlson’s career is that the political establishment’s ability to erect a firewall against certain ideas has collapsed. Advertisers boycotted Carlson’s Fox News show over his abrasive racial commentary; now that same kind of communication is the lingua franca of a presidential administration that won the popular vote. Carlson is a force to be reckoned with in the GOP, and curbing the influence of his most toxic ideas will require more than declaring them beyond the pale. It will require a politically successful Republican presidency, which, Carlson’s trajectory reminds us, the country hasn’t experienced for decades.

Richard Epstein and Max Raskin correct the historically ignorant (alas, she’s not alone) Billie Eilish. Two slices:

Billie Eilish brought the house down at the Grammy Awards on Sunday when she declared, “No one is illegal on stolen land.” While the first half of the statement was a fan favorite aimed at President Donald Trump and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the second half was a throwback evoking popular land declarations this past decade that consider all land stolen if not derived from an original indigenous title. But it’s time to put Eilish’s theory of property out to pasture: Americans are not thieves who built on stolen land.

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All disputes must come to an orderly legal end because life, commerce, and even the Grammys must go on. Statutes of limitation and doctrines such as adverse possession clearly provide that you must sue by a certain date or your title is gone, no matter how maliciously acquired. So while “pure” theory has said since Roman times that “prior in time means higher in right,” in the real world of rough and tumble conflicts and imperfect records, matters of proof and reliance cut back on these theoretical rights. Put concretely: Do Anglo-Saxons take England back from the Normans? That would be civilizational suicide.

Noah Rothman warns against embracing AI pessimism. Two slices:

The populist temptations to rush to the head of this ongoing parade are obvious and alluring. But is it in the interest of this administration to foster more of the economic anxiety that has bedeviled this presidency from almost the outset of Trump’s second term? Is it wise for the governing party to go hammer and tongs after an innovation that is responsible for much of the productivity growth in this economy, or the investments in it, which contributed substantially to surprisingly robust GDP growth in 2025?

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“Government programs have provided a cushion to displaced workers, but they have also impeded the transitions,” the Hudson Institute’s Michael Solon and former Senator Phil Gramm wrote in the Wall Street Journal this week. The authors came armed with a variety of examples of well-meaning efforts to shelter the public from technology-fueled economic dislocation. Ultimately, those initiatives were to the detriment of the workers who were displaced (as they invariably would have been) for longer than they might have been in the absence of public sector interventions. Indeed, hamstringing AI would not just cripple America in its geopolitical race with its adversaries abroad. It would also deprive the public of the instruments of their salvation.

Just as electrification displaced millions of workers but also produced new productivity gains and more capital to invest in services and industries that became the vocations into which those workers later settled, AI will be the cause of and the solution to economic displacement. The alternative is sclerosis and stasis, as Gramm and Solon write:

A feel-good expansion of our existing programs to address AI transitions could idle tens of millions of workers, squander much of the economic benefit we hope to derive from AI, and foster a dangerous “bread and circuses” political system in which those who have chosen to remain outside the labor force demand an increasing share of the benefits created by those who have chosen to work.

Even the most dogmatic techno-pessimist should not dismiss the extent to which AI doomsayers are engaged in a campaign of special pleading that is designed to grease the skids for a big-government solution to the “problem” of AI. Elsewhere in the Journal this week, Barton Swaim makes an excellent case for skepticism toward AI apocalypticism, much of which is coming from the technology’s developers themselves.

The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal observes this about Florida: “The state passed an E-Verify law. Job growth quickly declined.” Two slices:

The Sunshine State’s job growth was consistently among the highest in the U.S. during the pandemic and the prior decade thanks to low taxes and a pro-business environment. Covid lockdowns in progressive states supercharged Florida’s population and workforce growth. But in May 2023, Florida Republicans passed legislation aimed at countering Joe Biden’s porous border policies.

The law’s centerpiece requires private employers with 25 or more employees to use the federal government’s E-Verify system to confirm the work authorization of new hires. Violations could result in $1,000 daily fines and suspension of a business’s license. Gov. Ron DeSantis claimed to be “fighting back against reckless federal government policies.”

There’s no doubt the migrant surge burdened some communities. But the E-Verify mandate makes it harder for migrants to work to support themselves, and it adds a burden on employers. E-Verify can also be unreliable because it relies on federal records that aren’t always up to date. That means it can disqualify some immigrants with valid work permits.

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There’s little evidence that undocumented migrants are taking jobs from Americans. The reality is that employers can’t find enough Americans willing to work in the fields or hang drywall, even at attractive wages. Farm hands in Florida who work year-round earn roughly $47,000, which is more than what some young college graduates earn.

The Editorial Board of the Washington Post explains that “Bad Bunny is a free-market success story.” A slice:

Americans threatening to boycott Super Bowl XL because they disagree with the headliners’ political views are missing the point. The halftime show is about entertaining millions of Americans, and the NFL chose Puerto Rican singer Bad Bunny to perform because he is extremely popular with the massive global audience that will be tuning in.

It’s also worth noting that Bad Bunny represents a triumph of American capitalism: he went from bagging groceries and uploading songs on SoundCloud to global stardom because he has produced a product that millions of people are willing to pay for. His album “Debí Tirar Más Fotos” made him Spotify’s top artist in 2025, the fourth time he earned the distinction. His songs were streamed nearly 20 billion times last year.

“Most Americans hate Trump’s tariffs” – so reports Reason‘s Jack Nicastro.

National Review‘s Editors point out that Jeff Bezos isn’t ethically, economically, or legally obliged to subsidize losses at any business that he owns, including the Washington Post. A slice:

Without a doubt, it is deeply unfortunate when people lose their jobs — particularly in an industry where there are fewer than ever to go around. But Jeff Bezos is a businessman. He is not required to absorb limitless financial losses, particularly to maintain an institution whose ideological focus he feels to be misplaced. Demanding that he act otherwise reeks of entitlement.

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… is from page 10 of Robert Higgs’s excellent May 2005 study “Fear: The Foundation of Every Government’s Power” as this study is expanded, revised, and printed in Higgs’s 2007 book, Neither Liberty Nor Safety (link added):

Karl Marx famously declared that religion is the opiate of the people. Not so famously but equally correctly, Raymond Aron (1957) called collectivism, especially in its Marxist variant, “the opium of the intellectuals.”

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Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal.

Editor:

Barton Swaim wisely cautions against swallowing any of the many predictions that AI will cause massive unemployment (“Is AI the Next Climate Change?” February 5). Such predictions have been commonplace at least since British hand-weavers – led by the fictional Ned Ludd more than 200 years ago – warned that labor-saving power looms spelled doom for ordinary workers.

The value of economic activity is in its ability to satisfy human wants. As long as humans have wants that AI, machines, and other nonhuman processes cannot fully satisfy, there will be a demand, in market economies, for human labor to help to satisfy those wants. AI will cause massive “unemployment” only when it satisfies human wants so massively that most of us will experience heaven on earth. That day, unfortunately, will never come.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

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My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy, reminds us that wealth taxes are failures. A slice:

When government grows to dominate ever-larger shares of the economy, and when politicians refuse to be responsible about what they spend, there’s a predictable next move: Insist that the problem is “the rich” not paying enough. Never mind that high earners already shoulder a disproportionate share of the tax burden. Never mind that relying on a small and mobile group of people for the bulk of your revenue makes public finances more volatile, not more stable.

No, once spending is treated as untouchable and restraint as politically impossible, it’s only a matter of time before politics demands more, more, more. More taxes and more distortion. This helps explain why wild new forms of wealth taxes are popping up.

California voters are heading toward a November ballot fight over a so-called one-time 5 percent tax on billionaires’ net worth, tied to residency on a date that’s already passed. Illinois lawmakers recently flirted with a tax on unrealized gains—think of stocks yet to be sold at fluctuating prices that only exist on paper—before retreating. And New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani wants a wealth tax to help close the city’s roughly $12 billion budget gap. Prominent progressive Democrats have explicitly endorsed national wealth taxes (e.g., proposals from Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren).

Different places, same impulse: Avoid hard fiscal decisions by squeezing a narrow group harder.

A wealth tax is not like the income or consumption taxes we’re used to. In theory, it’s a cut of a person’s entire stock of assets (less their liabilities). In its classic form, a wealth tax is assessed annually. Newer examples in the U.S. appear as onetime levies or use a “mark-to-market” system to tax unrealized gains, treating appreciation as income. However it’s packaged, the economic logic is the same.

Wealth taxes are also a uniquely blunt and damaging instrument. Across advanced economies, they have repeatedly been narrowed or even repealed after delivering disappointing revenue, tax avoidance, capital flight, and costly administrative battles. The international record is decisively negative no matter what convoluted arguments their supporters want to use in America.

Phil Gramm and Mike Solon wisely counsel resistance to the use of government to ease AI-caused job transitions. A slice:

A consensus has formed that while artificial intelligence may create new and better jobs, its threat to current job holders requires massive new government training programs, unemployment assistance, income supplement programs and even a guaranteed minimum income. Missing from this rush to expand the government’s social safety net is any recognition that previous efforts to cushion the transition from jobs of the past to jobs of the future have done little to benefit those making the transition—and have raised the cost for society as a whole.

Societal gains from technological change come from what the economist Joseph Schumpeter called “the wave of creative destruction.” The lost jobs and investments rendered unprofitable by new technology free up labor and capital that can be redeployed to produce new and higher-valued goods and services. The more seamlessly the transition from the old to the new, the greater the gain from the new technology. “American exceptionalism,” our ability to generate and sustain higher living standards, has come in part from developing new technology and benefiting from being the first to implement it, and in part from our ability to move labor and capital dislocated by the wave of creative destruction efficiently into higher and better uses.

On average, every month since 2000 some 5.1 million American workers were separated from their jobs or were laid off and more than 5.2 million new jobs were created. In 2025, three times as many Americans changed jobs as did workers in the European Union. So inefficient is the Chinese economy in dealing with creative destruction that most industrial subsidies in China are used to sustain noncompetitive businesses. In short, the U.S. channels the wave of creative destruction through the economic system more efficiently than any other country in the world, and we are constantly enriched by it.

Government programs have provided a cushion to displaced workers, but they have also impeded the transitions. The 1962 Trade Adjustment Assistance program, which provided training, job-search and income support to workers harmed by foreign trade, has provided benefits to more than five million people. Numerous public and private studies have highlighted TAA’s failure by comparing the transition of TAA beneficiaries with workers who lost their jobs during the same period but didn’t receive TAA. Studies by the Government Accountability Office, the Labor Department and the U.S. International Trade Commission agree that TAA is insufficient in supporting dislocated workers to re-enter the labor market. It didn’t improve earnings. Benefits were used mostly as income support, and nonparticipants were re-employed faster than those who participated in TAA.

The Washington Post‘s Editorial Board reports on the much-anticipated release of the Cato Institute’s American Abundance Index. A slice:

The resilience of the American worker is one of the most underreported stories of the 2020s. From red tape to import taxes, successive governments have erected barriers to success. Yet America’s workers have persevered and figured out ways to prosper.

A new American Abundance Index illustrates this. The project from Human Progress, an arm of the Cato Institute, reveals the steady rise of the average worker’s purchasing power. The premise of the index is simple: how many hours do you need to work, compared to the month or year before, to be able to afford the “basket of goods,” which is a standard set of household items and services that comprise the Consumer Price Index used to calculate inflation.
The “time price” is how many hours of work it takes to purchase the basket of goods. The “abundance” is how much of the basket one hour of work can buy. The story told by the index is a very good one: since recordkeeping began, “abundance” for average private sector workers comes out to a net increase of 13.8 percent.

Scott Lincicome, Clark Packard, and Alfredo Carrillo Obregon report on a lawsuit that “exposes how opaque enforcement compounds the US tariff complexity problem.” A slice:

First, as complex as the US tariff system in 2026 may seem from a 30,000-foot view—Cato’s tariff complexity flowchart below should give you an idea—it’s even more impenetrable for the companies and, especially, the small businesses that must interpret or navigate the system daily. The ambiguity and obscurity of the system’s rules amplify these costs, especially when applied to complex imports or, as the Express Fasteners case shows, when interpreted in a surprisingly protectionist way by CBP. If a company’s interpretation of these rules doesn’t align with CBP’s version, that compnay can face unexpected—and inflated—tariff liabilities and maybe even penalties for noncompliance.

Trump’s call to nationalize elections has the Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal understandably wonder if Democrats might now see the wisdom and prudence of federalism. Two slices:

Republicans spent four years under President Biden opposing a Democratic push to nationalize elections, so naturally President Trump is now calling on the GOP to nationalize elections. Thankfully, Senate Majority Leader John Thune has a memory that begins before 2025 and foresight that extends past 2028.

“The Republicans should say, we want to take over, we should take over the voting in at least—many, 15 places,” the President told a podcast on Monday. “The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.” Mr. Trump claimed illegal aliens are casting ballots in vast numbers, and that not only was 2020 stolen, but he won Minnesota three times. Minnesota is a reliably blue state that not even Ronald Reagan carried in 1984.

Voter fraud happens, and the price of freedom is vigilance, but the idea that noncitizens are swaying national elections isn’t borne out by the evidence. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger ran an audit in 2024 of the state’s 8.2 million registered voters. It found 20 noncitizens, 11 of whom never cast a ballot, plus another 156 people whose status was unclear and who were sent for investigation.

“This is the most comprehensive citizenship check ever conducted in the history of Georgia,” Mr. Raffensperger said. As a reminder, Mr. Biden won the state in 2020 by 11,779 votes, which is a big enough number that if it were phony Mr. Trump’s campaign ought to have been able to find real evidence.

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Mr. Trump’s call to nationalize elections is a mistake for the GOP, since Democrats will be only too eager to try again, on their terms, the nanosecond they regain power. Instead Democrats should thank their lucky stars for America’s decentralized system. They say Mr. Trump is a budding authoritarian, yet the Constitution gives him little power over the 2026 midterms that could be a Republican wipeout.

On this, the 115th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s birth, Daniel Rothschild wonders if hope remains for Reagan’s call for “informed patriotism.” A slice:

The phrase “informed patriotism” was a considered one: President Reagan’s call was not for cheap jingoism but for love of country “grounded in thoughtfulness and knowledge” and informed by an “appreciation of its institutions.” This is consistent with his lifelong view of American exceptionalism as something materially different from American superiority; our exceptionalism stems from the righteousness of our cause and integrity of our institutions, not anything inherent in the American soil.

Regrettably, the national pride of Reagan’s era has dimmed considerably. In 2025, the percentage who said they were “extremely” or “very” proud to be Americans dipped to an all-time low in the 25 years that Gallup has been asking this question. A third of Americans told pollsters that seeing the American flag makes them feel bad. The patriotic recession is acute among the young: One in three of those under 35 report they are only a little or not at all proud of their country, and Millennials and Zoomers are far less likely than their elders to believe that America is exceptional among nations.

Nor are Americans particularly well informed. A 2024 survey by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni found majorities of undergraduates ignorant of such basic questions as when the Constitution was written, the substance of the First Amendment, and what’s included in the Gettysburg Address. Last year, a U.S. Chamber of Commerce study found that Americans could only answer about half of a battery of basic civics questions. A 2018 report found that most American adults lacked basic knowledge of American history from the Revolution through World War II.

How did we get here? Much of the fault for today’s waning patriotism can be placed at the feet of the American left. A generation ago, the left generally advocated a “warts and all” approach to teaching American history and inculcating informed patriotism; teaching the treatment of Native Americans, slavery, Jim Crow, nativism, and empire was inherent to teaching the story of America. This narrative spent more time dwelling on America’s blemishes than conservatives would prefer, but it placed those deficiencies in the context of a creedal (though few on the left would say covenantal) nation with great aspirations.

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… is from pages 150-151 of the 2005 Liberty Fund edition, edited by Bettina Bien Greaves and translated from the original German by Ralph Raico, of Ludwig von Mises’s 1927 book, Liberalism:

Liberalism is no religion, no world view, no party of special interests. It is no religion because it demands neither faith nor devotion, because there is nothing mystical about it, and because it has no dogmas. It is no worldview because it does not try to explain the cosmos and because it says nothing and does not seek to say anything about the meaning and purpose of human existence. It is no party of special interests because it does not provide or seek to provide any special advantage whatsoever to any individual or any group.

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The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal pushes back on Trump’s baseless claims that his tariffs are an economic boon to Americans. Two slices:

Mr. Trump starts by torching a straw man—to wit, that critics were wrong to say tariffs would produce a recession. We can only speak for ourselves, but we never predicted that. We said tariffs are a tax that would hurt growth, but their overall impact would depend on whether tax reform and deregulation outweighed the tariff harm.

So far they have. Congressional Republicans last year spared the economy an enormous tax increase, and the Administration is taking aim at burdensome regulations. The artificial intelligence boom is boosting investment.

The question is: How much better would the economy be now without the tariffs and their on-again, off-again imposition? Prices on many goods would be lower, for one thing. Tariffs don’t cause general inflation, but they do raise relative prices. Mr. Trump says foreigners bear the costs of the import taxes. He claimed in his essay for us that researchers at Harvard had found that “foreign producers and middlemen, including large corporations that are not from the U.S.” pay “at least 80% of tariff costs.”

We published that claim because readers should know that’s what the President believes, but the paper he cites says something different. In an updated version released after Mr. Trump wrote, the authors note that the “retail pass-through” of the tariffs has been 24%—a measure of the extent to which a given tariff rate feeds through to consumer prices, given that the cost of the good at the border is only one part of the final price. This pass-through rate is higher than under Mr. Trump’s 2018-19 China tariffs.

But that doesn’t tell the full picture of how the tariff cost is distributed. The Harvard economists note in the same paragraph that U.S. consumers are bearing up to 43% of the tariff burden, with U.S. companies absorbing most of the rest. That aligns with other research, such as a recent paper from Germany’s Kiel Institute that found Americans pay 96% of the cost of tariffs. Foreign exporters either pass on the full cost of the tariffs to their U.S. customers, or they ship smaller quantities of goods.

Americans pay one way or the other—via higher prices or less choice. Mr. Trump admitted as much when he said last year that tariffs mean Americans might have to buy fewer dolls for their children at Christmas.

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Higher tariff costs imperil the investments of which Mr. Trump is so proud. Volkswagen’s chief executive recently warned that his company may ditch plans for a new Audi plant in the U.S. You can’t blame him, when his supply chain would be vulnerable to willy-nilly tariffs.

Voters elected Mr. Trump to revive economic growth and tame inflation. His biggest successes have come despite his tariffs, not because of them. He isn’t going to repeal them. But if he froze them in place now and declared victory, he’d have a better chance of persuading Americans that he’s fulfilling his promise.

The Washington Post‘s Editorial Board reports on some collateral damage inflicted on Americans by Trump’s tariffs punitive taxes on Americans’ purchases of imports. Two slices:

Trump’s tariffs are rupturing what has been one of the most efficient cross-border trade relationships in human history. He claims his tariffs have “created an American economic miracle” with low inflation and high economic growth. But Michigan, which the president carried in 2016 and 2024, is experiencing high unemployment, layoffs, inflation and deepening anxiety.

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Canada’s retaliatory tariffs have badly damaged the farming sector, a key element of Trump’s coalition. Canada was Michigan’s primary export market. Now its wheat exports are down 89 percent since 2024. Cherry exports are down 62 percent. Soybeans, mostly destined for China, are down 46 percent.

All this could hurt Republicans in November’s midterms. Michigan has open races for governor and Senate. The major GOP candidates have largely backed Trump’s “America First” trade policy as necessary for revitalizing the economy, despite intense short-term pain. Democrats have hammered Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers, a former congressman, for seeming to dismiss the economic anxiety by saying, “The shoe is going to pinch every once in a while.”

Among Michigan voters surveyed, tariffs are about as popular as an Ohio State bumper sticker at an Ann Arbor tailgate. “Made in America” increasingly feels like “Taxed in Michigan.”

Sanjai Bhagat makes the case for capitalism over socialism. A slice:

The capitalist system provides individuals with powerful economic incentives to work and innovate; this contributes to and stimulates their economy. One of the major flaws of the socialist system is its complete disregard for human incentives — resulting in an ongoing and significant negative impact on their economy, and more importantly, on the lives of their citizens.

George Will wisely warns: “The national debt is nearing $39 trillion. Dire consequences are coming.” Two slices:

In 2016, a budget expert was allotted 20 minutes to brief Donald Trump on those possible consequences. After five minutes, Trump said, “Yeah, but I’ll be gone.” He was perfectly in sync with the political mainstream he professes to supplant.

…..

The most probable, and most ominous, outcome would be a gradual crisis. In 2021, debt service consumed less than 10 percent of federal revenue. In 2025: 18 percent. By being gradual, a protracted crisis would mean a demoralized nation slowly accommodating perpetual economic sluggishness, waning investments in research and development, social stagnation, diminished contribution from the entrepreneurial energies of talented immigrants, and waning U.S. geopolitical influence.

A gradual crisis would be anesthetizing, rather than an action-forcing, cymbal-crash event that could stimulate recuperative reforms of U.S. political culture. Instead, this culture would become more toxic. Political power would be fought for, and wielded, with the desperate ruthlessness of a zero-sum competition in which one faction’s gains must equal other factions’ losses.

So, government would simultaneously become more powerful, more divisive and less legitimate. The currency is how everyone meets the government every day through the unstated — because presumably obvious — government promise that the currency it issues is trustworthy.

Nothing unsettles a middle-class nation more rapidly than inflation, a component of all of these crises. By it, people are reminded daily that the currency is failing as a store of value. This unnerves the public as much as crime, today’s deportation mayhem and other disorders. Inflation is disorder. Its quiet ubiquity is especially sinister, making everyone feel powerless.

“Dystopian” is the antonym of “utopian.” “Utopia” was derived from Greek roots to denote something imaginary — “nowhere.” The dystopian consequences of U.S. debt could someday be everywhere.

The great Bruce Yandle asks: “Will Adam Smith’s ‘Impartial Spectator’ soften Trump’s hardest foreign-policy edges?”

National Review‘s Dan McLaughlin rightly criticizes R.R. Reno for lionizing Woodrow Wilson and the exercise of unconstitutional executive powers. Two slices:

Reno is vague and euphemistic in exactly how he wishes to present Wilson as a role model other than to promote a general sentiment in favor of strongman government. We need “solidarity,” he writes, and “our history has . . . been marked by periods during which illiberal methods were employed to renew and buttress solidarity,” a process in which “Woodrow Wilson played a central role.” Wilson and FDR “sought to renew American solidarity, which required taming and restraining certain kinds of freedom, especially freedom of contract. (Roosevelt intimidated the Supreme Court to secure the overturning of Lochner.) In a word, Wilson and FDR administered strong doses of illiberalism.” This is, in unspecified ways, a good thing because the past gave us the present, and this makes it good.

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More to the point, Wilson and FDR changed the American constitutional system less by formal amendment than by usurpations that the judiciary and Congress either connived in or were cowed into accepting. The vast administrative state, the great expansion of federal power, and the shriveling of basic economic liberties against the federal leviathan resulted in a government that would have been shocking to the people who wrote and ratified the Constitution. By the end of the era of Wilson and FDR, the country was unrecognizable in many ways, and many American traditions were put to rout. To imitate this is a species of envy utterly unmoored from the sense of responsibility that we ought to feel toward what we leave to our posterity.

Barry Brownstein decries “theocrats, socialists, and the totalitarian impulse to plan.”

Jack Nicastro is correct: “The private sector handles hunger better than Mamdani could.”

Politicians routinely insult their fellow citizens’ intelligence. Here’s a recent example tweeted by Jonah Goldberg: (HT Scott Lincicome)

Trump in NBC News interview: “we have record low crime in the United States. Nobody has been able to say that for 125 years.” I ask everybody: What does that mean?

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… is from page 3 of my GMU Econ colleague Bryan Caplan’s new book, You Have No Right to Your Culture [original emphasis; footnote deleted; link added]:

Most complaints about immigration are declarative: “Immigrants take our jobs.”  “Immigrants abuse the welfare state.”  “Immigrants won’t learn English.’  “Immigrants will vote for Sharia.”  One complaint, however, is usually phrased as a question: “But don’t people have a right to their culture?”  When people so inquire, their tone is usually conciliatory, as if to say, “Surely, even you will accept this.”  My considered judgment, however, is that this challenge is a true Trojan Horse.  No one, no one, has “a right to their culture.”

Why not?  Because culture is… other people!  Culture is who other people want to date and marry.  Culture is how other people raise their kids.  Culture is the movies other people want to see.  Culture is the hobbies other people value.  Culture is the sports other people play.  Culture is the food other people cook and eat.  Culture is the religion other people choose to practice.  To have a “right to your culture” is to have a right to rule all of these choices – and more. Though I dread hyperbole, the “right to your culture” is literally totalitarian, because you can’t ensure the preservation of your culture without totalitarian rule over the very fabric of life in your society.

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GMU Econ alum Dan Mitchell adds his voice to those who rightly criticize Donald Trump’s recent attempt, in the Wall Street Journal, to justify his punitive taxes – a.k.a. tariffs – on Americans’ purchases of imports. A slice:

By the way, protectionist policies are not inflationary. They distort relative prices, but don’t cause overall increases. If you want to know who to blame for rising prices, look at the Federal Reserve.

Next, we have Trump claiming that he’s reduced red ink.

Joe Biden handed me a catastrophically high budget deficit… But with the help of tariffs, we have cut that federal budget deficit by a staggering 27% in a single year

This is another easily debunked assertion.

The budget deficit was just as high in 2025 as it was in 2024, as shown by this data from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

“On fuel costs, Californians in particular are getting hosed” – so reports the Washington Post‘s Dominic Pino. Three slices:

The most obvious place to start in explaining California’s problem is its gas tax. At 70.92 cents per gallon, it was the highest of any state in 2025, and more than double the median state. But Illinois was only 4.5 cents behind, and its prices were nowhere near California’s.

California and Washington are the only two states with economy-wide cap-and-trade programs. California’s program raises the price of gasoline by forcing gasoline suppliers to buy allowances. Those higher costs are eventually passed on to drivers. The California Legislative Analyst’s Office estimates that cap-and-trade raises the retail price of gasoline by 23 cents per gallon.

…..

California also does not have any inbound pipelines for crude oil or gasoline that connect to the rest of the country. Its imports primarily arrive by ship. The Jones Act, a protectionist federal law that covers shipping within the United States, makes it uneconomic to transport oil or gasoline from the Gulf Coast region to California.

…..

In the meantime, Californians will continue to pay far more for gasoline than just about anyone else in America. And for what? The state’s share of commuters who use public transportation is slightly below the national average. As wealthier Californians switch to electric vehicles and pay nothing for gas, poorer people who can’t afford a new car are shouldering a growing burden. And even if California eliminated all of its greenhouse-gas emissions from passenger vehicles, it would account for only 0.2 percent of the world’s total GHG emissions.

Next time Sacramento politicians want to complain about price-gouging at the pump, they need to look in the mirror. Other states aren’t having this problem.

Bjorn Lomborg urges the Trump administration not to withdraw the United States from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. A slice:

The United States faces a choice at this pivotal moment. Withdrawing completely, as the Trump administration has said it will do, means surrendering influence over the IPCC’s direction — ceding control to alarmists, adversaries and less rigorous voices. The result will be more politicized exaggeration, more scare stories and more global alarmism.

Instead, the U.S. should remain, engage and wield outsize leverage as the IPCC’s largest funder. This would be remarkably cheap. In 2024, the U.S. paid around $1.9 million to cover more than a quarter of the IPCC budget, dwarfing China’s paltry $23,000 contribution the same year.

Writing at National Review, John Puri asks: “What was Customs and Border Protection (CBP) doing in Minneapolis in the first place? Isn’t this agency supposed to be, you know, patrolling the border?” A slice:

The problem, as we have learned, is that Border Patrol is a very different job from urban policing. There are no crowds of protesters getting in your way on the southern border. Nor are there many private residences that you need to enter when pursuing suspects, or a lot of U.S. citizens going about their day who could be confused for illegal immigrants.

By the nature of their day job, CBP agents are simply not trained to operate in dense urban areas as ICE traditionally is. If the administration keeps sending them into U.S. cities anyway, we shouldn’t be surprised if complications keep arising.

Walter Olson is no fan of the proposal from a Trump administration official to “nationalize the voting.” A slice:

Even coming from an ordinary politician, this federal takeover would be a terrible idea. The Constitution entrusts the administration of federal elections to the states and localities, subject to Congress’s passage of laws regulating the manner of election. Congress has rightly respected the states’ and localities’ lead role, and it should go on doing so.

Jacob Sullum ponders the Trump administration’s disrespect for Americans’ Second Amendment rights. A slice:

“I don’t care if you have a license in another district, and I don’t care if you’re a law-abiding gun owner somewhere else,” [Jeanine] Pirro said on Fox News. “You bring a gun into this district, count on going to jail, and hope you get the gun back.”

That broad threat is hard to reconcile with the right to bear arms recognized by the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen which said states may not require that people demonstrate a “special need” to carry guns in public for self-defense.

Jim Dorn is unfavorably impressed with Andrew Ross Sorkin’s 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History—and How It Shattered a Nation. A slice:

Although Sorkin does an excellent job of describing the main characters in the narrative, he fails to fully understand and convey the fundamental causes of the crash and depression. He overplays the role of speculation leading up to the market crash in October 1929; largely ignores the monetary causes of the deep depression, in which the stock of money fell by one-third between 1929 and 1933; and never addresses the flaws in the “Real Bills Doctrine” that misguided monetary policy. There is no mention in the book of: (1) the path-breaking work of Clark Warburton, who, in the mid-1940s and early 1950s, provided a detailed analysis of the monetary causes of business fluctuations [see Warburton 1966: Depression, Inflation, and Monetary Policy: Selected Papers, 1945–1953]; (2) Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz’s monumental Monetary History of the United States [1963]; or (3) Thomas Humphrey and Richard Timberlake’s Gold, The Real Bills Doctrine, and the Fed: Sources of Monetary Disorder, 1922–1938, which appeared in 2019.

Phil Gramm, former chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, calls the Humphrey-Timberlake (H‑T) book “the most important book written on the Great Depression” since Friedman and Schwartz’s Monetary History. According to Gramm, “The book points to an obscure and largely forgotten theory, the Real Bills Doctrine, as the culprit for the failure of the Federal Reserve … to respond to the collapse of the money supply, which turned a financial panic into a Great depression” (from the front matter in H‑T). It is a shame that Sorkin was unaware of this 201-page book.

Jay Parsons tweets: (HT Scott Lincicome)

Narrative buster: The share of U.S. single-family homes occupied by renters is at 15+ year LOWS, according to Redfin.

And yet both sides of the aisle want you to believe institutional investors are the boogeyman turning America into a renter nation… 🙄

David Lay Williams responds to my criticism of his interpretation of the writings of those of us who don’t obsess over differences in monetary incomes or wealth.

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… is from page 276 of the 1992 collection of some of William Graham Sumner’s best essays, On Liberty, Society, and Politics (Roger C. Bannister, ed.); specifically, this quotation is from Sumner’s famous 1898 essay “The Conquest of the United States by Spain“:

The perpetuity of self-government depends on the sound political sense of the people, and sound political sense is a matter of habit and practice. We can give it up and we can take instead pomp and glory.