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John Puri decries Comrade Mamdani’s presumptuous notion that he, as mayor, is the owner of all of Gotham’s rental properties. A slice:

John Locke identified the moral basis of property as improvement upon the state of nature, forged by human labor. The essence of property, he wrote, is “Dominion.” Renowned microeconomist Armen Alchian defined this dominion as “the exclusive authority to determine how a resource is used.”

The modifier in private property makes it a thicker concept. Alchian reduced it to three elements: “(1) exclusivity of rights to choose the use of a resource, (2) exclusivity of rights to the services of a resource, and (3) rights to exchange the resource at mutually agreeable terms” — the legal ability to control, profit from, and dispose of one’s property. In New York City, buildings subject to rent control or “stabilization,” a euphemism for milder rent control, or all those constructed before 1974, have been drained of every aspect of private ownership.

The practical purpose of property rights, Alchian notes, is to allocate scarce resources in a civilized manner. The pre-modern distribution of New York’s regulated properties is evidence that they are no such thing. Accurate prices are replaced by hours spent waiting in line. The wealthiest residents receive the deepest discounts. Turnover is minimal by design, so outsiders are squeezed into the bursting unregulated market.

Once an initial lease is signed, landlords lose control of who may or may not occupy their rent-regulated units. If tenants stay put, as nearly all do, managers are required to renew their leases indefinitely. Tenants may also pass on apartments they do not own to any family member, or “family-like” individual with an “emotional and financial commitment” to them, who has lived in the unit for one or two years.

For the services they render, landlords may charge only what the city permits, no matter their expenses. The New York City Rent Guidelines Board voted in June to fulfill Mamdani’s rent freeze, despite knowing that operating costs for rent-stabilized buildings had risen by 5.3 percent. A tenth of units are unprofitable by fiat. Last year, 57,000 dilapidated “zombie” apartments sat vacant because they would cost more to fix up than the government would allow them to earn. (The mayor might seize a landlord’s building if they rent without repairs.) And if a tenant does not pay rent, it can take months to more than a year to evict them.

Reason‘s Jacob Sullum explains something that shouldn’t – but, alas, what nevertheless does – need explaining, namely, “Trump’s assault on judicial review undermines a crucial safeguard against tyranny.” Two slices:

Although Trump’s comment about [Judge Jon] Tigar was mild compared to his subsequent attacks on judges who dared to disagree with him, it prompted a rare public rebuke by Chief Justice John Roberts, a George W. Bush appointee. “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges,” Roberts said in a statement released by the Supreme Court. “What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them. That independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for.”

It should be obvious by now that Trump is not thankful for an independent judiciary, which he views as an illegitimate obstacle to his policy agenda and personal whims. That much is clear from his over-the-top denunciations of recalcitrant judges and justices, whom he habitually accuses of political bias or cowardice, sometimes recommending their impeachment. It is also clear from the arguments that Justice Department lawyers have made in court, especially during Trump’s second term.

Again and again, Trump’s legal representatives have argued that the courts have no business reviewing his decisions or, at the very least, owe him the sort of deference that would allow him to do pretty much anything he wants. They have staked out that position in cases involving issues such as Trump’s tariffs, his invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, his National Guard deployments, his retaliation against political opponents, and his plan to replace the East Wing of the White House with a huge, gaudy ballroom.

Trump’s resistance to judicial review goes beyond criticizing the reasoning or conclusions of judges who rule against him. It amounts to a frontal assault on the rule of law and the separation of powers.

…..

Trump, in short, claimed that Congress had completely delegated its tariff authority to the president, subject only to his own determination that the requisite emergency existed. That claim was rejected by every court that considered it, including the CIT, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

Trump’s response to the Federal Circuit’s decision reflected his knee-jerk assumption that judges who rule against him are motivated by political bias. The court was “Highly Partisan,” Trump explained. He described the majority as “a Radical Left group of judges,” implying that the result was dictated by ideology rather than a careful consideration of the facts and the law.

Wall Street Journal columnist Mary Anastasia O’Grady reports on Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum’s squelching of her fellow Mexicans’ individual liberties, including their freedom of speech. A slice:

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum says the “audience rights” initiative she announced last month is designed to protect the public from fake news. But by making a government agency the arbiter of the truth, the president’s effort greenlights censorship. Journalists, writers, intellectuals and entrepreneurs are alarmed.

The slow strangulation of democratic pluralism in Mexico by Ms. Sheinbaum and her Morena party started with President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (2018-24), also known as AMLO. He governed as a classic populist, expanding welfare rolls to buy loyalty at the ballot box. But as someone who came up in politics during the 71-year rule of the repressive Institutional Revolutionary Party, he understood that perpetual power for Morena required more.

By the end of AMLO’s presidency, Morena had wrested control of the formerly independent National Electoral Institute and the Electoral Tribunal. When the party failed to secure a supermajority in 2024 lower-house elections, electoral authorities manipulated rules around proportional representation to make it happen. During his final month in office AMLO pushed a new law through Congress establishing the election of all judges. The Mexican judiciary has become a farce.

This creeping authoritarianism, which AMLO dubbed Mexico’s “fourth transformation,” or 4T, continues. Ms. Sheinbaum insists she supports democratic norms. Yet under her leadership, the Morena machine is using its sharp teeth and claws to shred any remaining protection of individual liberty and the rule of law.

James Lileks is correct: Too many of today’s “disciplines” in the social sciences – especially, but not only, the slew of ‘disgruntled-studies’ ones – are platforms for undisciplined emoters, not actual thinkers, teachers, or researchers). Here’s his conclusion:

But now they have it all figured out. Of course, science is always evolving and making new discoveries that require reassessment of fundamental beliefs, but the soft sciences — from an outsider’s ignorant perspective, I admit — seem like “Lysenko was wrong, but in its essence and intention, Lysenkoism is correct.”

It’s a fascinating topic, because mankind is endlessly fascinating, but science? Conservatives might not “believe” in it, despite the novel and interesting ideas it might produce, but who cares? Worry more about the people who believe in something because the person at the head of the classroom has a glistening resume, like the late Arday. A PhD in the spongy-soft sciences doesn’t mean you know more than everyone else. It means you designed an interesting basket for a hot-air balloon and got it six feet off the ground in front of a thesis committee, half of whom believe helium is a social construct.

Jon Miltimore writes movingly about the great Jimmy Lai, who is currently imprisoned by Beijing’s reigning brutes.

Mike Munger and Richard Reinsch discuss Milton Friedman.

Politico reports on the GOP’s embrace of collectives economic fallacies and policies. (HT Scott Lincicome) A slice:

“There’s not a lot of daylight between — and there hasn’t been for a decade — [Sen.] Bernie [Sanders] supporters and MAGA supporters. Bernie and the president just have a little bit different ideas on how to deliver those results, but there’s a lot of overlap,” said Alex Bruesewitz, an outside adviser to Trump. “When the Republican message for a decade or longer has been, ‘Work harder, I pulled myself up by the bootstraps,’ that’s not a particularly effective message to these people. They don’t want to hear it.”

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… is from page 53 of Ludwig von Mises’s September 1949 Plain Talk essay, “The Why of Human Action,” as this essay is reprinted in the 2007 Liberty Fund edition, edited by Bettina Bien Greaves, of some of Mises’s essays – a collection titled Economic Freedom and Interventionism: An Anthology of Articles and Essays:

The social function of economic science consists precisely in developing sound economic theories and in exploding the fallacies of vicious reasoning. In the pursuit of this task the economist incurs the deadly enmity of all mountebanks and charlatans whose shortcuts to an earthly paradise he debunks. The less these quacks are able to advance plausible objections to an economist’s argument, the more furiously do they insult them.

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I asked Claude to use World Bank data to calculate per-capita GDP in the median landlocked country relative to per-capita GDP in the median non-landlocked country. No surprise: Per-capita GDP in the median landlocked country is a mere 44 percent of per-capita GDP in the median non-landlocked country.

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Ryan Bourne and GMU Econ alum Adam Michel explain what shouldn’t – but, alas, what nevertheless does – need explaining, namely: “The DSA can abolish bills — it can’t abolish costs.” A slice:

The Democratic Socialists of America’s (DSA) new platform promises a world without bills. In their utopia, you’d see no rent check. No health insurance premium. No student loan repayment. No electricity bill. Life’s basics, including food, education, medicine, and transportation, would all become “common goods and utilities.”

That might sound appealing to Americans struggling with the cost of living after a bout of high inflation. But it’s just an accounting trick. A bill reflects the price of the service you were provided and how much of it you used. The DSA can socialize that payment, charging an out-of-pocket price of zero while taxpayers cover the tab. It cannot abolish the underlying cost of providing the service.

Nor can it abolish scarcity. A doctor’s time is limited. Apartments in Manhattan are scarce. Only so much electricity-generating capacity is available at 6 p.m. on a hot day in August. All goods and services require finite resources, whether they’re skilled teachers, construction workers, bus drivers, farmland, or whatever else. This is the central constraint nonmarket systems face when suspending market prices.

Market prices help manage that scarcity by conveying information about supply and demand. If a harvest fails, a crop becomes scarcer, and its price rises. That discourages some consumption—often by shifting to similar, lower-price substitutes—while encouraging additional production.

But DSA-style socialists see rising prices as a moral failure. The virtue of prices is not that they identify who is most deserving; it is that they allow millions of strangers to coordinate what they produce and consume without the impossibility of a central authority knowing everyone’s circumstances.

So that leaves the question: if not market prices, then what? What system of rationing replaces it? And who does get the bill?

And that bill from the DSA will be huge – as is made clear by Reem Ibrahim.

Some of Comrade Mamdani’s supporters are surprised to learn that they are among the comrades who must pay for socialist utopia. A slice:

Mamdani has not helped matters by singling out successful individuals. The mayor recorded a video earlier this year outside the apartment building where billionaire investor Ken Griffin lives. The stunt was an uncalled-for attack on someone whose alleged sin is owning a penthouse in the world’s financial capital.

Mamdani’s list is still live, and the mayor’s office seems to have no intention of taking it down. Podcaster Scott Galloway, who previously supported the tax, complained that the list “doxed” him, and he accused Mamdani of using it as a “wanted poster.” A Democratic City Council member said she is rethinking her support for the levy after seeing her primary residence of 30 years included on the list and hearing from many angry constituents.

Written before Jason Array’s suicide, this piece on Arday by John McWhorter is nevertheless superb. A slice:

The problem is that what is obvious is probably not very complicated—never mind that what Arday thinks is obvious is a vast and self-indulgent exaggeration. Within this mental universe, Arday’s academic focus was not on learning new things and fashioning new ways of processing existence but on criticizing others’ morals. This is not intellection but advocacy, and that is frankly much easier than thinking. The term “scholar-activist” tries to finesse this by making the two appear to be alternate forms of the same endeavor. But the scholar-activist is often more activist than scholar, and Arday was an extreme example of the type.

Nothing in his work suggests intense engagement with a body of data (Arday himself has claimed that because of his dyslexia, he can engage only one page of academic prose in a sitting) or with a challenging way of analyzing that data. In academia, what is interesting is the counterintuitive, the discovery. Arday merely reinforced long-established and simplistic pieties. He became the equivalent of a full professor at Cambridge based on doing interviews with acquaintances about the racism they experienced, and then largely just presenting what they said. At its highest level, this could be good (but not great) journalism; it could not be academic work. On the level Arday worked, my 14-year-old could best him after some quick training in Latinate, Judith Butler-esque prose.

Arday was defrocked after the revelation that most of even this incurious nattering in the guise of research was plagiarized from others’ work. Claiming that his supposed autism made him think that learning was mimicry, he composed most of his work from generous tranches of cut-and-paste from other sources, often (but certainly not always) lightly reworded. But even if this performance art disguised as thought were all his own work, his elevation to such heights by Cambridge was an abomination.

As I might say (with palms out and widened eyes), arguing for the obvious is not brilliance. Even when it’s about black people.

Also written before Arday’s suicide, and yet also nevertheless excellent, is this piece by Brad Thompson. A slice:

This is, quite likely, the worst academic scandal of all time. There have been other academic scandals over the centuries, but nothing quite like this one. It’s the worst academic scandal not only because it indicts one of the greatest universities in the world, but because it indicts all higher education in the English-speaking world! The Arday case is the symbol and culmination of the kind of intellectual and moral rot that has been seeping into higher education for sixty-plus years.

If Cambridge University—an 817-year-old institution—is to be saved (and it’s an open question as to whether it can or even should be saved), all those administrators and faculty involved in hiring, promoting, and defending Jason Arday should be fired immediately. Nothing less will do if Cambridge is to survive.

The great tragedy of the L’Affaire Arday is that there may very well be scores if not hundreds of similar cases around the English-speaking world.

Phil Magness continues to document J.D. Vance’s astonishing economic ignorance.

Here’s a headline that surprises no competent economist: “Stock-Picking Funds Are Performing as Poorly as Ever.”

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… from page 21 of my Mercatus Center colleagues Chris and Rachel Coyne’s essay “The Economics of Price Controls,” which is chapter 2 of Flaws & Ceilings (2015), an excellent collection edited by Chris and Rachel:

Price controls are often implemented with the goal of fighting inflation. But this, incorrectly, assumes that all wage-price increases are the result of inflation. In an unhampered market economy, there are constant, genuine changes to supply and demand conditions that will often lead to real price increases and relative price increases. The existence of price controls distorts the ability of the price mechanism to communicate this information by treating all price changes as if they are the result of inflation. The result is that scarce resources will not be reallocated to meet changes in the real, underlying economic conditions. Thus, due to persistent resource misallocations, standards of living will suffer.

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Writing at the Wall Street Journal, Kimberlee Josephson puts her finger on one reason why colleges and universities are today churning out more people sympathetic to big-sister socialism. A slice:

When students arrive in college, they encounter a vague sense of freedom. What they often do not realize is how controlled their campus experience is. Universities operate as a closed economy: centrally administered, collectively resourced, carefully controlled by administrators who hope their plans aid retention efforts.

Over the past several decades, the college campus has morphed into a comprehensive residential and lifestyle provider. Beginning in the 1990s, when colleges started competing more aggressively for larger enrollment numbers, investing in student life became a way to recruit students. Expanded student unions, more-comfortable residence halls, larger recreation centers, campus programming offices and improved dining choices became the norm.

By the early 2000s, colleges faced an “amenities arms race.” Rec centers were revamped with climbing walls and lazy rivers; dorms gave way to apartment lofts with expansive lounges; campus coffee bars were established with national brands.

The upgrading of amenities wasn’t only a matter of physical adjustments. Administrators, aware that nonacademic factors can influence educational outcomes, sought to provide full-scale support not only to ensure graduation (tutoring and writing centers) but also personal growth (wellness and DEI programming). Specialized administrative units and support services grew quickly, outpacing academic departments. Critics have argued that this growing array of services contributes to rising college costs and an emphasis on comforts and conveniences rather than educational value.

This transformation has been especially pronounced at America’s wealthiest and most selective colleges and universities. At elite institutions, students enter a nearly self-contained community. They ride campus buses without paying a fare. They enter expansive recreation centers without a membership card. They attend concerts, meet career coaches, reserve study rooms, download software, join student organizations, and participate in countless campus activities without ever reaching for a wallet.

None of these services are free. Their costs are embedded in tuition and fees, endowment income, donor support and government funding. Yet, because students rarely confront a price at the point of use, they experience consumption without consequence or even comparison.

George Will makes clear that, when it really matters to colleges’ and universities’ bottom lines, they refrain from the destructive practice of shielding students from the consequences of their – the students’ – choices and abilities. Three slices:

This autumn, when the student-athletes who compose the University of Michigan’s football team are girding their loins in preparation for Armageddon, a.k.a. the Ohio State game, suppose some freshman players make mistakes in practice. They miss blocking assignments, fumble handoffs, run the wrong pass routes.

Do we think Michigan’s coaches will respond therapeutically? If they emulate the university’s administration, the coaches will soothe their freshmen by saying:

Golly, to err is human, to forgive is to “curb the mental health crisis unfolding among college-aged individuals.” It is unfolding even among individuals who will not line up across the line of scrimmage from Ohio State’s stress-inducing student-athletes. As your coaches, our priority is to allow you freshmen to “acclimate to the demands of college and allow intrinsic motivations to guide personally meaningful academic journeys.” So, we will not respond to your mistakes with extrinsic motivations — e.g., criticism. We coaches are here to help you transition to academia. Thrashing OSU would be fun, but first and foremost we are “investing in students’ well-being and growth by fostering a culture of connection and collaboration — rather than competition.”

Granted, the quoted words do not sound like coach-speak from those responsible for filling the Big House, the nation’s largest stadium (capacity 109,901). The words sound like what they are, an emanation of today’s academic mind.

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The rhetorical goo celebrating “connection” and “collaboration,” and disparaging “competition” (an implicit reproach of “capitalist culture”?), has a practical as well as ideological function. A pass/fail first semester will partially obscure an embarrassing aspect of today’s “college for all” culture: the proliferation of remedial classes for students whose high school “experience” left them ill-prepared academically.

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Is it not possible that Michigan’s postulated “mental health crisis unfolding among college-aged individuals” is a self-fulfilling diagnosis? Tell young people that their professors presume them to be crisis-afflicted, and young people might conform to authority figures’ expectations.

And if “intrinsic motivations” are sufficient for learning, and are, as Michigan implies, somehow superior to dictated motivations, such as grades, supplied by professors, the university itself seems almost superfluous. Other than as an excuse for the football team.

“Ohio’s Republican governor says Haitians ‘played a major role’ in Springfield’s ‘economic comeback'” – so reports Reason‘s Billy Binion.

Phil Magness, on his Facebook page, shares this bit about our economically clueless VP:

Old clip I found of JD Vance at the start of his Senate career.

He wants to end the US dollar’s position as a global reserve currency, because he thinks it allows Americans to consume too much and do so too cheaply.

Keep that in mind the next time you order a $20 burrito on door dash.

The Editorial Board of the Washington Post explains what shouldn’t – but, alas, what nevertheless today does – need explaining (especially to people like Sen. Adam Schiff [D-CA]): Packing the U.S. Supreme Court is a very bad idea. A slice:

The justices have repudiated the president on key issues in his second term including tariffs, birthright citizenship, Federal Reserve independence and National Guard deployments. If Trump got to pick four additional justices, he might have won all those cases.

GMU Econ alum Dave Hebert reveals the real economic lesson of the rust belt. Here’s his conclusion:

Left to their own devices, markets tend to produce diversity. No single industry dominates indefinitely, and rational actors spread their bets rather than concentrating them. Detroit’s monoculture did not emerge from markets. It was constructed through politics. Union contracts that locked in labor rigidities, tariffs, and voluntary export restraints insulated incumbents from competition, and government subsidies favored existing industries rather than enabling new ones. Every act of protection deepened the monoculture and narrowed the viable alternatives within the community. The first-best prescription remains the same: let markets work.

Prices, not politics, are better suited to directing capital and labor toward their most productive uses. But the second-best prescription, that takes seriously the political realities that policymakers face, is equally clear: policymakers should avoid concentrating support on a single industry. Economic resilience comes from economic diversification.

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… is from page 3 of Menzie Chinn’s and Douglas Irwin’s superb 2025 textbook, International Economics:

Our food supply is globalized, too. We happily eat locally harvested fruits and vegetables when they are in season, but the rest of the year we enjoy asparagus from Peru, grapes from Chile, apples from New Zealand, and avocados from Mexico. We eat sushi wrapped in seaweed grown in China or South Korea. We top our salads, or stuff our pita sandwiches, with chickpeas grown in India or Australia. For dessert, we indulge in a little chocolate made from cocoa beans grown in Côte d’Ivoire or maybe Ecuador. Whatever your favorite meal or snack might be, these days it is likely that some of what is going into your mouth cam from a country far away.

DB: Reasonable people celebrate this reality, realizing – as they do – not only that globalization makes our food supply far more diverse than it would otherwise be, but also far more secure (given that, with globalization, our nutrition isn’t held hostage to the vagaries of our own country’s weather, or other, problems).

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Jeffrey Miron makes clear that California’s recent minimum-wage hike generated the ill-results predicted by sound economics.

Lincoln Fillmore reports an instance of supposedly serious ‘scholars’ – in this case, Yale’s Samuel Moyn – peddling ideas so detached from reality that they would make Robespierre blush. Three slices:

I almost didn’t believe what I heard. Samuel Moyn, a professor at Yale Law School, told an interviewer that parents can’t be trusted because they have a “divergence of interest” with their own children. He suggests assigning extra weight to the ballots of “the youngest eligible voters”—strangers to the children—lest children continue to be “hostages of their parents.”

Maybe I associate too much with loving, devoted parents and not enough with intellectuals who think parents are holding their kids hostage. In my own life, I recognize that my children’s interests and my own regularly diverge—that’s part of being a parent.

This week my daughter wanted to play Uno while I was in the middle of working, a clear divergence of interest. We played Uno. That’s what parents do—sacrifice for their children.

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Living in a free society requires us to begin by assuming that parents act in their children’s best interests. If we stop trusting parents with their children, someone must take their place. Schools? Government? Law professors and 19-year-olds? Each—except the “youngest eligible voters” Mr. Moyn favors—may possess valuable knowledge. But all inevitably carry their own biases, and none have the intimate understanding, sustained commitment or enduring responsibility that parents have for their children.

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Trusting parents isn’t naive. It’s an acknowledgment of a simple truth: No government official, no school administrator, no distant expert, no random young voter will ever match a parent’s depth of understanding, love or willingness to sacrifice when navigating the inevitable “diverging interests” between parent and child.

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy, reports that suspension of the cronyist Jones Act proves that that piece of protectionism is bad for Americans. Two slices:

Since March, America has been running an accidental experiment and glimpsing what the country might look like without one of its dumbest statutes. The results are in, and they embarrass a century’s worth of U.S. lawmakers and defenders.

The statute is the Jones Act, passed in 1920 to rebuild and protect the U.S. merchant marine fleet after World War I disrupted American shipping capabilities. It requires that any vessel moving cargo between two American ports must be built in an American shipyard, be American-owned, and be at least three-quarters American-crewed. Miss any one of these marks and the shipper is barred from carrying a single barrel of fuel from Houston to Honolulu.

The stated justification for the act is national security. We need American ships and American sailors to fight wars. But 100 years in, it’s hard to repeat this justification with a straight face.

An American-built cargo ship costs $190 million to $250 million to build; the same vessel costs about $30 million from a foreign shipyard. U.S. shipyards now build less than 1 percent of what China and South Korea do, and roughly 300 U.S. shipyards have closed since the early 1980s. Legislation meant to sustain a merchant fleet has presided over its collapse.

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The lobby mobilized against a limited waiver as if the republic were under siege. [Colin] Grabow described a national ad campaign drawing millions of views from an account with just a few hundred subscribers, a 10-state media blitz, a form-letter-writing machine, and roughly one op-ed or letter per week, mostly written by people on the industry payroll.

Two influencers who had never mentioned shipping policy, Kaya Jones and Olivia Krolczyk, posted identical lines about “protecting 650,000 Americans” a day apart, and one disclosed a paid partnership. A commissioned study for the Transportation Institute warned, with gross exaggeration, that 100,000 jobs were “at risk.” Fifty-two House Republicans, the speaker among them, bought into the economic illiteracy and urged the White House to let the waiver die.

Such machinery does not stop at persuasion. A few years ago, documents pried from the Maritime Administration revealed that an advisory committee meeting participant suggested, probably half in jest, that every past and present Cato Institute and Mercatus Center scholar (presumably including me) be charged with treason for criticizing the Jones Act. As economist Art Carden observed, that dragnet would have to be enormous, since the critics run from free-market economists to the far-left Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz.

Alan Wm. Wolff and Warren Maruyama predict that Trump’s newest tariffs will also fail in court. (HT Scott Lincicome)

John Puri explains that “3.4 percent is not a good inflation rate.” A slice:

The difference between 2 percent and 3 percent inflation may not seem that significant, but compound interest is a tricky thing. Inflation at 2 percent means that the dollar loses half its value in 35 years, whereas inflation at 3 percent cuts that time frame to 24 years. All the distortionary effects of excess money creation are amplified accordingly.

Jacob Smith reveals “when ‘consumer protection’ protects producers from competition.”

How impressive! Trump is also an expert in the details of modern aircraft-carrier equipment!

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… is from page xvi of the Second Edition (2025) of GMU alum Benjamin Powell’s excellent book Out of Poverty: Sweatshops in the Global Economy:

The laws of economics do not put “profits over people.” They dictate which policies will help poor workers and which policies will harm them.

DBx: Yes.

And pick any randomly chosen policy today peddled by either the progressive left or the MAGA right and you will likely pick a policy that, although marketed as helping the poor, actually hurts the poor.