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The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal warns of ill consequences to come if the U.S. Supreme Court refuses to restrict the power of the president of the executive branch to remove Federal Reserve governors. Two slices:

In 1913 Congress established the Fed to maintain a stable currency and financial system. Modeled on the quasi-private First and Second Banks of the U.S., it was structured to be insulated from political winds. Board member terms run for 14 years. The Fed draws its funding from regional reserve banks and open-market operations rather than Congressional appropriations.

Congress in 1935 removed executive-branch officials from the board and instituted removal protections for its members. The Federal Reserve Act lets a President fire governors “for cause,” though it doesn’t define the term, unlike other statutes with removal restrictions. The Federal Trade Commission Act defines “cause” as “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”

The Administration says the Fed law’s broad language grants the President sweeping authority to fire board members. “Congress chose to allow removal ‘for cause,’ without specifying required causes. That gives the President discretion so long as he identifies a cause (which excludes policy disagreement),” Justice says.

Under its argument, there are no constraints in practice on a President’s removal authority. That’s because the Administration also argues that Article III courts cannot stop the President from removing Fed officers. If the President can fire Ms. Cook based on mere allegations of misconduct without judicial review, the for-cause restriction is meaningless.

…..

But regarding the Fed, America’s framers sought to prevent the nation’s currency from being manipulated by the executive because they understood the risks of political control over monetary policy. This is wisdom born out in countless examples across the world.

The Fed has made many mistakes and taken on more executive power than it should over financial regulation. Congress can address both if it wishes. But handing Presidents control over monetary policy is more power over money in one man’s hands than the framers wrote into the Constitution.

Jim Geraghty – appalled by Trump’s childish message to Norway’s Prime Minister – decries Trump tearing NATO apart “over a trinket.” Three slices:

The president’s diatribe is unhinged, false, or bonkers in at least ten ways.

One: The Norwegian government does not award the Nobel Peace Prize; the Nobel committee does; its members are appointed by the Norwegian parliament; current members of the Norwegian government or parliament are barred from serving on the committee.

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Three: Trump has not “stopped 8 wars plus.” Let’s give him credit for Israel and Hamas, and Israel and Iran. Everything else is an exaggeration, either about the intensity of the conflict or the U.S. role in ameliorating it. Trump’s persistent boast that he ended the shooting war between India and Pakistan is a serious, and entirely unnecessary, irritant to the Indian government.

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Nine: Trump contends, “The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland.”

As many have observed, up until Trump took office, the U.S. and Denmark largely agreed on their roles protecting the island. I hate to disrupt a good controversy with facts, but the U.S. already plays a significant role in the national defense and economy of Greenland. The island is the location of the Pentagon’s northernmost installation, Pituffik Space Base (pronounced “bee-doo-FEEK”), formerly known as Thule Air Base.

Ten: Trump sounds like an angry toddler throwing a tantrum; in his recent interview with the New York Times, Trump emphasized that his priority is to own Greenland because of his feelings, and ownership is “what I feel is psychologically needed for success.”

Here are some other National Review staffers on “Trump’s ‘manic’ Greenland pursuit”:

“If the United States genuinely believes,” Charlie [Cooke] says, “that the acquisition of Greenland is necessary for its national security — and that’s an argument that Trump has started to make in fits and starts — then it can advance that case without, for example, sending missives to the Danish authorities complaining that the president didn’t receive a Nobel Peace Prize, without randomly threatening tariffs on the United Kingdom, on France.”

“He’s unfocused, and he’s wild. I don’t know if it warrants the 25th Amendment, but we ought not to downplay how capricious and manic he seems.”

Noah [Rothman] agrees, saying, “This whole enterprise is impossibly stupid. This administration privileges and is very sensitive toward the intangible aspects of statecraft. They are really obsessed with honor and respect and prestige, and they are very sensitive to violations perceived or otherwise of that. But totally dismissive of any other country that might privilege the same intangibles as they do, and they mete out embarrassment after embarrassment, provocation after provocation, and expect no response.”

George Will, of course, offers wise thoughts on Trump’s quest for Greenland. A slice:

Trying to imagine the unimaginable is a useful mental calisthenic. So, suppose Vladimir Putin faced this choice: He could assuage his fury about the Soviet Union’s disintegration by conquering Ukraine. Or he could destroy the cause of that collapse — NATO. Now, imagine that he might not need to choose, because of the American president’s obsession with seizing a possession of Denmark.

Averse to using a scalpel when there is a machete at hand, the president threatens Greenland with military conquest if Denmark will not sell the island. Were Congress to refuse funds for this purchase, he would declare a national emergency and “repurpose” money appropriated for other uses.

Using chest-thumping mob-speak, he says, “If we don’t do it the easy way, we’re going to do it the hard way.” If NATO, history’s most successful collective security instrument, perishes, he might consider that a bonus.

And here’s Holman Jenkins on the Greenland calamity. A slice:

If Donald Trump’s foolishness over Greenland gets out of hand, recall the U.S. Senate has ratified numerous treaties codifying U.S. duties under the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which under the U.S. Constitution are now the “supreme law of the land.” NATO’s Article 1, for instance, makes it illegal for the U.S. to exercise the “threat or use of force in any manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations.”

The U.N. Charter, adopted by the Senate 89-2 in 1945, giving it also the force of U.S. law, bans the U.S. from issuing the “threat or use of force against the territorial integrity” of a nonoffending member state. In 2023, for the benefit of any adjudicating judge, Congress further expressed its will by preventing a president from withdrawing from NATO without a two-thirds Senate vote.

This isn’t international law, MAGA types, it’s U.S. law. A Trump order to occupy an otherwise peaceful and unthreatened Greenland would likely be illegal six ways from Sunday. The U.S. military wouldn’t obey it. The Supreme Court would enjoin it.Congress might promptly remove such a president through impeachment.

These realities, widely unmentioned in the current moment, probably aren’t lost on Mr. Trump. The whole kerfuffle fits better under the heading: Why is he throwing his presidency away? Look at his tariff and immigration overkill, his sagging approval ratings, likely GOP defeat in the House midterms, his probable impeachment soon after.

Jack Nicastro is correct: “Trump threatens NATO members with tariffs paid almost entirely by Americans.”

Also correct is Eric Boehm: “America’s large and growing national debt is not just a budgetary liability, but increasingly a geopolitical one too.”

My Mercatus Center colleague Alden Abbott is no fan of the Department of Justice’s antitrust prosecution of Visa. A slice:

The government isn’t alleging collusion, price-fixing, or output restrictions. Instead, it takes aim at Visa’s use of volume discounts and contractual incentives that encourage banks to route debit transactions over its network—standard tools firms use to win business.

The DOJ recasts these arrangements as “de facto exclusivity,” claiming they prevent rivals from reaching efficient scale. But that framing stretches antitrust law past its limits, treating price competition and customer loyalty as exclusionary conduct and risking the mistake of condemning success in the market rather than harm to competition.

Yuval Levin reflects on America’s founding. A slice:

The founding generation of our nation was trying to do something we are also trying to do: enable a vast, diverse, complicated society full of dynamic, crazy, freedom-loving people to live together and address common problems while taking the truths about the human condition seriously. In some respects, they did it better than we could. George Washington was a better natural leader than any of us. James Madison thought more deeply about institutional design than any of us. We should preserve and reinforce what they built.

In other respects, they failed terribly to live up to their own standards and to ours. Washington and Madison both held other human beings in bondage. We should not excuse that. We should learn from it about the human temptation to avert our eyes from plain injustice—a temptation to which we are far from immune today.

A mature patriotism can hold these truths together. The founders were neither superhuman heroes nor subhuman villains. They were human beings confronting human problems, and they left us institutions and lessons of incalculable value. We can be grateful, clear-eyed, and reverent all at once—rooted in the knowledge that we did not earn the gift they bequeathed to us, but confident that we can earn it now by handing it down improved to our children.

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… is from pages 178-179 of Thomas Sowell’s Compassion Versus Guilt, a 1987 collection of some of his popular essays; specifically, it’s from Sowell’s May 31st, 1985, column titled “Staff Infection”:

People in many occupations serve the public: grocers, doctors, bus-drivers, telephone repairmen. Indirectly, so do farmers, factory workers, and in fact everybody who produces a good or service that others use. But when the deep thinkers speak of going into “public service,” with that special unction in their voice, they mean becoming a bureaucrat or politician.

The vision that is unfurled to the departing graduates is one of self-sacrifice for the common good. This is contrasted with going into the grubby world of business to make money for yourself.

Why it is nobler to seek power over others rather than be a producing part of the economy is never really explained.

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In light of Trump asserting that his failure to win the Nobel Peace Prize is sufficient reason for him to impose tariffs on American imports from Europe as a means to pressure Denmark into ‘selling’ Greenland, the Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal reminds us of the enormous importance of what will hopefully be a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that severely reduces executive power to impose tariffs. Two slices:

The world is waiting for the Supreme Court to rule on the legality of President Trump’s “emergency” tariffs, and Mr. Trump’s weekend tariff spree against European allies underscores again why his abuse of his authority needs to be reined in.

Mr. Trump unleashed a new tariff volley against several European countries (see nearby) to coerce Denmark to sell or cede Greenland to the U.S. He cited no legal authority for doing so. He simply said he is imposing the tariffs.

Though he didn’t say this, presumably he is doing so under what he has claimed is his power in an “emergency” under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. But what emergency? Greenland isn’t under threat of invasion, and Denmark has said the U.S. can have more or less free run of the island for defense purposes.

But Mr. Trump wants ownership of the island on his legacy resume, so he is likely to say that control of Greenland is an emergency even if it isn’t in any normal understanding of the term. The only observable emergency is the threat to the NATO alliance that Mr. Trump’s demands and tariffs are creating.

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Like Joe Biden’s abuse of the spending power on student-loan forgiveness without Congressional assent, Mr. Trump’s abuse of the taxing power cries out for a Supreme Court correction.

Greg Ip, with whom I often disagree, is correct in this:

This tariff threat isn’t like the others.

In the past year, President Trump has used tariffs extensively to pursue trade and investment deals, or address domestic complaints like illegal immigration and drugs.

His threat to hit several European countries with tariffs of 10%, rising to 25%, if they oppose the U.S. annexation of Greenland is entirely different. It would be an unprecedented use of tariffs against an ally for a strategic, as opposed to a domestic, goal.

This is the logical endpoint of Trump’s core doctrine: that the U.S.’s economic size and influence give it leverage to achieve a variety of goals through tariffs, including some that previously required military force. If it succeeds, it could usher in a new sort of trade war, one whose aims aren’t mercantile but geostrategic, including the annexation of more territory.

Presidents of both parties have for decades exercised economic coercion, from sanctions, blockades and embargoes to capital and export controls. The goal wasn’t to acquire territory but to contain hostile actors such as North Korea or Russia. (One exception: In 1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower used financial pressure to get Britain to withdraw forces from the Suez Canal.)

The modern analog to Trump’s latest gambit is China’s regular use of economic coercion, such as against Japan recently for its support for Taiwan.

National Review‘s Andrew Stuttaford explains what shouldn’t – but, alas, what today nevertheless does – need explaining: Greenland rightfully is a dominion of Denmark.

Robert Finnell’s letter in the Washington Post is excellent:

Asked recently by the New York Times whether there are any limits on his power, President Donald Trump responded, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” These words from a president should concern all Americans but especially conservatives.

Conservatism was never meant to be a celebration of personalities. It is a commitment to institutions, to restraint, to the slowly learned lessons of history. The system the Founders designed reflects that wisdom. James Madison reminded us that “if men were angels, no government would be necessary.” The problem with government is not that it is evil but that it is powerful. Thus the Constitution was not built for perfect leaders. It was built for ones who are human.

The conservative response to Trump should be firm: No person stands above the system, and no conscience substitutes for the law.

“Texas rare-earth magnet maker Noveon Magnetics has raised $215 million from investors as the U.S. pushes to develop domestic sources of a vital electronics component that China, the world’s largest supplier, has under a chokehold.”

Kate Andrews argues that the Trump administration’s policy of staging high-profile ICE raids, and of encouraging videos of such to go viral, is backfiring on the administration. Two slices:

Donald Trump likes visual proof of his influence and legacy. In the business world, this meant putting his name on the towers he built (or selling his name to adorn some he didn’t) and making cameo appearances in movies filmed on his properties. In government, it has also meant putting his name on things, like the Kennedy Center and the TrumpRx website, which is supposed to connect patients to cheaper drug options.

In the same vein, the Trump administration has directed attention to its ICE raids, working to make arrest videos go viral, The Post reported. The effort is backfiring spectacularly. Federal law enforcement is both consequential and delicate: It necessarily allows some people to have power over others, on the condition that officers do not impinge on fundamental rights afforded to citizens and immigrants. Turning their operations into a warped form of entertainment has almost certainly helped drive down Americans’ support for ICE since last summer as they question the legality and humanity of its operations.

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This is not a government strategy so much as it is a spectacle — one that has little to do with the president’s promise to deport violent criminals. The performance starts at the recruitment stage. “America has been invaded by criminals and predators. We need YOU to get them out” reads the current ICE sign-up page. “CHOOSE YOUR MISSION.” Deportation operations are being treated like a video game — one that comes with a signing bonus of up to $50,000, significantly scaled-back training and the federal government’s full backing.

Matthew Continetti credibly points out that “big government won’t help President Trump on affordability.” A slice:

Rather than pursue a short-term strategy of demand-side subsidies and price controls, Mr. Trump should embrace supply-side solutions that incentivize choice, competition and investment. The Republican Study Committee’s “Making the American Dream Affordable Again: A Framework for Reconciliation 2.0” document, released this week, is full of worthy suggestions. Among them: the president’s creative proposal to have ObamaCare subsidies flow directly to consumers

The Republican Study Committee’s plan would reduce regulations, ease permitting, cut taxes and spending and direct federal agencies to sell unused property. It isn’t perfect. Anyone who lived through the 2008-09 financial crisis ought to be leery of government-subsidized no-downpayment mortgages, for example. But it’s far better than what Ms. [Elizabeth] Warren’s wing of the GOP has to offer.

Wendy Edelberg, Stan Veuger, and Tara Watson update their investigation of the “macroeconomic implications of immigration flows in 2025 and 2026.” A slice:

Reduced migration will dampen growth in the labor force, consumer spending, and gross domestic product (GDP). We estimate the sustainable pace of monthly job growth to be between 20,000 and 50,000 in late 2025 and believe it could be negative in 2026.

About China’s infamous one-child policy, John Puri writes:

The one-child policy will go down as one of the greatest self-inflicted catastrophes in human history. Not just by helping collapse China’s birthrates, but by creating a permanent imbalance between the country’s younger male and female populations. (We can attribute this to abortion and even more appalling tactics by families who learned they were having a girl but wanted a boy.) America’s impending debt crisis will be a disaster of epic proportions, but even that will look like peanuts compared to what the Chinese government has done to its own population.

Speaking of China, the Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board reports evidence that busts the myth that the thugs holding power in Beijing are geniuses whose economic interventions are enriching that nation in ways that demand economic interventions by the U.S. and other governments. A slice:

At home, China is developing something of a Potemkin economy. Retail sales depend to a large degree on trade-in subsidies for items ranging from white goods to mobile phones. It isn’t sustainable. Electric vehicles offer a revealing example: Years of purchase subsidies encouraged households to buy EVs but also stimulated rampant overproduction. Now that Beijing is dialing back the subsidies, some auto makers are struggling.

Investment fell off a cliff near the end of 2025, with fixed-asset investment contracting 3.8% for the year—the first decline since data began in 1996. That figure includes local-government spending on public works, which is weighed down by mountains of debt hidden off official balance sheets. Business investment in the private economy fell 6.9%. Rapid expansion in politically favored industries such as artificial intelligence is masking a broader and deeper malaise.

Scott Lincicome tweets this finding by Derek Scissors:

“For at least a decade prior to that, Chinese wealth grew far more rapidly than official GDP and American wealth did. Since 2015, however, Chinese wealth gains have been uneven, and the American wealth lead has expanded”.

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… is from page 220 of the 2021 35th anniversary edition of Steven Rhoads’s superb 1985 book, The Economist’s View of the World: And the Quest for Well-Being [footnotes deleted]:

One of the most pernicious effects of the modern project to make economics more “scientific” is the accompanying tendency to ridicule all beliefs that are “empty of empirically verifiable content.” The older economists knew that good economics, like good politics, can settle for less certainty than that.

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Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal.

Editor:

So much can, should, and will be said about this flabbergasting message that Pres. Trump sent to Norway’s Prime Minister: “Considering your country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America” (“Trump Links Greenland Threats to Missing Out on Nobel Prize,” January 19).

But one troubling implication that shouldn’t be ignored is that the President of the United States just admitted that in his quest for a personal award he was not thinking about what is good and proper for the United States of America.

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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The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board rightly excoriates Trump for his reckless imposition of tariffs as a means to pressure Europeans into ‘selling’ Greenland to the U.S. government. A slice:

There are good reasons for Washington to care about Greenland, including the island’s strategic position and untapped reserves of rare-earth minerals. Mr. Trump isn’t the first President to suggest buying it outright, but the U.S. already has a high degree of access to the island and Denmark is willing to negotiate more. Tariffs in the cause of bullying imperialism is the wrong way to make a deal, and they might stiffen opposition on the island and in Europe.

Mr. Trump is taking reckless risk with the NATO alliance that advances U.S. interests in the arctic. If he doesn’t believe us, he can look up Norway, Sweden and Finland in an atlas. The latter two joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization recently, and already are discovering that with Mr. Trump no good strategic deed goes unpunished.

The economics are nonsensical too. All of the countries on his tariff list except for the United Kingdom are members of the European Union with a common trade policy. This means any tariff he imposes on those countries will have to extend to the entire 27-member bloc. So much for the trade deals Mr. Trump negotiated to great fanfare last year with the EU and the U.K.

Members of the European Parliament, which still must approve the U.S.-EU agreement, are threatening to put that pact on ice. This bullying plays poorly with the European public, making it harder for politicians to give Mr. Trump what he wants on Greenland or anything else. The message to these countries is that no deal with Mr. Trump can be trusted because he’ll blow it up if he feels it serves his larger political purposes.

The Greenland Tariff War of 2026 imperils other U.S. priorities. The trade tax on Britain could upset an agreement Mr. Trump struck last year under which Britain will pay more for pharmaceuticals in exchange for Washington dropping tariffs on medication imports from the U.K. Speaking of which: Why Mr. Trump would want to head into midterm elections foisting higher prices on voters worried about affordability is a mystery.

Also writing wisely about Trump’s mad attempt to ‘tariff’ Europeans into ‘selling’ Greenland is the Editorial Board of the Washington Post. Two slices:

President Donald Trump threatened this weekend to unilaterally impose 10 percent tariffs on eight European countries until a deal is reached that makes Greenland part of the United States. In other words, American businesses and consumers will pay higher prices because Denmark, a strong ally which already welcomes U.S. troops and investment in Greenland, isn’t willing to cede territory.

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The president and his allies are increasingly making the case that Greenland is strategically vital and resource rich, but America already has easy access. The Space Force maintains a base there. Denmark has been a particularly strong, committed and inoffensive partner. The Danes suffered one of the highest per capita fatality rates in supporting America’s military response to the 9/11 attacks.

Jessica Riedl tweets: (HT Scott Lincicome)

“Emergency” designations need to be completely overhauled in the law. Presidents & Congress can deploy U.S. troops domestically, impose any tariffs, and disregard all spending & deficit limits simply by slapping the word “emergency” on it. “Emergency” now means “I just want it.”

My GMU Econ colleague Bryan Caplan reflects on his recent debate with the socialist Matt Bruenig. A slice:

Even though Bruenig had a lot of common ground [with Caplan], the debate confirmed my pessimism about practical cooperation between libertarians and the left. On a core emotional level, the left is anti-market. Even when they admit that some kinds of deregulation or privatization would have great virtues, they’re not excited by these virtues. What excites them, sadly, is demonizing business and the rich — then making them suffer for their supposed sins.

Brian Albrecht rightly criticizes Trump’s Bernie Sanders-ish proposal to cap interest rates on credit-card balances. A slice:

The love affair with price controls is not partisan. Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) have already introduced legislation to cap credit card interest rates. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) won his race promising to freeze rents for 2 million residents. When socialists and populist Republicans converge on a policy, it’s usually a sign that politics has overwhelmed economics.

The political appeal to “do something” is obvious. Americans owe roughly $1.23 trillion in credit card debt, with average interest rates approaching 23 percent. Trump can cast himself as defending working families against Wall Street. Voters love a villain.

The economic logic is just as obvious, even if price-control advocates ignore it. Credit card interest rates aren’t arbitrary. They reflect the risk of lending to borrowers with different credit profiles. Higher-risk borrowers default more often, so banks charge higher rates to offset those losses. A 10 percent cap makes lending to millions of these borrowers unprofitable. Banks won’t offer products at a loss. These borrowers won’t get lower rates. They won’t get credit cards at all.

Christopher Lingle and Emile Phaneuf explain “how money laundering became a catch-all excuse to bully and surveil.”

GMU Econ alum David Hebert ponders competition. A slice:

[Adam] Smith recognized that markets don’t just allocate scarce resources. They cultivate habits of honest dealing. A firm that cheats will likely profit in the short run, but certainly not in the long run. The firm that treats and charges customers honestly builds a reputation, attracts repeat business, and ultimately outlasts the swindler.

Smith referred to this as the “discipline of continuous dealings,” which game theorists have taken to calling “repeated play.” When a firm expects future dealings, either with the same customer or with people that customer talks to, cooperation (not defection) becomes the dominant strategy. This isn’t because people become angels, but because cheaters ultimately get punished when their market counterparts do business with someone else instead.

I haven’t yet read this new paper by Rodrigo Adão, John Sturm Becko, Arnaud Costinot, and Dave Donaldson, but its abstract is interesting:

We use global tariffs to reveal the weights that nations implicitly place on the welfare of their trading partners relative to their own. Our estimated welfare weights suggest that formal and informal rules of the world trading system make countries internalize the impact of their policies onto others to a substantial extent, though not fully. On average, countries place 25% less value on transfers to foreigners than transfers to their own residents. Across nations, we find that countries that put higher welfare weights on the welfare of foreigners also tend to receive higher weights from them, consistent with a general form of reciprocity among nations. Using our estimated welfare weights, we provide a first look at what countries stand to lose, or gain, from the dissolution of the world trading system as we know it.

We’re fortunate that Bastiat’s Window will return to its regular schedule of programming in 2026.

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… is from page xi of Francis W. Hirst‘s 1927 book, Safeguarding and Protection:

Common sense tells us that restraints on business are generally bad, that red tape strangles enterprise, that taxes on goods in transit will reduce the volume of transactions, that wage earners will suffer if the things they buy are made artificially dear, that legislation to increase the cost of living and production must be especially disastrous to a populous manufacturing and commercial country like ours.

DBx: Yep.

Unfortunately, these days this common sense isn’t common; it’s rare. Perhaps ironically, those who today most vocally insist upon this common sense are dismissed as “elites.” Go figure.

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Duke University’s great trade economist Ed Tower today emailed to me a new Substack post by Paul Krugman – a post titled “China’s Trade Surplus, Part III.” In this post, the Nobel-laureate Krugman warns of the supposed dangers to the non-Chinese, especially to us Americans, of China’s manufacturing trade surplus.

Although there’s much in Krugman’s post that’s fine and important, much of it – in my non-Nobel-laureate opinion – is weak and wanting. I share here, beneath the fold, a slightly modified version of my reaction, sent earlier today to Ed (and to a few other friends), to Krugman’s post.

[continue reading…]

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Writing at National Review, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) decries the authoritarian arrogance displayed by ‘public-health’ officials during the covid pandemic. A slice:

Secret communications are the sine qua non of spycraft, and surprisingly, they were also quite in vogue at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) not too long ago. It’s been six years since Covid-19 arrived on our shores, and from the time we began hearing about this deadly coronavirus, many in the public assumed that the NIH would be working overtime to discover its origins and develop therapies. So it came as a shock to discover that some of the executives at NIH spent a great deal of time trying to cover up what was going on behind closed doors. It’s a sordid tale that proves it’s long past time for Congress to ensure that such potentially dangerous research is subject to the public scrutiny needed to keep Americans safe and experts accountable.

Arnold Kling – who’s currently a visiting professor at UATX – shares his thoughts about a recent report about turmoil at that new university.

Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberley Strassel rightly excoriates Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) for clinging to progressive economic lunacy. Two slices:

A few election victories aside, the Democratic Party remains adrift in the Donald Trump era, searching for a reconnection to voters. The mere hint of a shift away from pure progressivism isn’t sitting well with Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren. She on Monday came out swinging at D.C.’s National Press Club, with a speech designed to reassert far-left dominance, stamp out rebels, and lay the table for the 2026 midterms. The lecture was long on scorn and finger-pointing, short on explanations for past failure and evidence that hers is a winning formula. The question is whether the party now meekly succumbs to the browbeating.

…..

What does Warren want? The same thing she’s always wanted: giant (socialistic) governance. Yet she and Sanders are this year offering a strategic twist: Taking a leaf from Trump, they are pushing the party to stoke class divisions and wrap their standard progressive fare in populist language, presenting it as an agenda for “working people.” Warren laid out an agenda that includes all the top progressive goals, though modified to sound more benign (“universal health care”); more class-warfare (“cracking down on corporate landlords”); and more, er, blue-collar (“guaranteeing the right to repair your own cars, machines and business equipment”). Read through this list, however, and pretty much all her ideas were exactly those pushed or enacted by the Biden team and Democrats—an agenda for which they were tossed from office in 2024.

Jeffrey Blehar of National Review rightly excoriates the president of the United States for his appalling megalomania. A slice:

Trump, still smarting from his Nobel rebuke, declared in his post-operation press conference that [Maria] Machado didn’t “have the support” of her country to lead, and instead stated that he himself would run Venezuela until such time as he saw fit to hold elections. (Later he described Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, current head of the regime and longstanding Chávista, as a “wonderful woman.”)

That leads us to Thursday, when Machado arrived with a gift for America’s (and, apparently, Venezuela’s) benevolent leader: her Nobel Peace Prize, which she of course insists properly belongs to him. Trump was happy to agree, posing with a broad grin next to his newest framed trinket. As far as people celebrating trophies they didn’t and never could win goes, it’s not quite like that time when Vladimir Putin stole Bob Kraft’s Super Bowl XXXIX ring — but it has that stench regardless. (Machado, clearly, knows how to “take one for the team.”)

Once again, there is nothing to be done about it except lament the unspeakably small-souled trashiness of our president, a man who needs to be bribed and publicly flattered to maybe do the right thing. Spare me your defense of “She gave it to him! She even said he earned it!” Nobody is fooled by the pretense. Donald Trump took office in 2025; Machado has devoted her entire adult life to opposition to Chávez and Maduro, and her party won an overwhelming election long before he retook power. Trump earned this prize in the same way that he earned the addition of his name to the Kennedy Center: by being vain enough to demand it beyond all reason.

David Lynch reports this:

Introducing the highest U.S. tariffs since the Great Depression, President Donald Trump made a clear promise in the spring: “Jobs and factories will come roaring back into our country.”

They haven’t.

Manufacturing employment has declined every month since Trump declared “Liberation Day” in April, saying his widespread tariffs would begin to rebalance global trade in favor of American workers. U.S. factories employ 12.7 million people today, 72,000 fewer than when Trump made his Rose Garden announcement.

The trade measures that the president said would spur manufacturing have instead hampered it, according to most mainstream economists. That’s because roughly half of U.S. imports are “intermediate” goods that American companies use to make finished products, like aluminum that is shaped into soup cans or circuit boards that are inserted into computers.

…..

“2025 should have been a good year for manufacturing employment, and that didn’t happen. I think you really have to indict tariffs for that,” said economist Michael Hicks, director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana.

Small and midsize businesses have found Trump’s on-again, off-again tariffs especially vexing. Fifty-seven percent of midsize manufacturers and 40 percent of small producers said, in a November survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, that they had no certainty about their input costs. Only 23 percent of large manufacturers shared that complaint.

Smaller companies also were more than twice as likely to respond to tariffs by delaying investments in new plants and equipment, the survey found. One reason could be that taxes on imports raise the price of goods used in production much more than they do for typical consumer items, according to a study by the San Francisco Fed.

Clark Packard and Alfredo Carrillo Obregon write that “manufacturing employment data confirm the concentrated benefits — and dispersed costs — of Trump’s tariffs.” A slice:

The latest Bureau of Labor Statistics jobs report offers a stark reminder that US manufacturing continues to struggle. Manufacturing employment fell again in December 2025, marking the third consecutive year with negative net annual job growth. This persistent decline comes despite the Trump administration’s stated goal of revitalizing domestic manufacturing, and data increasingly suggest that the administration’s own policies — particularly, its erratic use of tariffs — are a significant part of the problem.

Andrew Stuttaford criticizes Trump’s reckless use of tariffs to compel a ‘sale’ of Greenland. A slice:

Ultimately, the only people who will decide whether Greenland should be sold, and to whom, are the Greenlanders. If they want to be a part of the U.S., that would be great, but that is something they should decide in a referendum (with, of course, a secret ballot: peer pressure is a thing, especially in small societies). But Trump’s antics are making it less likely that the U.S. will ever get to that point or even a very good second best, such as a compact of association akin to the agreements the U.S. has with the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, and Palau.

Currently, Greenland is an autonomous part of Denmark. Are Danish exporters to be punished because their government wishes to keep the Danish kingdom in one piece? Really?

And then let’s look at the other objects of Trump’s wrath: Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the U.K., the Netherlands, and Finland, none of which have any formal role to play in this matter. In effect, these sovereign nations are being threatened with a “fine” for sending a (very) small number of their troops to an ally’s territory — and with the agreement of that ally. Trump writes that this force has been sent to Greenland (a “sacred piece of Land”), “for purposes unknown,” a melodramatic turn of phrase. Is Perfidious Albion, eager to avenge past humiliation in North America, planning to use the one officer it is sending to Greenland as the first wave of a British North American Reconquista?

Here are more signs of intelligent life where, until very recently, there seemed to be none: Capitol Hill.