… is from page 654 of the 1988 collection of Lord Acton’s writings and notes to himself (edited by the late J. Rufus Fears), Essays in Religion, Politics, and Morality; specifically, it’s a note drawn from Acton’s extensive papers at Cambridge University:
False opinions work more mischief than bad men.
The rise of populism has been characterized by a liberalization of thought and speech that had previously been suppressed by the prevailing authorities of orthodoxy. Much of this was necessary and welcome. The cultural limitations on what ordinary people were supposed to think about issues like immigration and “gender identity” were thrown off when populist leaders came along who dared to say things that many people had felt. But with this liberation of legitimate and reasonable ideas inevitably came a wider unleashing of much uglier sentiments on the right.
…..
But nationalism has its malignancies. National exceptionalism is easily interpreted as national supremacism and, even in a multiethnic country like the U.S., as ethnic supremacism. As generations of Jews around the world know better than anyone, nationalism often breeds antisemitism and other bigotries.
The second factor feeding the far right is the collapse of trust in major institutions. Universities, public “experts” and the media have forfeited their credibility by promoting ideological viewpoints disguised as research and reporting. The effect has been to weaken public faith in authority more widely. Part of the far right’s appeal is to say: “If they lied to you about climate change and Covid, how do you know they’re not lying to you about the Holocaust and slavery?” In this void of mistrust, all kinds of noxious ideas will flourish.
Barry Brownstein reminds New Yorkers about what they’ve forgotten about prosperity.
Jack Nicastro reports that “Trump baselessly accuses meat packers of ‘criminally profiting at the expense of the American people.'” Here’s his conclusion:
Trump has expressed concern that American ranchers are being improperly blamed for high meat prices at the checkout counter. To ascribe blame for the recent uptick in meat prices to four-firm concentration in the meat packing industry is unconvincing at best and, at worst, a deliberate smokescreen for his restrictionist trade policies that have exacerbated the problem.
Erica York tweets: (HT Scott Lincicome)
The President is confusing tariff revenues with investment plans
Tariff revenues are paid by US importers (CBP shows $89B paid through mid-Sept) and would need to be returned.
Investment plans from foreigners are separate and would not require repayment if abandoned.
Ben Connelly rightly criticizes state lotteries. Here’s his conclusion:
Conservatives should be clear about something. Gambling is a vice. It is not a social good. It is not an individual good. One of the roles of the conservative in society is to frown upon vices, to enforce social stigma against those activities that harm both the individual and society. Whether or not you believe that adults should be free to make their own choices about their money, including choosing to waste it on sports betting or lotteries, every conservative should agree that states shouldn’t be profiting from a vice. Even libertarians should agree with that, even if they don’t believe there’s anything wrong with gambling.
… is from page 359 of Gordon Wood’s great 1991 book, The Radicalism of the American Revolution:
“The public happiness,” said Daniel Webster, “is to be the aggregate of the happiness of individuals. Our system begins with the individual man.” People did not have to feel guilty any more about pursuing their personal happiness here and now.
I’m reading the abstracts that Bob Lawson and Phil Magness helpfully compiled into their new volume, Neoliberal Abstracts. This volume brings together in one place the abstracts of 100 of the most unintentionally zany and moronic papers that are poorly costumed as “scholarship.” Each of these abstracts is to a paper by an author (or authors) who use(s) the term “neoliberal” (or any of its variations) to smear those of us who reject ‘progressive’ notions of identity politics, collectivist economics, class warfare, and all of the other uninformed presumptions and juvenile attitudes that today haunt too many halls of higher education.
Reading these abstracts – each of which is meant to be serious – provokes a mix of laughter and despair: Laughter at the inanity (often verging on insanity) of the self-anointed crusaders against “neoliberalism,” and despair that such people are employed as college professors.
One other impression warrants mention: None – and I mean none – of these anti-neoliberals writes intelligibly. It’s as if there’s a contest underway for who can mash together multiple syllables into the greatest number of made-up words that are then strung together into convoluted sentences that defy the understanding of anyone not completely tripped out on acid.
The “scholars” who wrote these papers and abstracts are self-parodying.
This is a teaching moment for a high school logic class. Start with the contradiction that Mr. Trump can both pay a tariff rebate and pay down the national debt. The annual federal budget deficit is roughly $1.8 trillion even with tariff revenue, so paying a rebate would add to the national debt, not reduce it.
Mr. Trump’s claim of a revenue benefit from tariffs also belies what his Solicitor General, John Sauer, told the Supreme Court on Wednesday. In arguing that tariffs aren’t really taxes and are mainly a tool of foreign policy, Mr. Sauer said “these tariffs, these policies, it is clear that these policies are most effective if nobody ever pays the tariff. If it never raises a dime of revenue, these are the most effective use of these—of this particular policy.”
He added later that “So they’re clearly regulatory tariffs, not taxes. They are not—they’re not an exercise of the power to tax.”
But wait. If tariffs are most effective if no one ever pays them, then how are they going to raise the revenue Mr. Trump needs to pay those rebates? The truth is tariffs are taxes, but Mr. Sauer didn’t want to admit this lest the Court conclude that Mr. Trump is usurping a core constitutional power of Congress. Which he is.
Mr. Trump is essentially promising to repay Americans $2,000 of the border taxes they’re paying in higher prices. But if tariffs are a free economic lunch, and their benefits abound, why offer a rebate? Shouldn’t voters be thrilled about tariffs even without a rebate?
…..
Mr. Trump is trying to dull the public’s tariff pain with direct payments that he can take credit for. This is a new version of the age-old income redistribution game of taxing people too much but then trying to appease them with tax credits or one-time cash payments. Democrats do this all the time with child tax credits and other favors to special-interest groups.
The key question for the Supreme Court’s upcoming term is whether its recent pushback on presidential authority will continue. For 50 years, the court has steadily decided fewer cases, and Chief Justice John Roberts’ court now issues the fewest decisions in modern history. A newer trend is its growing reliance on its “emergency docket” to issue terse, sometimes cryptic guidance. Meanwhile, the Trump administration — governing largely through executive orders on tariffs, birthright citizenship and more — appears poised to test the court’s skepticism of sweeping presidential power.
…..
From Franklin Roosevelt’s sweeping emergency orders during the Depression and World War II to today’s late-night emergency docket rulings, the American government has wrestled with the same problem: How far can a president go when acting alone? Each generation has confronted the temptation of “government by executive order” as courts struggle to balance energy in the executive with constitutional limits.
For decades, the pattern has been one of drift. Congress, finding lawmaking cumbersome and politically perilous, has delegated many of its lawmaking powers to the president. Courts, reluctant to wade into political disputes, have too often deferred. The result is a one-way ratchet: Powers asserted in crisis become permanent tools of the presidency.
Creating a federal system to market cheaper drugs is a surefire way to make CEOs bend to the will of politicians. But Republicans will come to regret their party’s attempt to further centralize commerce. It’s easy to imagine a future Democratic president using the TrumpRx precedent to force companies to adhere to their own ideological agenda. That could be a disaster for innovation and consumer choice.
If Trump wants to stamp his name on something, let it be on a piece of legislation that cements incentives for companies to drop their prices, rather than a website that empowers him to pick and choose corporate winners.
Palantir CEO Alex Karp attributed Zohran Mamdani’s election as New York mayor to a reverse class warfare: “I think the average Ivy League grad voting for this mayor is highly annoyed that their education is not that valuable, and the person down the street who knows how to drill for oil and gas, who’s moved to Texas, has a more valuable profession.”
He has a point. Colleges are graduating a surfeit of young people who lack hard or even soft skills. Even as employers complain about a dearth of qualified workers, a growing college-educated proletariat can’t find jobs they want to work. They believe their degrees aren’t being adequately rewarded by the free market and blame capitalism.
The real culprit is enormous government subsidization of higher education, which has distorted the labor supply. More than seven million bachelor’s degree recipients have entered the labor force since January 2020. Meanwhile, the number of workers without college degrees has declined by about 200,000 and those with associate degrees has shrunk by 1.1 million.
…..
It’s understandable that grads might feel indignant about employer demands after having earned stellar GPAs for little effort and mediocre work. A recent Harvard report found that A’s account for about 60% of grades, compared with 25% two decades ago. Some 80% of grades awarded at Yale in 2023 were A’s or A-minuses.
It almost requires an effort to get a C. In a Substack essay, Johns Hopkins political scientist Yascha Mounk observes: “In one of the oldest jokes about the Soviet Union, a worker says, ‘We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.’ To an uncomfortable degree, American universities now work in a similar fashion: Students pretend to do their work, and academics pretend to grade them.” Parents and students who pay $80,000 a year expect high marks in return.
Eased academic standards and resulting grade inflation recall how credit raters, which were being paid by banks, slapped AAA ratings on subprime mortgage-backed securities in the lead-up to the 2008-09 financial crisis. Markets seized up as foreclosures rose and buyers of the mortgage bonds realized they couldn’t trust the ratings.
Similarly, employers are figuring out high GPAs aren’t a reliable indicator of merit. Even Ivy League schools are starting to worry that their top students are becoming a dime a dozen in the labor market.
[DBx: Although my lifetime income has been vastly inflated by government subsidies to “higher education,” I wish that these subsidies had never existed and that they would end immediately.]
Michael Sobolik, in this letter to the Wall Street Journal, rightly criticizes Tucker Carlson:
Ben Shapiro is right that “if Republicans cower before Nazi apologists and their popularizers, the GOP will lose—and deserve to” (“The GOP Mustn’t Give the ‘Groypers’ an Inch,” Letters, Nov. 5). Nick Fuentes’s antisemitism, which Tucker Carlson largely ignored on his podcast, indicates a broader rot that could infect conservative circles: an affinity for Communist China.
Beyond his pro-Hitler screeds, Mr. Fuentes has mused about the Communist Party invading cities in the U.S. “What if they did to Harlem and the South Side of Chicago what they’re doing in Xinjiang to the Uyghurs?” Mr. Fuentes once asked on his show. “Is that not ideal?”
That rhetoric is vile, but it signals that elements of the far right are sympathetic to America’s enemies. Mr. Fuentes isn’t alone in his cheerleading for people like Joseph Stalin and Xi Jinping. As Mr. Shapiro wrote, Mr. Carlson has “defended Vladimir Putin, massaged Iran’s dictatorship [and] praised Venezuela’s.” In 2024 he hosted Jeffrey Sachs, an academic who has played down China’s treatment of the Uyghurs and urges the U.S. to abandon Taiwan.
Mr. Carlson’s choices aren’t new. During a broadcast in 2020, he praised China’s national unity as something we “could actually learn from,” and in 2021 he lauded the Communist Party for doing “something virtuous,” namely restricting housing speculation, curbing celebrity idolization and limiting access to video games. Never mind the authoritarianism that underlies each.
Americans shouldn’t pine for the intimidation, surveillance and violence that the Chinese people endure daily. Beijing is rooting for the groypers. Conservatives should give them no space in their movement.
Michael Fragoso rightly criticizes J.D. Vance for supporting an end to the Senate filibuster. A slice:
The vice president stated, “Many of my friends (and former colleagues) in the Senate are against eliminating the filibuster because they don’t think the Democrats will do it.” That’s just not right. The Senate’s filibuster ultras know perfectly well what Democrats intend to do because they were around last time Democrats tried to do it. Not only were they around, but senators like Mitch McConnell, John Thune, Thom Tillis, Shelly Moore Capito, and even the vice president’s predecessor, Rob Portman, were instrumental in assisting Kyrsten Sinema’s efforts to preserve it — and with her efforts, Joe Manchin’s continued support. It was a near-run thing, and they were in command.
Saying McConnell or Thune doesn’t understand Democratic intentions on the filibuster is like saying Wellington underestimates Napoleon. They know perfectly well what Democrats will try to do.
The issue isn’t that they think Democrats won’t do it; it’s that Democrats doing so is a remote, contingent hypothetical. Republican senators are responsible for their actions, not those of future Democrats.
Trade allows everyone to make their own choices, not have others choose for them. Each side to an exchange decides on their own wants, [Adam] Smith says, and then both sides benefit.
Here’s a letter to Fox Business.
Editor:
President Trump today promised to use tariff revenues to ensure that “at least $2000 a person (not including high-income people!) will be paid to everyone” (“Trump calls tariff opponents ‘fools,’ promises $2K dividend payments for Americans,” Nov. 9).
Let’s do the math (as we ignore the fact that the administration only days ago told the Supreme Court that the revenues raised by these tariffs are “incidental”).
In the second half of fiscal 2025, April through September, Trump’s tariffs brought in roughly $150 billion (or, annualized, $300 billion).
The U.S. population today is 348,000,000. Subtracting the approximately 14 million ‘illegal’ immigrants, that leaves 334 million people in the U.S. Let’s now lop off the richest ten percent. That leaves 300,600,000 Americans to get “at least $2000.” To fully fund payment of these so-called ‘dividends,’ the tariffs would thus have to bring in just over $600 billion – a sum that won’t be available to cover these “dividend” payments until the second quarter of 2027 at the earliest.
I say “at the earliest” for two reasons. First, Treasury secretary Scott Bessent insists that the tariff revenues will be used to reduce U.S. government debt – an insistence that Mr. Trump today also seems to endorse. Dollars used to pay down the debt are dollars that are unavailable to pay as rebates to us Americans of the extra taxes we paid in the form of tariffs. Second, as the tariffs achieve the president’s goal of reducing Americans’ purchases of imports – an outcome that takes time – the amount of revenue brought in by the tariffs will decline.
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
Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal.
Editor:
Desmond Lachman correctly explains that Trump’s tariffs won’t reduce U.S. trade deficits (Letters, November 8). In doing so, however, Mr. Lachman uses language that mistakenly suggests that trade deficits are necessarily a problem. He writes: “A basic economic truth is that a trade deficit is simply the result of a country spending on consumption and investment more than it produces.”
Although conventional, this language subtly misleads. A country isn’t a person or an organization, and so “it” doesn’t consume, save, invest, or produce. When we economists say, for example, that “America invests,” what we really refer to are the investments made in the geopolitical region known as “America” by individuals and organizations. Some of these individuals and organizations are American and others are foreign. Yet in discussions of the balance of trade these investment decisions are all lumped together into the phrase “America invests.” When this investment exceeds the amount that Americans save, the impression is created that we Americans are living beyond our means – that in order to make up the difference between what we save and what is invested here, we must borrow the funds from foreigners.
This impression is false because “we” don’t make all of these investments. Many of the investments in America are equity investments made by foreigners. When Ikea builds a store in Ohio the U.S trade deficit rises, but the investment is done by foreigners, not by Americans. This investment is neither a result nor a symptom of us Americans living beyond our means. It is, instead, a happy indication of the attractiveness to global investors of America’s economy.
Evidence confirms that U.S. trade deficits haven’t drained Americans of wealth. The real net worth of the average American household today is 236 percent higher than it was in 1975, the year when America last ran an annual trade surplus.
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
Today’s socialists are bursting with self-confidence, more precisely, with that easy self-confidence that comes from knowing that your opinions are fashionable, and that the cultural momentum is on your side. If ‘history’ is a battle of ideas between people who believe in completely different ways of organising a society, then history is well and truly back. Those of us on the other side of that battle better act like it.
Jim Geraghty corrects Trump’s false claim that prices have recently been falling. A slice:
While 3 percent inflation is considerably better than the 9 percent peak of the Biden era, 3 percent inflation can indeed steadily eat away at your purchasing power. A few weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal editorial board asked whether the Trump team was satisfied with 3 percent and warned, “at some point you have to admit all these add up to a persistent inflation problem. At a 3 percent inflation rate, the value of a dollar today would be 73.74 cents in ten years.” At 2 percent, that dollar is worth 82 cents in ten years.
The Democratic romp in this week’s off-year elections highlighted voters’ persistent frustration about inflation and the cost of living. The White House has taken note. Unfortunately, its first reflex is the same as that of the Biden-Harris administration: Blame corporate price gouging. That approach didn’t turn out well for Democrats in 2024, and there’s no reason the GOP should expect better results.
“I have asked the DOJ to immediately begin an investigation into the Meat Packing Companies who are driving up the price of Beef through Illicit Collusion, Price Fixing, and Price Manipulation,” President Donald Trump said Friday on Truth Social.
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Trump is a very different president from Biden, but this episode shows a parallel. Both governed to please their base. But a base-pleasing agenda is politically vulnerable if it’s accompanied by inflation. Solving that problem requires a deeper rethink than unleashing regulators on the food supply chain.
Here’s Wall Street Journal columnist Joseph Sternberg on Kevin Roberts on Tucker Carlson. A slice:
How do you solve a problem like the “groypers”? The question is tearing apart sections of the American conservative movement after the Heritage Foundation last week rushed headlong into the wrong answer. That institution’s hapless president, Kevin Roberts, would have done better to hop on a plane to Europe for a study trip first.
The groypers purport to be a movement of disaffected far-right nationalists, predominantly young men, under the sway of charismatic podcasting personality Nick Fuentes. Mr. Roberts plunged into hot water last week when he announced that he wouldn’t cut Heritage’s ties with Tucker Carlson after Mr. Carlson gave Mr. Fuentes a platform to air a sampling of his antisemitic, racist and misogynistic views uncontested. Mr. Roberts argued that to disavow Mr. Carlson would be to give in to a form of cancel culture, and insisted the conservative movement should remain a big tent.
Stephanie Slade tweets: (HT Scott Lincicome)
I don’t think I agree that nationalism is racism. I do think nationalism is like black magic: People who think *they* will be able to control *it* are often clueless about the forces they’re playing with.
GMU Econ alum David Hebert documents a recent example of civil society.
Steven Greenhut warns that “California’s aggressive regulations put burgeoning AI industry at risk.”
American intellectuals of the Adjectival Fascism phase had a terrible year in 1989. In June, Chinese students in Beijing rebelled against the ancien Maoist régime, defied the tanks, and brought out into Tiananmen Square a plaster statute, the Goddess of Democracy, who, with her arms lifted to the heavens, looked suspiciously like the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. Who among the intellectuals ever would have suspected that Chinese dissidents had been looking to America as their model of freedom all along? Then on November 9 the Berlin Wall came down, and in no time the Soviet Union collapsed and its Eastern European empire disintegrated.
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