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Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal.

Editor:

Steve Moore’s case that the U.S. economy today is “Trumping expectations” consists chiefly of claims that today’s economy is better than the economy under Biden (Letters, January 27). Given Biden’s colossally bad economic policies, however, this comparison tells us little about the merits of Mr. Trump’s second-term policies.

Here’s a better comparison. As I write this letter mid-day on January 26th, 2026, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is 17 percent above its close on election day 2024. But on January 26th, 2018 – the same distance into Trump’s first term as we are now into his second term – the DJIA closed 45 percent above its close on election day 2016.

While the stock market isn’t the whole of the economy, it’s no minor barometer of the economy’s performance and, importantly, of expectations of future performance. The far more market-friendly policies of Mr. Trump’s first term seem to have been vastly better for America’s economy than are his dirigiste, hyperactive, they-have-Elizabeth-Warren-secretly-smiling interventions of his second term.

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 Editorial Board of the Washington Post – with an assist from scholars at the Cato Institute – have the numbers: Trump’s tariff promises don’t add up. Two slices:

Every time a big expense comes up, President Donald Trump assures Americans that all the money raised from tariffs will take care of it. The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, has been tracking Trump’s promises on how he would spend the revenue going back to the campaign. Added together, Trump has said the windfall from his tariffs will help cover nearly $6 trillion in costs. That’s over 22 times more than the administration’s own estimates for how much revenue his taxes on imports will generate this year.

We ran the numbers, and they just don’t pencil.

…..

All told, for Trump to keep his promises on what tariff revenue would be used for, he’d need them to raise almost $6 trillion this year. The U.S. imported $3.61 trillion in goods last year, so such a number isn’t even possible.

Scott Lincicome is correct: Among the biggest genuine emergencies we Americans now face is the cascade of declarations of “emergency.” A slice:

My latest column at The Dispatch examines what President Trump’s now-canceled Greenland tariff threat says about not only US trade policy but alsothe increasing use and abuse of “emergency” powers by the executive branch (and not just Trump).

Summarizing previous Cato research, I note that the 1976 Senate special committee charged with emergency powers reform was appalled that four national emergencies were in effect at that time, yet “today we live under 50 active national emergencies, several of which date back decades and all of which unlock broad executive powers—under IEEPA mainly but also several other US laws—that are typically reserved to Congress or delegated to the president in a much narrower fashion.” Here’s the full list.

Speaking of the U.S. government abusing its powers to ‘protect’ Americans from Trumped-up threats, here’s Joe Lancaster.

Jon Hartley and Art Laffer explain that proponents of a wealth tax in California ignore lessons from that state’s Proposition 13. Two slices:

California is flirting with a new and destructive tax. A proposed ballot initiative, the 2026 Billionaire Tax Act, would impose a one-time 5% levy on the net worth of California residents with more than $1 billion, calculated as of Jan. 1, 2026, with payment due in 2027 and an option to spread payments over five years at an added charge.

While the tax would be a “one-time event,” nothing would prohibit similar initiatives in the future. Supporters call it a tax on billionaires, but in practice it would be a giant, government-mandated liquidation event for people whose wealth is often tied up in illiquid business equity. It also contains a feature that should make any taxpayer uneasy: It would be retroactive to the start of 2026.

California has seen this movie before, and the voters wrote the ending in 1978 with Proposition 13, a constitutional amendment that limited property-tax increases.

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Europe’s experience should further sober California voters. Over the past few decades, most countries that experimented with broad net-wealth taxes abandoned them after discovering that they raised modest net revenue relative to their administrative burden while encouraging avoidance and relocation. Of the 12 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries that had broad wealth taxes in the 1990s, only Norway, Spain and Switzerland still do. Most recently, Norway’s tighter wealth-tax regime coincided with an exodus: Nearly 500 high-net-worth individuals left the country in 2022 and 2023, illustrating how sensitive location decisions become when governments tax worldwide wealth and toughen exit rules.

California doesn’t suffer from too little taxation. Its top marginal state income-tax rate is 13.3%, the highest in the U.S. Capital-gains taxes, corporate taxes and sales taxes are all at or near the highest in the nation as well. The wealth-tax initiative would amplify the problem of revenue volatility by taxing volatile paper valuations while assuming the tax base will sit still when the bill arrives.

Proposition 13 was a warning about what happens when government treats unrealized gains like income. California shouldn’t need another tax revolt to remember it.

The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board calls on the Trump administration to pause ICE’s operations in Minneapolis. Here’s its conclusion:

The violence in Minneapolis has erased the state’s welfare fraud from the headlines, which no doubt pleases Mr. Walz. It’s also given Democrats in Washington an excuse to shut down the government a second time over the Homeland Security funding bill.

Mr. Miller’s mass deportation methods are turning immigration, an issue Mr. Trump owned in 2024, into a political liability for Republicans in 2026. Americans don’t want law enforcement shooting people in the street or arresting five-year-old boys. The President who said you have to have a heart in enforcement ought to show some.

Jonah Goldberg tweets: (HT Scott Lincicome)

It’s so funny how effortlessly these cheerleading “conservatives” just embrace whatever ridiculous argument comes out of the administration without even a moment’s hesitation.

GMU Econ alum Matt Mitchell draws three lessons from the economic collapse of Venezuela. Two slices:

President Trump has accepted the Nobel Peace Prize that was awarded to Venezuela’s opposition leader, María Corina Machado. Unlike Machado, however, he does not accept the central lessons that can be gleaned from five decades of Venezuelan misrule.

…..

As the Cato Institute’s Marcos Falcone recently explained, one Venezuelan who seems to have internalized these lessons is María Corina Machado. As a decades-long leader of the opposition, she has consistently championed both personal and economic liberty. She traces much of the country’s corruption, mismanagement, and stagnation to its 1976 nationalization of the oil industry.

And she is wildly popular. In the unified opposition primary of 2024, she ran on a platform of complete oil privatization and won 90 percent of the vote. Maduro refused to let her run in the general election, so she backed Edmundo González Urrutia and he is estimated to have won 70 percent of the vote. But Maduro refused to recognize the result and clung to power.

Now, apparently, President Trump is in charge. But like Maduro before him, Trump refuses to recognize the results of the last election. He claims that Machado lacks the “respect” and “support” to lead. Polls, meanwhile, indicate that she is favored by more than 70 percent of the country. While accepting her re-gifted Nobel Prize, Mr. Trump has decided to give the reins to Maduro’s Vice President, the socialist Delcy Rodriguez, calling her a “terrific person” and predicting a great Venezuelan renaissance.

As for privatization, Trump instead says “we’re going to keep the oil.” He claims that Rodriquez will be “turning over” up to 50 million barrels to the US, the proceeds of which will be “controlled by me, as President of the United States of America.”

Meanwhile, he is strong-arming US oil companies to invest in the country, telling them that if they want to recover their property that was seized by President Andrés Pérez in 1976, they’d better cooperate in rebuilding Venezuela’s infrastructure. For their part, the companies have been reluctant to do so, citing the country’s poor track record of protecting private property.

Like Andrés Pérez, Chávez, and Maduro, Trump seems to imagine that the right central plan will unlock the country’s vast oil wealth. But history teaches a different lesson.

Wall Street Journal columnist Mary Anastasia O’Grady warns that Delcy Rodríguez and other Venezuelan ‘leaders’ – a more accurate term is ‘thugs’ – who Trump praises and is now partnering with are bad news. Two slices:

Why does President Trump call Venezuelan dictator Delcy Rodríguez “a terrific person,” despite her monstrous human-rights record and her reputation for corruption? It’s perplexing—until one considers that Chevron Corp. and Florida asphalt magnate Harry Sargeant have long lobbied the president for licenses to operate in Venezuela, and Ms. Rodríguez has been their counterpart in Caracas.

The Guardian reported last week that in October the U.S. began considering Ms. Rodríguez, right hand to then-dictator Nicolás Maduro, to replace him. The British newspaper said it learned from sources that she told the U.S. she was on board with the removal of her boss and ready to cooperate with Washington.

“One factor was her promise to work with American oil and her acquaintance with Americans in the oil business. ‘Delcy is the most committed to working with US oil,’ an ally of hers said.”

It’s no secret the fashion-conscious Marxist, who plays ping-pong when she isn’t running the narco-trafficking police state, has made inroads with foreign oil executives. Not all, of course. ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips left the country years ago. But for those still making a buck off the repression of the Venezuelan people, she’s the ideal despot, more interested in power than ideology and therefore “flexible.”

Mr. Trump’s own obsession with oil might explain why he disparaged opposition leader María Corina Machado at a press conference the day the U.S. captured Mr. Maduro. He claimed the wildly popular Ms. Machado has neither “support” nor “respect” in Venezuela. That’s absurd. She is such a threat to the regime that it banned her candidacy for president in 2024. Edmundo González, who took her place, received 70% of the vote.

…..

After Ms. Machado presented her Nobel Peace Prize medal to Mr. Trump, he declared her a “wonderful woman,” and last week he said, “I am talking to her and maybe we can involve her in some way” in Venezuela. That’s big of him. Then he gushed again about the much-hated Ms. Rodríguez. Flying back from Davos, Switzerland, last week, Mr. Trump again engaged in moral equivalence: “I get along well with both sides.”

Amity Shlaes reviews Richard Vague’s The Banker Who Made America: Thomas Willing and the Rise of the American Financial Aristocracy, 1731–1821. A slice:

As Vague notes, Willing grasped principles of business that seem mundane to us but were rarely applied, or even recognized, in his day: diversification to reduce risk, and the two magics: the magic of the actuarial pool and the magic of compounding. Later, Willing invested in a then-new business, life insurance. Perhaps excited at the prospect not merely of profits but also of protecting widows, Willing penned a pamphlet: “An Address to the Citizens of Pennsylvania Upon the Subject of a Life Insurance Company.”

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… is from page 389 of Johan Norberg’s splendid 2025 book, Peak Human: What We Can Learn from the Rise and Fall of Golden Ages [footnote deleted; link added]:

The Industrial Revolution came about when entrepreneurs and engineers gained the freedom, knowledge and inspiration to innovate and improve, and this was not dependent on colonial capital. Unlike some earlier interpretations, it was not a big push of investment that got industry going. Usually businesses started with small sums scraped together from relatives and acquaintances, and then the main source of funding was self-finance – entrepreneurs ploughed their profits back into the business. The revolution ‘pulled itself up by its bootstraps’.

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Here’s a letter to The Hill. (The details of this history, I am sure, are more complicated and muddy, but the general lesson remains sufficiently straightforward and clear.)

Editor:

You report on the Trump administration’s executive order that, in your words, “rebukes defense firms for stock buybacks, paying dividends to investors and high compensation for CEOs, rather than using profits to invest in plant capacity” (“Defense industry flummoxed by Trump’s executive order on profits,” January 25). I have no special sympathies for the concerns of executives of defense firms, but their objections to detailed micromanagement by government of their operations are legitimate.

Neither Pres. Trump nor anyone in his administration knows how best to strike the countless trade-offs that firms must strike in order to obtain the amounts and kinds of capital – financial and human – that best ensure efficient operation. Proscriptions and prescriptions of the sort now imposed by the administration are destined to obstruct defense-firms’ abilities to supply the Pentagon as well as possible.

As always, history offers sound counsel. Johan Norberg writes in Peak Human that as America was entering WWII, former automotive executive Bill Knudsen “convinced Washington not to nationalize or command production, but just to put in the orders and then allow businesses to find the best and cheapest ways of producing, free from control and regulation.”*

Knudsen’s advice was wise then. It is no less wise now.

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

* Johan Norberg, Peak Human: What We Can Learn from the Rise and Fall of Golden Ages (London: Atlantic Books, 2025), page 419.

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Phil Magness’s new essay on the origins of the vague and derogatory term “neoliberalism” is superb. A slice:

While most versions of the neoliberal label still come from the academic left today, the term has come back into favor within a certain, curious strand of the right. Conservative writers such as Patrick Deneen, Adrian Vermeule, Gladden Pappin, and Sohrab Ahmari pepper their works with complaints about “neoliberalism,” which they blame for a long list of economic and cultural grievances. In doing so, they tapped a growing discontent with the economic wing of the American right, particularly among religious and social conservatives. Rebranding themselves as “Postliberals” in the early 2020s, these thinkers espouse an ultra-traditional and collectivist form of conservatism that explicitly aims to purge free-market thought from the American right on the grounds that it allegedly subverts traditional values and morality with economic consumerism.

There’s not much in the way of sophistication to Postliberal economic theory beyond a visceral distaste for modernity. They aim to resurrect long-discredited economic doctrines such as 18th- and 19th-century tariff protectionism, and map it onto the Trump administration’s own tariff and industrial policy agendas. But that fact itself has given the Postliberals an outsized presence in the political arena. J.D. Vance, for example, considers himself a follower, and has joined in the rhetoric of blaming America’s economic faults on the neoliberal bogeyman.

In an April 2020 essay, Vance bemoaned an alleged donor class on the right who had “gotten rich” off of “neoliberalism and globalization.” Adopting the same conspiracist style that dominates left-wing deployment of the term, he attacked the Covid-era anti-lockdown movement by calling it a political distraction, a sideshow to divert attention from our economic precarity, benefiting those who wanted to keep the “globalization gravy train” flowing. Vance concluded the piece with a call to “thrust more daggers into [the] heart” of the “neoliberal consensus that has dominated the American Right.”

Despite a few passing nods to conservative social issues, Vance’s message was indistinguishable from the incoherent anticapitalist screeds of the academic left that we surveyed in Neoliberal Abstracts. It is difficult not to see history rhyming with itself in this horseshoe-like convergence, a return to the origins of the term as part of a joint assault on economic individualism from the illiberal left and right. And just like its 1920s precursor, today’s attacks on neoliberalism obscure the vacuity of their term of choice by making it a universal scapegoat for everything about the world that they happen to dislike.

Walter Olson is right: “In Minnesota, ICE is assaulting the constitutional rights of citizens.”

BlueBadger2600 tweets: (HT Scott Lincicome):

Positions ICE has taken:

– We can enter your home without a warrant
– You must carry your papers at all times
– But we can ignore them and only our scanner matters
– We can detain you anywhere, no matter your age, situation or status
– Indefinitely with no access to a lawyer
– And basically no right to a day in court
– We can send you to a third world prison if we choose
– But we can’t bring you back if we made a mistake
– And if you interfere with any of this we can shoot you because you are a terrorist

How is this not a recipe for totalitarianism?

Reason‘s Stephanie Slade reports how the Heritage Foundation’s economically clueless president, Kevin Roberts – a man who, when he speaks or writes about economic policy, sounds more like Bernie Sanders than like Ronald Reagan – has effectively destroyed that once-admirable organization. By choosing to carry water for “New Right” politicians and provocateurs, Heritage is no longer what it had long been, namely, an intellectually respectable source of, and haven for, sound American conservative ideas. Two slices:

While the proximate cause of the ongoing staff exodus is a video Roberts recorded in October defending Tucker Carlson’s decision to amplify the white-nationalist influencer Nick Fuentes, the turmoil at Heritage has been brewing for far longer. In fact, Reason has learned, Heritage leadership has been directing employees to read Roberts’ 2024 book, which agitates for a “Second American Revolution,” and to leave if they can’t agree with the positions therein.

Scores of board members, employees, and visiting fellows have opted to depart, variously citing antisemitism, misogyny, retaliation against employees who dare to speak up, and an institutional pivot away from free market principles. In conversations with more than a dozen current and former staffers, I repeatedly heard that Roberts’ belief that he alone should get to determine all of the think tank’s stances has provoked resentment among his own subject matter experts.

“The issue is you have the president of an organization committing everybody in it to his position unilaterally,” one senior staff member told me in November. “Because Heritage has a one-voice policy, when the president goes out and says Heritage Foundation has this position” — be it support for tariffs or support for Tucker Carlson —”he implicates everybody down the chain, and he makes everybody stand for that.”

…..

In theory, free enterprise and limited government are core Heritage principles, and the think tank was historically a staunch defender of free trade. Roberts’ book, on the other hand, comes out swinging against globalization, in which “US firms sought to make profits all over the world by expanding into new markets, sending factories overseas, running money through international tax havens, developing global supply chains, and employing other new strategies,” and calls for using “the immense powers of our federal and state governments” for protectionist ends. It also asserts more than once that President Donald Trump “won” the trade war during his first term.

Roberts is equally hostile to the modern financialized “sham economy,” which he says is guilty of “funneling money to the parasitical enemies of the American way of life.” In his view, the goal of the conservative movement should be to return to an economic system that would allow more men to support families on a single income, and he hopes to “restore the proper use of the government” to bring about his favored outcomes. He’s comfortable with trade barriers, industrial policy, and the aggressive use of antitrust regulations “to rein in globalist corporatism,” he writes. “Especially when it comes to Big Tech and big banks, we need to consider the nuclear option.”

The book acknowledges that all of this would require “short-tem sacrifices, including higher prices for some consumer goods,” but insists the pain will be worth it.

Peter Earle, decrying Trump’s gambit to use protectionist means to acquire Greenland, writes that “if borders become negotiable under tariff pressure, risks rise, investment falls, and fragile global norms further fracture.” Two slices:

Even setting aside valuation, the Greenland proposal fails a more basic test: symmetry. If historical ties, strategic relevance, and latent economic value were sufficient grounds for territorial acquisition, then several European powers could assert claims to US territory with equal legitimacy.

Spain governed Florida, Texas, and much of the American Southwest for centuries. France once controlled the Louisiana territory, sold under geopolitical pressure in 1803, which now represents tens of trillions of dollars in economic value. Britain administered the original colonies and left behind enduring legal and institutional frameworks. Russia sold Alaska in 1867 for a sum that dramatically undervalued its eventual strategic and resource significance, particularly in today’s Arctic context.

Yet no serious policymaker treats these historical facts as grounds for modern claims. The reason is economic as much as legal. Once sovereignty becomes contingent on strategic usefulness or newly discovered resource value, borders lose durability. Risk premia rise. Long-term investment becomes fragile everywhere. The modern economic order depends on the expectation that territorial arrangements are not perpetually renegotiable under pressure.

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Finally, Greenland is not some unoccupied resource cache. It is home to a population with political institutions, cultural identity, and stated preferences. Treating territory as a tradable asset abstracts away governance and consent, precisely the factors that determine whether resource wealth becomes long-run prosperity or stagnation.

The Institute of Economic Affairs’s David Frost identifies “three problems with industrial policy.” A slice:

First, how do Kyle or Burnham know what industries Manchester or Britain actually need? They may think they know – but in truth they are just looking at industries that are already successful elsewhere in the country or the world and saying “we want some of that”. It’s not a basis for economic policy. Suppose Manchester industrialists 200 years [ago] had said “British transport depends on horses and canals. What we need is strategic support for a stagecoach and barge industry.” Would anyone have bothered developing the first railway line in the world then? The truth is the industries of the future are not known to politicians: the knowledge is decentralised in the economy, in the entrepreneurs and experimenters. The best thing is to get out of the way and let them find what works.

The second problem is the famous “What is seen and what is not seen” problem first described by the French economist Bastiat in the mid-1800s. Yes, politicians can build a shiny new factory with public money. Everyone says “Great. Look at all the activity and all the jobs created.” That’s what’s seen. But no one thinks about what could have been done if the money had not been paid over in taxes but left in the hands of the people who earned it. That’s what’s not seen. Maybe, left to their own devices, they’d have done better. And at least if they hadn’t, it would only have been their own money they lost. We wouldn’t all be paying for it – as we do when the politicians get things wrong.

Bob Graboyes is turning his grief into flourishing.

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… page 563 of the 2025 Liberty Fund edition (translated by Jurgen Reinhoudt) of Jacques Rueff’s 1945 magnum opus, The Social Order:

Under the liberal system, the laws and regulations – once taxes have been paid – do not prohibit any of the uses allowed by the natural order of things. A strictly liberal society is therefore a society without any laws or regulations other than those that forbid the enjoyment and disposal of other people’s property or that establish tax obligations.

By contrast, under the authoritarian system of government, the laws and regulations subject individual wills to the restrictions that are willed by government authority.

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Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal.

Editor:

Many of Pres. Trump’s supporters continue to insist that his wild policy moves reflect his brilliant strategy at playing 4D chess. Yet in light of Mr. Trump’s new threat to impose 100 percent tariffs on Americans’ imports from Canada – a threat issued in anger at Canada’s efforts to increase its trade with China – it’s clear that, even in the standard two-dimensional version of chess, Mr. Trump plays, not with skill, but with obliviousness and myopia (“Trump Threatens New Tariffs on Canada Over China,” January 24).

Skilled chess players, when pondering their moves, anticipate other players’ future moves in response. In contrast, sloppy players consider only the immediate and most-obvious consequence of their next move. Just as the sloppy chess player is surprised when, after triumphantly capturing an opponent’s pawn with a bishop, that opponent captures that bishop with one of her pawns, the president was apparently surprised that his earlier tariff hikes on (and generally shabby treatment of) Canada prompted that country to trim its economic losses by expanding trade with China.

Any competent economics undergraduate could have predicted Canada’s response to Mr. Trump’s tariffs. And that same undergraduate would now tell the president that this new tariff threat will only drive Canada and other allies further away from the U.S. and, in turn, weaken America’s economy.

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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In this letter in the Wall Street Journal, Vance Ginn explains that “it is troubling to see the president flirting with policies straight out of the Sanders-Warren playbook in his second term.” A slice:

Price controls on credit card interest rates may sound populist, but decades of evidence show they reduce access to credit, especially for lower-income and higher-risk borrowers.

Banning institutional investors from single-family housing would reduce capital flowing into housing markets, shrink supply and ultimately raise costs for renters and buyers. Housing affordability improves when we build more homes, not when we restrict who can finance them.

George Will finds relevant wisdom in G. Edward White’s new biography of former U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Robert H. Jackson. A slice:

In 1952, the court and Jackson again confronted the task of reconciling constitutional principles and a president’s claim of urgency. With the Korean War raging, Harry Truman said an impending nationwide steelworkers strike would “jeopardize national defense,” so he issued an executive order for government to seize and operate most mills. The companies sued, arguing that no act of Congress or constitutional provision validated Truman’s action.

Truman’s lawyers argued that his authorization “could be implied from the aggregate of his powers under the Constitution,” especially as commander in chief. The court disagreed, 6-3.

Concurring, Jackson said that Truman’s action flowed from neither an express nor implied authorization by Congress, and was against Congress’s will as expressed in a 1947 labor relations law that made no provision for such presidential action. It would be “sinister and alarming” to say that the president, enjoying vast discretion regarding foreign affairs, can by “his own” foreign commitment “vastly enlarge his mastery over” the nation’s internal affairs. This way, the president “of his own volition” can give himself “undefined emergency powers.” Truman’s seizure of the mills originates in his “individual will” and “represents an exercise of authority without law.”

Today, the nation is inured to presidential claims of urgent needs — “emergencies,” “existential” dangers — being used for evasions of the Constitution. Said Jackson, our institutions for keeping the executive under the law might be “destined to pass away,” but “it is the duty of the Court to be last, not first, to give them up.”

The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board decries the Trump administration’s attempted resurrection of the “equal-time” rule. Two slices:

President Trump’s desire to control the public airwaves is verging on the comic, literally. Witness the Federal Communications Commission’s memo this week targeting late-night comedy—yes, the same shows that Mr. Trump claims are irrelevant.

The FCC is resurrecting its “equal time” rule, an artifact of the 1934 Communications Act. The rule requires public broadcasters, if they provide air time to one political candidate, to give comparable time and placement to all other candidates running for the same office. Congress later exempted “bona fide” newscasts, interviews, documentaries and events.

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There’s a strong argument that the rule violates the speech rights of broadcasters. It also makes no sense in today’s diverse media market in which public broadcasters account for a shrinking share. Many politicians connect with voters using social media and podcasts. Joe Rogan can host any politician he wants, and so can shows on cable networks, but Jimmy Kimmel gets government supervision.

The rule can lead to absurd results. After Arnold Schwarzenegger declared his candidacy for California Governor in 2003 on Jay Leno’s “Tonight Show,” all 135 candidates were invited to appear. Each was given 10 seconds to shout his ideas—at the same time. Stations also stopped running the actor’s movies during the campaign.

The FCC missive is a regrettable diversion from the yeoman work Mr. Carr is doing rolling back Biden-era regulation. Then again, maybe the goal is to make Mr. Trump’s Presidency the highest-rated comedy on TV.

Steven Greenhut understandably asks: “Where have the ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ Republicans gone?” Three slices:

Based on the troubling goings-on in Minneapolis, it’s hard to describe former GOP Rep. Justin Amash’s post on X as hyperbolic: “They’re building a police state right before our eyes—which will ultimately be deployed against conservative Christians and gun owners and those who refuse the jab—and a lot of ‘Republicans’ with Gadsden flags in their bios are like, ‘Yeah, FAFO!'”

There’s no hope for anyone cheering, but “responsible” conservatives have a rationale for defending these actions: It’s better than having Democrats in charge. Had, say, Kamala Harris won the presidency, she would have imposed socialistic policies, they say. That’s probably true, but have you noticed the latest policy plans from Donald Trump? His economic proposals echo the Democratic platform.

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These are the types of easy-button leftist solutions that always make matters worse because they interfere with the workings of the free market. Markets direct goods and services and set prices that reflect supply and demand. When the government meddles, via regulation, taxation, government ownership, and “industrial policy,” companies make decisions based on political preferences. It slows economic growth, stifles innovation, and rewards firms that serve the king rather than the consumer.

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A decades-old Catholic social teaching is known as the “seamless garment of life,”which references the tunic Jesus wore at the crucifixion. The faithful are supposed to revere life in a seamless manner by opposing all policies that undermine the dignity of human beings. These days, Republicans are pursuing a seamless garment of big government, from police-state immigration tactics to their interventionist economic policies. With both parties now hostile to limited government, Americans can only expect civic life to get worse rather than better.

David Henderson had a few things to say about Mark Carney, Donald Trump, Howard Lutnick, and free trade.

Harrison Griffiths reports that the economic damage inflicted by Trump’s protectionism falls disproportionately on his most ardent supporters.

Fareed Zakaria mourns the damage that Trump is doing to the reputation of the United States. Two slices:

Trump enjoys using America’s vast strength — built over generations — almost for sport. He placed tariffs on Switzerland, and then raised them sky high because the Swiss president, he said, “rubbed [him] the wrong way.” He relished recounting how quickly the Swiss came to him seeking relief. This was less strategy than a power play.

Last year, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte appeared to jokingly liken Trump to a “daddy” intervening in a schoolyard brawl, and Trump has repeated that line with evident pleasure, including at Davos. He seems to enjoy even insincere flattery because it shows that he is so powerful, people have to fake their admiration for him.

…..

The United States has been the world’s dominant power for close to a century. But its leaders understood that primacy is not only about coercion; it is also about legitimacy, reassurance and voluntary cooperation. They grasped a basic truth: Power is more sustainable when it is exercised with restraint, and influence is larger when allies feel dignity rather than fear.

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy, applauds Javier Milei’s latest speech at Davos. A slice from Vero’s post:

Javier Milei’s recent address at Davos is impressive. It’s also a very timely reminder of many important lessons that are often forgotten.

The Argentinian president presents free enterprise not merely as an efficient economic system, but as a moral and institutional order rooted in Western ethical traditions. Rejecting the supposed tradeoff between justice and efficiency, Milei explains that true economic efficiency emerges only from institutions grounded in private property, voluntary exchange, and the non-aggression principle. In his view, policies that reject principles in order to pursue short-term political advantages are not only immoral but dynamically inefficient, ultimately leading to economic and social collapse. Free enterprise capitalism, Milei contends, is the only system that is both just and capable of sustaining long-run growth because it respects natural rights and enables entrepreneurial discovery.

Milei places economic growth squarely within an institutional and values-based framework. Growth depends on dynamic efficiency: the ability of institutions to reduce uncertainty, protect property rights, and allow entrepreneurial creativity to scale through capital accumulation, innovation, and the division of labor. He contrasts this commitment to free markets with socialism and heavy regulation, which suppress increasing returns and kill growth by punishing profits and blocking the diffusion of economic benefits. Argentina’s recent reforms, such as mass deregulation, fiscal stabilization, and a deliberate retreat of the state from economic control, are presented as real-world applications of these principles. For Milei, values are not an ornament to economic policy but its foundation: Societies that uphold liberty, property rights, and moral restraint create the institutional conditions for sustained prosperity, while those that abandon these values invite stagnation and decline.

Also praising Milei’s speech at Davos is the Washington Post‘s Editorial Board. A slice:

Trump is often credited with delivering hard truths to Davos attendees, but it’s Milei’s policies that are actually upending the status quo. Unlike Trump, the self-proclaimed anarcho-capitalist has been working to eradicate trade barriers, even with countries like China. “If you look at China’s weight in the world,” Milei said at Davos, “you’ll understand I have to trade with China.”

But what truly sets the Argentine president apart from other leaders is his desire to reduce his own power and control. “The most responsible thing politicians can do is to stop pestering those who are creating a better world,” he said in Switzerland. Few of his peers will agree, which makes his message all the more important.

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… is from page 338 of Chapter 6 (“The Dutch Republic”) of Johan Norberg’s marvelous 2025 book, Peak Human: What We Can Learn from the Rise and Fall of Golden Ages:

Europeans who used to think that wealth came from land and conquest and that stability came from one unifying faith noticed that the one country without land and religious oppression became the richest in the world and stayed stable when other great powers tore themselves apart in religious war. The [Dutch] republic’s openness to refugees and debate made it the epicentre of the European Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment.