Some Links
The politically-driven effort to force a transition from traditional power to wind, solar and battery has produced an energy crisis in blue America. Progressive-led states are beset by increasing electricity rates and declining reliability. Although their leaders uniformly blame President Trump, the costs have become so high that some on the left are finally scaling back these destructive policies. But it’s no guarantee sobriety will win the day.
New leftwing awareness of energy realities is apparent coast to coast. Former New Jersey Rep. Mikie Sherrill won the state’s governorship this month in part by pledging to deal with high electricity costs. As a member of Congress Ms. Sherrill reliably voted for the energy-transition agenda, although on the campaign trail she blamed Trump policies for her state’s problems. Out West, California Gov. Gavin Newsom is moderating some of his positions in anticipation of a 2028 presidential run from a state with the nation’s highest electricity rates. Mr. Newsom recently signed legislation returning billions to the state’s beleaguered rate-payers. As he slowed some of the “climate” regulations that he previously helped accelerate, Mr. Newsom deflected responsibility to subsidy reductions in President Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” that have yet to take effect.
Yet recent infighting over detransitioning in Massachusetts indicates that holdouts remain, opposing even the most sensible adjustments. In late October, the organization tasked with ensuring the reliability of New England’s grid warned of power shortages as soon as this winter, emphasizing the need to obtain dependable energy production. The gist: Solar and wind will not deliver sufficient, constant, reliable power.
My GMU Econ colleague Vincent Geloso reviews Thomas Piketty’s A Brief History of Inequality. Three slices:
As political manifestos go, this is outstanding work. There is substance and coherence. At the same time, however, I doubt how much a politician can win on such a manifesto because the remedies offered are also accelerants to the forces of populism and illiberalism. The politics of redistribution can lead to tensions between those who pay and those who receive. This is why numerous economists point out that policies reducing the size of the state (in both scale and scope) are associated with less populism.
For example, when using ‘economic freedom’ indices—which weigh components such as property rights protections, free trade, business regulation, monetary policy, and the size of government—in conjunction with measures of political populism (both right and left), one finds that ‘economic freedom’ depresses populism. In other studies, what some call ‘welfare chauvinism’ is what drives anti-immigrant feelings (nativism). As Krishna Vadlamannati and Indra de Soysa summarized, the ‘positive effect of a bigger immigrant share of the population on support for nativist populism is conditional upon higher degrees of social welfare’ spending. In other words, the book proposes remedies that have fueled the rise of the populist right and left.
It is not surprising, then, that in Piketty’s home country of France, the Rassemblement National of Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella (which seems poised to win in 2027) has been a confused mix of left-wing economic policies and right-wing identitarian ones. France, with its sprawling welfare state that goes well beyond what the near-totality of economists would call the optimally sized state, has already implemented most of what Piketty recommends—and it is precisely there that liberal democracy appears most threatened, both from the left and the right.
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In other words, the very institutional arrangements and policy frameworks that Piketty criticizes as obstacles to equality appear, in practice, to foster intergenerational progress in educational achievement. Far from hindering mobility, economic freedom and moderate taxation seem to create an environment in which children are more likely to surpass the educational outcomes of their parents. What this chapter amounts to is a complaint about ‘not enough’ (an arguably fair complaint) and then a series of rehashed clichés about solutions for which there are good reasons (not discussed and ignored) to believe would make things worse.
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Using economic freedom indices (notably the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World), one can assume that higher scores correspond to more capitalist economies with more liberal policies—precisely less of what Piketty prescribes. Evidence shows that ‘big liberalizations’ not only raise average incomes but also lift those in the bottom deciles along with the top, leaving inequality relatively unchanged. Conceptually similar results apply to economically disadvantaged groups such as women who gain noticeably from liberalizations (there is evidence that this applies to minority groups as well). Crucially, such liberalizations also generate large increases in income mobility. These causal results align with a growing body of associational studies linking economic freedom to greater upward mobility—relationships consistently stronger than those between inequality and mobility.
GMU Econ alum Jeremy Horpedahl tweets: (HT Scott Lincicome)
France is 25 years behind the US in GDP per capita.
The direct costs of the tariffs don’t even tell the whole story. As Reason has detailed, the tariffs have created headaches for board game and toy companies across the country, as normally reliable supply chains have become more expensive and sometimes totally unworkable amid the White House’s ever-shifting tariff edicts.
“The U.S. is our least trustworthy trading partner right now—and I say that as an American,” Price Johnson, COO of Cephalofair Games, told Reason last month. “I can’t trust what the policy is going to be tomorrow, let alone next week.”
Two weeks ago, the Trump administration seemingly admitted that its tariffs were making some goods more expensive. The White House rolled back tariffs on coffee, bananas, and several other items. That was framed as an attempt to lower grocery prices amid rising inflation and deepening skepticism from the American public about the merits of Trump’s tariff plans.
As [Ed] Gresser notes, however, the tariffs that remain in place are in many cases bigger tax increases than the ones on goods like coffee and bananas, which have now been removed.
“The tariff hike on toys is twice as big as that of the banana and coffee tariffs put together, and that on shoes tariff increase alone offsets the entire 238-product exclusion list,” he wrote earlier this month.
National Review‘s Andrew McCarthy decries the Trump administration’s lawless war-making on the high seas. Two slices:
An explosive Washington Post report, the subject of so much discussion the past two days, says that, in the first missile strike the Trump Defense Department carried out against operatives of a boat suspected of transporting narcotics on the high seas off Venezuela, two survivors were rendered shipwrecked. As they clung to the wreckage, the U.S. commander ordered a second strike, which killed them.
If this happened as described in the Post report, it was, at best, a war crime under federal law. I say “at best” because, as regular readers know, I believe the attacks on these suspected drug boats — without congressional authorization, under circumstances in which the boat operators pose no military threat to the United States, and given that narcotics trafficking is defined in federal law as a crime rather than as terrorist activity, much less an act of war — are lawless and therefore that the killings are not legitimate under the law or armed conflict. (See my Saturday column, with links to prior posts on this subject.)
Nevertheless, even if we stipulate arguendo that the administration has a colorable claim that our forces are in an armed conflict with non-state actors (i.e., suspected members of drug cartels that the administration has dubiously designated as foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs)), the laws of war do not permit the killing of combatants who have been rendered hors de combat (out of the fighting) — including by shipwreck.
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The laws of war, as they are incorporated into federal law, make lethal force unlawful if it is used under certain circumstances. Hence, it cannot be a defense to say, as Hegseth does, that one has killed because one’s objective was “lethal, kinetic strikes.”
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