The argument is straightforward: Subsidies distort markets, breed inefficiencies, and encourage cronyism. Green subsidies — particularly those for EVs and solar — often channel funds toward politically favored companies rather than toward market-driven innovation. Meanwhile, fossil-fuel subsidies remain deeply embedded in our tax code, quietly favoring oil and gas companies. Both should be eliminated, but there isn’t much appetite for that among Republicans.
My Mercatus Center colleague David Beckworth talks with George Selgin about George’s new book, False Dawn: The New Deal and the Promise of Recovery, 1933–1947 (which you can buy here).
The American economy is now more politicized than it has ever been. President Donald Trump threatens tariffs on individual businesses such as Apple and Mattel. On Thursday, he threatened to terminate government contracts with Musk’s companies. He tells executives who want favorable treatment to ask him personally. This week, his press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, boasted that business leaders are “begging to meet with this president and begging to come to the White House.”
Trump has explained how he views the American economy: not as a vast and gloriously complex free-market system with hundreds of millions of private transactions; no, to him it is one, big beautiful store. “I own the store,” he explained, “and I set prices, and I’ll say, if you want to shop here, this is what you have to pay.” Business leaders must deal with America the way they used to deal with third-world dictatorships: Appease the supreme leader. And they are adjusting to this new model quietly and without much dissent.
There is a new biography out about William F. Buckley Jr., the intellectual godfather of the American right. Buckley was a friend of mine, and I remember him once making an odd statement. He said to me that his favorite country in the world might be Switzerland. I asked why. He explained that it was a genuine free-market democracy where the government truly left people alone. He told me that “if you ask the average person in Switzerland, ‘Who is the president of your country?,’ most wouldn’t know.”
Needless to say, Buckley’s dream would be Donald Trump’s nightmare.
John Tamny reviews Phil Gramm’s and my new book, The Triumph of Economic Freedom (which you can buy here).
Barry Moltz talks with Phil Gramm and me about our new book.
“Even after scoring a huge victory against President Donald Trump’s tariffs in federal court last week, David Levi still isn’t sure if his small business will survive the trade war” – so reports Eric Boehm.
Arnold Kling’s son-in-law’s job is safe.
George Will wonders why U.S. “leaders” are refusing to read the open book that is Vladimir Putin. A slice:
Although there is no excuse for it, there is a reason for the failure of U.S. leaders to understand Putin. He is an open book who has been reading himself to the world since long before he published his 2021 essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.” This farrago of ethnic mysticisms and history seen through a pseudo-theological lens is Putin’s “Mein Kampf.” His resentments and revenge aspirations are all there. But are largely ignored or disbelieved by the West’s statesmen and publics who complacently believe that the end of history meant the end of toxic nonsense such as this:
Putin believes Russia is a “civilization-state” with cultural-cum-religious significance, rights and responsibilities that justify the erasure of other nations. Which is why the Economist correctly says that for Putin, “war has become an ideology.”
Here’s an interesting comparison, by GMU Econ alum Dominic Pino, of big U.S. states.
