By Re-Enlightenment, I mean the revivification of the intellectual goals of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment that privileged empirical observation, logic, and reason above base authority, ancient custom, and rank superstition. That intellectual movement modernized the world, leading to the American Revolution and the sundry economic revolutions that released humanity from the population trap identified by Thomas Malthus and that helped billions of people to become better off materially than the wealthiest pre-Enlightenment monarchs just three centuries ago.

Will progress continue, though? Will the gains already made persist? History is literally littered with societies that experienced so-called Golden Ages only to devolve back towards what Adam Smith termed “barbarism.”

In the latter half of the twentieth century, many Western intellectual elites jettisoned the Enlightenment in the mistaken belief that its ideals had caused the horrors of the twentieth-century: the two world wars, the Great Depression, numerous genocides, and the ever present threat of nuclear holocaust, not to mention racism, sexism, and xenophobia. In the place of Enlightened ideals, those elites embraced postmodernism, a creed that denies the quest for objective truth and replaces it with nihilism, subjectivism, and a quest for governments powerful enough to dictate “truth” by fiat.

The irony is that authoritarian government, or in other words a dearth of Enlightenment in politics, diverted the productive forces unleashed by the Enlightenment in economics to violent, tribal ends. But instead of trying to tame the destructive forces of authoritarian government, the postmodernists blamed humanity’s woes on “capitalism” and Enlightenment, and undercut them at every turn in classrooms and legislatures while bestowing them with heinous sobriquets.

Where the postmodernists won early ascendancy, under labels like communism and national socialism, they ran headlong into the objective realities that they denied. Within a few years or decades they faltered and failed, often reappearing in the more gradualist varieties that gained a foothold in the “free” countries of the West, including the United States. There, they spread throughout government and academia supported by the largess of rationally ignorant taxpayers and wealthy alumni with eyes swaddled by thick layers of nostalgia.

Reality, though, again reared its oft ugly head, revealing in 2020 Western institutions that the intellectual leaders of the Enlightenment would recognize as new forms of authority, custom, and superstition. The conflation of science and authority, the repression of legitimate business, and widespread censorship during the pandemic constituted the Enlightenment’s nadir, but also a springboard from which Re-enlightenment may gain ascendance.

The same day that I began teaching U.S. History at the new University of Austin I began regularly to work out at the gym again, after having given up my lifelong routine during the pandemic. I did so because for the first time since March 2020, I again want to live long. The conversation that day in early January, which began before the appointed start time of 8:30 am, was deep, frank, and precisely the reason that I decided to join the academy 35 years ago.

The parallel institutions of higher education that have been springing up – some de novo like the University of Austin and Reliance College, others like mushrooms from the rotting corpses of dying incumbents – provide hope that America and the rest of the West will not further devolve into idiocracy, kakistocracy, or tribalism. I still fret, though, that their efforts will prove too little, too late unless they are accompanied by more widespread Re-Enlightenment across America’s intellectual landscape.

The Re-enlightenment can improve upon its predecessor by incorporating the best that its postmodern critics offered. The following sentiments encapsulate it:

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but Truth is not. Beauty therefore can be achieved for some, but humans can only strive towards Truth without ever fully attaining it. Intellectual humility therefore behooves everyone. No single mind, even that of the great leader or the mighty AI, can understand all. Collectively, however, through the free trade in ideas, human understanding can advance closer to Truth.

Anyone may claim whatever he or she likes, but no one else is bound to listen to, let alone heed, the message. Just because someone offers a good for trade does not mean anyone must take it up. The same holds for the trade in ideas.

Normative claims can be ignored on their normative basis alone. Positive claims can be ignored too, but at the listener’s peril. If a person shouts “fire!” in a crowded theater, for example, the listener can call the Thought Police but will be better off by critically assessing the veracity of the claim. Who is the speaker? Does the speaker have more information or better insight into the state of the theater than the listener does? If so, the listener should seek more information.

The listener can also independently assess the speaker’s credibility. If the speaker is carrying a large water hose and wearing a fire-retardant uniform, following directions will likely extend the listener’s existence. If the speaker is another theatergoer giving directions to a character to shoot his gun, ignoring “fire!” likely will extend the listener’s enjoyment of the film, play, musical, or other theatrical entertainment.

The veracity of the most important positive claims, however, is not so easily ascertained. Some Enlightenment thinkers erred by being too optimistic about the ease of establishing Truth claims. Moreover, some policymakers incorrectly invoked the Enlightenment to support normative claims that bolstered their power, a propensity that constitutions based on Enlightenment thought did not sufficiently check. In reaction to the Enlightenment’s intellectual overreach and its usurpation by power seekers, the intellectual pendulum swung too far in the other direction, toward nihilism and Continental philosophies like postmodernism.

Higher education and freedom suffered as a consequence. Free speech devolves into vacuous concepts like “voice” when all claims carry equal weight, or solely the weight of the speaker’s perceived authority. Free enterprise likewise suffers when its defenders’ views can be outright censored, distorted through linguistic twists that conflate authority and liberty, or denigrated as “biased” even if based on empirical evidence and logic.

To re-establish the intellectual milieu in which free speech and free enterprise can thrive, universities can again ground students in analytic philosophy, reason, and logic, alloyed with applied history and tempered by post-modernist concerns over power relationships, particularly those of the state over individuals.

Consider, for example, classroom treatment of the following proposition: “The U.S. federal government should ban all firearms.”

Many universities today would laud students for making or virtue signaling support for such a claim. A few would chastise students for supporting it and might even try to ban such speech. A Re-enlightened University, by contrast, induces intellectual investigation by first asking what type of claim it is. It is normative, so listeners need not heed it.

The proposition could be better understood, however, if reframed as a positive claim, like “If the U.S. federal government bans all firearms, the homicide rate will …” If the speaker ends the claim with “decline,” a certain set of universities will reinforce and another punish the speaker. If the speaker ends the claim with “increase,” the set of universities will reverse.

Note that if they do not insist upon restatement of the original normative claim in positive terms, some universities will laud students who believe that the U.S. government should ban firearms because the students believe doing so will increase the homicide rate.

A Re-enlightened University, by contrast, asks the speaker to state the empirical grounds for his or her positive claim. That is where simplistic views of the world can be questioned (can’t people kill each other with weapons, like bombs and vehicles, other than firearms?) and rational tools like comparative analysis, logic, and statistical inference can be used to move toward a better understanding of the issue and perhaps even closer approximations of Truth.

Re-enlightenment is not inherently imperialist, racist, sexist, or anything else anyone might think untoward because it is more intellectually humble than its predecessor. Contrast the views of, say, Friedrich Hayek with the Marquis de Condorcet. Re-enlightenment will also be even more skeptical of intrusive government policies than its predecessor. Contrast the skepticism of James C. Scott with, say, the optimism of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

A Re-enlightened University does not exclude topics of discussion but simply accords postmodern approaches to policy questions their due weight. Not everything is knowable, or effable, but for those things that are, the methodologies of the Enlightenment, like randomized control trials and natural experiments, remain far superior to those of postmodernism. Re-enlightened universities allow postmodernists to speak, of course, but attend to them only insofar as they help students to progress toward greater understanding of the real world.

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When Americans claimed independence from Britain, they were free to choose their own healthcare providers (HCPs) on the basis of their reputation. Despite vast advances in communication technology over the last quarter millennium, the median patient then knew far more about their HCPs than the median patient does today.

Some HCPs then held licenses but good apothecaries/pharmacists, barbers/dentists, internists, midwives, and surgeons saw their reputations and revenues wax, regardless of licensure, while bad ones struggled until they improved or found occupations more amenable to their talents.

When good HCPs erred, they reduced or eliminated fees, which came directly from the pockets of their patients. Good HCPs also adjusted their fees to accord with their patients’ “station” or wealth.

Overcharging would have broken the sacred Hippocratic Oath to do no harm and would also harm the HCPs themselves in a highly competitive market. No “certificates of need” or “scope of practice” restrictions then segmented the market for healthcare services. Cognizant of the importance of their reputations, HCPs freely referred patients to those better equipped to ameliorate specific maladies. Moreover, patients who lost faith in an HCP could jump to another without worrying if they were “in network” or not.

Vaccinations there were but, outside of the military, no mandates to take them. Medications and medical devices were also used on a strictly voluntary basis. If a certain snake oil made some people feel better, they bought more and told their friends. If it didn’t, they told their friends that too. Caveat emptor, but rest assured that the purveyor of outright poisons suffered dearly.

Although some Americans then lived into their 80s and 90s for a small fraction of today’s medical expenses, overall life expectancy was then lower, entirely due to ignorance, not the incentives of HCPs. Americans drank alcohol to avoid the often feces-infected water. Many other early American hygiene habits, even in hospitals, rightfully repulse us today.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, safer municipal water supplies and medical equipment sterilization extended American lives more than any HCP, medicine, or hospital did until the antibiotics revolution of the 1940s. To this day, the best way to live long is to avoid getting, or immediately treating, cholera, dysentery, influenza, measles and other childhood diseases, the plague, rabies, smallpox, syphilis, tuberculosis, typhoid, or typhus.

As Sean Masaki Flynn showed in The Cure that Works (2019), if the U.S. federal government had stayed on its original policy course and left healthcare to market forces, Americans today would enjoy health outcomes similar to those of Singapore, which adopted the original U.S. system. They would live longer, healthier lives for about a quarter of what they currently pay and no one would suffer from a lack of access. Instead, policy changes made during the long New Deal tied health insurance to employment and healthcare to third party payers, both of which mangled incentives and created the dying, dysfunctional system presently in place.

Moreover, if healthcare policies had not changed so dramatically in the 1930s and 1940s, U.S. taxpayers would not be forced to fund huge bureaucratic research machines of dubious merit or efficiency. Life insurers would fund most medical research, just as they did before the New Deal, and they would almost certainly do a better job than the government because they have much stronger incentives to do so.

Due to large unfunded promises to pay superannuated Americans life annuities and health insurance, the incentive of the U.S. government is for Americans to die the day they begin to collect Medicare and Social Security. (This is not a conspiratorial or empirical claim, just an elucidation of the government’s incentive structure for the last 90 years.) Life insurers, by contrast, face strong incentives to help their insureds to live long, healthy lives because they don’t pay until the insured dies.

The median American two and a half centuries ago better understood basic economic concepts than the median American today does. Back then, fear and hatred of monopolies helped to spur revolution. Today, too many Americans fear and hate competition. Their heads swim with too many falsehoods inculcated by government-run or -controlled educational monopolies to debunk in short compass.

Thankfully, policymakers do not have to force Americans to accept the healthcare policies of the Founders, all they have to do is to allow them the choice to stick with the failed nostrums of the long New Deal or to return to the freedom of healthcare independence. They will soon learn which is better.

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My wife put the unwanted items at the curb so that trash pickers could help themselves before the garbage men hauled any leftovers to the local landfill. In my neighborhood, as in many across America, that is The Way.

Sometimes, the stuff is so good that the curb gets picked clean, leaving the garbage guys with nary an item to collect. This time, though, it rained, and rained, and rained. Most pickers stayed home and a lot of previously usable stuff got ruined anyway. So come pickup time, lots of water laden stuff sat at my curb.

A few days later, a summons arrived in the mail. I had broken a local ordinance and faced fines and possibly jail time! I looked up the ordinance and discovered that the township’s bulk trash collection rule bears no resemblance to actual practice or even the brochure that new residents receive. It is also ambiguous as all get out.

I immediately filed a motion to quash the proceedings but instead of sharing it with the judge, some clerk simply rescheduled the virtual hearing. When the judge and prosecutor (!!) finally read my motion at the hearing, and I started asking questions like if I could plead nolo contendre, they got squirrely and suddenly wanted to make a deal. I pleaded guilty and paid $25 in court costs in exchange for no fine or sodomy time.

Bully for me, but I cannot help but wonder how many fellas out there with less legal acumen than myself are right now getting bullied by The Sisters in the jail shower room for heinous crimes like not monitoring how much trash is at their curb.

This episode raises a bigger question: why are municipal governments involved in trash collection at all? I have lived in two places—Sioux Falls, South Dakota and Mount Pleasant, Michigan—with private trash pickup and, predictably, received services superior to, and at lower cost than, those provided in towns that monopolize the function.

Tellingly, the businesses directly adjacent to my current home lawfully contract with private companies to haul away their trash. But somehow households are incapable of contracting likewise? Trust me, it is much easier to hire a trash removal company than to deal with a municipal court!

But municipal government officials, just like state and federal ones, seek money and power. Municipal trash pickup means yet another budget to bilk, more union members to control, and more perks, like unlimited garbage hauling, for municipal officials.

And think of the power trip and money involved for the prosecutor and judge. I can hear them at the tavern in the evening: “We got that sum bich good today, eh! How dare his wife clean out the garage and try to help out others in the community by leaving it at the curb.”

Yes, Americans need to worry about federal government overreach, by both major parties. But they also need to worry about the petty tyrants who gorge themselves on real estate taxes and ignorance about the proper scope of government. If we do not first re-privatize garbage collection across the nation, how will we ever convince enough Americans that we can re-privatize the roads and schools, too?

The post No Kings! But Petty Tyrants Galore Is Ok? appeared first on Free the People.

More troubling, for partisans on both sides, is that DJT’s policies often mimic FDR’s, risking the same dire consequences: economic instability, environmental degradation, and unchecked presidential power.

Ignoring these parallels blinds us to the perils of populism, whatever its partisan guise.

FDR’s “First Hundred Days” marked the last time the U.S. embraced sweeping policy experimentation over incremental reform. Programs like the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) imposed rigid price-fixing, paralyzing small businesses, killing 500,000 jobs by 1935, and stifling a nascent rebound in output. DJT’s tariff gambits echo this recklessness. The Congressional Budget Office warns these could raise consumer prices 1 to 2 percent, costing families $1,000 annually and risking disruption akin to FDR’s missteps.

Economic folly wasn’t their only parallel; both pursued aggressive immigration policies with dubious outcomes. FDR’s Mexican Repatriation program forcibly expelled 500,000 people, including citizens, costing millions without addressing unemployment’s roots. DJT’s 2025 deportation plan, targeting 1-2 million immigrants at $400 billion per ICE projections, promises similar futility, disrupting communities while failing to fix employment mismatches.

Trade policy offers another parallel. FDR inherited Hoover’s Smoot-Hawley Act, which deepened the Depression by choking trade. Although granted authority in 1934 for bilateral deals, FDR did little to reverse protectionism. DJT’s tariffs, leveraging the same authority, threaten economic isolation, with economists projecting a 0.5 percent GDP drop for every 10 percent hike in tariffs.

Both prioritized populist optics over mutually beneficial cooperation.

FDR’s rural electrification entrenched coal dependency, with 80% of rural grids coal-powered by 1950, stalling green innovation in batteries, solar, and wind. DJT’s deregulation, boosting coal 5% in 2018, similarly favors short-term gains over long-term considerations, echoing FDR’s trade-offs.

FDR’s government reforms mirrored DJT’s rhetoric. Promising to cut spending and streamline the executive—the equivalent of “draining the swamp”—FDR saw deficits soar and bureaucracy balloon before trade restrictions provoked conflict with Japan, then Asia’s largest economic and military power. DJT’s pledges faltered as spending rose 20 percent in his first term, and reorganization efforts, like Schedule F and DOGE, stalled.

While both leaders’ promises outstripped results their populist appeal cemented their influence. FDR’s birthday balls, held nationwide from 1934 into the 1940s, raised millions for polio research, casting him as a hero and stoking voter sympathy due to his long personal struggle against polio. Attended by celebrities and common folk, they built a cult of personality. DJT’s rallies and 2024 assassination survival paint him as an indomitable savior, deflecting policy scrutiny.

Both wielded charisma to mask flaws, yet their most dangerous similarity lies in their authoritarian impulses.

FDR’s alphabet agencies, like the National Labor Relations Board and Securities and Exchange Commission, expanded federal overreach without commensurate gain for laborers or investors. He weaponized the IRS against critics like Huey Long and used Fireside Chats, reaching 80% of radio-owning households, to control the narrative. DJT’s 300-plus executive orders also erode constitutional checks, while his X posts, amplified to millions, control the narrative. Critics labeled FDR a dictator; DJT faces similar charges. Both centralized power, threatening the freedoms Americans have traditionally held dear.

Despite these parallels, historians who laud FDR deprecate DJT, while MAGA supporters vilify FDR. Such tribalism obscures reality. FDR’s crisis leadership steadied a nation at the pit of the Depression; DJT’s pre-COVID economy grew robustly. Yet their populist authoritarianism—marked by risky experiments, environmental harm, and centralized power—threatens Americans’ freedom. Their policies, from tariffs to deportations, burden small businesses and families, undermining free markets. Jettisoning partisan blind spots is essential to confront unchecked populism’s risks to liberty and prosperity.

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By court history, I mean the penchant for putting historians on the government payroll, often for a pretty penny. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is currently making one such hire, offering a $200,000 annual salary in an opaque hiring process that, at best, will lead to the appointment of an apologist, sycophant, or placeman (or woman) who will have a vested interest in hiding the government’s mistakes and exaggerating its virtues. As Alexander Hamilton noted in 1792, “it is thought ungrateful for a man to bite the hand that puts bread in his mouth.”

Don’t get me wrong, I hold a Ph.D. in History because all those old cliches about the dangers of not learning the lessons of the past hold true. The past decisions of our sundry governmental bodies ought to be rigorously examined, not by biased government employees but by all who wish to investigate, at their own expense of course. Had competitive history been encouraged in the past, DOGE today would have a much easier time convincing lawmakers and citizens that specific government entities create costs far exceeding their benefits.

Competition, even in ideas, leads to the best outcome at the lowest price.

Court historians crowd out competitive historians by using the power of their positions to deny the “outsiders” equal access to primary sources, the raw materials on which quality histories must be built. Better to allow all who wish to examine the sources to do so, in as accessible a manner as possible.

Other bureaucracies, like the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), employ no court historian but also restrict access to primary sources by forcing researchers to file Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests simply to gain archival access. I know from bitter and repeated experience that the SEC then weaponizes the FOIA process to stall for time, hoping that professors subject to “publish or perish” pressures will switch to easier topics that won’t threaten the status quo. The costs involved in “doing the FOIA dance” are substantial for both the researchers who stick it out and the government entities themselves.

For those reasons, DOGE should do away with government-employed court historians and open up competition in historical research by allowing National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) archivists to do what they were trained to do, create useful finding aids for researchers and allow direct access to historical sources without the need to submit FOIA requests. Then researchers can more fully investigate the virtues and foibles of the federal government before our democracy dies in an artificially-created darkness.

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Before introduction of the Australian or secret ballot around the turn of the twentieth century, politicians for high office in America often paid for votes with cash or rum punch. The destruction of the secret ballot in 2020 via mass mail-in voting has revivified the direct approach in some states, under the euphemism of “ballot harvesting.” Buying the votes of most swing voters, those not blinded by partisan rage or unbendable ideological convictions, however, remains an indirect process. Politicians promise payments to broad groups and are judged during the next election in part based on how well they fulfilled those obligations.

President Biden, for example, pledged to reduce student loans, the debts that many Americans accumulate to attend, and sometimes graduate, from the nation’s many fine, overpriced institutions of “higher learning.” Although thwarted by the Supreme Court in his first attempt, Biden has taken a new tack so that he can fulfill his promise and garner millions more votes.

Similarly, former president Trump promised to erect a wall along America’s long border with Mexico. Only portions of the promised wall were completed during his administration, however, purportedly because he wanted to leverage the immigration issue during his 2020 re-election campaign. Were it not for the Covid catastrophe and his acquiescence to disastrous lockdown policies, the tactic may have worked because the wall’s implicit promise of higher wages and employment levels for low-skilled workers was in fact being fulfilled in the final two years of his term.

This time around, Trump’s promised trade policies also promote the interests of tens of millions of relatively uneducated and unskilled Americans, who have been killing themselves with alcohol, drugs, and guns in prodigious numbers for more than a decade. “Deaths of despair” they have come to be called. Trump’s high tariffs, the forlorn and forgotten imagine, will create high-paying manufacturing jobs for Americans with at best a so-so high school education.

To the extent that high tariffs increase employment for America’s relatively most unproductive workers, the prices of everyday items will increase, roughly by the amount of the tariff, like the 100 percent Trump called for on Chinese cars made in Mexico, the 60 percent he has floated for all Chinese goods, or the 10 percent he has suggested slapping on all imports.

America has imposed tariffs over 50 percent only twice in its history, a century apart. Both times it spawned retaliation, the first time by one of its own states, setting off the Nullification Crisis of 1832-33, which nearly led to civil war, and the second time by much of the rest of the world, further deepening the downturn we now call the Great Depression. A recently released movie has raised the specter of a new American civil war (though without delving into its causes, other than a hated POTUS), and further increases in the price level could institutionalize inflation and stagflation, as it almost did in the 1970s. Yet, Trump claims not to care about retaliation. An American autarky, after all, would certainly raise employment, his stated goal.

Tariffs and other trade barriers might not lead to as many jobs, or as many “good” jobs, as Trump and nationalist conservative pundits purport. If cut off from foreign workers by trade walls and border walls, U.S. manufacturers might choose AI-enabled robots over America’s unskilled masses, who have lost their former reputation as honest, hardworking folk. That will especially be the case in states with binding, high minimum wage laws.

At one time, states set their own minimum wages at, or below, the national minimum wage. As inflation whittled away the purchasing power of the national minimum wage, states and even municipalities began to pass their own, higher minimum wage laws. Such policies remain popular in some places even though, or perhaps because, wage price floors hurt the poorest and least skilled workers by reducing the number that employers want to hire. Employers subject to higher minimum wages work the people they do hire harder, or replace them with cheaper undocumented workers or machines perfectly capable of cleaning floors, taking food orders, and even doing inventory.

If protected by high tariffs or low quotas, U.S. manufacturers will begin operations in, or relocate to, areas with the lowest minimum wages and sufficient workforces. That will help those who already own land or service businesses in those states, but no more than it will hurt landlords and business owners in the high wage states that are already experiencing relative, and even absolute, population loss.

In fact, to a large extent tariffs, quotas, and nontariff barriers, like regulatory mandates, simply redistribute wealth away from American consumers and towards U.S. manufacturers and the national government. In the process, trade restrictions also reduce overall wealth by creating what are called “Harberger triangles,” or deadweight losses.

Tariffs create two such deadweight losses, or reductions in wealth that no one else gains. The first are losses to consumers who cannot afford to pay the price of the imported good plus the tariff, or the equally overpriced U.S.-produced equivalent. The second are the social losses associated with the production of goods at costs higher than would be incurred in a globally competitive market.

Both deadweight losses grow in direct proportion to the size of the tariff. They were quite small during the heyday of globalization and the WTO in the 1990s and 2000s but under Trump’s plan would grow to unprecedented size. Domestic manufacturers, and their workers, would gain from 60 percent tariffs, in other words, but America would be poorer for it to the extent that goods markets are globally competitive.

Trump and his acolytes, however, argue that Americans have enough buying power to force foreign manufacturers to suffer the brunt of the taxes. In other words, they assert that America, in the lingo of international trade economists, is a “large” country that can set prices, not a “small” one that must take prices established by global supply and demand conditions. American consumers do appear to have some monopsony power in certain markets, so Trump is not entirely wrong when he claims that his agenda would “tax China to build up America.”

Moreover, the political calculus for claiming to tax foreigners is irresistible. The U.S. state governments that do not tax the income of their residents all tax out-of-state visitors to their tourist attractions (like Florida, Nevada, and South Dakota), or they tax the energy sources beneath their feet (Alaska and Texas). Politicians in those states can buy votes with increased expenditures without increasing taxes on their voters or running large deficits (which most state constitutions no longer allow).

To keep its large war machine and welfare state afloat, however, the U.S. national government needs much more money than it could possibly raise from tourists or energy or land leases. Unlike state governments, though, it can appease both taxpayers and supplicants by running budget deficits financed with Treasury bonds and U.S. currency.

Those deficits, and along with them the U.S. national debt, however, have grown to monstrous proportions, sparking legitimate fears that neither Americans nor foreigners will want to hold as many U.S. dollars or as much Treasury debt as U.S. politicians want to supply. Talk of a BRICS currency union and high yields on Treasuries portend trouble to come if the U.S. government’s voracious appetite cannot be brought to heel, and sooner rather than later.

No U.S. presidential candidate would dare discuss cutting government expenditures or raising taxes in a realistic way. (Some call for taxing the rich but numerous studies have shown that the truly wealthy are not numerous or rich enough to be of much help.) A tariff that would fall on foreigners is therefore very appealing.

Increasing revenues significantly through tariffs, however, is unrealistic, if for no other reason than that they would invite retaliation in direct proportion to their effectiveness. Claims to the contrary notwithstanding, U.S. businesses export billions of dollars of physical goods every year and the country actually runs a sizable services surplus. While tariffs would help U.S. businesses in competition with foreign imports, they would hurt U.S. exporters just as much, thus reducing the corporate taxes they pay.

Moreover, to the extent that Trump’s tariffs help American manufacturers and workers, they will hurt Chinese manufacturers and workers. That may not be a wise geopolitical strategy given that America’s real rival appears to be the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), not Chinese workers or businesses. To the extent that Chinese workers and businesses understand that their problems stem from the trade policies of the U.S. government, they will increase their adherence to the CCP. America’s foreign policy interest lies in driving a wedge between the CCP and the Chinese people, not uniting them against a common American enemy.

Biden did not increase Trump’s tariffs but he did not reverse them either. Instead, Biden has increased nontariff barriers, especially by insisting that foreign producers increase environmental regulations. Whatever the intention of such regulations, their economic effects are similar to those of tariffs except that they do not generate revenue for the U.S. government. They do, however, protect U.S. manufacturers and their employees at the expense of U.S. consumers and foreign manufacturers and their employees.

The world has experienced two periods of relatively low international trading costs and high volumes of global trade. Both were periods of peace and prosperity. The first ended with the Great War, which in turn led to the Great Depression and a second world war. The second period of globalization ended with the subprime mortgage crisis and Great Recession and could be headed toward another major international conflict.

Although international trade does not guarantee peace, it does tilt the odds in its favor. Instead of tariffs and green trade barriers, U.S. policymakers should improve the competitiveness of American manufacturers by lowering taxes and unnecessary regulatory costs and improving the efficiency of the nation’s costly yet subpar educational and healthcare sectors.

The post Biden and Trump on Trade appeared first on Free the People.

The consensus at a bleeding edge AI symposium recently held at Central Michigan University remains that AI still isn’t a viable job candidate, a view that macroeconomist Scott Sumner reinforced by showing that Claude 3’s understanding of economics is B level at best. It can spit back definitions, in other words, but it cannot apply economic concepts to novel situations. Some other carbon flesh bag who knows how to effectively leverage AI might take your job, but the computer itself still isn’t ready.

The bad news is that at least two AI-related threats to your liberty persist.

Although the US economy has spluttered since the dreadfully daft policies implemented four years ago, unemployment has remained mercifully low, with most of the pain being spread via lower real wages. When unemployment spikes at some point in the future, however, sundry statists and central planners will raise the specter of an AI-induced employment crisis to try to dupe Americans into accepting untried socialist nostrums like Universal Basic Income. Faux evidence of the “effectiveness” of so-called UBI experiments have been planted in the media for years to prepare people for such a push.

Another threat to liberty looms even larger. The large language models (LLMs) that most people associate with AI—the Chat GPTs, Geminis, Claudes, and such—have become instruments of the Radical Left due to the same heady stew of cash carrots and deep state sticks that drove universities, think tanks, legacy media, and search engine companies to abandon all semblance of positive science for Woke drivel.

The self-anointed leaders of Western Civilization are not burning their old books as envisaged in Fahrenheit 451, they are simply leaving them out of the LLM AI training canon, thus essentially de-platforming them and denying access to their truths to all except an ever shrinking cadre of book nerds.

Unlike the Metaverse, AI is not going away. LLMs are rapidly replacing search engines by providing “answers” to queries rather than just pointing users to websites. This renders them much more convenient for users but also incredibly powerful tools for shaping public perceptions. They cost really big bucks to program, train, and operate, but rake in billions despite their obvious shortcomings.

The knowledge bases of these LLMs are broad but shallow and they still haven’t figured out that many users do not want “an” answer, they want “the” answer. I personally gave up on ChatGPT when it fed me a fake Alexander Hamilton quotation and then concocted a source when I challenged it on the quotation’s authenticity. (Typical liberal move to double down on a convenient falsehood like that.)

When a company recently offered me a nice load of bread to help train a next gen AI in economic history, though, I couldn’t resist. But after a month, the company exiled me because I was teaching the AI not to be a Woke moron. (I wish I could expose the company but I honestly do not know which it was as it worked in a cloak and dagger fashion through a maze of shell subcontractors.)

A ray of hope, though, recently poked through the gloom. SLMs, or small language models, have begun to appear. Instead of being broad and shallow, SLMs are narrow but their knowledge runs deep. Moreover, unlike LLMs, which use vast cloud resources, SLMs can run on a laptop with the aid of a neural processing unit (NPU), a silicon wafer that contains its own CPU (central processing unit), GPU (graphics processing unit), memory, and specialized security processor. NPUs can run trillions of operations per second without creating the heat associated with traditional CPUs and GPUs. They are pricier than traditional chips but they can run an SLM at much less cost than any LLM.

The hope is that due to lower entry costs, competitive markets in AI can still prevail. Big corporations will continue to provide their anodyne products but little guys can still enter the AI market and offer alternatives, directly to users or through a common interface that routes user queries to appropriate SLMs that then compete for the user’s approbation and the associated fee.

I firmly believe that most users will prefer well-reasoned, well-sourced, and positive responses over polemical, normative ones, especially in matters of health and well-being, economics and finance, and public policy. Users who ask whether ivermectin or some novel vaccine is “safe and effective” will pick the most comprehensive and reasonable response, not obvious claptrap, providing the incentive against “misinformation” that purportedly everyone wants.

Ditto users who wonder if higher taxes and more powerful government is really the answer to all of society’s ills. Right now, they will only hear from LLMs what that powerful government wants them to hear. But liberty lovers could begin training an SLM fed with the works of Bastiat, Hayek, Mises, Rothbard, Smith, and other classical liberals, so that their ideas shall not perish from this earth, lost in the great knowledge purge currently taking place at Alphasoft and such at the behest of the same players that brought new meaning to the term ‘March madness’ four Marches ago.

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For starters, the quality of the feedstock is just as important to methane production as interspecies metabolic differences are. What goes in, largely determines what comes out, a fact known since at least 1986. Beef cattle feeding on the range, for example, exude much less methane than milk cows or cattle fed richer diets in feedlots do.

If other domesticated ruminants, like feedlot sheep, replace range-fed cattle, CH₄ emissions may be largely unchanged. Even relatively non-gassy camelids (alpaca, llama, camels) fed a rich diet in feedlots to stimulate demand for their meat may produce as much methane per pound of food as range-fed cattle. Moreover, while every part of every healthy head of cattle is used to produce a wide variety of food and nonfood products, some camelid parts may go unused and produce methane after being discarded.

According to several studies, the least gassy herbivore species are horses, kangaroos, and rabbits. In the past, Americans relished the flesh of each but cultural barriers make horse consumption, which is now de facto banned in the United States, unlikely. Kangaroos would have to be imported or we’d have to risk massive environmental damage from their widespread introduction. Rabbits are tasty but more like poultry than red meat.

If Americans are to give up red meat, why not just eat protein concoctions made from grasshoppers? Although not all insects produce methane, scientists have shown that as a group they “contribute substantially to atmospheric methane,” and in particular grasshoppers pass, as one journalist put it, “some pretty impressive gas” when concentrated en masse.

Keep in mind as well that unless tunnel visioned policy makers salt the earth to save the earth, something will replace cattle. If it isn’t another domesticate, it will be something wild, like bison or deer, which also spew methane. Red deer produce less methane on average than cattle do, holding weight and diet constant, but in the absence of predation the number of deer per acre will be determined by the amount of available food, not by the long-term interest of a rancher, so the amount of methane produced per acre could increase.

Predators that could cull wild herds of methane-making herbivores also produce some methane, though in lower concentrations than ruminants do. If predators manage to keep herbivores in check, though, uneaten grass will produce methane when it decomposes, as much methane as it would if eaten and burped or farted out by an herbivore.

Which species produce methane and which do not, moreover, is still little understood and more about evolutionary history than their current foraging strategies. Moreover, intraspecies methane emission variations are large, even when fattened on the same feedstock, suggesting that microbiota functionality may play the largest role of all in determining methane emissions.

All said, then, nobody following the scientific method could reject the hypothesis that reducing the number of cattle, even to zero, will have a negligible net effect on methane emissions. Confusing gross and net effects has already clouded thinking about transportation policy, so the threat to burgers and steaks nevertheless remains palpable.

And infuriating. After all, time spent debunking absurd policy proposals by powerful players detracts from time that could be devoted to investigating realistic steps, like encouraging (discouraging) range feeding (feedlots) or developing varieties of cattle, or cattle microbiota, that produce less methane. Humans have made remarkable changes to cattle since their initial domestication in the Ninth Millennium BC and could certainly tweak them yet again.

What humans cannot seem to change is their predilection for placing pinheads into powerful policy positions. While the species works on that problem, enjoy your burgers and steaks guilt-free, even if you believe that anthropogenic global climate change is real and best solved by reducing emissions rather than scrubbing “excess” greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere. There are no simple solutions, only simple people.

The post Why Governments Cannot Centrally Plan the Climate appeared first on Free the People.

Americans are already accustomed to digital dollars (DDs). Most dollars today are electronic accounting 1s and 0s that change ownership. Numerous private entities, including banks, credit unions, finance companies, and other businesses, issue those digital dollars and track changes in their ownership. Like when a friend uses a (digital) bank deposit to buy a digitally encoded retail gift card, which the card recipient exchanges electronically for goods over the internet or a physical point of sale.

Today, the government regulates the flow of DDs and physical cash through anti-money laundering laws, bank supervision, the IRS, and so forth. Its ability to surveil, let alone curtail, individual money flows, however, remains limited. The Fed has some ability to control the overall supply of DDs but as America’s recent bout of inflation shows, its control is far from absolute.

The Federal Reserve relishes the power to determine the money supply with precision. To that end, it could retire its own physical notes from circulation on the grounds that they flow in and out of domestic circulation, can be hoarded, and so forth. In the name of systemic stability, it could also force banks to lend or borrow only its CBDC (or perhaps banks’ own non-anonymous digital currencies).

At that point, the federal government would be able to track every formal economic transaction in the country. While such an unprecedented intrusion on privacy would presumably greatly increase the efficiency of tax collection and transfer payments, it would also empower the government to coerce compliance.

The government could, for example, prevent some or all Americans from buying blank white paper because it’s the new international symbol of censorship, or ammunition because it doesn’t want an armed citizenry, or a certain type of food because somebody in power heard on NPR that it’s bad for the climate. It could also block donations to “extremist” political parties that oppose, or support, killing babies or criminals. It could strip property from deplorables or woke folk by refusing to transfer their mortgage or car payments. It also could reduce your CBDC balance 10 percent per day until you submit to a vaccine, help tear down a certain statue, and/or literally bend the knee during the National Anthem.

As Americans learned during the recent pandemic, some of the Constitution’s checks and balances against arbitrary policies still work, but much too slowly were the government to ever control the proverbial “purse strings” of every citizen. And that is precisely how the Founders and Framers would have viewed CBDC. The only people in their world who could not control the strings of their own purses were slaves, married women, and minors, for the express purpose of keeping them subservient to their masters, husbands, and guardians, respectively. By enabling easy imposition of a 100 percent fine or tax, a CBDC also would trigger Chief Justice John Marshall’s dictum in McCulloch (17 U.S. [4 Wheat.] 316) that the power to tax is the power to destroy.

A CBDC may look innocuous because it resembles Bitcoin or DDs, but it is not a type of money as recognized by the Constitution because nothing could stop it from being used as a mechanism for totalitarian control that could be wielded by the Right or the Left. The risk to the Republic posed by a CBDC far exceeds any of the minor benefits the Fed claims for it.

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