Almost all of the debates about housing policy over the last several years have revolved around prices. This is natural but unfortunate, as it has left the most important benefits of building more housing out of the public eye. More construction would indeed lower prices, but more construction is not good because prices would fall.

As the most obvious example of this general phenomenon, New York City mayor and democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani’s efforts to “freeze the rent,” as well as the resulting backlash, are all focused on prices. But so is the “YIMBY” vs. “NIMBY” cage match over zoning regulations. The dividing line between the two camps is invariably whether someone believes that upzoning and repealing other restrictive regulations will lower rents, or they believe that rents would stay the same or even go up.

Building is good. (Because it lowers prices.) Or building is bad. (Because it raises prices.) Even when nary a soul would be displaced by a proposed development, like the Hudson Yards project in New York or a multifamily proposal meant for a parking lot here in the small town I stay in as a PhD student, pushback usually comes in the form of a couple insistent questions: How many units will really be “affordable”? And what will the average monthly rent be?

The Argument’s Jerusalem Demsas, in her recent column making the case that housing regulations really do matter, reasonably chose to focus mostly on how these regulations affect the cost of housing. While rebutting anti-YIMBY arguments for the Roosevelt Institute, Ned Resnikoff, also a great policy wonk, again focused on claims about whether increasing supply would meaningfully reduce prices.

This focus on prices does have an obvious, proximate cause. The most salient and painful part of any contract for housing—whether a mortgage or rental agreement—is the monthly payment. Once a month, every month, a large sum of money leaves your bank account. That sucks. Like me, you probably get an email from your bank or credit union confirming that your checking account balance is now appreciably lower. That also sucks.

Despite this, focusing just on a single aspect of the housing market, even one as important as prices, requires eliding the most interesting parts of housing markets, the factors that make renting a new place to live different (and more difficult) than buying a bag of dried lentils at your local grocery. As understandable and even rational as our current price monomania may be, we cannot actually understand the benefits of increasing the housing supply unless we all take a collective second to step back and think about what it really means to purchase a home or rent an apartment.

Almost invariably, when you make a major purchase you aren’t really buying different quantities of one discrete thing. You’re considering a lot of “bundles” of distinct qualities and then trying to pick the best bundle given your budget. Think about the experience of purchasing a new laptop and scrolling through a store’s inventory. You’re probably checking each model’s storage, RAM, CPU specs, and screen size and resolution, at minimum.

In quantitative economics, this is the core insight underlying so-called hedonic pricing models. First pioneered by economist Andrew Court in the late 1930s, hedonic pricing models recognize that the value of a good is really determined by a combination of several characteristics. Court, as an employee of the Automobile Manufacturers Association, set about trying to explain why the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated car prices had risen more than 40 percent over a decade. The types of automobiles being sold had obviously changed between 1925 and 1935, he observed, but the BLS indices implicitly assumed cars of a given model were comparable, and at the same time ignored some components that had gone from add-ons to defaults.

“In the case of passenger cars, if the relative importance to the customer of horse-power, braking capacity, window area, seat width, tire size, etc., could be established, the data reflecting these characteristics could be combined into an index of usefulness and desirability,” Court wrote in his 1939 article. “Prices per vehicle divided by this index of Hedonic would yield valid comparisons in the face of changing specifications.”

Since the revival of hedonic pricing by economist Zvi Griliches in the 1960s, the descendants of Court’s early models have now been used extensively in real estate economics. After all, the same logic that governs shopping for a laptop applies when people are participating in the housing market. This becomes patently obvious when browsing Zillow.

Every unit in every housing market is defined by a very important set of characteristics: the number of bedrooms, the number of bathrooms, the square footage, and, most importantly, the location, inter alia. When the median person enters the housing market as a consumer, they aren’t looking for the cheapest roof and four walls currently on the market or else everyone would be moving to Todd County, South Dakota. Consumers of housing weigh monthly rent or mortgage costs against all of these other characteristics and then try to find the best match for their own preferences and budget.

The lack of attention paid to these other non-price determinants of demand is the single factor which has most impoverished the public’s understanding of why upzoning and other regulatory changes are important. An ocean of digital ink has been spilled debating the precise impacts of policy changes on prices. Scholars try to measure both quantity and price changes in their work, but podcasts and articles about YIMBYism and its critics usually begin with notes like “Housing prices have been soaring,” or “For years, housing activists couldn’t agree on what was driving prices higher, let alone how to fix it.” Even academic articles on both sides of the divide are fairly regularly published with ‘catchy’ titles like “We Zoned for Density and Got Higher House Prices.” The conversations on X, né Twitter, are naturally far worse.

Instead of accepting the premises of this interminable back-and-forth, policy makers and housing advocates ought to heed Court and his successors and recognize that any policy change which increased the housing supply but kept prices constant would still have significant public benefits. If a city adds more units, that can be good independently of what happens to prices.

Let’s imagine, if you will, the NIMBY’s worst nightmare: A magic slider that allows a city planner to frictionlessly increase the number of units in a given area. Move the slider and you can instantaneously double the number of units in some local housing market, keeping the composition of housing characteristics constant. (I.e., if 10 percent of units were studio apartments before, 10 percent are studio apartments after the slider; if 5 percent of units rented for below $700 a month before, 5 percent of units rent for below $700 a month afterwards.)

If your understanding of housing markets has been entirely shaped by the foci of recent debates, then this magic device would appear utterly pointless. Sure, it increases the supply of housing, but by its very construction the slider has absolutely no effect on prices. In reality, though, this sort of adjustment would be miraculous.

As I highlighted above, one of the most important determinants of demand for housing is location. Really it’s location, location, location that explains why a mansion way out in the boonies costs a fraction of what an apartment in New York does, an observation core to the foundational model of modern urban economics. And what increasing the supply of housing in an area does, in addition to any price effects, is massively increase the number of options facing consumers in the housing market. (In economics jargon, it adds to their “choice set.”)

No one can move into a unit that is already fully occupied by another household. And while it is possible to reproduce almost all of the bundle of characteristics that define someone’s dream home just about anywhere in the world, construction companies, no matter how hard they try, cannot manufacture points in physical space.

But what a construction company can’t literally do, it can metaphorically do by increasing density. By providing more options at a specific location, increasing density grants more families the opportunity to live in a certain neighborhood. Increasing density lets more workers live within a reasonable commuting distance from their employers and allows more people to find a spot next to their preferred bundle of spatial amenities, like a lovely view of the Pacific Ocean outside their window. And every single one of the people who would choose to live in these more dense neighborhoods would have their lives improved.

Many of my colleagues here at UMass Amherst critique the standard economic model of a consumer as a “rational utility maximizer” but it is self-evident that when folks choose to make a major decision like buying a house, they choose to make the transaction that offers them the most benefit out of all options available to them that they were aware of. By which I simply mean that whenever someone chooses to rent or purchase a unit, that decision was invariably the best, most-preferred option for their situation.

So if someone moves into a newly built unit, then that unit must have better catered to their tastes given their budget than all of the other units out on the market while they were searching for a new place to live. The people who move into their old place must have decided that that now vacant unit was the best fit for them, and so on for the people who move into the unit left empty by that move. Supposing that that initial unit of new construction had never been built, ceteris paribus, the would-be resident and everyone else in that chain of movers would have been forced to move into a less preferred unit and been left worse off.

Every new unit that is built and occupied helps someone just by existing. On Earth-2, where the housing market is centrally planned by HUD and all prices are set in stone, building more housing still improves people’s lives.

Personally, I do in fact believe that dramatically increasing the supply of housing would lower rents. But the excessive focus on this one particular question has unfortunately resulted in an understanding of increasing the housing stock as an instrumental goal, as only a method to reduce prices. Meanwhile, a relatively neglected question of equal or greater import is how policy reforms can best increase the supply of units regardless of price effects. More eyes need to be directed toward the Center for Public Enterprise’s reports on housing supply tools or FRED graphs of housing starts, and fewer on the latest catchily titled op-ed about why YIMBYism won’t make San Francisco affordable.

America needs much more housing: Every day, renters and prospective homeowners across the country are forced to settle and spend their lives in subpar units. When YIMBYs and housing policy analysts are making the case for giving everyone more choices of where to live, price effects alone simply cannot fully capture the benefits of their proposals.

“No wonder Sen. Ossoff tried to save UNICEF – they are just as woke as he is.”

That’s how Alabama’s senior senator, Tommy “Coach” Tuberville, defended his vote against an amendment to protect federal funding for the United Nations Children’s Fund.

A 70 year old man, a member of the United States Senate, wrote in an official statement to the press that UNICEF “are just as woke as [Sen. Ossoff] is.”

“American tax dollars should go to building bridges and roads, improving education, and getting homeless people off the streets in the U.S., not indoctrinating kids about LGBTQ+ in Uganda,” he averred.

Tuberville did not join the 19 other Republican senators who voted for the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law back during Biden’s presidency. He did not sign the letter written by Republican senators earlier this month asking the Trump administration to unfreeze federal funds designated for public schools, including $68 million meant for Alabama. And he’s called beneficiaries of public programs “inner city rats.”

But evidently federal funding should really go to all of those programs Tuberville has consistently opposed, rather than “indoctrinating kids about LGBTQ+ in Uganda.”

Two years ago, Uganda made having sexual relations with a member of the same sex a crime punishable by life in prison. In cases of “aggravated homosexuality,” the death penalty is a real possibility.

Personally, I fully and earnestly believe international bodies should push back against laws that make loving the wrong person a capital offense. But UNICEF isn’t even doing that as far as I can tell.

Despite repeated Republican intimations to the contrary, like most major government programs UNICEF is essentially an open book. The organization maintains a public “transparency portal” which anyone with some spare time can dig through. It takes a mere matter of minutes to get a basic idea of where UNICEF’s money comes from, where it goes, and how UNICEF actually decides how much to send to any given country.

Looking at UNICEF Uganda’s page on the portal, you’d quickly see that the largest expenses—by far—are on childhood nutrition programs and investments in water and hygiene systems. And the “social and behavior change” programs seem to be primarily focused on combating teen pregnancy and child marriage.

But UNICEF’s most important (and most expensive) work isn’t in Uganda. It’s in countries like Sudan and Yemen, where millions of people are food insecure: the UN recently announced that 638,000 people in Sudan are “facing catastrophic hunger.”

According to a June report, UNICEF helped screen 1.3 million Sudanese children for acute malnutrition in May alone. Just in that month, UNICEF identified over ten thousand children with severe acute malnutrition, referred them to its outpatient therapeutic program, and gave 165,633 pregnant women “iron and folic acid supplementation.”

UNICEF is also responsible for vaccinating millions of children worldwide against life-threatening diseases. The CEO of UNICEF USA wrote in April that “nearly half the world’s children under the age of 5 count on UNICEF and its partners to deliver the vaccines that protect them from disease and even death.” UNICEF USA’s website claims UNICEF has “helped reach more than 760 million children with lifesaving vaccines since 2000, preventing more than 13 million deaths.”

According to that aforementioned transparency portal, the federal government is both the first and third largest donor to UNICEF. And the rescissions package Tuberville helped pass is going to cut the U.S.’ core contributions to UNICEF, totaling $137 million, as well as $5 million in additional funding for the Joint Program on Eliminating Female Genital Mutilation.

UNICEF’s executive director, Catherine Russell, put it plainly in a recent letter to Delaware senator Chris Coons:

“Our core resources are specifically designed to support the children in greatest need and whose lives are most at risk. These resources ensure that UNICEF can be on the ground before, during, and after crises. Indeed, UNICEF is often one of the first humanitarian organizations to respond to a crisis, providing life-saving support to vulnerable families. Simply put, we will not be able to provide needed services next year if our FY25 U.S. contribution is rescinded and too many children will suffer or die as a result.”

What was it that Tuberville said again? Oh, yeah. “No wonder Sen. Ossoff tried to save UNICEF – they are just as woke as he is.”

“Too many children will suffer or die as a result.”

“[UNICEF] are just as woke as he is.”

Please let those two phrases sit in your brain for a minute or two today. Think about what it means that nowadays members of Congress are evidently unashamed to say they voted against funding a program responsible for saving tens of millions of children’s lives on the grounds that it is too “woke.”

Think about the fact that voters are unlikely to punish politicians for these deadly cuts, or for the many, many people abroad who have died or will die because of the Trump admin’s deliberate mismanagement of foreign aid programs. And think about the 500 tons of emergency food that will become 500 tons of ash rather than go to help the victims of famine.

Back in 1965, UNICEF was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the year immediately after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. received that same award. I will leave you with an excerpt from the acceptance speech UNICEF’s executive director, Henry Labouisse, delivered that year:

“But to me, the great, the most important meaning of this Nobel award is the solemn recognition that the welfare of today’s children is inseparably linked with the peace of tomorrow’s world. The sufferings and privations to which I have referred do not ennoble; they frustrate and embitter. The longer the world tolerates the slow war of attrition which poverty and ignorance now wage against 800 million children in the developing countries, the more likely it becomes that our hope for lasting peace will be the ultimate casualty.

It is not just in those countries, of course, but in all countries, rich and poor alike, that we adults should constantly ask ourselves: is our society doing, or failing to do, all that is possible to equip our children with the weapons for peace? When our children grow up, will they have trained and informed minds, liberated from the old prejudices and hatreds? Will they trust their own civilization? Will they be prepared to trust and understand others? This is an area way beyond the mandate of our agency – but not beyond the probing of our own conscience, as individuals.”

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Here are a few articles that I’ve written for the Alabama Political Reporter recently:

• A summary of exhibits in the lawsuit over Alabama’s anti-DEI law

• An interview with the likely Democratic nominee for a seat on Alabama’s Supreme Court

• Another account of how the state may adjust to forthcoming federal cuts to SNAP

• And a write-up of Tuberville and Britt’s vote for the rescissions package

And, for good measure, I’ll also point out a piece or two from other places and other pens you might enjoy:

• Robin Wigglesworth’s interview of Steve Berkley for FT Alphaville

• Christopher Robbins on the Eric Adams “coordinated criminal conspiracy” lawsuit for Hell Gate

• And Jamelle Bouie’s interview of Charles Sumner biographer Zaakir Tameez for the New York Times

In 1917, Austrian sociologist Rudolf Goldscheid stated that “the budget is the skeleton of the state stripped of all misleading ideologies.” The next year, that phrase was snatched up and popularized by fellow Austrian Joseph Schumpeter in his pamphlet “The Crisis of the Tax State.”

Schumpeter added that “the spirit of a people, its cultural level, its social structure, the deeds its policy may prepare—all this and more is written in its fiscal history, stripped of all phrases.”

And “he who knows how to listen to its message here discerns the thunder of world history more clearly than anywhere else.”

At the time Schumpeter was writing, the First World War (or as he called it, “the war”) had scarcely ended and Austria was obviously mid socio-fiscal-political crisis. “The rich and powerful Empire of Austria-Hungary had in 1919 been broken in war and dismembered by peace as no other country has been in recent history,” wrote Arthur Salter in an article for Foreign Affairs a few years later. He added: “for three years Austria became the beggar of Europe.”

Thankfully the United States is no postwar Austria. Interest rates on U.S. Treasuries continue to steadily rise (see below) but we aren’t necessarily on the immediate precipice of economic disaster. Everyone seemingly still wants the dollar. And being downgraded by Moody’s is a bad sign but not the whole ball game.

Bafflingly, Congressional Republicans obviously recognize that fact. H.R. 1 is not a classic austerity budget: it cuts spending but Penn Wharton Budget Model estimates it’ll still increase the 10 year deficit by $3.5 trillion.1

And that deficit spending would all be used to finance massively regressive tax cuts, not investments in social or physical infrastructure. While working on an article for the Alabama Political Reporter last month, I spoke to three experts about the probable effects of the OBBBA as it stood at the time. Liz Hipple of the Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality called the proposed budget “a bill that takes from the many to give to the few and to the few that are already well off.”

Now, that is 100 percent true. The bill will take money out of the pockets of the poorest Americans while shoveling cash at the nation’s richest and wealthiest families.

But folks’ justifiable focus on how much the überwealthy will fill their pockets if the bill passes belies the real purpose of the budget. If the budget “is the skeleton of the state,” then Congressional Republicans are trying to remake America according to the way that Trump sees the world.

Just read what the vice president tweeted recently: “Everything else—the CBO score, the proper baseline, the minutiae of the Medicaid policy—is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions.”

The budget would increase funding for ICE by dozens of billions of dollars, while setting aside even more money for new detention facilities and even more for a U.S./Mexico border wall. Here’s Dan Moynihan with some comparisons:

“The ICE detention budget is larger than the total budget for USAID used to be. The ICE detention budget increase is larger than cuts in education, or for SNAP in the BBB. It is larger than cuts to NIH, CDC and cancer research combined.”

Those are the priorities about to be enshrined in the federal budget.

As the skeleton of the state will soon reflect, in Trump’s America 17 million people losing their health insurance is immaterial when compared to the ability to keep people in “Alligator Alcatraz,” the new compound of cages in Florida that regime toadies boast will be “Hell on earth.” Over 50,000 unnecessary deaths every year according to public health researchers? Immaterial so long as the state can get ready to deport American citizens. The same goes for the children who will go hungry as a result of cuts to SNAP. Immaterial.

If you’ve paid any attention to the consequences of the White House’s evisceration of USAID, you would already know they don’t care if kids starve to death, or have to grow up without their parents.2 As Tom Fletcher of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs put it, the international aid community has been “forced into a triage of human survival.” And a recent study published in The Lancet projected there will be 14 million deaths as a result over the next five years. So clearly kids dying is alright according to D.C. Republicans.

After all, to quote Senator Ernst, “We all are going to die.” So the Republican budget is just gonna make sure a lot more people die a lot sooner. Big deal, who cares.

But as a document “stripped of all misleading ideologies,” the budget also reveals what really does matter to Republican lawmakers, not simply the inverse. Children’s lives may not be of concern, but Republicans will evidently still move mountains to cut taxes for the superrich and keep nonwhite people out of the country.3

What else is new.

I for one cannot help but remain pessimistic about the future of the American polity. But with the federal budget about to be, in the Biblical words of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, “a covenant with death, and an agreement with hell,” I must remain hopeful that things can improve. That one day we may be able to examine the federal budget and hear the glorious news that “the cross is bending, the midnight is passing, and joy cometh with the morning.”

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Zohran Mamdani doesn’t think there should be billionaires.1 That’s what he said during a recent interview on NBC News’ “Meet the Press.”

And with how Bill Ackman, Michael Bloomberg, and John Catsimatidis have reacted to his candidacy, I for one can’t blame him. (He’s really been learning his billionaire ABCs.)

Now, the discourse after someone says billionaires shouldn’t exist typically devolves rather quickly to a discussion of incentives, that word which has long served as the universal sign someone fancies themselves an economist. This go-round isn’t any different.

See an exemplary post from Reason magazine reporter Billy Binion below:

Now, I am personally fairly skeptical increasing taxes on multimillionaires and billionaires would do all that much to reduce the rate of business formation, or even necessarily lead to enough capital flight to reduce total tax revenue (see Medlock 2024). Frankly, the number of people who would start a business if they knew they could make over $1 billion, but not if they could “only” make $999 million just seems pretty likely to be a big ol’ goose egg to me.

But let’s just leave the discussion of incentives for economists far smarter than me and more well versed in the relevant literature. Without considering public policy at all, should billionaires exist?

I’ll begin by making the following assumptions:

1. People have a right to ensure that they live comfortable lives.

2. People have a right to help their family live comfortable lives.

3. It is generally okay for someone to prioritize economic security for themselves and their family over other people.

4. An innocent person dying a preventable death is bad.

5. Helping prevent someone from dying is good.

   1. Addendum, if you can prevent someone from dying with negligible cost to yourself, it is actually bad not to do so. (Barring exceptional extenuating circumstances I won’t discuss here.)

   2. And saving the lives of many people is “more good” than marginally improving the life of one person.

Alright. Hopefully you don’t find those assumptions too egregious. So now let’s make use of a thankfully convenient “ripped from the headlines” example.

The numbers floating around seem to be that Jeff Bezos spent $500 million on his shiny new 417ft superyacht, the Koru, and $75 million on the “support vessel,” the Abeona. Yearly upkeep costs for both ships are reportedly in the ballpark of $30 million.

In the past GiveWell, the preeminent charity evaluator/aggregator, has typically estimated saving a human life has “an average cost between $3,000 and $5,500.”2

Taking the high end of that estimate to be (methodologically) conservative, the amount of money Bezos spent on the Koru and the Abeona could instead have saved over 100,000 lives.3

Purchasing those yachts was simply a monstrous decision. Without any reference to what Bezos did to get his hundreds of billions, my assumptions ought lead us invariably to that conclusion.

Now, I’m sure the Koru is a lovely vessel. After all, Architectural Digest contributor Elizabeth Stamp wrote that it has “three Jacuzzis and a swimming pool.” (Presumably so that when Bezos tires of one Jacuzzi but still desires those wondrous bubbles, he has a choice of where to go next.) But having the world’s largest yacht did not meaningfully improve Bezos’ life. If he’d instead bought a mere 260ft yacht for a piddling $75 million, I imagine he could host just as many Eyes Wide Shut-style bacchanals.

And the difference between that $75 million yacht and the $575 million super yacht and support vessel combo Bezos actually bought is very conservatively 90 thousand lives.

Consciously or not, Bezos chose between saving many thousands of people from needless, likely painful early deaths and getting to boast about having a real big ship. And he chose the ship. He is a monster.

Basically every billionaire, by dint of retaining their billions, makes the same choice every time they buy a new mansion or whatever else folks with more money than sense splurge on. (N.B.: There are some exceptions to this rule even though others have problems with billionaire backed philanthropy.)

“Aha!” My imaginary uncharitable interlocutor might now exclaim. “Americans are far wealthier than the vast majority of the world’s population, so doesn’t your argument imply that every American family should donate the vast majority of their wealth?” (The interlocutor has been here the entire time; they were just silent until now.)

Which is where I could simply point to assumptions 1, 2, and 3 before justifiably proceeding to ignore them. But to be more specific, I will concede that it seems perfectly reasonable to believe it is fine, good even, to save money and property up to some upper limit where you and all your loved ones can be assured that you will all live comfortably ever after. That threshold though is far, far, far below $1 billion.

Let’s say you become a multimillionaire with a sizable fortune of some $50 million following a ridiculously lucky streak in Vegas (don’t gamble kids). By being prudent and placing those millions in U.S. Treasuries, you could get an annual yield of somewhere north of 4 percent at the time of writing. So just by putting your fortune into Treasuries, which were essentially risk-free until recently, you would have a tidy annual income of some $2 million. Not shabby.

And assuming you have three children and a spouse all likely to survive you, your fortune could be split four ways upon your passing while still leaving all your immediate family independently wealthy (with individual incomes near the 98th percentile or so of the American income distribution).

Of course, the preceding thought exercise shouldn’t be taken to suggest that the average American oughtn’t donate far more of their income. Less than half of all Americans donate to charity and those who do only donate around 4 percent of their income according to one report. Plainly, the world would be in a much better place if non-impoverished families took some inspiration from religious practices and “tithed” ten percent of their income to effective charities.

But it hopefully helped illustrate that anyone would be able to ensure a more than comfortable life for themselves, their children, and their spouse with a twentieth of $1 billion. To accumulate and to hoard not just twenty times that $50 million fortune, but over seven thousand times as much—to take Elon Musk as of June 2025 as an example—when every additional five grand could have been used to save a life is a moral crime beyond comprehension.

In short, I don’t think we should have billionaires either. And you hardly need to be a socialist to believe so.

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If you haven’t been paying attention to the news as of late, this guy named Zohran Mamdani is likely going to be the next mayor of New York City. And he wants to set up a network of city owned and operated grocery stores.

The most infuriating responses to this proposal, in my experience, have been folks talking direct to camera with photos of empty shelves in the Soviet Union behind them. As I’ve pointed out to several people in personal conversations, the issue with Soviet food supply chains, believe it or not, was not retail establishments. And thankfully Zohran is not proposing that municipally run grocery stores should only sell municipally grown crops collected by municipally manufactured harvesters.

However, there have been a couple somewhat more thoughtful critiques. Joe Lancaster, assistant editor of the libertarian magazine Reason, recently penned a piece arguing past publicly run stores have largely been flops. Adam Lehodey put together a similarly critical write-up for City Journal.1

Near the end of Lancaster’s article, he claims that “government-run retail establishments are inherently less efficient than their private-sector counterparts.” He does not provide any evidence. (And no, pointing out that state liquor stores have intentionally higher prices and that a couple city-run grocery stores have closed in the past does not count. Especially when those cities only started running stores after every private company failed to make it pencil out.)

Lancaster also does not acknowledge, besides a mere mention that Zohran said so, that the municipal grocery pilot locations would be on city-owned land, obviating hefty NYC rent payments. Or that a network of municipal grocery stores might be able to benefit from economies of scale and volume discounts. Instead he holds up as a cautionary tale a town-owned store in Baldwin, Fl. that closed last year in large part because the costs of stocking the store were elevated as a direct result of its small size and volume.

Now, unlike state liquor monopolies, commissaries2 do lose money year after year. But they’re also tasked with providing significant savings compared to nearby stores. Frankly, given the quite thin profit margins for grocery stores, it would be a literal miracle if they regularly made a profit.

Because they operate at a loss, the Defense Commissary Agency covers operating and capital costs through two major sources: annual appropriations from Congress and a 5 percent surcharge on patron sales. Revenue from actual sales goes into a “Resale Stocks” account where it’s used to restock the stores. Despite this somewhat odd system, relative to one’s mental image of how a private grocery store might work, we still have numbers on how much DeCA sells and spends every year:

So with the over 200 commissaries across the United States raking in a total of $4.7 billion in 2024, operating expenses were around 31.2 percent of net sales. Operating expenses for Walmart, on the other hand, are pretty consistently just above 20 percent of net sales. Perhaps Lancaster was right.

But what looking at operating expenses as a percentage of net sales fails to take into account is that commissaries are supposed to sell their products at 25 percent below civilian market prices. Some quick back of the napkin math shows that if commissaries were selling the same volume but at normal market prices, their net sales would likely be more like $6.27 billion. And their operating expenses as a percentage of these adjusted net sales? Around 23.7 percent.

What with Walmart being rather notorious for how it treats its employees, I personally feel comfortable suggesting that small gap remaining in this one measure of commissaries’ and Walmart’s efficiency can’t immediately be attributed to some “public sector penalty.” I would also hazard that Walmart is likely much faster to shutter underperforming locations than DeCA. If either of those factors was responsible for a small reduction in “efficiency,” my question would simply be why does it matter?

In Lehodey’s piece for City Journal, he writes that one “customer chimed in to say that city-managed groceries would be ‘as well-run as the U.S. Postal Service.’” The USPS delivers “318 million mail pieces daily” for less than a buck an envelope. And despite a mandate to deliver mail to any address in the United States,3 packages and letters delivered by the postal service are overwhelmingly received on time. That’s why the USPS is consistently one of the most well regarded agencies in the federal government according to public opinion polling.

I sure hope that anonymous customer was right. Hopefully we’ll all get to find out.

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Here are some articles written by other folks to read:

• Jessy Edwards’ interview of Brad Lander for Hell Gate

• Sam Adler-Bell’s review of Buckley: The Life and The Revolution that Changed America for The Ideas Letter

• As well as Vikas Patel and Preston Mui on macro policy for Employ America

I’ve got some major pieces coming shortly, I hope, but nothing worth sharing just now.

The pseudonymous essayist recently argued in a short but incisive Substack post that the past decade is best understood as “the Age of Trump,” in the same sense that Andrew Jackson’s two terms became known as the Age of Jackson.

She explains:

“Around 40% of my entire life has been in the Age of Trump, and at this point we have to call it the Age of Trump, just as we had the Age of Jackson two centuries ago. Politics and American life have been polarized around him and remade in his image. The most essential question of someone’s political, social and cultural beliefs is if you are for him or against him, and it is rare to find someone who does not have an opinion on him.”

Over the last year, William McKinley has become the most common historical touchstone to ‘explain’ Trump, at least in my personal experience. That Trump’s monomaniacal obsession with tariffs as an economic panacea has led him to repeatedly claim McKinley made America rich is largely at fault.

But as Daniel Immerwahr notes in a recent piece for the New Yorker, “McKinley was not a businessman but a lawyer and a career politician.” Immerwahr quotes Timothy Shenk as saying McKinley “possessed a ‘titanic blandness’” and Robert W. Merry describing McKinley as a “sweet-tempered adjudicator.” Hardly a ready parallel to Trump.

During the first Trump term though, reporters and editors were calling up Andrew Jackson biographers and historians who could help explain his presidency. Trump still seems to have a personal affinity for Jackson1 but in 2017 and 2018 Steve Bannon’s influence made “Old Hickory” much more prominent.

Personally, I still believe that save for the tariffs Jackson provides the best historical parallel to the present Trump administration.2 Namely, both men thought themselves to be the true voice of the American people, essentially coronated by reelection as a Hobbesian Leviathan with the executive branch as their political body.

Trump and his appointees have repeatedly defended administration policy by declaring that the president has a mandate. For example, in a statement about the 3,000 arrests a day quota set by Stephen Miller, Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said that “we are delivering on President Trump’s and the American people’s mandate to arrest and deport criminal illegal aliens and make America safe.”

Even during the leadup to Trump’s second inauguration, the man began floating the idea of adjourning Congress in order to appoint his coterie of sycophants. (Given the weak moral character of our modern senators, this proved unnecessary.) And the unofficial official motto of DOGE, as featured on its website, is “the people voted for major reform.”

Trump’s electoral victory over Harris, the argument goes, was so large3 it is both antidemocratic to push back against his agenda and unnecessary to actually consult the legislature.

Jackson too viewed his more considerable electoral victory as a mandate capable of conveying immense power. Near the end of his first term, Jackson had vetoed the rechartering of the Bank of the United States, a decision Congress proved incapable of overturning. Upon his reelection, Jackson decided to unilaterally remove the United States’ deposits from the Bank of the United States and place them in state banks, in direct violation of federal law. Treasury Secretary William Duane, who had been reticent to break the law at Jackson’s direction, was removed shortly thereafter.

In a statement read to his cabinet on Sept. 18, 1833, and later seized upon by his political opposition, Jackson relayed that “Whatever may be the opinions of others, the President considers his reelection as a decision of the people against the bank.”

Jackson, like Trump, felt that his being granted a second term meant he rather than Congress embodied the will of the people.

Senator Henry Clay, the famed Whig from Kentucky, responded venomously to Jackson’s power grab, spending the next few months supporting the first and to date only censure of a president by the Senate. In a lengthy speech midway through December of 1833, Clay eviscerated the president’s statement to his cabinet:

“The truth is, that the re-election of the President no more proves that the people had sanctioned all the opinions previously expressed by him than, if he had the king’s evil or a carbuncle, it would demonstrate that they intended to sanction his physical infirmity.”

Jackson’s decision to remove Duane from office also spurred a furious debate over the scope of the presidential power to remove appointed officers from their posts. In Jackson’s response to his official censure for “assum[ing] the exercise of a power over the Treasury of the United States not granted to him by the constitution and laws,” he defensively claimed the Vesting Clause granted him the “unqualified power of removal.”

Today, Trump’s administration has similarly taken recourse to the Vesting Clause and the “executive power” as they have sought to cleanse independent agencies of Democratic appointees in contravention of “for cause” dismissal requirements.

The suit Trump v. Wilcox, which appears likely to end favorably for the president, began following his illegal removal of NLRB member Gwynne Wilcox and MSPB member Cathy Harris. In an April filing with the Supreme Court, U.S. solicitor general D. John Sauer opened with a reference to the Vesting Clause and called reinstating removed officers “a grave affront to the President’s ability to run the Executive Branch.”

I already tried to detail in a previous post how members of Congress during the New Deal sought to limit the president’s ability to remove select officials in the name of good administration. And I’m hoping to explain just how in flux this presidential power was during the first decades of the American republic in a to-be-written essay for Liberal Currents.

Given the narrower scope of this piece though, I hope it will suffice to say that as drafted the Constitution left the power of removal up for grabs. The first Congress eventually, after weeks of spirited debate, seemed to narrowly decide the president ought be able to remove those he appointed but much remained unclear.

Throughout the nineteenth century, Congress would repeatedly seek the ability to restrict the president’s purported removal power, with the most incisive critics arguing for a theory of congressional delegation. Unfortunately, Myers v. United States (1927) and to a lesser extent Humphrey’s Executor v. United States (1935) strongly limited Congress’ ability to guard the administration of the laws from presidential passions.

Jackson viewed and Trump views Congressional limits on their ability to say “you’re fired” as undemocratic checks on their hard-won power. Both men found in their reelection “proof” that their will and the will of the American people was one and the same, and that their whims could therefore justify extraconstitutional, anti-constitutional measures.

Today as in the 1830s, the president of the United States believes he, in the words of Daniel Webster, possesses “the especial guardianship of the constitution” and that his every action has been sanctified by a single election.

I am unable to disagree with Athena. We do live in the Age of Trump. The question is, where shall we find our Clay, our Webster? Who can still defend true republican freedom?

“Mr. President, the contest, for ages, has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power. Whoever has engaged in her sacred cause, from the days of the downfall of those great aristocracies, which had stood between the King and the people, to the time of our own independence, has struggled for the accomplishment of that single object. On the long list of the champions of human freedom there is not one name dimmed by the reproach of advocating the extension of executive authority; on the contrary, the uniform and steady purpose of all such champions has been to limit and restrain it.”

Excerpted from a speech delivered in the Senate by Daniel Webster on May 7, 1834.

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Here are some great articles from other folks to check out:

• Alex Bronzini-Vender on WelcomeFest for The Baffler

• Andrew O’Hagan on Joan Didion for the London Review of Books

• And E.J. Dickson on a conservative women’s summit for The Cut

And a couple things I wrote this week as well:4

• An op-ed on Tuberville’s Johnny-come-lately support for SNAP

• And another article about the probable effects of the OBBBA

Last month, secretary of state Marco Rubio told Congress that “no children are dying on my watch.”

He lied.

Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times put together a great article highlighting the names, photos, and stories of just two of the many, many children who have died as a direct result of the Trump administration’s cuts to foreign aid. If for some reason you still doubt children left without the antiretrovirals they need have died and will continue to die, read Kristof’s piece now.

We will not know the total death toll of the DOGE-led gutting of USAID and PEPFAR for years, maybe decades, but we already know children are dying painful, preventable deaths. When Rubio first paused PEPFAR, mere days after he was confirmed as secretary of state, he did so fully aware that many thousands, maybe millions, of men, women, and children would likely die in the coming months and years.

As I detailed at the time, since President George W. Bush created the program, PEPFAR had already saved tens of millions of lives, prevented millions of children from being born already infected with HIV, and greatly reduced the number of orphans in the world. UNAIDS projected last year that going forward PEPFAR would prevent “an additional 5.2 million AIDS-related deaths and 6.4 million new HIV infections” just between 2024 and 2030.

Achim Steiner, the outgoing head of the United Nations Development Programme, told the Financial Times last week that “literally overnight, clinics are closing, supply chains are disrupted and people are not receiving antiretroviral treatments.”

In May, Nuha Ceesay, the UNAIDS country director for Eswatini, said that “HIV testing services, the gateway to treatment, are now limited.” He explained that “stockouts of antiretroviral, lab test kits, and condoms are expected within months, and health worker layoffs are affecting service delivery and quality data collection.”

One UNAIDS report states that children born after their mother’s antiretroviral treatment was interrupted during the third trimester are 14 times as likely to be born with HIV. The agency is also worried about the horrifying possibility of a drug-resistant HIV mutating, which is more likely when people are missing doses or only receiving fractions of what they should be.

Here’s an exemplary excerpt from the latest report on the global anti-AIDS effort prepared by the secretary-general of the United Nations:

“Direct contributions from [the Government of the United States] amount to 33 per cent of HIV funding in countries supported by the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, and the potential withdrawal of the Plan poses a major risk. Many of those nations face high disease and debt burdens, which limits their ability to replace lost resources. While domestic contributions in countries supported by the Plan have risen by 38 per cent since 2010, they remain insufficient to fully cover the support provided under the Plan in a short amount of time.”

As even those somewhat sympathetic to America reducing its role in global health admit, like Hannah Johnson of the George W. Bush Institute, the countries the Trump admin cut off simply cannot afford to pay for the life-saving medications and preventative care we supported. That’s why Bush began PEPFAR in the first place.

Until recently though, those who don’t want to see millions dying in order to save the American taxpayer pennies a day still had a glimmer of hope.

The Trump admin’s first assault on PEPFAR and USAID was almost certainly illegal, a blatant violation of both the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 and Congress’ establishment of USAID as an independent agency. It was fueled by ridiculous conspiracy theories that USAID, one of the most Congressionally supervised and audited agencies in the federal government, had somehow been propping up the Democratic party for decades. It was justified by clear falsehoods, like JD Vance’s recent claim that only 12 percent of foreign aid actually went abroad.

So even after USAID employees were placed on indefinite leave, and food meant for famine relief began to rot in American ports, people could still hope that Congress might step in and get the flow of medicine and stars-and-stripes branded manna going again. Surely senators and members of the House would say something. After all, some of them had been working to define and defend America’s foreign aid programs for decades.

Instead, speaker of the House Mike Johnson just pushed a rescissions package through the House: H.R. 4. If it’s rubber stamped by a simple majority of the Senate, the evisceration of America’s foreign aid programs overseen by Musk et al. will largely remain in place.

Shortly after ramming a budget that will increase the 2025-2034 deficit by $3.0 trillion through the House, Johnson says we just have to let people abroad die easily preventable deaths so that “your taxpayer dollars are no longer being wasted. Instead, they are being directed toward priorities that truly benefit the American people.” So what would H.R. 4 actually cut?

First, H.R. 4 would claw back $500 million of funding for USAID meant to help reduce child mortality; support immunization and oral rehydration; help necessary health and sanitation projects; assist orphans; control HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, polio, malaria, and other diseases; and prepare for future global health threats. I guess money spent to save a child’s life is wasted.

It would officially cut US funding for the Global Fund, under the auspices of PEPFAR, by $400 million. Health news outlet KFF explains that America’s funding for the Global Fund essentially takes the form of a 1:2 match, so the cut appears likely to reduce total funding for global efforts to fight HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria by over a billion dollars.

As I mentioned in my first Substack post on the fast, then slow, death of PEPFAR in January, the average “landed cost of first-line ARVs” is just $58.97 per patient per year according to a 2022 State department report. Taking those numbers as a given, and assuming foreign assistance will decrease by $2 for every $1 the U.S. cuts, H.R. 4 would effectively reduce the Global Fund’s ability to help those with HIV/AIDS by over 20 million patient-years according to some back of the napkin math.

USAID’s operating expenses would also be formally cut by $125 million, reflecting the Trump administration’s illegal and unilateral effort to put the agency underneath the state department and Rubio’s official remit.

Other spending categories like international disaster assistance, which includes funding for the World Food Programme, and refugee assistance would face hundreds of millions in cuts as well. And, while less important than America turning its back on the world’s sick, hungry, and poor, H.R. 4 would totally kill federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.1

And in order to kill kids across the globe, to dry up the flow of life-saving food and drugs that costs the average American taxpayer virtually nothing but means everything to countless families abroad, Mike Johnson set to work herding cats. He managed to get Representative Don Bacon, R-Nebraska, who told the Times just last week that he wouldn’t vote for cuts to AIDS relief to vote for the package.

CNN reported yesterday that Johnson even engaged in some last minute haggling over SALT deductions in order to push the package over the finish line. Congressman Nick LaLota, R-New York, explained to the outlet that he “had some conversations with the speaker that raised my level of confidence that will put this and future issues in the right trajectory.”

Johnson proved able to convince 214 Republican members of Congress to vote to kill kids yesterday. Thankfully, there is still a slim but essential chance that the rescissions package might fail in the Senate.

If you live in a state with a Republican senator, call them now. Tell them you won’t vote for a murderer. Tell them children deserve to become adults, no matter where they’re born. Tell them what Jesus told his disciples: “whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.”

If you don’t have a Republican senator, consider giving to one of the charitable organizations trying desperately to fill in the gaping chasm left by the Trump administration. The charity evaluator/aggregator GiveWell has begun directing grants in response to US aid cuts. I donated $450 to them today and ask that you also give if you are able.

In January, I wrote that “Trump could choose to not make the United States a world historic monster, a creator of orphans sans parallel.” He did not so choose.

But Republican senators still have the chance to deny Trump’s wanton destruction of American foreign aid the imprimatur of Congressional approval. I pray that they do so.

Here are a couple articles I’ve written recently for the Alabama Political Reporter:

• An exposé of candidate for lieutenant governor Nicole Wadsworth lying about receiving a PhD from the University of Alabama

• And a breakdown of Tuberville’s first major campaign finance reports as he runs for governor

As well as a few odds and ends from elsewhere you should read:

• T. Christian Miller and Sebastian Rotella on Bukele’s deal with MS-13 for ProPublica

• Ezra Klein’s interview of former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert on his New York Times podcast

• And Anisha Steephen’s first piece on the IRS for Notes on the Crises

Last month, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority appeared to tee up overturning Humphrey’s Executor with its stay in the case Trump v. Wilcox, where National Labor Relations Board member Gwynne Wilcox and others are suing over being illegally fired by Trump.

The unsigned decision asserts that the president “may remove without cause executive officers who exercise that power on his behalf, subject to narrow exceptions recognized by our precedents” and suggests the NLRB and MSPB “exercise considerable executive power.” The Fed, on the other hand, “is a uniquely structured, quasi-private entity that follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States.” (Read Harold Meyerson for more on that.)

Justice Kagan, in her charged dissent,1 writes that “Congress created [independent agencies], though at different times, out of one basic vision. It thought that in certain spheres of government, a group of knowledgeable people from both parties—none of whom a President could remove without cause—would make decisions likely to advance the long-term public good.”

The legislation that would eventually be known as the National Labor Relations Act, or Wagner Act, was introduced by Senator Robert Wagner, D-New York, in February of 1935, although it was based on prior efforts.

Interestingly, the text of Wagner’s original draft (pgs. 2368-2371 of the Congressional Record, vol. 79) did not explicitly protect members of the NLRB from arbitrary dismissal. But it would have established the board “as an independent agency in the executive branch of the Government.”

And on March 13, 1935, Wagner told the House Committee on Labor that he “cannot urge too strongly that the National Labor Relations Board should be maintained as an independent agency of the Government.”

“For years lawyers and economists have pleaded for a dignified administrative tribunal, detached from any particular administration that happens to be in power, and entitled to deal quasi-judicially with issues with which the courts have neither the time nor the special facilities to cope. With such a tribunal in the offing, its integrity should be preserved,” he stated.

As thankfully preserved in the Congressional Record and assorted House reports, the 1935 debate over whether the NLRB should be an independent agency shows that in explicitly stating NLRB members should be protected from arbitrary dismissal, Congress was actively responding to Humphrey’s Executor and Schechter. Congress was self-consciously exerting powers it had used many times before by trying to maintain a degree of separation between the state’s levers of economic management and transient partisan whims. A separation now seemingly threatened by the Supreme Court’s majority.

In a rare in-person appearance,2 Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins argued before the House Committee on Labor that “the Board should be established in the Department of Labor” rather than as an independent agency (House Report No. 969), mainly on the grounds that it would be more efficient. While at first sympathetic, Congress would eventually reject that proposal following a spirited argument by New York Representative Vito Marcantonio (whom I will quote at length shortly).

Then chairman of the National Labor Relations Board3 Francis Biddle also critiqued Perkins’ argument, writing in a letter to the House committee that “where Congress has defined a policy and created an administrative board to carry out that policy, it has with marked consistency recognized that the board so created should be appointed for comparatively long terms of office and be free of control by the executive departments or by any particular administration” (ibid). Biddle explicitly compared the NLRB to the Interstate Commerce Commission, the FTC, the Communications Commission, and the Reconstruction Finance Commission, as well as the SEC and National Mediation Board.

On June 19, 1935, in a lengthy exchange before the House, Marcantonio defended the constitutionality of the NLRA from its conservative critics,4 namely Howard Smith of Virginia and John Hollister of Ohio. With A.L.A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, or Schechter, just decided and large swaths of the NIRA freshly unconstitutional, supporters of the NLRA faced accusations that it was similarly an illegitimate aggrandizement of the commerce clause.

And, with Perkins’ amendment to place the NLRB within the Department of Labor similarly before the House, Marcantonio had to argue, with frequent references to Congress’ past actions, that necessity dictated the NLRB be an independent agency:

“I should have thought that even without regard for the past history of the National Labor Relations Board and the testimony before this committee, both of which seem to me compelling upon this point, precedent alone would have induced the establishment of the Board as an independent agency. The Board is to be solely a quasi-judicial body: with clearly defined and limited powers. Its policies are marked out precisely by the law. That such an agency should be free from any other executive branch of the Government has been the recognized policy of Congress. Ready examples are the Interstate Commerce Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, the Communications Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the National Mediation Board, and agencies that are even less judicial in character, such as the Federal Housing Administration and the Reconstruction Finance Corporation.”

Reflecting the times somewhat, Marcantonio also explicitly argued that placing the NLRB under the Department of Labor would make people suspect it was biased towards workers’ interests, rather than being a neutral board capable of hosting impartial arbitrations and ruling against both companies and labor.

“It should be repeated that the National Labor Relations Board is to be purely a quasi-judicial commission. Its prestige and efficacy must be grounded fundamentally in public approval and in equal confidence in its impartiality by labor and industry. If the Board is placed in the Department it will suffer ab initio from the suspicion that it is not a court, but an organ devoted solely to the interests of laboring groups. Far from helping labor, this will impair the work of the Board and render more difficult the sustaining of its supposedly impartial decisions by the Federal court.”

And Marcantonio quoted at length from Humphrey’s Executor to make his case before his fellow members of the House. He plainly argued the Supreme Court had sanctified Congress’ ability to protect some members of the executive branch entrusted with quasi-judicial powers from arbitrary dismissal, and Congress needed to once again make use of that ability in this case.

Placing the NLRB under the Department of Labor, Marcantonio claimed, “invites the risk that under the Myers case the President might have the unrestrained power of removal of the members of the Board during their statutory terms of office, contrary to the intent of Congress.”

The amendment, first suggested by Perkins, to place the NLRB under the Department of Labor was rejected in the House by a vote of 48 ayes to 130 noes.

Later, when trying to reconcile the House and Senate versions, the representatives of the House championed this “amendment no. 7” to add the following sentence to section 3(a) of the NLRA:

“Any member of the Board may be removed by the President, upon notice and hearing, for neglect of duty or malfeasance in office, but for no other cause.”

The conference report of June 26, 1935 (excerpted below) is clear evidence Congress recognized that they were responsible for vesting the President with the power of removing certain officers. There is no hint of a Constitutional power of the president to dismiss any employee of the executive branch they wish, save for Jerome Powell.

If the Supreme Court officially overturns Humphrey’s Executor, or so enfeebles the precedent such that it may as well have been overturned, they will have again acted as partisans of the presidency against the legislature. And the country will be poorer for it.

Today, at every level the American economy is shaped, directed, and restrained by the federal government. At the start of the 20th century, during the Progressive era and the early years of the New Deal, as Congress set about drafting legislation that would remake the American economy, they recognized the forces they were playing with.

Hardly removed temporally from the heyday of Tammany Hall and the Teapot Dome scandal, politicians knew they had to head off open corruption. Members of Congress saw that the public bodies governing markets had to be apolitical and consistent for the invisible hand to properly function. Whether they were tasked with drawing up plans for the FTC, or the SEC, or the NLRB, prudent legislators sought to act as the Founders had and design institutions insulated from malfeasance.

Today, the Supreme Court’s majority evidently recognizes that fact, as their carveout for the Federal Reserve indicates. They have forgotten, though, that while the Constitution does vest the “executive power” in the president, the Founding Fathers did not give us a king.

As a simple reading of the Federalist Papers or the Constitution reveals, the legislative branch was always meant to be predominant, and the president’s authority inseverable from their dictates.

By making the president immune from prosecution for criminal “official acts,” and weakening Congress’ ability to check presidential whims, the Supreme Court is not defending the constitution. They are rewriting it.

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Back during my student paper days, one of the many hot takes I churned out just in time for a newsletter was the case against term limits. To set the stage, it was September 2023 and every week a new piece about Dianne Feinstein’s staffers-turned-puppeteers was going viral. Mitch McConnell had just frozen in the middle of two press conferences on live TV.

And my tongue-in-cheek response to those stories was: “If it takes ‘Weekend at Bernie’s’ing a literal corpse out onto the Senate floor to pass ‘Medicare for All’ or the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, sling that body over my shoulder.”1

Senators being senile doesn’t matter, I argued. What’s important is how they vote and the U.S. just doesn’t need term limit band-aids. It needs a “strong party” system.

This year, term limits have been in the news for a very different reason. Past me’s arguments about the ability of parties to whip votes and the need for serious electoral reform still mostly ring true, but aren’t quite as relevant to this iteration of the discussion.

However, as a flexible—one might say reflexive—contrarian, I’m still perfectly prepared to explain why presidential term limits are a bad idea too.

Per popular history, the two term precedent was first set by George Washington who, in the words of Lin Manuel Miranda, wanted to “teach ‘em how to say goodbye.” Washington’s farewell address, however, framed his decision to retire from politics as a personal one, not a choice grounded in political principle.2 Indeed, when term limits were actively considered during the Constitutional Convention, Washington had been an opponent.

In a 1788 letter to Lafayette, Washington explained his stance on the matter:

“There cannot, in my Judgment, be the least danger that the President will by any practicable intrigue ever be able to continue himself one moment in office, much less perpetuate himself in it—but in the last stage of corrupted morals and political depravity: and even then there is as much danger that any other species of domination would prevail. Though, when a people shall have become incapable of governing themselves and fit for a master, it is of little consequence from what quarter he comes.”

Fellow regular Liberal Currents contributor Pat Sobkowski argued recently that “Article II … has become a suicide pact.” I’ve written similar things myself, both for Liberal Currents and this Substack. So at first glance it just makes sense to put more checks on those power hungry enough to aspire to the presidency.

After all, the second Trump administration is plainly ruinous: simultaneously an authoritarian plot against America’s republican institutions and a massive grift. And much of the last four months was remarkably easy to see coming ahead of inauguration day. So I feel I can confidently state that a third Trump administration—were, God forbid, such a thing to become reality—would be even worse.

But, as the maxim goes, hard cases make bad law. People’s justifiable fear of a third Trump administration doesn’t mean antidemocratic checks on the ability of popular candidates to be re-elected are appropriate.

The public would do well to remember that the 22nd Amendment, which set the two term limit in Constitutional stone, was shepherded through the same Congress that passed the Taft-Hartley Act over Truman’s veto. The amendment was consciously intended to foreclose the possibility of a second Roosevelt and first seriously proposed as a campaign talking point by Republican candidate Thomas Dewey during the 1944 election cycle.3

More important than the 22nd Amendment’s specific history though is what Washington wrote in 1788: “when a people shall have become incapable of governing themselves and fit for a master, it is of little consequence from what quarter he comes.”

Our present two term limit evidently does not and cannot prevent the seizure of political power by far-right demagogues. Famously, when George Wallace was prevented from running for governor again by the Alabama Constitution’s restriction on consecutive terms, he simply had his wife run and win.

Term limits’ sole “merit” is that when the U.S. does have a genuinely popular president, like Reagan, Clinton, or Obama, the people are prevented from re-electing them as often as they may like. If we actually want to prevent tyrannies like those we have observed these past few months, the solution won’t be found in a technocratic, institutional mechanism like term limits.

Our salvation will have to be found in a recognition that as Alan Elrod, Jamelle Bouie, and, yes, myself have pointed out, civic virtue matters.

To quote Machiavelli, “these republics in which a free and pure government is maintained will not suffer any of their citizens either to be, or to live as gentlemen; but on the contrary, while preserving a strict equality among themselves, are bitterly hostile to all those gentlemen and lords who dwell in their neighbourhood; so that if by chance any of these fall into their hands, they put them to death, as the chief promoters of corruption and the origin of all disorders.”

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I’ve written a few decent articles in the last couple weeks, so I’ll actually lead this section with those:

• A sizable critique of Ross Douthat’s interview of Jonathan Keeperman, also known as L0m3z, published by Liberal Currents

• A piece breaking the news that Missouri Senator Eric Schmitt hired Nate Hochman also in Liberal Currents

• And a breakdown of how Trump’s proposed budget cuts would affect Alabama for APR

And if you’re looking for other things to read, check out:

• Jon Lee Anderson interviewing Lula for the New Yorker

• on gender and politics for Vox

• And Cornel Ban and Jacob Hasselbalch on indicative planning for Phenomenal World

The fight over a potential multifamily development on Phillips Place I wrote about last week is still trudging along.

On Thursday, over thirty people crowded into Northampton’s city council chambers ahead of the planning board meeting’s 7pm start time, with a handful more trickling in over the next hour and some more people tuning in over Zoom. I arrived maybe ten minutes early toting a copy of Garry Wills’ The Kennedy Imprisonment, a prudent choice given I would not end up leaving until over four hours later.

After ninety minutes spent discussing another multifamily development, and a slideshow of before and after visualizations of that project which rather resembled a “spot the differences” game, the board finally moved onto the Phillips Place proposal.

O’Connell Development Group was granted time to speak first, space they used to try to preemptively address the complaints they knew would be relitigated during the public comment period. Unfortunately for the developer though, albeit to photojournalists’ great delight, everyone looks guilty when surrounded by men in suits, even if those men are architects rather than lawyers.

Sarah Stine, ODG’s president, defended the company’s ongoing restoration of the St. John Cantius church and pointed out the zoning code doesn’t actually require the development have any parking at all. And, alluding to comments published by the Daily Hampshire Gazette, she spent much of her time seeking to address “concerns about who might live here.”

Dan, who rocked up to last week’s city council meeting in a Jaws tank top, a denim jacket, and yellow-tinted sunglasses, had told the paper that “this is going to be a wall of like 30 college students and 20-somethings staring at my 2- and 5-year-old kids. It’s creepy to me the way this is going to be in my face.”

“This isn’t student housing, but I assume some college students will live here,” Stine said. “This isn’t senior housing, but it is ADA accessible. …. Based on our market research, we have some guesses: Seniors, that’s been mentioned, who are downsizing who want to stay in Northampton; nurses, doctors, other medical professionals who want to work at Cooley Dickinson; young people in their twenties and 30s who are new to the area or saving to buy a home; people who work at the business in Northampton and right now have very limited options to live where they work.”

As for the rent levels, she noted that the company is “using $2,000 to $3,800 in our financial projections.” For studio apartments through two bedroom apartments, that may seem a tad pricy, but fairly solid evidence suggests the development would still help low-income Northamptonites through filtering and the general effects of an increase in supply.

The public comment period went much the same as it did the week prior, despite the planning board’s repeated pleas to avoid any complaints that were already submitted through the online comment system, or brought up by a previous speaker.

Residents of the neighborhoods, especially abutters, called the plan “this monstrosity,” an “egregious massive behemoth of a building,” and said it “is not infill, this is invasion.” (That last statement was repeated in a letter by H. Leslie Wolfe published by the Gazette.) One said the plan “looks like a jail to me” and the residents “feel like pawns in a rigged game run by the city.”

A sizable minority, if not a majority, showed up with flyers, posters, and cute, apparently homemade scale models.

City councilor Rothenberg also made an appearance to showboat in front of her constituents, gratuitously reminding the planning board that “the award of this special permit is totally discretionary, which is fabulous.”

“Please try to find the difference between a NIMBY and a community that really does want to be involved,” she beseeched them.

Unfortunately, that difference cannot be found. It does not exist. A NIMBY isn’t a mustache-twirling villain who is against homes being built anywhere — again, the clue’s in the name. Even a “community that really does want to be involved” can help contribute to our horrific housing crisis. Arguably, it’s those communities that are most at fault.

As Dan said over Zoom on Thursday, he bought his Phillips Place home in 2022. First built in 1856, public records show the property was recently appraised at a value of almost $870,000.

Documents available online through the Hampshire Registry of Deeds reveal the same building was sold just over ten years ago, in 2014, for $405,000. Even after accounting for inflation, that’s a more than 50 percent increase in price, or around 4 percent every year.

Now, Dan isn’t responsible for the price of the place he lives skyrocketing over the past decade or two. As his family bought the property near the tail end of that meteoric rise, he’s arguably a victim.

But everyone ought to consider what those numbers might mean, especially for lower-income renters.

One document prepared by the Pioneer Valley Planning Commission in 2006 shows there were already significant shortages of housing at almost every income level almost twenty years ago. A more recent report prepared by the commission in 2022 records that the “median rent [in Northampton] increased from $843 in 2010 to $1,189 to 2020,” an 18 percent increase after inflation adjustments. Only 940 units were added to Northampton that decade.

As I tried to make clear last week, I think many of the aggrieved parties might have legitimate grievances. But the issue with NIMBYism — and that is what all this is despite residents’ protestations — is that everyone has legitimate grievances when their neighborhood is going to change significantly.

As a homeowner, you spent far too much of your hard-earned money on your house and are planning to stay there for years, maybe decades. Of course you’ll be concerned when someone proposes a large development right down the street. “Think of the traffic!” you might say. Or perhaps you’re more worried about those rambunctious Smith College students carousing late into the night.

In the 1965 classic The Logic of Collective Action, economist Mancur Olson effectively transposed the classic public goods problem, where non-excludable and non-rivalrous goods are systemically underprovided by markets, to an analysis of large groups.1 Basically, Olson sought to show it can be individually rational for members of small groups to engage in some costly provision of a public good—like speaking at a city council meeting—but in a large group costs tend to outweigh the added benefits of contributing.

When everyone pushes back on new housing in their own backyard, while the people likely to benefit from new construction naturally fail to organize, all of those individually rational decisions compound together and end up freezing a city in amber. Rents continue to climb higher and higher while low-income families are forced out.

Near the close of the four hour meeting on Thursday, planning board member George Kohout said frankly that “we can’t get at the paucity of housing” through condos alone. He explained that the board has to prioritize “providing housing for people who live here and may live here in the future.” (By this point I was taking dictation on an old subscription form for The Atlantic that’d been stuck inside the book I had brought. My phone was long since dead.)

Responding to current residents’ concerns about neighborhood character, Carolyn Misch, the Northampton director of planning and sustainability, remarked that “it’s not out of character in the city to have these juxtapositions.” One planning board member noted there’s already a large multifamily development within ready eyesight of the currently empty lot. And board member Janna White quipped that “you can’t make a new old building.”

At least by my estimation, the board members clearly recognize that Northampton needs new housing, not just homes built before the Emancipation Proclamation was drafted, and that multifamily housing is a key part of meeting that need. But, with midnight quickly approaching, they still chose to put off actually granting the special permit request, asking that the developers put together a few changes to their plans for another meeting in late May. Actually breaking ground has been delayed for another month.

And even after being given this temporary respite, residents still left steaming mad, already putting the new meeting date in their calendars and presumably organizing new email chains.

As the meeting concluded, I overheard one man muttering that the board would “rubber stamp” the proposal, a sentiment he thankfully illustrated with a mimed stamping motion. “We feel totally abandoned,” another complained, and a man who repeatedly griped about a “sidewalk to nowhere” spat expletives as he left.

As H. Leslie Wolfe said in the Gazette, “Beware social engineers. Their plans always end in tears.” I do question though whether he realized while writing that letter that NIMBYs are as much social engineers as the planning department he meant to critique.

The best articles you might’ve missed are:

• Nic Johnson’s article about Trump’s trade war for the New York Review of Books

• Preston Mui on how to think about a slowdown in hiring for Employ America

• Julie Su on the latest from the Department of Labor for the American Prospect

• And Josh Eidelson’s long-form piece on the subminimum wage for Bloomberg Businessweek

And I’ve written a couple pieces recently as well:

• An article detailing Birmingham Starbucks workers’ accounts of alleged illegal unionbusting

• And a short piece about Trump announcing he would give a commencement address at my alma mater

Up here in the Northeast local democracy has a somewhat better reputation than it does in Alabama.1 Every American studies professor’s favorite French aristocrat, Alexis de Tocqueville, practically rhapsodized about the New England town meetings he witnessed while touring the then burgeoning republic:

“Town-meetings are to liberty what primary schools are to science; they bring it within the people’s reach, they teach men how to use and how to enjoy it. A nation may establish a system of free government, but without the spirit of municipal institutions it cannot have the spirit of liberty.” (Excerpt from chapter 5 of Democracy in America, originally published in 1835)

After all, even when de Tocqueville first arrived in the United States in 1831 the country was far too large for everyone to know their representatives in Congress, or even really to have the chance to talk to them. At the town or city level, though, citizens could still come together and do what they all wished they could do in D.C.: shout and laugh and clap at the people they’d elected, or even try to change their minds on occasion.

So, in a curious mood and with de Tocqueville’s words rattling around the back of my head, and more importantly still trying to put off starting the second econometrics problem set, I decided to attend my local city council meeting earlier today. And, as expected, I found firsthand evidence confirming what was already clearly shown by the rallies across the nation earlier this month: the body politic is angry. But if I’d been asked what they were angry about before tonight, I’d have been far off base.

Even accounting for the speakers eloquently decrying the war in Gaza and the liberal arts college students supporting a resolution in favor of a climate superfund—both of which I believe may be standard fare up here but would have been an arresting sight at a city council meeting back in the “Heart of Dixie”—the most emotionally charged topic of the day was the fate of 32A-170 and 32A-197, two zoning parcels on Phillips Place2 maybe a block from the center of town.

Just over a third of an acre combined according to Northampton’s GIS maps, the two parcels are currently zoned CB-Side, or “Central Business-Side Street District” in the somewhat arcane jargon of the Northampton zoning code.

O’Connell Development Group, after buying the St. John Cantius Church and surrounding properties in 2020, wants to turn the plots into a 5 story, 54-unit housing complex.

A Change.org petition presumably put together by one of the folks I talked to or heard speak earlier today has accumulated well over 200 signatures to “SAVE OUR NEIGHBORHOOD” in the last ten days. The petition complains, just like the participants in the public comment session, about shadows and how “most of the ground floor will be a parking garage, capacity 25 vehicles.”

And, you know, I might have felt inclined to complain about that too. After all, the area in question is just a couple minutes’ walk from the closest bus station or about ten minutes from the city Amtrak station, and one woman spent her two minutes of public comment talking about how lovely it is to bike in Northampton.

Then I decided to look up what the property looks like today. Right now, 32A-170 and 32A-197 are just one massive parking lot. Check Google Street View if you don’t believe me.

The folks talking at the city council meeting and the real nice petition they drew up (which notably doesn’t include any pictures of the actual site) are complaining that a new building replacing a parking lot would… have parking. That’s one of their ace-in-the-holes, an apparent rallying cry.

Observant readers may have noticed that you’re now a few hundred words into this post and I still haven’t mentioned the word I texted to my urbanist friend the second I overheard what people were planning to gripe about. As best as I can recall, none of the eight councilors who ended up voting against the dezoning said the word either. But it was certainly weighing heavily on the anti-development crew’s minds.

“This is not exactly what you would call a NIMBY community,” Councilor Rothenberg defensively asserted at one point. The Ward III city council member, Rothenberg was the strongest opponent of the development during the meeting, even appearing to gather the members of the public who came to oppose the project to discuss strategy at the close of the public comment period. And at one point she somewhat laughably referred to the proposed building, which looks just fine to me, as “something like a Soviet-style block building.”

I feel I would be remiss—albeit likely a somewhat better person—if I declined to note here that, before Rothenberg spoke, the man widely identified by the council as the person with the most legitimate grievance literally called for the development to not be built in his backyard.

“How this personally affects me is that I’m the abutter—directly right here, next to it—and my property will be in a perpetual shadow,” he explained to the council members with the help of a prepared visual aid. “This has emotional, financial, and environmental implications that are real.”

And yes, that one man’s house being in the shade would prevent him from installing solar panels on his roof. (It would not, however, prevent him from paying a couple more cents per kWh to participate in the Valley Green Energy program Northampton helped establish and receive 100% green energy through the grid.)

But larger buildings, multifamily buildings, are far better for the environment than single family homes, even if they are built on what was “a hawk habitat for many, many years” in Rothenberg’s telling. If Northamptonites3 in every neighborhood push back and fight tooth-and-nail against five story buildings, then unless we stop anyone from moving to western Mass., we’ll be seeing a lot more single family buildings. And that’d be far worse for the climate than a couple families being left unable to install solar panels and forced to buy green energy from Eversource instead.

If you’ve already read the article in The Atlantic I took the epigraph for this piece from, what I’m about to say won’t be a new concept to you: As the title of Demsas’ piece somewhat glibly relates, “community input is bad, actually.”

You see, my “day job” is being an economics TA for UMass Amherst. This semester, the students I’m helping teach are all working on group projects about local markets they care about.

Almost every single group elected to write about housing.

I’m teaching ECON 203, or intermediate micro, so most of my students have already been kicked out of the first year on-campus housing and into the western Mass. rental market. And, by and large, they’re all still so sore about that experience and how much they’re now paying in rent every month that they opted to spend this semester writing about the local housing market.

It sure seemed to me like every single person who lives on the same street as the proposed development came to the city council meeting tonight. At the very least, the Phillips Place crew thought so.

Do you know who didn’t come? Who could not conceivably have come because there is no way they’d ever know they had an interest in the outcome of this smallbore zoning dispute? The 54 individuals and/or families who might get to move onto Phillips Place in a couple of years if the project isn’t delayed or, worse, cancelled because of interminable community input cycles.

At one point during her lengthy comments on the proposed ordinance, Rothenberg referred to a submitted public comment that asked “if [the proposed development]’s not good for traffic, if it’s not good for this, if it’s not good for that, what is it good for?”

Well, it could be good for whoever wants a home in Northampton: maybe students who need a place to stay while studying at Smith or UMass or Amherst College, or families just trying to settle down in western Mass. And in my opinion that ought to be enough.

Before the sun set, anyone sitting in the city council chambers could have glanced out the window and seen McDonald House, one of the local public housing authority’s developments. I looked at it several times during the night’s proceedings. A 7 story building with 60 units, McDonald House was built in 1964. Some back of the napkin math suggests it has likely been a home to hundreds, if not thousands, of people in the more than fifty years since its construction.

One wonders if it could have been built today.

My favorite pieces of the last week or so are:

• Kim Kelly writing about the uncertain fate of the MSHA’s silica rule for In These Times

• Dan Moynihan on the death of Direct File for his Substack

• Ben Ehrenreich on nonviolent resistance in the West Bank for Harper’s

• Jamelle Bouie writing about Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s detention for the New York Times

• And Elizabeth Bruenig on the Natal Conference for The Atlantic

And you can find a couple other things I’ve written below:

• A detailed piece about what recent data about CHOOSE Act applications might mean for Alabama’s public schools

• And a write-up of an intra-Republican debate about whether Alabama should embrace crypto

Matt Bruenig published a fun little piece on the People’s Policy Project website last Friday preemptively dismantling conservatives’ claims that young men are not working because of Medicaid. As he put it: “man cannot live on doctor visits alone.”

Analyzing Current Population Survey data from the last two years, Bruenig found over 30 percent of the one-in-ten young men (20-25 years old) who aren’t in school or employed when they’re first surveyed will find a job at some point before they’re rotated out of the survey pool for the second and final time.

He didn’t explicitly look at whether Medicaid actually had any effects on job-seeking though. And I needed a somewhat compelling reason to put off doing research for a term paper.

So I spent an open Friday night in my 20’s downloading an excerpt of CPS data covering 2010 through 2019 and messing around in Stata. Specifically, I used the CPS’ Annual Social and Economic Supplement to determine whether people were actually enrolled in Medicaid and then calculated roughly the same measure Bruenig did: whether a young male respondent who was unemployed and not in school in month 1 found a job in survey months 2-8.1

And… I found that young unemployed men who weren’t in school and were on Medicaid were markedly less likely to find a job over the next fifteen months than young men in the same situation who weren’t on Medicaid.

The conservatives were right all along. Medicaid is really being taken advantage of by lazy twenty-something men who should be working in the factory or, better yet, the coal mines instead of playing on their Nintendo.

Time for the rending of liberal garments and gnashing of leftist teeth.

And by markedly less likely, I mean the odds were roughly halved: Around 34 percent of the young men of interest on Medicaid found a job at some point, compared to almost 60 percent of young men who weren’t on Medicaid.

So after doing some quick work to see if Medicaid expansion had any notable impact on job-seeking behavior (it didn’t, despite a ~50% increase in Medicaid coverage in states that expanded it), I emailed my initial results to Bruenig in the hopes he might have some thoughts.

He then helpfully pointed out something I was frankly embarrassed to not have already considered. That is, a lot of the young men who both make an effort to be on Medicaid rather than go uninsured and don’t have a job are probably disabled.

So I redownloaded a new CPS extract that included responses to questions about disability status.

In that extract, there were 990 men between 20 and 25 years old that recorded being on Medicaid within the last year and answered all 8 surveys. Just 317 of those men weren’t either in school or employed the first month they were surveyed.

Of those 317, only 209 didn’t report having a job during one of the eight months that they were surveyed. 100 of the 209 said that they have some physical or cognitive difficulty. 106 said they either have a health problem or disability “which prevents him/her from working or which limits the kind or amount of work.”

Only 83 said they didn’t have either some physical or cognitive difficulty or a disability or health problem that impedes working.

And out of those 83, a whole 49 of them did not either report looking for work or actually working within the last year. Then, after the 8 month pause built into the CPS, when those 49 men were surveyed again, only 30 reported being on Medicaid within the last year.

That’s just 3 percent of our initial sample of young men. Young, able-bodied men deciding to stay at home and play video games instead of going to college or finding a job aren’t the folks benefiting from Medicaid.

Medicaid beneficiaries are exactly the people the program is meant to help: low-income families, children2, people with physical and/or mental disabilities, anyone who has temporarily fallen on hard times, and those who have been looking for work but can’t find it.

If Republicans deliver on the House’s budget resolution and gut Medicaid, the people left unable to afford a doctor visit won’t be listless 21 year old layabouts siphoning up your tax money. They’ll be single mothers, residents of Rust Belt towns, and Americans of every age left struggling to pay their rent on minimum wage.

Just look at what’s been happening in Georgia.

Here are the best things I’ve read recently:

• Christopher Ketcham’s profile of a “livestock saboteur” for The Baffler

• Mark Chiusano on Zohran Mamdani’s media strategy for Politico

• And Jessy Edwards on NYC removing a landlord for Hell Gate

And a few things that I’ve written for the Alabama Political Reporter:

• A piece about the looming termination of leases for OSHA and MSHA offices in the state

• An article about the House Education Policy committee passing a bill to mandate putting the Ten Commandments in schools and expand the “Don’t Say Gay” law

• And a general write-up of Senate Republicans’ bonkers plan to avoid saying they’ll increase the deficit

The title of this piece shouldn’t be taken to mean I’m not proud of some—and on especially cheery days most—of the pieces that I’ve written. For whatever it’s worth,1 I received a national student journalism award for my columns last year.

When I say I do not write well, I say it in the same sense that I would say I do not rollerblade well. That is, I may eventually end up at my destination, but the journey is inevitably an uncomfortable one and passersby may receive the impression that something important is worse for wear after the experience.

This feeling of mine has not been much alleviated by significant practice: As a simple statement of fact, I write a lot.

Last summer, I wrote around ten pieces a week while interning for the Alabama Political Reporter, an output likely equivalent to a shorter book in total wordcount. While I was a student columnist for The Crimson White, I wrote a fairly hefty op-ed about every other week despite being neck deep in graduate coursework. That rate did not change much when I became the opinions desk editor. At present, I’m still writing two pieces a week for APR on top of the occasional freelance piece and Substack post as a hopefully competent PhD student.

Writing a lot (mostly) is hardly a characteristic only shared by bad writers of course. Two of my favorites, Jimmy Breslin and Mike Royko, were both “deadline artists.” That is, Harry Siegel aptly described Breslin as “a man who knew he was playing a numbers game and whose work mostly appeared inside of the following day’s fish wrap.” This Substack, its recent unplanned hiatus aside, is meant to be my living homage to the art that newspapers’ frequent deadlines inspired.

ChatGPT also writes a lot though. And my writing process isn’t that dissimilar from those black boxes.

My typical opinion piece begins with either a title or a single fact; one might call these prompts. It then snowballs in size, quickly becoming a considerable agglomeration of facts, quoted snippets, and hyperlinks evenly split between notebooks, Google Docs, and my brain.

Then, once I have my raw material, I doff my researcher’s cap and become—depending on my mood and my subject—a butcher, a surgeon, a modern Prometheus. The process of outlining then comes long after I have already decided what should go in the outline and, having already spent so much time researching, I’m typically loathe to cut a single fact. (To the distress of both my editors and, eventually, myself when I read someone else’s more economical column.)

And as my likening this process to butchery may suggest, it also tends to be more mechanical and practical than artistic. The overwhelming majority of my time drafting any piece is consumed by making sure each sentence does not surprise the reader who has just finished the last one. Perhaps five percent, if that, is actually spent refining my ideas or carving away at beautiful sentences.

Indeed, most of the sentences I’m proud of having “written” came to me entirely unbidden, oft ending up in the final draft essentially unchanged. (This is an experience that tends to occur as I’m on the precipice of sleep, necessitating a blind grasping for the notebook and pen, a flip of the light switch, and the sacrifice of another fifteen minutes of slumber.2)

All that said, it is perhaps to be expected that I remain pleasantly surprised my words have ever seen print. Thankfully, though, the assembly of this piece has also suggested potential ways to write in a markedly less Swedish style. Will I heed my own advice? The world would be better if more men did.

I have now written almost 700 words about the importance of brevity and my own torturous writing process. In order to not further embarrass myself, I shall conclude here.

If you’re interested in reading some articles with less navel-gazing, check these out:

• Liza Featherstone on Rep. Al Green’s protest at Trump’s joint address for Jacobin

• Christopher Robbins on Andrew Cuomo entering the race for NYC mayor for Hell Gate

• Hamilton Nolan on how TSA workers need to respond to the White House trying to scrap their union contract for his Substack

• And Josh Marshall on the DOD removing antisegregation clauses from their contracts for Talking Points Memo

For a couple examples of my fairly consistent output the past couple years, look at these recent pieces:

• A bit of news about the municipal election results in Tuscaloosa, Ala.

• A book review of Schlozman and Rosenfeld’s The Hollow Parties for Democratic Left

• And an op-ed about the University of Alabama walking on eggshells around UA YAF

And then Elon Musk posted that he’ll be rehiring Marko Elez, with the explicit encouragement of Vice President Vance.

For the unaware, Elez was one of two “DOGE” employees with read-and-write access to the Treasury’s payment system, according to stellar reporting by both Wired and Nathan Tankus.

And he was also spewing racist hatred on X under the nom de plume “nullllptr” recently enough that you might still have food in your freezer1 you bought while he was typing out that we should “normalize Indian hate.” Or that he was “racist before it was cool.” Or that he wants a “eugenic immigration policy.” Or that Congress should repeal the Civil Rights Act. You get the idea.

After Elez’s racist posts were discovered by Katherine Long of the Wall Street Journal, hardly a bulwark of liberal muckraking, he resigned on Thursday. Less than twenty four hours later, Musk was crowing on X about how “forgiving” Elez for being an vociferous bigot is “divine.”

The vice president of the United States of America was posting about how “stupid social media activity [shouldn’t] ruin a kid’s life” (Elez is twenty-five years old, three years older than I am) and he should just be let go after he’s rehired if he’s “a bad dude.” I guess thinking everyone who doesn’t have white skin is inherently worse than those who do doesn’t make you a bad dude in Vance’s book.

As I’ve quipped before, the affirmative action program for white men you would cross the street to avoid talking to is still ongoing.

But this whole fiasco alone isn’t really what sent me into a furious rage. Plenty of racists are working in the Trump White House. The guy who is apparently acting undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, Darren Beattie, spent his time during the Biden administration posting about how “white men must be in charge” and Black people need to be offered Air Jordans so they’ll get sterilized. And he too was fired for being a racist before accepting this latest promotion, albeit during the first Trump administration.

What really kills me, what grinds my gears, is how conservatives still claim that they are the true guardians of Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy. During Trump’s second inaugural address, a speech I already pooh-poohed in a previous post, he took some time to boast that his new administration will be carrying on King’s work:

“Today is Martin Luther King Day. And his honor — this will be a great honor. But in his honor, we will strive together to make his dream a reality. We will make his dream come true.”

And during the benediction that day, the crypto-hawking scam artist they introduced as a pastor essentially delivered a funhouse mirror version of the “I Have a Dream” speech.

Josh Moon, a columnist/newshound for my frequent employer the Alabama Political Reporter, made a pretty forceful case against Republican misappropriation of King’s legacy last month, in a piece published the morning before Trump would deliver those lines. New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie wrote about King’s real beliefs back in 2023, and there’s about five hundred articles in Jacobin explaining that King was a socialist.

But listen to Republicans and they’ll tell you with a smile on their face that the ongoing lawfare campaign against pro-diversity programs in the public and private sector2 is in service of King’s dream. And, as Moon wrote, “you know the quote” they’ll regurgitate at you if you disagree.

If you refuse to believe these obvious lies and just look at what the Trump White House has been doing, and what Congressional Republicans have been abetting, you’ll see a wholesale assault on the political order that the Civil Rights movement painstakingly won and on the popular consensus that we should try to avoid discriminating against people on the basis of their race.

One of the first official acts of Trump’s second term was repealing executive order 11246, which forbade discrimination by federal contractors and was issued by LBJ shortly after he’d signed the Civil Rights Act. The Trump White House brazenly boasted that this nullification was “the most important federal civil rights measure in decades.” (Perhaps even the most important measure since LBJ signed the EO they’d targeted.)

It’s been ~lost in the deluge of horrific news from D.C., but following one of Trump’s “anti-DEI” EOs, various federal agencies issued orders telling their employees not to celebrate things like Black History Month, Juneteenth, and, yes, Martin Luther King Jr. Day.3 In a decision that was (mostly) walked back after public outcry, videos about the Tuskegee Airmen were wiped from Air Force training courses.

Foreign policy is just as bad, even without focusing directly on the millions that may die as a result of Musk et al.’s assault on USAID.4 Secretary of state Marco Rubio is refusing to attend the G20 summit in South Africa on the spurious grounds that the theme, “solidarity, equality, & sustainability,” is woke and anti-American.

And yesterday, Trump signed an executive order citing a law passed by South Africa’s centrist coalition meant to address longstanding inequality in land ownership. The EO orders various agencies to “prioritize humanitarian relief” for members of the white Afrikaner ethnic group and “promote the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees.” At the same time, Tom Homan is preparing to deport the Venezuelan refugees who escaped Maduro’s regime en masse.

Whether you look at the Trump admin’s staffing decisions, their choosing to hire and rehire unrepentant racists like Elez and Beattie, or their policy decisions, they have formed a unified front against the progress America had seemingly made in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

Like Elez tweeted, Richard Hanania spewed forth in his recent book, and Charlie Kirk openly admits, they want to come after the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the consensus that white people aren’t better than everyone else by dint of their skin. White backlash is in the White House.

I will leave you with this excerpt from King’s fourth and final book:

“The white backlash is an expression of the same vacillations, the same search for rationalizations, the same lack of commitment that have always characterized white America on the question of race.

What is the source of this perennial indecision and vacillation? It lies in the ‘congenital deformity’ of racism that has crippled the nation from its inception. The roots of racism are very deep in America. Historically it was so acceptable in the national life that today it still only lightly burdens the conscience. No one surveying the moral landscape of our nation can overlook the hideous and pathetic wreckage of commitment twisted and turned to a thousand shapes under the stress of prejudice and irrationality.

This does not imply that all white Americans are racists— far from it. Many white people have, through a deep moral compulsion, fought long and hard for racial justice. Nor does it mean that America has made no progress in her attempt to cure the body politic of the disease of racism, or that the dogma of racism has not been considerably modified in recent years. However, for the good of America, it is necessary to refute the idea that the dominant ideology in our country even today is freedom and equality while racism is just an occasional departure from the norm on the part of a few bigoted extremists.”

And if you aren’t too depressed now to do anything except stare at the wall, here are some good articles from around the web:

• A host of reporters on Musk’s coup attempt for the New York Times

• Nathan Tankus’ ongoing coverage of the Treasury disaster for his site Notes on the Crises

• Jael Holzman on DOE contracts getting canned for Heatmap News

• And Michael Kinnucan on the illegality of political parties in the US for J.W. Mason’s blog

And a couple articles I’ve written recently:

• A piece about an Alabama bill that would make it harder to collect unemployment insurance

• And an article about the possibility the legislature will allow the Alabama overtime tax exemption to expire

The last couple weeks have not been very fun. (That may be an understatement.)

Jamelle Bouie, of New York Times and short form video fame, posted on Thursday that Trump’s second term behavior has only drawn him closer to the “republican” tradition:

Personally though, even though I’ve thought for a while that a reappraisal of virtù is overdue, I think recent events are a more striking impetus for a re-evaluation of the republican concept of arbitrary power.

Here’s an illustrative excerpt from Philip Pettit’s seminal paper “Freedom as Antipower”:

“Under the conception of freedom as antipower, I am free to the degree that no human being has the power to interfere with me: to the extent that no one else is my master, even if I lack the will or the wisdom required for achieving self-mastery” (578).

This aspect of republican thought is fairly obvious in the Declaration of Independence’s discussion of “when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism.”

But it’s also the clear throughline in Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. When Paine writes that “the rich are in general slaves to fear, and submit to courtly power with the trembling duplicity of a spaniel” and decries that the king has “such a thirst for arbitrary power,” a republican aversion is the motive force behind his quill.

This fear of arbitrary power is in part why a major goal of most any union contract is moving away from at-will employment to just cause. And it’s why one of the books I bought last month on my bimonthly trip to scoop up most anything related to American labor relations was titled Steel-Dictator.

Certain neo-republican theorists often section these “economic decisions” off from what they consider arbitrary power. For instance, Robert S. Taylor wrote an interesting article in APSR arguing that “the proper republican attitude toward competitive markets is celebratory.” Pettit claims that a dominating party “cannot just be a system, or network, or whatever,” and despite republicans’ oft debated coolness towards markets, Taylor’s interpretation of Pettit’s view is hardly without merit.

But as I’ve touched on previously, socialist theorists like Alex Gourevitch and William Clare Roberts have in their work focused on the economy and private ownership of capital as major founts of arbitrary power and unfreedom.

Note the conclusion to chapter 6 of Capital Vol. I: “He, who before was the money-owner, now strides in front as capitalist; the possessor of labour-power follows as his labourer. The one with an air of importance, smirking, intent on business; the other, timid and holding back, like one who is bringing his own hide to market and has nothing to expect but — a hiding.”

While I am personally sympathetic to this expansion of republican principles to the economy, and should probably reread Roberts’ book Marx’s Inferno at some point, arbitrary power is most widely and consistently viewed as a critique of specific, usually public, actors. And this interpretation is more than sufficient for a critique of the second Trump admin.

In the collection Republicanism and Political Theory, Quentin Skinner explains that circa the English civil wars, the main concern was that “by emphasizing its prerogative rights, the crown was laying claim to a form of discretionary and hence arbitrary power that gave it the means to undermine specific rights and liberties with impunity.”

Skinner’s recounting of the English republicans’ concerns is a remarkably apt description of events these past two weeks. Since Trump swore for the second time that he would “to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,” he has been utilizing the traditional deference given to the president to run rampant over the Constitution (by attacking the clear and specific meaning of the 14th Amendment) and Congress (by refusing to spend Congressionally appropriated funds).

Winning the presidency, in the mind of Trump and the conservative apparatchiks that collect checks from the Heritage Institute and Claremont Institute for their work justifying Trump’s whims, means the ability, the power, to run about yanking the wires out of the walls. To put a pause on millions of people’s access to lifesaving medicine. To shut down vital programs like Medicaid seemingly on a late night whim.

As Bouie highlighted in one of his recent columns, in 2019 Trump declared that he has “an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.” Now, 5 years later, unitary executive theory, while not identified as such, is being used to justify Trump’s attempts at impoundment and, presumably, Musk’s mucking around with the heart of the American fiscal system.

And the nation’s billionaires, from Bezos to Zuckerberg to L.A. Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong have all been “slaves to fear, and submit to courtly power with the trembling duplicity of a spaniel,” just as Paine wrote almost 250 years ago.

The second Trump administration’s primary project thus far has been gathering arbitrary power for itself, the ability to interfere with every aspect of American and international life at their own discretion. Centuries of republican thought provide both the cipher and a playbook for how to respond.

Here are the best articles that have been published since my PEPFAR piece:

• Vittoria Elliott writing about the kids running “DOGE” for Wired

• Jamelle Bouie on the OMB memo madness for the New York Times

• Nathan Tankus on the Treasury crisis for his site Notes on the Crises

• This Harris and Rogan focused excerpt of Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes’ forthcoming book published by NBC News

• And the interview of Zohran Mamdani by the “New York Editorial Board”

What I’ve written and had published recently:

• A somewhat hefty article on the shockwaves of the attempted federal funding pause in Alabama

And the books I’m reading (for fun) at the moment:

• Honoré de Balzac’s Droll Stories

• Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle

Government works. It saves lives. And when you stroll into the White House with a sledgehammer and start smashing away, people will die.

Early in 2003, George W. Bush, a couple years after stealing an election and a couple months before starting another pointless and bloody war, secured his place in utilitarian heaven. He proposed PEPFAR, the marginally catchier acronym for the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief.

“Ladies and gentlemen, seldom has history offered a greater opportunity to do so much for so many,” Bush told Congress. “We have confronted, and will continue to confront, HIV/AIDS in our own country. And to meet a severe and urgent crisis abroad, tonight I propose the Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief -- a work of mercy beyond all current international efforts to help the people of Africa.”

He continued: “This nation can lead the world in sparing innocent people from a plague of nature.”

A recent report from the State department to Congress on PEPFAR’s current status is unequivocal. The program has been a roaring success for the over twenty years since Bush announced it:

“Thanks to PEPFAR and our many partners, AIDS-related deaths globally have fallen from a peak of 2 million in 2004 to 650,000 in 2021.”

“In 2004, over 1.8 million new HIV infections were documented yearly across PEPFAR-supported countries; in 2021, in large part because of PEPFAR, new HIV infections per year have decreased by half” (4).

If you paid attention to Figure F, you would have noticed that the number of people on PEPFAR-supported HIV treatment has continued to steadily increase even as funding for the program has plateaued. That’s because the cost of antiretrovirals (the drugs used to treat HIV) has steadily declined over the past couple decades.

In 2003, Bush told Congress the United States had the chance to save lives because “the cost of those drugs has dropped from $12,000 a year to under $300 a year.” In 2022, the total cost per patient per year of “first-line” antiretrovirals was $58.97. It’s possible that this will continue to drop further.

Tens of millions of lives saved for the federal budget equivalent of dryer lint and pocket change.1 Millions of children who won’t enter the world already HIV-positive and almost incalculable second-order benefits.

The UNAIDS 2024 report records that “PEPFAR accounts for 72% of total donor government HIV funding globally.” The costs of ending the program would be correspondingly immense:

“Using PEPFAR results in 12 high-disease burden countries for 2023, projections indicate that between 2024 and 2030, PEPFAR will prevent an additional 5.2 million AIDS-related deaths and 6.4 million new HIV infections—including one million new infections among children—and prevent more than four million children from being orphaned due to AIDS. If PEPFAR was halted, projections show that numbers of AIDS-related deaths in these countries would increase by more than 400% by 2030 and the number of children orphaned due to AIDS could double” (199). [emphases added]

Yet, Apoorva Mandavilli of the New York Times reported on Monday that the “Trump administration has instructed organizations in other countries to stop disbursing H.I.V. medications purchased with U.S. aid, even if the drugs have already been obtained and are sitting in local clinics.”

Part of a larger freeze on all foreign aid, and as of Monday a freeze on all outgoing “federal financial assistance,” the pause on PEPFAR funding is a horrific testament to the Trump administration’s view of America’s role on the world stage.

There’s a decades old thought experiment popularized by the philosopher Peter Singer and still bandied about in the “effective altruist” community.2 Singer asks the participant what they would do if, on the way to a business event in a fancy suit, they saw a child drowning in a pond off the side of the road. Saving the child would of course ruin the suit and might make the participant late to the important meeting.

The expected answer is that the participant would hurry to save the child. And then Singer asks, what if the child is on the other side of the world? And you could still save their life for the nominal cost of that suit you voluntarily ruined. You should still do it, right?

By pausing PEPFAR, the Trump administration has rejected the fundamental premise of Singer’s thought experiment, the belief that moral actors should make negligible material concessions in order to save children’s lives.

If, as seems possible, PEPFAR is never revived, millions of people and children across the world will die for lack of medicine that costs the U.S. $59 a year. (Mandavilli writes that an email told federal employees PEPFAR’s data systems would shut down at 6pm on Monday, a poor omen for the program’s longevity.)

Of course, the Trump administration could still reverse course. Trump can choose to not consign millions of innocent people across the globe to needless deaths by telling secretary of state Rubio to resume disbursements for PEPFAR. They don’t even have to wait for the 90-day window the executive order pausing foreign aid created to pass.

With one single text message, Trump could choose to not make the United States a world historic monster, a creator of orphans sans parallel. The world is waiting.

This nation can still lead the world in sparing innocent people from a plague of nature.

Here are my favorite articles since my last post:

• Bentham’s Bulldog’s plea to save PEPFAR on his Substack

• Natascha Elena Uhlmann on the possibility of a pro-worker NAFTA for Labor Notes

• Matt Bruenig on the limits of corporate DEI programs for his site NLRB Edge

• And Will Kendall and Neil Warner interviewing Anthony Bogues for Phenomenal World

Something I’ve written recently (I really do have a lot in the works!):

• A piece about Alabama lieutenant governor hopeful Dean Odle’s 470+ page flat Earth manifesto

And finally the books I’m (still) reading:

• Harold F. Gosnell’s Machine Politics: Chicago Model

• Honoré de Balzac’s Droll Stories

In 1955, midway through Eisenhower’s first term as commander-in-chief, William F. Buckley Jr. drafted a mission statement for National Review and the movement of conservative intellectuals he was slowly building.

Most of the four page document is mere moral grandstanding about how brave the ‘50s conservative—and, almost explicitly, the National Review subscriber—is to oppose the New Deal and criticize the “Social Engineers.” But Buckley’s description of NR’s role in American public discourse remains easily one of his most quoted lines1:

“[National Review] stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.”

At the time, few people were opposed to the incredibly successful New Deal programs. A Whiggish view of history was the status quo. And as Nathan J. Robinson of Current Affairs fame writes, “Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican, famously declared that core parts of the New Deal reforms had built such a lasting consensus that they simply could not be undone.”

Over the following decades though, despite the stumbling blocks of Nixon’s loss in 1960 and Goldwater’s in 1964, the conservative movement, in frequent fits and intermittent starts, made progress in their fight to “repeal the twentieth century.” Beginning in 1981 bona fide conservatives had the reins of power in Washington for over a decade. By the ‘90s even the Democrats were willing to agree to work towards welfare “reform,” and snub labor by signing NAFTA.

A lot of ink has been spilled (and keystrokes entered) over the last ten years about how the American left could mimic the successes of the insurgent right. “Can the left have its own Tea Party?”, Geoffrey Kabaservice asked in the Washington Post back in 2018. More recently, many have begun to argue Democrats need to learn from Trump’s second victory by enthusiastically adopting populist rhetoric.

And the hosts of the phenomenal podcast Know Your Enemy muse every other episode about the lack of any left-wing analogue to the so-called “conservative welfare state,” the constellation of think tanks, magazines, and foundations ready to offer fellowships to any right-winger with a GPA above 3.3.

The real lesson Democrats should take from conservatives’ success is not to copy their alt-academia institution building or specific Congressional blocs though. It’s this: “Not one inch.” Do not give one single inch to the Republicans looking to remake the federal government in Trump’s image. And so far, this is a test almost every Democrat-in-office has failed.

Alabama Congresswoman Terri Sewell, who I actually canvassed for while president of the UA College Democrats, flip-flopped on the Laken Riley Act posthaste after Trump’s popular vote victory. When I reached out to her office while working on a piece for the Alabama Political Reporter, Sewell pointed to the homicide rate in Birmingham and said “undocumented immigrants who commit crimes should not be allowed to stay in our communities.” One still wonders why she felt differently just last March.

NYT columnist Jamelle Bouie and my friend and former CW takeslinger in arms Alex Jobin have both made eloquent versions of this argument. In a system where political parties were able to discipline their elected officials, you wouldn’t see unanimous support for Rubio’s ascent to secretary of state, or liberal senators wavering in their opposition to RFK Jr. (NB: Not a single one of Biden’s cabinet appointees received a unanimous vote.)

Beyond the mere tactic of intransigent opposition, a vein of conservative thought I have frequently found useful is those thinkers who become partisans of Congress against the imperial presidency. Offended by the anti-legislative sentiment of Wilson, and then the perceived excesses of (either) Roosevelt2, they’ll say that the powers of the president need to be curtailed.

For obvious reasons, these conservatives—in as much as they still exist—remain quite quiet at present. It is now time for Democrats to take up this particular torch.

In total opposition to the intent of the 14th Amendment’s Congressional supporters in 1866, the Supreme Court’s explicit ruling in U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark, and the plain text of the amendment itself, one of Trump’s first official acts was an attempt to abrogate a constitutional right by executive diktat. (One federal judge has since dubbed the order “blatantly unconstitutional.”)

Seemingly out of outright malice, the Trump administration has paused funding for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, a decades old program which has saved millions of lives for a fraction of one percent of the federal budget.

While families in California are still grieving those killed by the recent wildfires, and struggling to rebuild their shattered lives, Trump opines that he may require California to pass a voter ID law before sending out federal aid.3 (And suggests that he may dismantle FEMA entirely, leaving states on their own after horrific disasters.)

Most recently, he unlawfully fired “roughly 17” inspectors general without the requisite 30 days notice to Congress. Inspectors general, of course, being the nonpartisan watchdogs tasked with preventing fraud and abuse in federal agencies under the Inspector General Act of 1978. (A piece of legislation left over from an age where Nixon was still viewed as a crook and a monster rather than a victim of the liberal media.)

Before the Trumpism boom, the more erudite conservatives used to espouse a principle entitled Chesterton’s fence, named after the following parable:

“There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, ‘I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.’ To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: ‘If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.’”

I’d like to see someone argue that the Trump admin’s ongoing approach to governance reflects this principle. (Please try.) Birthright citizenship, medicine for those stricken with AIDS, emergency relief for the suffering, and independent oversight of federal agencies are all up on the chopping block with nary a second thought. Could Trump tell us the countless benefits of PEPFAR? Why a post-Watergate Congress felt inspectors general were needed or why states can’t deal with earthquakes and hurricanes on their own?

The most the more intelligent type of reformer can say is “if some of what they do is the wrong thing to do, but they shake government up in a way and maybe even pull some stuff out, we may be able to build back things that are kind of right-sized, the right-size procedures.” (Excerpted from Jerusalem Demsas’ interview of Jennifer Pahlka.)

Almost two hundred years ago, in 1838, a young Abraham Lincoln offered a moving defense of American institutions before the Young Man’s Lyceum in Springfield. His description of the “mobocratic spirit” and those who “having ever regarded Government as their deadliest bane, … make a jubilee of the suspension of its operations” is markedly reminiscent of recent headlines, but I’ll focus on his treatment of ambition for now.

Lincoln argued that the greatest threat to America was not foreign invasion4 but rather those who belong to “the family of the lion, or the tribe of the eagle.” Some “Alexander, a Caesar, or a Napoleon” who could never be satisfied by a seat in Congress or a presidency. The young lawyer explained:

“Distinction will be his paramount object, and although he would as willingly, perhaps more so, acquire it by doing good as harm; yet, that opportunity being past, and nothing left to be done in the way of building up, he would set boldly to the task of pulling down.”

As an advocate of a healthy welfare state and strong labor laws, I could hardly endorse the idea that there is “nothing left to be done in the way of building up” in America today, yet the general sentiment rings true. To a one ambitious and vain men, the Trump administration has begun pulling down all that has served the nation well for the past decades and centuries.

Musk wants DOGE to be his legacy, so he takes aim at the very agency that is responsible for collecting tax revenue in the name of fixing the federal budget. Ever obsessed with size and physical projection, Trump has already begun to prattle about expansionary wars in Panama and Greenland, to international horror.

The next four years, or at least the next two years, will not see any major progress at the federal level. Democrats’ goal instead must be to stop this stripping of the federal government for parts. This ongoing conversion of time-hallowed institutions into plaques and idols dedicated to the veneration of Donald J. Trump et al.

While many Americans may profess a belief the federal government should be reformed, that foreign aid should be slashed irrespective of the lives lost, Democrats must nevertheless choose to “[stand] athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.”

Well, there’s my case for a more conservative Democratic Party. Can I get my thousands of Substack subscribers and lucrative contract with The Free Press now?

Subscribe now

My favorite articles of the past week:

• Andy Craig on militant liberalism for The UnPopulist

• Steve Early interviewing Dan Osborne for Labor Notes

• Charles Kaiser interviewing Paul Krugman about leaving the NYT for the Columbia Journalism Review

• And Andrew Fedorov’s profile of Chapo Trap House for Vanity Fair

Another thing I’ve written recently (quite a few good pieces coming in the next ~week!):

• A profile/explainer of the three candidates running for Tuscaloosa’s District 1 city council seat

And the books I’ve been reading recreationally:

• Harold F. Gosnell’s Machine Politics: Chicago Model

• Honoré de Balzac’s Droll Stories

Only a handful of Americans will ever deliver a second inaugural address. This is primarily a consequence of that very small number of people who could be and are elected president: forty-five to date.

But it’s also a product of the difficulty of winning re-election. The almost impossibility of governing a fractious, continent-spanning nation for four years, and then convincing the American polity you deserve four more.

And, due at first to the precedent set by Washington’s retirement and now to the 22nd Amendment, every second inaugural address is delivered with the expectation of a forthcoming retirement. (And frequently an expectation of retirement from political life entirely.)

It may be this note of slight melancholy at the presumptive end of a career, or perhaps the implied reflection on years of leading a nation, that places two of these speeches amongst my favorite pieces of American oratory. Lincoln and FDR’s second inaugurals rest easy atop their pedestals alongside King’s “I Have Been to the Mountaintop,” Jesse Jackson’s address at the ‘84 DNC, and Debs’ speech awaiting his sentencing.

Lincoln’s first inaugural address, as historian Eric Foner relates in his book The Fiery Trial, was an appeal to American civic virtue crafted to keep the disintegrating union together. “Lincoln closed with an eloquent call for reconciliation, based on a paragraph suggested by Seward but reworked into a poetic conclusion to an otherwise impersonal speech,” Foner writes.

His second inaugural address was delivered after four years of bloody war. Compared to the first, it was terse and functional. Compared to the Gettysburg Address, it lacked odes to eternal values. Garry Wills believes (and I’m inclined to agree) that “it was precisely because he saw the staggering size of the problems that had to be addressed that he was setting a mood of pragmatic accommodation to each challenge as it came up.”

In the conclusion to his second inaugural address—likely the speech he was most proud of penning—Lincoln resigned the country to God’s will and dedicated the nation to a future mission of healing and peace he would not live to see through.

“Fondly do we hope ~ fervently do we pray ~ that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword as was said three thousand years ago so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’

With malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan ~ to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

Last night, on the eve of Donald Trump’s second inauguration and in a contemplative mood, I opened up my vinyl record set of Franklin Roosevelt’s speeches. (Infer from my owning a boxset of FDR speeches what you will.)

On the stump in ‘36, Roosevelt bellowed that the forces of organized money “are united in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred!” But that sentiment didn’t make it into his inaugural address. That division between populist and statesman emblematic of true civic virtue yet remained.

Riding a tremendous landslide into a second term, Roosevelt, like Lincoln, still struck a humble note:

“Today we reconsecrate our country to long-cherished ideals in a suddenly changed civilization. In every land there are always at work forces that drive men apart and forces that draw men together. In our personal ambitions we are individualists. But in our seeking for economic and political progress as a nation, we all go up, or else we all go down, as one people.

To maintain a democracy of effort requires a vast amount of patience in dealing with differing methods, a vast amount of humility. But out of the confusion of many voices rises an understanding of dominant public need. Then political leadership can voice common ideals, and aid in their realization.”

When compared to two of the greatest speeches ever drafted and delivered on American soil, Trump’s second inaugural address proved somewhat lackluster. Completely ignoring the buffet of lies and half-truths, his promise to stop the social engineering of “gender” by directing the executive branch to enforce traditional gender roles, and his warmongering over the Panama Canal, Trump’s address revealed a man still as unfit to occupy the White House as he was on that escalator.

The national vibes may suggest otherwise but his re-election was decidedly less sweeping than Lincoln or Roosevelt’s—barely one percent of the popular vote paired with a modest electoral college victory.

Yet neither Lincoln nor Roosevelt bragged about their re-election in their second inaugurals. Indeed, Lincoln opened his remarks with the muted statement that “there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the first.” Today Trump made sure to point to his “powerful win in all seven swing states, and the popular vote we won by millions of people.”

Lincoln and Roosevelt both beseeched the divine for guidance as they prepared to face the forthcoming trials of governing. Trump declared before the nation that he “was saved by God to make America great again.”

Where Lincoln and Roosevelt made powerful paeans to the sacrifice of the American people, Trump said he personally exemplifies the American dream. (Roosevelt almost exclusively used plural pronouns when describing his first term and plans for a second. Lincoln used first person only for a single sentence.)

In Federalist No. 68, Hamilton made the following argument: “Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union, or of so considerable a portion of it as would be necessary to make him a successful candidate for the distinguished office of President of the United States.”

Ha. To quote the selected epigraph, I hope the world has finally “realized this is a nation that might do anything.” To quote scripture, “forgive them; for they know not what they do.”

Here are some articles I’ve enjoyed lately:

• digressionsimpressions on Machiavelli and Althusser for his Substack

• Matt McManus’ review of We Have Never Been Woke for The UnPopulist

• Adam Gurri on resisting Trumpism for Liberal Currents

• And Jamelle Bouie on Trump’s McKinley obsession for the New York Times

A couple things I’ve written:

• An update on the state of the Laken Riley Act

• A synopsis of an Alabama cryptocurrency commission meeting

• And a piece about Biden’s statement on the Equal Rights Amendment

Plus a good book I read recently:

• Kenneth M. Stampp’s The Era of Reconstruction: 1865-1877

Economists love exogenous preferences. After all, being able to abstract away consumer desires sure makes model building easier. But—and before I say this, kindly prepare a soft resting place for your jaw—the real world rarely resembles ideal economic theory.

Friedrich Hayek himself readily pointed out how much real markets diverge from perfect competition: “Advertising, undercutting, and improving (‘differentiating’) the goods or services produced are all excluded by definition—‘perfect’ competition means indeed the absence of all competitive activities.”

Advertising in particular is a good sector to single out. Thanks Hayek.

Adbusters style paranoia is more than a little overblown, but the industry still enjoys significant stigma amongst those members of the left who view it as companies manufacturing desire for their products. (And not, as Hayek may have argued, the simple dissemination of information.) More interesting still, though, is the role of addiction in the American economy. At least to me.

It (debatably) remains unclear whether someone chooses to buy a Big Mac because the hundreds of millions of dollars McDonald’s spends on ads every year incepted them with new desires, or they always would have wanted a hamburger and the ads just let them know McDonald’s does in fact sell burgers. But we can say with some confidence that our society’s various addiction peddlers actually do manufacture consumer demand.

Within living memory no one in the States had ever heard of a “Zyn.” Now nicotine pouches are a multibillion dollar industry. And, according to one industry funded report, the average user burns through almost five cans a week.

The initial seed of demand for an addictive product may be internal to a consumer—needing to stay up to study, wanting to relax after a tough day at work, etc.—but typically most sales end up being to people who are hooked, in one sense or another. The products create their own demand.

Because of this peculiar quality, addictive industries (widely construed) have been a key part of American economic development, encouraging economic development, industrialization, and specific forms of agricultural production. In one especially filmic tale, Jimmy Hoffa used the Teamsters’ pension fund to bankroll the construction of modern Vegas. (Morgan Stanley moved the fund to a more conventional allocation in 1983.)

Before the dominance of a single national currency, distilled spirits served much the same purpose as gold, both “some lasting thing that Men might keep without spoiling.” Merchants and farmers in the early American economy relied upon alcohol both to facilitate trade in the cash poor West and to pay laborers.

Producing sufficient liquor for all these varied needs was one of the most essential and wide-ranging (geographically speaking) economic undertakings. W.J. Rorabaugh’s The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition, a short but dense volume, provides a neat summary:

“Distilled spirits had long played an important role in the American economy. Before the Revolution, molasses and rum accounted for one-fifth of the value of all goods imported from British possessions, and from Philadelphia northwards the distillation of rum from imported molasses was the leading manufacturing process” (61).

“A merchant might buy molasses in the French West Indies, ship it home, distill it, trade the rum in Africa for slaves, transport the slaves to the Caribbean cane plantations, and trade them for more molasses” (63).

Alcohol aside, the slaveholding South would boldly declare that “cotton is king” in the 1850s, but addictive tobacco was always a major plank of several Southern states’ economies (and a key consumer of slave labor).

According to the 1840 Census, the state of Virginia produced over seventy-five million pounds of tobacco, compared to just three-and-a-half million pounds of cotton. Nigh a century later, the 1938 Report on Economic Conditions of the South still recorded that “the farming South depends on cotton and tobacco for two-thirds of its cash income” [emphasis mine].

Taken in 1936, the photo I selected from the Library of Congress’ digital archives for this post is a nice visual reminder of the long historical tail of the tobacco industry in the South. On a personal note, as a kid I actually went to summer camps in an old tobacco processing plant.

Of course, alcohol and tobacco companies, while still significant political donors, constitute a somewhat smaller fraction of the economy than in their respective heydays. Paul Krugman, formerly of the New York Times and presently of the same website as me, has written a couple pieces recently about social media and gambling as the addictive industries of today.

I’ll recommend you read both pieces in their entirety (and subscribe to his Substack of course) but here are two key excerpts:

“So what’s a society to do when many people engage in an activity that is often self-destructive? Saying that it’s just a matter of individual choice is naïve; the assumption that people can be trusted to make their own decisions has a lot going for it in many situations, but it really breaks down when it comes to addictive behavior like heavy drinking and gambling.”

“How much damage will the national gambling epidemic do? We won’t know the full extent of the damage until those natural Ponzi schemes collapse, which they will.”

Krugman, like me, doesn’t believe outright bans are necessarily the way to go anymore, but does think we need much more regulation of these addictive industries. Regulations we are hardly likely to see, for reasons I’ve spelled out before, under a second Trump administration. (For a lightly pro-ban on social media case, see Katherine Alejandra Cross in Liberal Currents.)

One way or the other, if we’re going to address the social fallout of gambling, social media, and all the other addictive industries, we ought to start as soon as possible. We won’t see movement federally any time soon, but state politicians should shy away from legalizing gambling where they haven’t already done so (just raise taxes). Mobile gambling should be rolled back entirely. And maybe one place to start with social media would be changing platforms’ incentives by making it illegal to advertise to minors.

Here are some of the best articles I’ve read recently:

• Luis Feliz Leon on the drive to unionize BlueOval for Labor Notes

• Matt Peterson interviewing Karthik Sankaran for Barron’s

• Matt McManus on Pat Buchanan’s Hitler apologia for Commonweal

• And Christopher Robbins on congestion pricing in NYC for Hell Gate

As well as a couple other things I’ve written:

• A description of the latest lawsuit Alabama’s AG filed challenging environmental regs

• And a short piece about a successful union election in Tuscaloosa

A lot of problems in the U.S. stem from the simple fact that our politicians hate raising taxes. Maybe even as much as they love to take credit for cutting taxes.

The Social Security shortfall? Taxes are too low: The SSA recently estimated that “busting the cap,” or eliminating the taxable maximum, would slash the shortfall by 73 percent.

178,000 deaths annually from excess alcohol use? Taxes are too low: So-called sin taxes on addictive substances have repeatedly proved quite effective.

Too much traffic? You guessed it, taxes are too low: Congestion taxes that fund public transit could keep the streets clear for ambulances and help you commute.

This forosophobia—fear of taxes—leads to a lot of creative “solutions” to the problem that most government programs do in fact need to be paid for. And a lot of bad policy.

One example that’s really stuck in my craw is the recent cut to the grocery sales tax in Alabama. Well, more specifically, the tireless advocacy by the purportedly progressive Alabama Arise1 to cut the grocery tax.

Testifying before the state Grocery Tax Commission in 2023, Alabama Arise policy and advocacy director Akiesha Anderson said the grocery tax “impacts lower income Alabamians more harshly than it impacts higher income Alabamians.”

This, of course, is facially true. As household income goes up, the percentage of it spent on food tends to go down (see the chart below). But nominal household spending, the actual number of dollars and cents spent on food, goes up (again, see the chart below).

So, looking at it one way, Anderson was right. A grocery tax will consume a higher percentage of low-income households’ budgets than it would for high-income households. But looking at it in the way I’d advocate for, high-income families are transferring more dollars and cents into government coffers than poor families are.

In Alabama, the grocery tax was used to top up the Education Trust Fund. While poor families are somewhat more likely to have children under 18, and also more likely to send those children to public schools, the distributional impacts of the program are still a bit hazy.

So let’s imagine that instead of supporting the Education Trust Fund,2 revenue from the grocery tax was evenly distributed among all Alabama families instead. All of a sudden, that horrible “cruel tax on survival” (to quote one Alabama Arise report) would be remarkably progressive.

Using the BLS numbers that ERS chart highlighted again (God bless our federal data wonks), and assuming a 4 percent grocery tax on all expenditures covered by the BLS’ “food at home” category,3 here’s how the grocery tax-and-redistribute system would shake out:

• Households in the lowest 20 percent would pay an average of $148.80 in, and get $242.12 back (a net benefit of $93.32)

• Households in the highest 20 percent would pay an average of $367.92 in, and get the same $242.12 back (a net loss of $125.80)

• The average household in the second and third quintiles would also be a net beneficiary, and the average household in the fourth quintile a net contributor

Maybe the ruby red state legislature in Alabama wouldn’t brook this sort of food communism of course—I’m not actually holding a major grudge against Alabama Arise for engaging in the slow boring of hard boards. But cutting the grocery tax wasn’t a progressive measure just because poor families spend more of their income, as a percentage, on food.

Keeping the “regressive” grocery tax and distributing the proceeds in a wholly egalitarian manner would have been much more progressive than cutting the tax. In fact, the grocery tax was arguably already a net progressive program given the aforementioned distribution of public education needs.

You see, taxes are flows. That old “tax-and-spend” adage is an important reminder of what taxes actually are: ways to fund government programs, whether redistributive or public goods. If a given tax causes a lot of money to “flow” away from poor families, but even more money flows away from rich families and poor families are actually better off afterwards, it’s a progressive program overall.

And it’s almost too obvious to write out but if cutting taxes means leaving the government unable to afford an important program, a tax cut can hurt the purported beneficiaries.4

At the same time that anti-tax sentiment leads to tax cuts meant to help the poor which are actually worse than doing nothing, it also encourages horrific public policy proposals like legalizing gambling.

Keeping Alabama as my frame of reference, politicians there have repeatedly pushed in recent years to license new casinos, open a state lottery, and roll out the red carpet for DraftKings. I, as I’ve made clear before, think that this would be an awful idea.5

But the seemingly ironclad armor for advocates of legalizing gambling in Alabama is, as it has been in dozens of states, “think of the kids.”

Or, in the words of Democratic state representative Barbara Drummond: “I applaud all of those who voted for gaming, but was particularly gratified because of the money that would have been generated for education.”

Basically every politician who supports helping more Alabamians get addicted to gambling says they support it because legalization will help generate tax revenue and fund public schools. Which is, as Hank Green brusquely stated in a recent YouTube video, a “f—ing garbage reason.”

If Alabama politicians actually wanted to fund public schools, they wouldn’t have passed the CHOOSE Act, the state’s shiny new voucher program. Or, better yet, they would just raise taxes.

This 2023 report from the Public Affairs Research Council of Alabama more or less makes my case for me: “Since the early 1990s, when PARCA began this analysis of Alabama’s taxes compared to other states, Alabama has had the lowest or second lowest tax collections per capita among U.S. states.”

I won’t deny that at high enough rates taxes can have adverse effects like discouraging investment or reducing growth. But would Alabama going from being the state with the second lowest per capita taxes to “just” the tenth or fifteenth lowest ruin the state economy?

Per that same PARCA report, if Alabama collected as much in taxes per capita as Kentucky does, the state would have $2.2 billion more per year. That’s an awful lot of money that could be given to the state’s public schools, or used to increase state retirees’ pensions.

But because state politicians are so loath to raise taxes, every legislative session civically engaged Alabamians must endure the dog-and-pony show of debates over legalizing gambling.

Now, in blaming politicians for this particular brand of policy malfeasance, I’m not saying that voters secretly love taxes. It’s hardly a secret that most voters like seeing taxes taken out of their paycheck as much as a root canal—with me of course being the rare exception.

But I will say that tax saliency really matters. Lawmakers could (and perhaps should) raise taxes that voters don’t think about when they enter the voting booth. Think value-added taxes, employer payroll taxes, and so on.

I will say that publicizing and promoting what higher taxes help to fund matters. If a taxpayer sees that 4 percent surcharge on their receipt, but also sees all the billboards advertising the new school down the road, maybe their wallet doesn’t ache as much.

These spoonfuls of sugar might not be wholly sufficient to help the proverbial medicine go down, but politicians should at least give it a try. If any elected official is reading this, I, a voter, am begging you: Raise my taxes.

For the voracious readers, here are some articles by other folks that I really liked:

• Janet Bufton on liberalism and democracy for Econlib

• Jaya Saxena on the paucity of vegan options for Eater

• And Bryce Covert on universal pre-K in the Big Apple for New York Magazine

And here are a couple more things I’ve written recently:

• An article about Starbucks workers going on strike in Birmingham

• And a retrospective of sorts on my work for the Alabama Political Reporter in 2024