Interventionism

With Trump’s crony capitalism, the government taking equity positions in US businesses, and socialists making real inroads in the Democratic Party, it is hard to find defenders of free markets.

Washington is pursuing industrial policy again, this time being an attempt to form a minerals consortium with other countries to secure minerals vital to US manufacturing. No doubt, this initiative will end up on the ash heap of bad policy.

AI has created enormous demand for new data centers, and many communities do not want them nearby. The Rothbardian answer is not blanket permission or blanket prohibition, but a property-rights framework and the return of market forces that government policy has largely displaced.

Washington is pursuing industrial policy again, this time being an attempt to form a minerals consortium with other countries to secure minerals vital to US manufacturing. No doubt, this initiative will end up on the ash heap of bad policy.

Ryan McMaken argues that the American constitutional structure has become a suicide pact. It's a system that guarantees growing conflict and provides only one approved solution: more centralized power in Washington.

Bill Anderson offers a ground-level view of California's decline, arguing that the state's deep entanglement of government with water, energy, housing, and transportation has created a self-reinforcing system where every new crisis produces more regulation, more spending, and fewer productive citizens.

Connor O'Keeffe argues that California's wildfire crisis is not simply a climate story but a government failure story.

Chris Calton links California's housing crisis to three books published in the 1960s that spawned three ideological movements, each of which handed activists and bureaucrats new tools to block development and destroy private property rights one permit hearing at a time.

Peter Klein traces the ideological transformation of the UC system from a world-class research institution to a cautionary tale of government-subsidized capture.

"There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. It went by in the Night of Depression, singing songs to freedom."