Since the 1930s New Deal and the 1960s Great Society, the US federal budget has shifted from providing pubic goods to distributing transfers (in the form of both spending and lending) to favored groups, a continually metastasizing shift that has now created a federal budgetary and debt crisis. It has also allowed politicians to perfect the fine art of buying votes by awarding federal transfers to select voter groups as a means to winning elections.

Argentinian president Javier Milei recently snubbed the Spanish political class by visiting Spain and refusing to meet with any government officials, attending a rally of the opposition party Vox, and insinuating that the socialist Spanish president’s wife—currently at the heart of an anticorruption case—was corrupt. In retaliation, the Spanish president recalled his country’s ambassador from Buenos Aires.

The economist and social critic Glenn C. Loury has written a book sure to attract attention, but in what follows, I don’t propose to address what is likely to be the principal source of that attention. In Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative (W.W. Norton, 2024), Loury has offered an account of his life that reads like a romantic thriller. Readers in search of salacious gossip will find it in abundance.

Many small colleges are shutting their doors, and it is largely the fault of overexpansion, government protectionism, and bureaucratic infiltration.

In American culture, public schools are praised in public and criticized in private, which is roughly the opposite of how we tend to treat large-scale enterprises like Walmart. In public, everyone says that Walmart is awful, filled with shoddy foreign products and exploiting workers. But in private, we buy the well-priced, quality goods, and long lines of people hope to be hired.

Many people who appreciate free markets are hailing the recent Chevron decision. Striking down Chevron curtails the powers of many officials in regulatory agencies, but how does this really affect entrepreneurs and markets? There are two important things to note here. First, striking down Chevron didn’t remove any regulations from US industry, this ruling transferred powers to interpret regulatory rules. Second, there are two sides to regulatory capture.

Some libertarians argue that libertarianism requires support for “open borders,” but this is a mistake. “Open borders” is the view in the existing world of states, the state ought to admit as many people who want to come to the United States as possible. Of course, you don’t have the right to occupy property that is privately owned. But much of the property in the United States is “public,” which means that it is up to those who run the state to decide what to do with it.