What the French Protests Can Teach Americans

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, October 21, 2026

 

On Monday, France’s Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez admitted that police have “lost control” as some cities continue to see massive waves of looting and mayhem. Social media brims with images of stores being ransacked, cars burning, and mask-wearing goons running wild. In Limoges, the beautiful Hôtel de Ville was burnt to the ground.

 

But the chaos, as is so often the case, began peacefully. And many supporters and leaders of the protests have condemned the violence. I think that violence has more to do with France’s miserable record of assimilating immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East than with budget cuts. Call me cynical, but I don’t believe the goons pillaging Louis Vuitton stores are planning to resell the handbags to buy better school supplies or to bolster their teachers’ salaries.

 

The initial protests were about budget cuts, primarily in education. As allied groups joined in—socialist and communist parties, labor unions, etc.—the argument expanded to generalized complaints about France’s “austerity” policies. In short, they argued, as they have for generations, that the government should spend more on pensions and other entitlements.

 

The problem is that France can’t afford it. It’s borrowed money to pay for its lavish government sector for a very long time. It has run consecutive budget deficits—i.e., took in less than it spent—for more than half a century. In 1974, public debt was around 15 percent of GDP. Today it’s at 116  percent. Government spending now makes up 57 percent of the GDP (compared with 23 percent of GDP for the U.S.), and France spends three times as much on “social protection” —including pensions and family benefits—as does the United States, and more than any other country in Europe and the OECD.

 

Naturally, the blame for this sorry state of affairs, according to some supporters of the protests, falls on capitalism. Famous French economist Thomas Piketty says the country’s woes are the result of the state pursuing the “capitalist logic” of underinvesting in the public sector and undertaxing the wealthy. In terms of personal income taxes alone—France has massive payroll and consumption taxes as well—the top 10 percent of French taxpayers provide 74 percent of the revenue. The top 1 percent provide a third. France also has the highest corporate tax rates of any country in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

 

I’m hard-pressed to see how just a bit more taxing and spending will solve France’s problems.

 

I have real sympathy for the nonviolent French youth. Their economy is moribund in large part because retirees have a stranglehold on the state’s finances, consuming 14 percent of GDP. (Social Security and Medicare account for 9.4 percent of U.S. GDP. One reason education spending is so tight: A third of the education budget goes toward Education Ministry pensions.  

 

I don’t think retirees should be thrown to the wolves, but such a system is objectively unsustainable. Yet, in 2023, when French President Emmanuel Macron introduced reforms to bump the retirement age from 62 to 64, the resulting protests paralyzed the country (that modest reform was suspended last month). France is now caught in what economists call the “dependency trap,” producing too few workers to pay for the lifestyles of its older generations.

 

When protesters talk about feeling “hopeless,” what they often mean is that the gravy train will run out before they get to partake in it. I don’t blame them for being resentful, but it’s difficult to see how this is a failure of capitalism or “neoliberalism.” As Margaret Thatcher famously said, socialist governments “always run out of other people’s money.”

 

The most obvious answer to France’s problems is economic growth—much easier said than done, of course. The reason that’s so hard for France isn’t because the government is “unresponsive” to the people and their concerns., It’s because it’s too responsive. For decades, the French have demanded the economic policies that got them into this mess, and the government appeased them.

 

France is an outlier in its poor economic performance and lavish social spending, but its problems are recognizable across the West, including in America. The U.S. economy has grown twice as fast as France’s over the last quarter-century, but the demands for less “capitalism” from young Americans echo those protesting in Paris.

 

France has the sort of universal health insurance many insist would solve everyone’s problems here. It hasn’t spared France from political turmoil. Our own Social Security and Medicare aren’t far from insolvency, but demands for higher benefits and “Medicare for All” only grow louder.

 

The French canary in the coal mine is a good reminder that the best solution to some crises is to avoid them in the first place.

The EU’s Inexplicable Aggression Toward America’s Tech Industry

By Josh Hodges

Wednesday, October 21, 2026

 

Last month, the American AI company Anthropic reported that Chinese operators had circumvented its security safeguards to develop military software, including air-defense suppression tools simulating strikes on Taiwanese targets. Chinese AI labs have also siphoned off Claude’s capabilities to train rival models. Months before that, the EU sanctioned two China-based companies for their roles in cyberattacks across six member states. And in January, a San Francisco jury convicted a former Google engineer of stealing AI trade secrets for China’s benefit.

 

China is coming for Western technology, and neither the United States nor Europe can claim they haven’t been warned. The EU’s own sanctions show that its leaders understand the danger of an authoritarian adversary willing to hack and steal its way to technological dominance over the West and, ultimately, the world.

 

Given that threat, Europe has every reason to stand alongside the American companies that China is targeting. Instead, the EU increasingly treats those companies as enemies.

 

On September 21, Ireland’s Data Protection Commission fined Google, whose AI trade secrets had been stolen for China’s benefit, nearly $500 million over its handling of users’ location data under EU privacy rules. That came barely two months after the separate European Commission fined Google nearly $1 billion over its search rankings and restrictions on purchases outside Google Play.

 

European penalties against America’s leading technology companies now total roughly $18 billion, with Google’s alone accounting for nearly $12 billion. According to U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, the EU’s fines against Google account for “over 2 percent of the EU’s budget,” effectively making the company a larger financial contributor to the bloc than many EU member states. In late September, France’s Minister for Europe proposed using €4.6 billion in Google fines to cut what member states pay into the EU budget.

 

The rest of America’s technology sector is getting much the same treatment as Google. EU officials have already used the Digital Services Act to investigate how X moderates speech, while House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan has accused them of pressuring the platform to censor political speech the European Union disfavored. The European Commission ultimately fined X $140 million over its blue-check system, advertising database, and refusal to give them sufficient access to its data.

 

Similarly, Apple was fined $570 million by the European Commission over the App Store’s management of outside purchases, on top of a $2 billion penalty involving music-streaming apps the year before. Meta was fined another $228 million over its advertising model.

 

In June, the European Commission went further, preliminarily designating Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure under the Digital Markets Act — even though it conceded that neither meets the law’s quantitative thresholds. That move would subject both cloud services to European regulations backed by fines of up to 10 percent of the companies’ annual revenue.

 

Meanwhile, potential changes to the Digital Networks Act described in a leaked January draft raised the prospect of requiring American platforms to subsidize European telecom companies through “network usage fees.” Doing so would directly contradict the EU’s explicit promise in its 2025 trade commitment to the United States that it would not adopt such fees.

 

In its quest for “digital sovereignty,” Europe has become shamelessly determined to bleed America’s technology industry dry. Never mind that it’s targeting a democratic ally’s companies already under attack from China, or that these are the very companies whose technology European businesses and broader economy have depended on for years.

 

Even the commission has struggled to replace American technology with European alternatives. This summer the European Commission rolled out a “sovereign” backup to Microsoft Teams. Its staff kept using Teams. One official called the replacement “absolute shit,” Politico reported; another conceded that if American technology went dark, the U.S. would “instantly win the war.”

 

When Europe’s homegrown alternatives inevitably fall short, the fallback won’t be European; it will be a choice between America and China. Europe has a direct stake in keeping American companies strong, both for its own economy and for the West’s broader economic and national security.

 

Beijing, of course, isn’t complaining about Europe’s aggression toward U.S. tech companies.

 

Chinese state-owned outlets have praised the EU’s fine against X as evidence of the bloc’s willingness to confront major technology companies. They’ve also characterized European investigations into Google and Meta as flashpoints in the transatlantic relationship and described the bloc’s technology disputes with Washington as “a new focal point of transatlantic conflict.”

 

But Beijing’s support for that scrutiny disappears as soon as Chinese companies are involved. Any EU proposals to remove or even investigate high-risk Chinese suppliers are framed under the same media apparatus as “naked protectionism” and “unreasonable suppression.”

 

Beijing clearly wants European markets open to Chinese companies and European regulators occupied with American ones. And its state media is perfectly willing to encourage the fights that help make that possible. All the while, Chinese operators will keep trying to hack into and steal from companies on both sides of the Atlantic. European leaders should recognize whose interests they are serving. Burdening American companies gives their Chinese competitors more room to advance, while the resulting disputes give Beijing more opportunities to divide the allies.

 

Europe has another reason to reconsider its approach: The United States still holds substantial advantages in the global AI race. American firms drew $286 billion in private AI investment last year, 23 times China’s total, according to Stanford’s 2026 AI Index. The United States hosts roughly three-quarters of the world’s AI computing power; China, about 15 percent. And where Chinese labs have closed the gap, they’ve often done it by copying: According to Anthropic, a single Alibaba campaign used fraudulent accounts to generate more than 151 million exchanges with Claude between May and July this year to train its own models. China’s frontier is, in no small part, built on the back of America’s technology and innovation.

 

The EU claims to understand the danger of Chinese technological dominance. It cannot expect to prevent that outcome while relentlessly penalizing the American companies best positioned to compete. Each new fight with those companies is another opening for Beijing, and Europe has already given it far too many.

Eurozone Crisis 2.0?

By John Gustavsson

Tuesday, October 20, 2026

 

Although the unrest in France is unlikely to grow into another French Revolution, it could in retrospect prove to be a pivotal moment in triggering the next eurozone debt crisis. French bond yields have risen sharply in the middle of a global bond selloff, and the difference between French and German yields are now greater than at any point since the early 2010s. Other eurozone countries, largely untouched by the crisis 15 years ago, are now also in the danger zone. One thing is clear: Another eurozone debt crisis would not look like the first one.

 

The eurozone crisis of the early 2010s followed the global financial crisis of 2008. The trigger varied by country: Ireland and Spain saw collapsing housing and credit bubbles, while long-standing fiscal problems and fudged numbers resurfaced in Greece. During the boom years, the common currency delivered an artificially strong euro and unusually cheap borrowing to countries that had previously faced higher interest rates and frequent devaluations of their pre-euro national currencies. When the crisis hit, these now over-indebted countries were unable to set their own interest rates and depreciate their currencies, as they no longer had their own currencies. Rising sovereign yields threatened bank balance sheets (many of which held large amounts of domestic government debt), prompting bank bailouts that further increased public debt and deepened the spiral. Portugal, Spain, Ireland, and especially Greece lost normal market access.

 

Facing the risk of contagion that could destroy the currency altogether, the European Commission, reinforced by market interventions by the European Central Bank, orchestrated a series of bailouts funded by the vehicles underwritten by eurozone members and the International Monetary Fund. The eurozone was saved, but underneath the surface, structural problems remained.

 

Though countries such as Ireland staged a strong recovery, in much of continental Europe, growth remained sluggish and deficits remained stubbornly high. The EU’s rule against deficits above 3 percent of GDP continue to be ignored, with France’s deficit running over 5 percent for the past three years. Neighboring Belgium is doing about as poorly, with Italy only slightly better. Less indebted but still vulnerable countries include the likes of Finland and Slovakia. History suggests that investors, if forced to reevaluate one formerly safe haven (e.g., France), will soon take a much closer look at others.

 

Some American observers have noted that French debt-to-GDP and French ten-year yields are still below American levels. This, however, is cold comfort: America can sustain a higher level of government debt on account of the dollar’s status as the global reserve currency. Also, and while this is far from a get-out-of-jail-free card, technically, the United States cannot be forced to default, since its debt is issued in a currency that it prints. This is not true for France, or any of the other countries that use the euro.

 

A debt crisis is not by any means a sure thing. What is sure, however, is that such a crisis, were it to happen, would look very different than the one during the early 2010s.

 

To begin with, a debt crisis would realistically require Thatcherite welfare and tax reforms. Whereas the first eurozone crisis was first and foremost a financial crisis caused by an unsustainable surge in cheap credit overheating peripheral eurozone economies, a new crisis would be a truly economic crisis caused by a decade or more of accumulating structural issues: a loss of competitiveness causing a long slog with little economic growth resulting in little growth in tax revenues, combined with an aging population and an underemployed migrant population. The recent French riots, though not explicitly in response to cuts, have reminded French — and European — politicians of just how dangerous public anger can be, especially coming from the aforementioned immigrant population. France has only implemented modest tightening, and there has already been serious trouble. No doubt this will make many policymakers hesitate to support broader reforms.

 

The upcoming French presidential election in April next year does not make it easier. The two candidates most likely to make it into the run-off are Jean-Luc Mélenchon, from the far left LFI, and the populist right National Rally’s Marine Le Pen. The former has indicated he would partially default on France’s debt, even openly mocking the idea of “reassuring the markets.” Of the two, Le Pen would be the better alternative, but even she has so far resisted calls to raise the retirement age, even suggesting she may lower it back from 64 to 62, or even down to 60 for certain groups. She does promise other spending cuts, but these may not be enough — even if she’s able to pass them at all.

 

Second, this crisis would be different because France, in particular, may just be too big to fail. In the aftermath of the eurozone crisis, several measures were implemented to prevent a repeat: The European Stability Mechanism (ESM) is supposed to provide funds for countries in financial turmoil but does not have anywhere close to unlimited resources, and conditions would be attached. Outright Monetary Transactions — the purchase on the secondary market by the ECB of the short-term bonds of a country in trouble — is another backstop, but again this is supposed to have fiscal conditions attached to it. Aiding a country flagrantly violating EU deficit rules would make a mockery of those rules and would encourage others to ignore them, setting the stage for future crises.

 

An important distinction between the 2010s crisis and what might be coming is that the Greeks and Irish were genuinely concerned that, if they did not yield to the EU’s harsh demands for austerity, they might be kicked out of the club. The French, on the other hand, know that the club does not exist without them in it. Does that mean that France will get off scot-free? Not so fast.

 

Nobody in Germany requested an encore. During the last crisis, the Alternative für Deutschland party (AfD) — then known as a “professor’s party” with a strong, classically liberal strain — was formed to oppose the bailout of Greece and other troubled member states, arguing that Germany should cut its losses and let them fail. The AfD remains a broadly euroskeptic party, and if another debt crisis occurred, and Germany once again agreed to bail out other members of the eurozone, it just might strike a definitive deathblow to the country’s political mainstream — and even more so if a hypothetical French, Belgian, or Italian bailout didn’t come with the tough conditions imposed on Ireland and Greece last time around. These countries were effectively placed under administration, with years of national budgets having to be approved by an unelected troika of the European Commission, the ECB, and the IMF. France is not a country that likes being pushed around (and it’s not too keen on living within its means, either, having run a budget deficit every year since 1974). French voters might very well prefer default to subjecting themselves to troika rule.

 

The ECB, having assured investors that the eurozone crisis was a one-time thing, would find its credibility seriously questioned. It could drastically lower interest rates to try to ease the burden on France and other troubled nations, but as always this would come with the risk of higher inflation. With inflation already on a steady upward trend since this summer, and with several countries more worried about inflation than deficits, this balancing act will only get harder.

 

Making matters worse politically is the fact that the European Union has explicitly endorsed deficit spending for the purpose of rearmament. During the first half of the 2010s, military spending was on the chopping block as European policymakers looked for easy cuts to balance budgets. For geopolitical reasons, that won’t be an option if another debt crisis kicks off, but convincing voters to accept continued rearmament while slashing social welfare will still be a hard sell.

 

Brussels has also encouraged heavy government spending on decarbonization. Without expensive subsidies, tax credits, and government investment into green sectors, the EU’s already unrealistic climate goals would be completely out of reach. Unfortunately, the sunk cost is too great: Too many industries and too many jobs have been lost, and too much political capital invested in the transition, for Brussels to turn around and say, “Forget net zero, save your economies.” After all, a debt crisis is nothing compared with an uninhabitable planet — which is what Brussels has told Europeans is at stake if they don’t go green.

 

In 2012 the message from Brussels was a simple “Don’t spend beyond your means,” something voters, however much they hated austerity, fundamentally agreed with. This time, the message would be far more muddled: “Deficit spending is bad, except for in these areas which we in Brussels deem worthy.”

 

On top of this, the EU is planning to raise membership fees. While the hike, if passed, is not going to be anywhere close to a main deficit driver, it will present an easy political target (“Why is the EU getting more, while our retirees and unemployed receive less?”), further hurting the EU’s credibility with ordinary Europeans.

 

How it ends is hard to predict. Wealth taxes, which most of Europe already abolished for good reason, would almost certainly stage a comeback as left-wing populism surged. Eurobonds — joint bonds issued by the eurozone — were first discussed during the first eurozone crisis. The proposal was revived during the Covid-19 pandemic, and such bonds would certainly be hotly debated once again.

 

Supporters of EU centralization will argue that the problem is the EU’s lack of authority to directly intervene in the day-to-day fiscal affairs of its member states, that if Brussels had the power to force countries to raise taxes or reduce spending, national budgets could be balanced. Euroskeptics will, in turn, point to the growth-hampering bureaucracy imposed by the union to make the case that Brussels already has its fingers in too many pies. The skeptics are right, but “less EU” is only part of the Thatcherite package that Europe will need to get out of its low-growth, high-debt slog.

 

A debt crisis is not inevitable. Though bond yields have risen, no eurozone country has lost market access. If the next French president, likely Marine Le Pen, were to rise to the challenge of taking on France’s entrenched interests and win, this may even provide political cover and embolden other European leaders to follow suit. Otherwise, markets will eventually, like in the 2010s, force Europe to do what its leaders will not. To quote the words of the economist Herb Stein, “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.”

France: Debt and Disorder

By Andrew Stuttaford

Sunday, October 18, 2026

 

Writing about the growing market jitters over the state of France’s finances in the Wall Street Journal earlier this month, Stacy Meichtry and Chelsey Dulaney pointed to, among other factors, “concerns that France has become so ungovernable that its political system can no longer take corrective action.”

 

News of the disorder in Paris and other French cities, let alone the images of the destruction of the town hall in Limoges, over 200 miles southwest of the French capital, will not ease those concerns. The trouble may have begun with protests over school conditions, but the scale of the disturbances that have ensued are, to say the least, evidence of profound dysfunction and are hardly likely to encourage the current French government to cut back on spending.

 

Five-year French sovereign credit default swap spreads (essentially the price paid to insure against a French default) have soared recently to around 80 basis points, against just over 30bp in late August. This is the highest they have been since the ebbing of the eurozone crisis (during which the spreads were as high as 250bp). Even at 80bp, the expectations of a French default are still very low, but the movement in the price of insuring against it is worth noting as another indication of deteriorating market sentiment. The yield on France’s benchmark ten-year OAT (government bond), which has been rising, as have yields elsewhere, since the beginning of the Iran war, started to move up sharply in August and has now reached 4.8 percent, the highest level in over 20 years.

 

Given the state of France’s finances, that’s not helpful. France’s government debt stands at around €3.6 trillion, meaning that it has a debt/GDP ratio of around 120 percent. Its budget deficit is about 5.4 percent, far above the “rules-based” eurozone stipulation of 3 percent. Cutting that further (it has been falling since the pandemic peak) is a feat that may elude the weak minority government now in place in Paris.

 

Moreover, as the WSJ’s Meichtry and Dulaney explain:

 

France has more than $1 trillion in debt coming due by 2030, and next year is set to sell a record of about $380 billion in debt into a market where once-reliable sources of demand have evaporated. France’s central bank is no longer buying government bonds and is instead letting its portfolio shrink as bonds mature. Once-steady investors like Japanese asset managers have also stepped back. Hedge funds that have stepped into the void have been burned by the recent volatility.

 

Oh yes, there is a French presidential election next year, for which the frontrunner is Marine Le Pen of the populist-right RN. She has said that she wants to reverse (or more) the leisurely planned increase in France’s pension age to 64. Meanwhile, at least until the current riots, her most likely opponent has been Jean-Luc Mélenchon of the far-left LFI. If that changes on the back of the LFI’s “association” (perceived or otherwise) with the drama playing out in France’s streets, Le Pen may face a less divisive opponent. In all other respects, it is hard to imagine that she has not been helped by the current disorder.

 

France, of course, is in the eurozone, meaning that a French debt crisis could spread elsewhere through a currency union distinguished mainly by shoddy construction and economic illiteracy. Heading off, to use the dread word, contagion will be something that Brussels and the European Central Bank will be intent on doing. The way things are headed, their ability to do so may soon be put to the test.

The Rise of Dumb, Anti-Innovation, Job-Saving Laws in Blue Cities and States

By Jim Geraghty

Sunday, October 04, 2026

 

Our James Lileks laments the City of Minneapolis requirement that self-driving cars have a $31.50/hour nondriver sitting in the driver’s seat, even though they are not driving the car:

 

You expect that they will find new ways to protect jobs threatened by societal advances. Think of all the entry-level pump jockey jobs lost! When people were permitted to refuel their cars on their own! The city should require all gas stations to have someone stand by every pump, doing nothing. After a year at this position, they will be eligible to be promoted to stand by the electric car charging stations, doing nothing.

 

Oh, James! Let us turn our eyes to the Garden State of New Jersey, where pumping your own gas has been illegal since 1949. Raised in New Jersey (Exit 10), I never learned how to pump gas until well into adulthood. Then, while stopping there many years later, I got out and started pumping my own gas like a regular Billy the Kid outlaw until the attendant rushed out and made me stop. Heaven forbid I do something I’ve probably done hundreds of times in other states!

 

Why does New Jersey still require “pump jockeys”?

 

The exact role of a pump jockey is outlined in the New Jersey Retail Gasoline Dispensing Safety Act and Regulations, in which they describe a pump jockey as someone who pumps gasoline and prevents others from pumping gasoline. They are generally minimum wage jobs, earning 16 dollars an hour.

 

The ban is enforced with fees which are primarily intended for gas stations in violation. For pumping your own gas, the first offense ranges from 50 to 250 dollars. There is a 500 dollar fine for each subsequent offence. Attendants, themselves, will also act to prevent consumers from pumping themselves.

 

The primary motivation to keep the ban in place has been to protect jobs and provide a better service. There are estimated to be about 7000 gas station attendants employed in New Jersey. Lifting the ban would cause the loss of these low requirement jobs.

 

If a local or state government could ban assembly-line robots, automated telephone switchboards, automated teller machines, online shopping, self-operated elevators, and pinboys (the folks who used to reset pins at the bowling alley by hand), they would do so.

 

I was going to add banning self-checkout to the list of ridiculous ideas, but California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, and Washington have contemplated legislation that would require a balance between employee-operated and self-checkout stations, a certain number of employees per self-checkout station, and/or stricter limits on the number and types of items that customers can bring through self-checkout. (This is an anti-shoplifting effort.)

 

Rhode Island passed its law; starting January 1, 2027, any grocery store in the state that provides self-service checkout stations must have a ratio of one manual checkout station for every three self-service stations. Heaven forbid we let the grocery stores decide for themselves! Heaven forbid we allow customers to decide which option they want to use!

Unstatesmanlike Statesmen

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, September 28, 2026

 

A few years ago in Switzerland, to which then I was giving some serious thought to relocating, a local asked me about my view of Swiss politics. I said that when it comes to Switzerland, I am a conservative. He asked if this meant I thought well of the Swiss People’s Party, the Swiss vessel for the kind of rightist populism currently resurgent elsewhere in Europe. I replied that what I meant was not that I favor the political right in Switzerland but that I am conservative in the sense that I like Switzerland the way it is, and, more to the point, that I am conscious of the fact that Switzerland got the way it is with very little input from slightly disreputable American journalists over the course of its now nearly seven and one-half centuries of existence. Schweiz für die Schweizer may be a right-wing slogan (and everything sounds more right-wing in German, even Swiss German), but the underlying sentiment—that Switzerland is for the Swiss—is one that Swiss people of many different political persuasions will voice, from time to time, usually politely.

 

I think a little about the story about how Secretary of State George Shultz would direct newly appointed ambassadors to a globe and say, “Show me your country,” at which point the freshly elevated diplomats would invariably point out the country to which they were being dispatched. “No,” Schultz would say, tapping his finger on the United States: “This is your country.” I could live happily in Switzerland or Italy or France, but none of those is my country.

 

In the United States, the au courant expression on the right is “America First!”—never mind the ugly history of that particular phrase. (“Switzerland for the Swiss” also echoes antisemitic campaigns from the 20^th century.) But the notion that America is for Americans, first and foremost, ought not be controversial—for whom else should it be? I would think that a reasonably intelligent right-wing populist and a reasonably intelligent democratic socialist (a double dose of question-begging there, I know) could agree in a general way that U.S. policy regarding immigration or military deployments ought to be conducted with an eye to U.S. interests—even the few genuine advocates of an open-borders immigration policy typically argue that this policy would be good for the United States rather than argue that the United States has some kind of moral duty to present itself to the world as a kind of global public resource. Nationalist ideology is not a prerequisite for a policy oriented toward national interest.

 

Nor is nationalism per se necessary for understanding that relations between citizens of the same country are different from relations between those citizens and foreigners—and it should be understood that different is a value-neutral term: I feel differently about Americans than I do about Canadians or Mexicans or Japanese, and that is not exclusively in a positive way. We have different countries for a reason, and we have different kinds of interpersonal relationships for a reason, too.

 

Which brings me, first, to Benjamin Netanyahu.

 

I do not follow internal Israeli politics closely, but I would say that I am better disposed toward Netanyahu than most of my friends and colleagues. I have friends who follow Israeli politics very closely and who are dauntless and long-standing friends of Israel who believe that, whatever his merits and whatever good he may have done in the past, Netanyahu has overstayed his time. These are questions for history, but what I am interested in here rises barely, if at all, past the level of etiquette: I did not care for Netanyahu’s coming to New York City to lecture the mayor of that city, Zohran Mamdani, about his political views. Yes, Mayor Mamdani has imbecilic and morally unsound views when it comes to Israel, and, yes, the United Nations is notionally outside of the United States under the extraterritoriality agreement attached to its founding, but as anyone who ever has sat through a traffic jam caused by a meeting of the General Assembly could tell you, the United Nations is in New York City, whatever some piece of paper somewhere says. The Israeli prime minister is a guest when he visits New York City, and he should act like one. The U.N. is a forum for diplomatic exchange, but that is not what Netanyahu was offering. Netanyahu was campaigning.

 

The episode illustrates a strange aspect of politics in our time: A generation ago, the proverbial wisdom was that all politics is local; for a minute or two, it appeared to be the case that all politics was national; and now, all politics—or at least a lot of politics—is global. In spite of the fact that New York City has no meaningful foreign policy to speak of (the mayor of New York City does not even have jurisdiction over the No. 6 train), Mamdani has made Israel and Gaza central to his political message, and his positions are championed by his fellow Democratic Socialists of America and increasingly common among progressives and mainstream Democrats at large. In Slate, Aymann Ismail writes:

 

Since 2024, Democratic voters have moved substantially further away from Israel. Candidates attacking unconditional support for the Israeli government have won Democratic primaries. More than 100 House Democrats recently voted to eliminate billions in military assistance to Israel. And several of the people who spent the 2024 convention trying to convince Democrats that they were attempting to save the party, not sabotage it, have spent the intervening years burrowing further into Democratic politics.

 

That tendency is not limited to Democrats seeking national offices where they might expect to have some influence on foreign affairs. Gaza is a factor in the politics of, e.g., the Oakland school board, as the Wall Street Journal reports:

 

The board had scarcely embarked on its agenda, which included school-site improvements and enrollment issues, when a pro-Palestinian speaker’s microphone was cut off after his two minutes expired. When the man continued to talk, Mike Hutchinson, Oakland school-board president, announced a five-minute recess.

 

While Hutchinson and his colleagues remained seated, demonstrators chanted “Free Palestine!” and “Shame!” The school-board president then adjourned the meeting before the measure was formally introduced, as dozens of people were still waiting to speak.

 

In the largely progressive San Francisco Bay Area, other local governments and political organizations have already taken steps to condemn Israel’s actions, drawing praise from Palestinian supporters and accusations of antisemitism from Jewish groups—along with questions about why they are taking positions on a war on the other side of the world.

 

Oakland’s public schools are such that only one-third of students are proficient in reading at their grade level, while only one-quarter are proficient at math, in both cases underperforming the California average, which is not great. The evidence suggests that the people who run the schools in Oakland probably should not be allowed to adopt kittens from animal shelters, much less be empowered to manage the education of the children of a city with more than 400,000 residents—and how much less ought we to care what they think about a conflict that has been raging either for about 80 years or (if you take the long view) about 14 centuries? Similarly, the thinking person probably will discount Mamdani’s views on complex geopolitical questions until after the sage of Astoria figures out how to get the trash picked up on Bruckner Boulevard.

 

Netanyahu and his party have reciprocated Mamdani’s unseemly interest, leading to the bizarre fact that the name and likeness of the mayor of New York City can be seen on billboards and in campaign literature in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. And that is fair enough, I suppose, if strange: Mamdani has invited the attention, and his equivocation (and worse) between Israeli self-defense and the Palestinian campaign of (among other things) raping and murdering civilians at music festivals is grotesque, illiterate, and—yes—profoundly antisemitic, in that (and not only in that) the idiotic claim that Israel is engaged in genocide against the Arabs is categorically antisemitic, an anti-Jewish smear applied to Jews because of the Jewish experience as the targets of a campaign of genuine genocide. Netanyahu has a right to be steamed. But a statesman should be statesmanlike, which entails moderating one’s speech and behavior when one is outside one’s own country. And Netanyahu probably should forgo presenting himself as the tribune of Jewish Americans, many of whom do not wish to enjoy the very slight honor of being used as the prime minister’s political props.

 

Likewise, a statesmanlike statesman ought to tailor his behavior when dealing with foreign nationals—especially foreign heads of state. Donald Trump’s simpering courtship of Chinese autocrat Xi Jinping would be difficult to bear under any circumstances, but the American president’s gleeful denigration of his predecessor in the office as president for the amusement of a foreign despot was intolerably shameful. There is almost nothing that Trump could do that would surprise me—nothing short of an act of courage or generosity—and the business with the autopen “portrait” of Joe Biden is textbook Trump stuff: petty, corrosive, dumb. I do wonder how Trump’s sycophantic circle, the members of which are obsessed with the notion that they and the man they love are “alpha males,” received Trump’s display of subordination to Xi. Presumably, they will do what they usually do and try to convince themselves that it is part of some brilliant tactical ploy. One can safely bet what Xi is thinking: “Here’s a couple of pandas, boy, and I’m taking Taiwan.”

 

If it means anything, then “America First” means Americans first, even Americans as dotty and useless as Joe Biden, a contemptible and grubby little grasper who did not have much of a working brain back when he had something of a working brain. If you are a nationalist in any genuine sense, then your people are your people. But, of course, Trump is not a nationalist in any meaningful sense, for the same reason he isn’t really much of a patriot or a racist or a Christian—Trump is his own god, and he recognizes no loyalty at odds with his interests and no good that is not in accord with his appetites and desires. Trump may say that he cares about “America First,” but naturally he will wait and see what Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin or some Qatari potentate has to offer to him, too. Trump has on a hundred occasions sold out genuine American interests in the service of his own vanity and greed, and he’ll probably do it a hundred more times before he leaves office, however he leaves office.

 

The president of the United States is not the United States. The president is not the country. But in one-on-one dealings with Xi or any other head of state, the president represents the United States, and while he does so he is clothed with vast symbolic and actual power. Batting his eyelashes at Xi and putting on a sophomoric mean-girls act to ingratiate himself with the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party? That is a funny kind of nationalist, indeed, and a desperate one.

 

Economics for English Majors

 

By request: How is it that the proposed ban on diesel exports could actually raise diesel prices in the United States?

 

To be sure, a diesel export ban likely wouldn’t have the exclusive effect of raising diesel prices. The bad news: A diesel export ban likely would have the effect of raising the prices of diesel, gasoline, jet fuel, and other refined-petroleum products.

 

A little background:

 

Because of the way oil is refined into usable petroleum products, it is not the case that refiners say: “Well, we need this much diesel, this much gasoline, and this much jet fuel, so we’ll turn x barrels of crude into diesel, y into gasoline, and z into jet fuel.” Rather, it is the case that each barrel of crude simultaneously produces a variety of petroleum products in more or less fixed amounts. Typically, a 42-gallon barrel of oil will give you around 20 gallons of gasoline, 12 or 13 gallons of diesel and heating oil, around 5 gallons of jet fuel, and a quantity of other stuff (asphalt, lubrication oil, petrochemicals) that accounts for the rest. (N.B.: 42 gallons of petroleum produces more than 42 gallons of refined product.) In the United States, the total amount of oil that gets refined into fuels and other products is determined mainly by demand for gasoline. Producing enough gasoline to supply the U.S. market means producing more diesel than Americans consume. Happily, the world is full of people who want to buy American petroleum products, and so surplus U.S. diesel helps to deliver food to shops in the United Kingdom and powers buses in Brazil and runs backup hospital generators hither and yon. It also provides Americans with something Americans absolutely love: corporate profits, which, beyond making sure that some oil barons get a new yacht every couple of years, shore up various tax bases and pay dividends into retirement accounts and fatten up paychecks with profit-sharing programs, etc. Hooray for profit!

 

Given that refiners export that diesel because doing so is profitable, what do you think they will do if Uncle Stupid tells them that they cannot export it anymore? Do you think that taking away one source of profit is likely to get them to cut prices in the United States? No. That would be what the economists call stupid wishful thinking. Exxon did not get to be Exxon by being blasé about profit.

 

At first, the refiners probably will divert diesel into storage. Diesel doesn’t last forever, but neither do stupid export bans. Once the storage facilities are full, then refiners probably would begin reducing their output—remember, they already produce all the diesel U.S. consumers use plus a bit of what the rest of the world uses, too. Producing less diesel would not mean only that refiners were no longer producing the diesel they used to export—it would also mean that they would no longer be producing the gasoline, jet fuel, etc., that they produced in the course of producing that exported diesel. That probably would lead to higher prices for all of those fuels, lubricants, and chemicals, because less is … less. Reduce supply, keep demand steady, and prices can be expected to go up.

 

Higher prices for fuels, lubricants, and chemicals mean upward price pressure on … pretty much everything. Not great for a country already dealing with persistent inflation.

 

An export ban would also create business opportunities for overseas competitors to U.S. producers legally prevented from serving export markets. That would not be great news for those producers’ shareholders and employees.

 

Now, presenting the Trump administration with a dumb and destructive economic policy is like presenting a kid with a cookie—or a marshmallow, as in the famous Stanford experiment. If a thing is dumb, it is a safe bet these dummies are going to do the thing. That’s what dummies do. It’s a dumb marshmallow, and they are going to eat it pretty much every time.

Republicans Facing the High Political Cost of Tariffs

National Review Online

Monday, September 28, 2026

 

As Republican prospects in this fall’s midterms deteriorate, the pre-criminations have already started. Many are eager to blame President Trump’s decision to launch a war on Iran, and indeed, the increase in diesel and gas prices has been politically brutal. But another piece of the puzzle is the incredible political damage done by President Trump’s sweeping unilateral tariffs.

 

Trump completed a stunning comeback in 2024 in large part because soaring inflation during Joe Biden’s presidency led the majority of Americans to conclude they were better off economically during Trump’s first term. While federal government intervention rarely works to bring down prices, it can certainly make things more expensive. And in raising tariffs, Trump took an action that, by design, made many goods more expensive for consumers.

 

A major part of the case for tariffs was that for decades, our dependence on buying goods abroad has shrunk the industrial base at home, hollowing out towns and moving people away from stable factory jobs to the uncertainty of a gig economy. The thesis was that by raising the cost of foreign goods, the government could reverse this process, convincing businesses to manufacture more goods domestically.

 

We have always been skeptical of these claims. But even if the protectionists were right on all points, the transformation of the economy they sought was bound to take more than one election cycle. Businesses make decisions such as where to manufacture products years in advance. Moving manufacturing from overseas back to the U.S. requires planning, building, and a massive investment. Businesses were never going to make decisions like this in reaction to a policy that not only could change with the next president but has also wildly vacillated during this presidency. Trump, often on social media, spent the early months of his presidency arbitrarily announcing he was raising or lowering tariffs, with his policies often fluctuating based on which foreign leader he was feuding with on a given day. He triggered an unnecessary rupture with Canada, which is rich in natural resources and has long been a key partner. He also imposed tariffs with shoddy legal reasoning that the Supreme Court rejected.

 

The result of this erratic policy is that Americans have felt the pinch from tariffs, which have led them to trust Republicans less on their handling of cost-of-living issues. President Trump’s repeated insistence that foreigners pay the full burden of tariffs and that affordability issues are a “hoax” has understandably fallen on deaf ears. And this sticker shock has not been offset by benefits from increased American manufacturing. The manufacturing sectors that are doing the best tend to be the ones least protected by tariffs.

 

Additionally, many states with competitive House and Senate races have been hit by tariffs that hurt consumers and businesses dependent on overseas parts and materials, as well as by retaliatory tariffs limiting their export businesses. Ohio, Michigan, Texas, North Carolina, and Iowa are all examples, and tariffs have played a prominent role in those races as well as close House races.

 

Aside from being bad economic policy and a political own goal, all of this is yet another reminder of the wisdom of the Founders, who believed that major changes needed to be approved first by the people, through the House, and then by the states, in the Senate. Trump couldn’t be bothered to try to win the approval of either, so he acted on his own whim, and Republicans increasingly look like they will pay a hefty political price.

Farmers Voted for This

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, September 25, 2026

 

American farmers rely on imports for many of their most critical inputs—fertilizer, chemicals, machinery—and rely on exports to large overseas markets such as China for a big part of their profits, and, as such, conducting a series of trade wars fought with tariffs is just about the worst possible economic policy for them as a group. Naturally, American farmers and farming communities keep voting roughly two-to-one for trade wars—a vote for Donald Trump, the guy who insists that “trade wars are good and easy to win,” is a vote for trade wars.

 

Farmers voted for trade wars, and trade wars they got.

 

And—surprise!—agriculture is in something like a full-blown recession, with farm incomes projected to decline by a whopping 5.5 percent in real terms this year. Farm bankruptcies are up 46 percent since 2024, and some 15,000 farming operations went dark last year. This is an entirely predictable outcome of the 2024 presidential election.

 

In much the same way that Americans lately have been promised that gasoline and diesel prices are just on the verge of going back down—and in much the same way that the Republican standard-bearer has been three weeks away from a healthcare plan for 12 years now and running—Trump keeps saying that the Chinese have committed to buying $x billion worth of this or that commodity from U.S. farmers, and—surprise!—those commitments continue to go unrealized, with China being at the moment many, many billions of dollars behind on promised orders from U.S. farmers. “We like to hear commitments from Chinese buyers, but we also need to see beans on boats headed west,” says a board member of the American Soybean Association. It is almost as though one cannot quite trust in the good intentions of an authoritarian police state run by Communist Party oligarchs or in the sound judgment of a serially bankrupt former game show host who once tried to overthrow the U.S. government. Which raises the question:

 

Why are American farmers such a bunch of chumps?

 

Thomas Frank’s famous thesis, spelled out in What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, is that shady right-wing corporate interests have successfully used culture-war rhetoric and Jesus talk to snooker Middle America’s farmers, blue-collar workers, and small-business owners into—all together now!—“voting against their own interests.” It isn’t a very good thesis, inasmuch as the evidence very strongly suggests that voting in a way that would appear to be at least superficially at odds with one’s self-interest is so common as to be nearly universal in American politics. Americans are not especially self-interested voters.

 

For example, college-educated white voters and college-educated African American voters are, on average, more progressive than the non-college-educated of their respective racial groups, and college-educated white voters in particular are more likely than their non-college counterparts to support redistributive tax and welfare policies that are likely to increase their own tax burden while providing no benefit to them, their families, or, in general, to people who are economically similar to them. The Democrats are the party friendlier toward redistributive tax and welfare policies, and it is the Democrats—not the Republicans—who in recent years have seen the most growth in their support among the educated and affluent most likely to be disadvantaged by those policies. As Sam Zacher, a researcher with the progressive Analyst Institute, observes in a very interesting 2024 paper titled “The Polarization of the Rich: The New Democratic Allegiance of Affluent Americans and the Politics of Redistribution”:

 

Strikingly, in multiple elections since the 2010s, the data actually show a form of “backwards” polarization: majorities of affluent voters voted for Democratic candidates. Specifically, some evidence shows that Democratic candidates actually beat Republicans in attaining support from the top 5% (by income), the highest income stock- owning voters, and even the top 1% of voters (by income) over the past decade.

 

That being well-disposed toward welfare programs (to linger on an illuminating example) does not neatly follow income should not surprise you very much if you have thought through the issues a little bit. There are many possible factors at work. High-income African American voters, having the shared experience of racial discrimination, may be more oriented toward racial solidarity than class interest and may see their socioeconomic status as necessarily tied up with the shared interests of black Americans, who are more likely to rely on welfare programs than whites. (African Americans make up about 13 percent of the overall population but more than twice that share of SNAP beneficiaries, for example.) Similarly: For years, I have been chronicling the leftward political drift of Wall Street, and people who are surprised by the political loyalties of the men and women at the commanding heights of finance should consider that these voters are disproportionately products of the Ivy League and other elite universities, that they largely live and work in and around New York City and other major metros, and that they have a great deal politically in common with similarly situated voters who do not work in finance but who share experiences and interests with the Wall Street gang even if they occupy lower tax brackets. A related, albeit cynical, possibility is that affluent Americans of all backgrounds have an unarticulated but understood interest in giving the poor just enough to depress any more radical efforts at economic reorganization, in much the same way that many historians see the emergence of the Bismarckian welfare state as an essentially conservative program meant to take the steam out of the socialists with more far-reaching ambitions.

 

Whatever the reason, it is reasonably well-established that economic self-interest has very little reliable effect on voting or policy preferences. As the economist Bryan Caplan observes, “self-interest has little effect on public opinion.” Caplan is among those who believe that we would have better politics if voters were more self-interested because altruistic attitudes so often lead voters to support “foolish policies,” and he laments that the stereotypical, conspiracy-theory-adjacent view that our policymaking agenda is dominated by billionaires is—alas!—not quite true. Rather, there is broad agreement across income groups on many big policy questions, including the big economic ones, though the very wealthy do tend to prevail in those cases where they sharply disagree with the non-wealthy. In those cases, Caplan writes, “democracies listen to the relatively libertarian rich far more than they listen to the absolutely statist non-rich. And since I think that statist policy preferences rest on a long list of empirical and normative mistakes, my sincere reaction is to say, ‘Thank goodness.’”

 

In much the same way that Harvard-educated, Manhattan-dwelling Wall Street traders vote a lot like Harvard-educated, Manhattan-dwelling nonprofit executives, rural America has a fair number of export-dependent farmers who vote a lot like the clerk down at the feed-and-seed. Many of those farmers are multimillionaires with graduate degrees from Texas A&M who run sophisticated high-tech businesses and know a hell of a lot more about crop genomics than Bobby Kennedy Jr. does and a good deal more about practical Chinese politics than Marco Rubio does: They aren’t rubes—but they vote like rubes.

 

Well, I didn’t vote for an assault on American farmers! I didn’t vote for $6.59 diesel because I wanted to spend $320 to fill up my F-250. I didn’t vote for chaos! I didn’t vote for this! I hear that all the time. But the truth is, some 77 million Americans did vote precisely for this. Trump ran as a trade-war and tariffs guy. This is what a trade war looks like: It makes you poor and vulnerable. Trump’s low character was a matter of public record way back in the ancient days when the great big wall in our political discourse was the one running through Berlin. His profound ignorance, biliousness, and moral grotesquery long have been observable in American public life for anybody with enough money to buy a copy of the New York Post. Americans should have known better in 2016, but there’s no excuse for not having known better in 2024. Farmers voted for this just as much as Philadelphians have spent two generations or more voting for high crime and crappy schools and Angelenos have voted for ... well, go there and have a look around.

 

There are better ways to govern. We could begin with Caplan’s observation—which is unimpeachable—that Americans’ “policy preferences rest on a long list of empirical and normative mistakes,” e.g., that a country can get rich by blockading its own ports, literally bombing its own supply chains, having the state seize the means of production, and deporting a chunk of its workforce—and doing so because a pampered and half-literate New York City real estate heir thinks socks and building supplies aren’t expensive enough.

 

Yes, Americans voted for this: Farmers and car dealers and a whole lot of people who should have known better. The question is how much pain it is going to take for Americans to choose something better.

Britain’s Inertia Is a Warning to America

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, September 24, 2026

 

In recent years, I have been privy to the curious trend of Europeans who, having been assiduously fed all manner of nonsense about life in the United States, have come to understand that their presumptions were all wrong. In yesterday’s London Telegraph, Allister Heath describes this phenomenon rather well. Beneath the pull-no-punches headline, “I saw a breathtaking glimpse of what Britain could have become,” Heath offers a blunt challenge to the smug among his fellow countrymen:

 

If you want to comprehend the scale of Britain’s decline, our economic, geopolitical and technological humiliation, the magnitude of the self-sabotage inflicted upon our nation by our incompetent political class, head to one of America’s booming Republican-run Red States.

 

It will guarantee a shock to your system, and jolt you out of any residual complacency. It will simultaneously energise you and plunge you into depression. You will be blown away by the growth, the clatter of construction, the siege of cranes across the skyline, the massive cars, the energy, drive and ambition, the wealth, abundance and cheap energy, the entrepreneurial go-getting, the ostentatious celebration of success.

 

I was born in Britain, and I live in Florida (the state that Heath visited), so I have seen this from both sides. And I can tell you, unequivocally, that the author’s assessment is correct. The juxtaposition of the two places is increasingly stark, and yet, because distance serves as a shroud, this is obvious only to those of us who have visited both regularly over time. Most British people have not, and because of this, Heath concludes, it has become possible for them to lie “to [themselves] about the depth of the hole [they] have jumped into,” and to remain unaware that, irrespective of their healthy self-conception, they are actually “poor and increasingly backwards.”

 

I take no pleasure in confirming this. I am the only member of my family who emigrated to the United States, and while I am indeed an unreconstructed Americaphile, I bear no ill will toward my country of birth, nor toward my parents, my sister, or the rest of my kin that still lives there. It’s just that . . . well, Britain has got it wrong.

 

Heath contends that Britain never truly recovered from Covid, but I’d put the decline a little earlier: Britain, like the rest of Europe, never truly recovered from the 2008 financial crash. In that year, the economies of Europe and the economy of the United States were the same size. Now, the economy of the United States is about 150 percent the size of the economies of Europe. And why wouldn’t it be, given that the countries of Europe haven’t actually done anything useful. Britain is a welfare state. That’s what it exists to be. That is its purpose, its role, its ambition. Neither its bureaucrats nor its people care about growth, innovation, or success — except insofar as they can use those things to pay for more welfare. Its National Health Service — which is awful — is seen not as a system that exists to serve people but as a political end in its own right. (If the British government wants the public to do something, it insists that it is necessary to “save the NHS.”) Its unbelievably lavish social spending is, bizarrely, widely described as “austerity.” Its vaunted attacks on “inequality” have stagnated wages and made everyone poorer. Its refusal to use its energy reserves — or abandon its ridiculous “net zero” aims — has made the price of energy a permanent crisis. The whiny are lauded; the useless are celebrated; and the handful of aspirational figures who are left are regarded as too pushy, too aggressive, too American to be trusted. The result is that Britain has become drab, lazy, inert, and, worst of all, fatally complacent.

 

As an American, do you feel good reading Heath’s description of the United States? I do. I also feel alarmed. There’s nothing written in the stars that guarantees that our country must be this way. On the contrary: America’s position in the world is the product of choices it has made. America, The Telegraph notes, values “success.” If it ceases to, it will get less of it. Relative to Britain, America has low taxes and no VAT. If that changes, so will the dynamism of its economy. America has no single-payer health-care system to permanently corrupt its politics and devour the energy and treasure of the middle class. If it introduces one, it will decline inexorably. America has a constitutional order that features a strong separation of powers, encourages gridlock, and entrenches protections of individual rights. If it deconstructs that system, it will collapse into dysfunction, infighting, and mediocrity. Like Britain, America faces the demographic trend of an aging population relying on a relatively smaller share of workers for the payment of government benefits; but unlike Britain, it has not yet enshrined the “triple lock” guarantee that ineluctably increases pension payouts and makes other reform impossible. If it does, it will fatally harm the group that is pulling the wagon.

 

Allister Heath is depressed by contemplating what Britain “could have become.” He is right to be. Americans should thank him for the compliment and then turn to worrying about what America could become, too — if, but only if, it follows the same path.

Canada’s EU Romance Is a Mistake

By John Gustavsson

Wednesday, September 23, 2026

 

Last week, the European Commission’s president, Ursula von der Leyen, surprised the world by announcing an offer to make Canada the first “associate member” of the European Union. What makes an “associate member” is not legally defined in any of the EU’s treaties, but there is no doubt that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney appears determined to embrace the EU as he seeks to reduce his country’s dependence on the North American market. After Donald Trump’s threats to turn Canada into the 51st state, Carney’s approach may seem reasonable — and, judging from the PM’s approval ratings, Canadians are, so far, on board.

 

Yet running to Brussels would be as big a mistake for Canada as it was for Britain.

 

Whatever Canada’s new relationship with the EU ends up looking like, it will be a much cozier relationship than before. Whereas Carney’s predecessor, Justin Trudeau, never missed an opportunity to emphasize Canada as an indigenous land and apologize for the sins of the settlers, Carney seems to have rediscovered his country’s European heritage, going as far as to label it “the most European of non-European countries.”

 

On Canada Day, CBC/Radio-Canada announced that the country would compete in the 2027 Eurovision Song Contest, by far the biggest music competition in the world, with around 160 million viewers. Joining the ESC is not cheap; indeed, several countries decline to participate every year citing the cost. Fortunately, Carney had increased the public broadcaster’s budget for this very purpose.

 

In May, Carney became the first non-European leader ever to attend the semiannual European Political Community summit, an intergovernmental summit attended by leaders of 48 European countries. Last year, he signed a Strategic Partnership of the Future with the EU, covering areas including trade and climate transition, as well as a security and defense partnership. An “associate membership” in the EU — whatever that term ends up meaning — could be seen as a logical next step, fitting with Carney’s ambition to double Canada’s non-U.S. exports over the next ten years.

 

Carney increasingly looks like an insecure high schooler trying to hang with the cool kids. But, much like in high school, the cool kids are not really all that cool.

 

First, Europe struggles with economic growth. Since the global financial crisis, the wealth gap between America and the EU — and especially the western EU — has widened, as Europe has struggled with weak and inconsistent growth. Economic shocks like those brought on by the war in Ukraine and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz have contributed, but taxation, an ill-conceived common currency, and regulatory policy in areas such as energy, climate, and tech, bear the brunt of the blame. It would make more sense for Canada to diversify by adding more members and deepening ties with the faster-growing Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), a trade pact that has nearly eliminated tariffs among signatory countries following the United States’ withdrawal from the preceding Trans-Pacific Partnership in 2017.

 

Supporters of Carney’s European adventures may counter that there is no need to choose — that Canada can diversify elsewhere while still deepening ties with Europe. But it is not that simple. Brussels rarely gives deep market access without pulling partners toward its rule book. If “associate membership” turns into dynamic alignment, Canada, while still formally able to sign other foreign trade agreements, would find those deals harder to use: Goods and data would still have to clear European process rules, including rules written after the ink is dry.

 

Nowhere is this more dangerous than on climate policy. Whereas Carney has begun the process of rolling back his predecessor’s unrealistic goals, the EU is still charging full steam ahead, even implementing climate tariffs (the “carbon-border adjustment mechanism”) on its trade partners. That the EU climate regime is not exactly suitable for an oil-, gas-, and minerals-producing country should go without saying.

 

It may seem counterintuitive that Europe would ever try to force its environmentalism on Canada, seeing as how Canada’s minerals and natural gas — two sectors that EU rules could devastate, if applied to Canada — are part of what makes the country attractive to the EU. But in Brussels, the link between overregulation and underinvestment is not properly understood. Sure, policymakers want rare earths and natural gas — but since that’s never stopped them from overregulating those industries almost to extinction in Europe, Canada should not assume it will get a free pass. The mere threat of future regulatory alignment with the EU could deter investment into Canada’s extractive industries.

 

For Canada’s tech sector, the EU poses an even bigger threat. The EU prides itself on a “regulate first, ask questions later” approach that has strangled innovation in the union. If Canada is pushed to adapt EU tech regulations, the effect would be even worse than in Europe, since geographical proximity means Canada’s tech sector competes with the U.S. and Silicon Valley more directly than Europe’s does.

 

The same is true for the auto and chemicals industries as well as many other sectors, and geographical proximity makes it easier not just for businesses but also for skilled Canadians in affected sectors to move to the United States, something more and more of them are already doing.

 

Carney may feel emboldened by polls showing that large majorities of Canadians favor closer ties with the EU, with one poll even showing 57 percent would support full membership. But the idea of greater integration with the EU and the reality of such a path are starkly different. Brits once overwhelmingly voted in favor of EU membership, but decades of clashes between Britain’s Anglo-Saxon worldview and Brussels’s continental ways eventually led to a bitter divorce. And more than a European nation, Canada — with apologies to Quebec — is first and foremost a British nation, and that is something Carney ought to consider before he traps his country in a union that neither he nor his voters fully understand.

 

Of course, Trump was wrong to ever suggest that Canada should become America’s 51st state. It would be nothing short of tragic if Canada, in its rush to safeguard its sovereignty, merely ended up giving it away to another foreign bidder.

Trump’s Reckless $5,000 ‘Dividend’

National Review Online

Monday, September 14, 2026

 

During his address to the Republicans’ novel “midterm convention,” President Donald Trump plucked a new political promise out of the air. If the GOP keeps control of the House and the Senate, he vowed, he will send every American adult a $5,000 check.

 

As is his habit, Trump waved away any objections to this plan. Asked later if he would need Congress to agree to the payment, he said, “We think not.” Asked if it would add to the deficit, he said, “I’m not at all worried about that.” Asked why he couldn’t do it now, given that the Republicans already run Congress, he said, “Because they can’t. I’ll tell you what, because the Democrats can’t do it, because with them it’s negative growth. With us, it’s so positive.”

 

Glad we cleared that one up.

 

Not to be outdone, Vice President JD Vance got in on the action with nonsense of his own. Asked by Bret Baier about the potential consequences for the “deficit and debt” and “inflation,” Vance insisted that the checks could be paid for from tariff revenues. “We’re taking in an extraordinary amount of revenue,” he said.

 

None of this is true. In his speech, the president described the potential payout as a “Trump Dividend.” But this is a brazen misuse of that term. Were his plan to come to fruition, it would be good old-fashioned government spending — nothing more, nothing less. Under the U.S. Constitution, that spending would have to be authorized by Congress, not by the president. And, because the federal government is running multi-trillion-dollar deficits, that spending would have to be borrowed, which would increase the debt. If President Trump’s vow is to be taken literally, the cost would be between $1.3 trillion and $1.5 trillion. Adding that amount of money into the economy would undoubtedly make inflation worse, and, because it would eventually be paid back unequally via our highly progressive tax system, it would represent precisely the sort of “socialism” that Trump spent the rest of his speech in Texas denouncing. As for Vance’s preposterous claim that the project would be covered by the revenues from tariffs? The projected tariff haul in 2027 is $125 billion — less than 10 percent of the cost of Trump’s plan.

 

Reflexive apologists for Trump’s proposal have tended to focus on the sins of the other party — pointing, for instance, to the unnecessary and inflationary stimulus checks that the Democrats issued in 2021, and to President Joe Biden’s illegal attempt to forgive student loans. But this isn’t a defense, so much as a confession. Those policies were bad, and the Republican Party opposed them. That they were attempted was a disgrace; it was not a catch-all excuse for further reckless behavior. Whatever problems may exist in the American economy in 2026, there is no need for a round of debt-financed $5,000 checks. The central problem of our political era is the persistence of inflation and the associated increases in the cost of everyday goods. Trump’s suggestion would worsen, rather than improve, that issue.

 

The role of the federal government within the U.S. economy ought to be to provide a stable framework within which free people may thrive. When it taxes, it ought to tax predictably and consistently, with the purpose of covering its spending. When it spends, it ought to spend on those functions that only the national government can fulfill. President Trump’s proposal cannot be squared with the federal government’s proper role — nor, for that matter, can it be justly described as “policy.” Had he contrived it on the fly as he spoke in Dallas, it would look no different. This is no way to run a country.