Tariffs: 'Liberation' Day

in ,

April 2 will be “liberation day for America” as President Donald Trump unveils his tariff hikes, he promised — one of the “most important days in modern American history,” according to Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.

Trump will say what he’s going to say, but the basic picture he paints has not changed for decades, although the role of principal villain may do so (in the 1980s, it was Japan). Leavitt sets it out again: A lack of reciprocity has contributed to a “large and persistent annual trade deficit that’s gutted out industries and hollowed out key workforces.” This, the president says, will now change.

Read More

Net Zero: Fantasy Island

in ,

Britain’s Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero (good luck with combining those) Ed Miliband has been working to accelerate the rate at which Britain runs the “race” to net zero since assuming office after the Labour party’s election victory in July 2024. Part of that acceleration will involve decarbonizing 95 percent of the U.K.’s electricity grid by 2030, an impossible objective. The people, equipment, and resources are not there. Nevertheless, the disconcertingly exuberant Miliband exudes the confidence of a Soviet central planner of the high Stalinist era, convinced that determination, coercion, and the arc of history will overcome all obstacles…

Read More

Twelve Months of Milei

in ,

Wait, what?

In the third quarter Argentina’s GDP grew by 3.9 percent over the previous quarter, more than the 3.4 percent that was expected. This follows earlier signs of improvement and reinforces hopes of strong growth next year, albeit from a deep trough. Year-on-year, the quarterly numbers still show a decline of 2 percent (compared with the third quarter of 2023), but recovery must start somewhere…

Read More

Decline and Fool

in ,

Germany has slipped deeper into crisis with the collapse of its governing coalition. An unlikely union between the center-left SPD, the Greens, and the free-market(ish) FDP never made much intellectual sense, but the parliamentary arithmetic worked, so that was that.

And that was then.

Read More

The EU: A Prescription for More Stagnation (or Worse)

in ,

In July 2007, José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission (Brussels’ top bureaucrat) said rather a lot of the quiet part aloud. The European Union, he boasted, was an empire, an empire of new kind, a “non-imperial empire,” but an empire all the same. For some that had always been the idea. Europe’s former great powers could never, individually, restore the global preeminence they had enjoyed before the world wars. Maybe they could come close to doing so collectively. A united Europe could become a rival “pole” to the U.S., not an enemy, not militarily, but economically and as an exemplar to the rest of the world of a better way forward….

Read More

Argentina: It's Still Milei Time

in ,

Ten or so months on, Argentina’s Javier Milei is still pressing on with his reforms, but even though the Argentine system gives a lot of power to the president, it doesn’t help that his still young party (LLA — La Libertad Avanza) only has 15 percent of the seats in Argentina’s lower house and about 10 percent in the Senate. Even with the help of allies it can only exercise some degree of control via ad hoc blocking minorities.

Midterms are due late next year, and, if a recent poll in Buenos Aires province is any indication (not that much: the midterms won’t be held until October next year, an eon away under current circumstances) the LLA should increase its representation significantly, although still well short of a majority…

Read More

Britain’s Dangerous Territorial Giveaway

in ,

However (very) bad Britain’s Conservative government may have been, the Labour government that has replaced it has proved to be infinitely worse. Much of this (such as the doubling down on net zero) was predictable, but Labour’s destructiveness has extended into areas — including (checks notes) the Indian Ocean — that have surprised even the gloomier pessimists.

Read More

Electric Vehicles: Eurotrashed

in ,

Sooner or later there comes a moment when central planners’ spreadsheets and targets run into reality. And it is rarely a happy moment. Some years ago, officials in the EU, UK, California, and other dim-bulb jurisdictions came up with the idea of imposing a quota system on automakers…

Read More

German Reparations: Far From a ‘Carthaginian Peace’

in ,

Winston Churchill was “a chief villain of world war 2?” Well, that’s the view (neatly filleted by Andrew Roberts, Churchill’s finest contemporary biographer, National Review’s Mark Wright, and others) of Darryl Cooper, the podcaster recently interviewed by Tucker Carlson. Carlson described Cooper as possibly the “best and most honest popular historian in the United States,” which would be both alarming and remarkable were it true. Cooper takes a revisionist view of the second world war that goes far beyond a continuing reexamination of the past — a basic part of any historian’s work — or even an exaggerated contrarianism into far darker territory.

This is the Capital Letter, not the History Letter, but there was one comment which marched into Capital Matters territory. It appears at the end of a tweet in which Cooper refers to the Treaty of Versailles. “The terms,” he wrote, “would keep Germany in destitution for another decade.”

But did they?

Read More