The Next Economic Bubble Is Here | Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Next Economic Bubble Is Here | Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoJH9cGtv1s
Donald Trump and Oren Cass Promised Tariffs Would Bring Prosperity. Both Are Now Confronting Reality.
“”I think a global tariff is the right way to do things,” Cass said. “It’s a very simple, broad policy that conveys a value that we see in domestic production.”
That is, more or less, the view that the White House adopted during the first year of Trump’s second term: Making stuff in America matters, and the best way to encourage more production in America is to make it more expensive to import anything made somewhere.
Of course, there are two major flaws with that logic. First, there are things that can’t be made in America—or can’t be made here in sufficient quantities to satisfy Americans’ demand. Coffee, chocolate, bananas, and many other agricultural products, for example.
Second, making things in America often requires importing raw materials or intermediate goods. More than 50 percent of all American imports are unfinished goods that are used to make other things, from cars to houses to industrial pumping equipment and chocolate bars. If all those materials are suddenly more expensive, it becomes harder, not easier, to manufacture more things here.”
https://reason.com/2025/10/21/donald-trump-and-oren-cass-promised-tariffs-would-bring-prosperity-both-are-now-confronting-reality/
From Many Christianities to One Church: The Rise of Orthodoxy
From Many Christianities to One Church: The Rise of Orthodoxy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0ttWsWF5PI
ICE’s Spending on Weaponry Is Up More Than 600 Percent Over Last Year
ICE’s Spending on Weaponry Is Up More Than 600 Percent Over Last Year
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/10/ice-spending-small-arms-weapons-chemical-munitions-increased-700-percent-2025/
Homeland Security Won’t Stop Lying About Who Immigration Enforcers Are Arresting
“In case after case, Homeland Security’s Public Affairs Office releases incorrect information about arrests carried out by federal immigration officers.
…
ProPublica reported last week that it had found 170 U.S. citizens who had been detained by federal immigration officers since Trump’s mass deportation blitz began. Some of them were pepper-sprayed and assaulted, and others were held in detention for days before being released.
…
After a video of a Chicago-area teenager being violently arrested went viral earlier this month, McLaughlin wrote on X that the video was “from a year ago” and that the agents involved weren’t ICE. Both claims were false.
McLaughlin also recently claimed that a 13-year-old boy detained by ICE in Massachusetts was in possession of a knife and gun. However, the town’s mayor confirmed during a press conference the next day that “no guns were found” during the boy’s arrest.”
https://reason.com/2025/10/22/homeland-security-wont-stop-lying-about-who-immigration-enforcers-are-arresting/
Live Nation’s Merger with Ticketmaster Isn’t Responsible for High Resale Prices—You Are
“the company’s market share decreased by 10 percentage points following its merger in 2014, sitting at around 70 percent in 2024. Live Nation’s FY 24 net profit margin of 2.8 percent—considerably lower than the total U.S. market’s net margin of 8.7 percent—suggests that the firm lacks pricing power. Moreover, the profits Live Nation makes have little to do with the secondary ticket market: “Revenue from fees on concert ticket resale is less than 2% of Live Nation’s revenue,” the company said in a reply to Blackburn and Luján on Friday.
…
so long as artists set prices below the market rate, brokers will find a way to get tickets to those who value them the most, with or without Ticketmaster.”
https://reason.com/2025/10/22/live-nations-merger-with-ticketmaster-isnt-responsible-for-high-resale-prices-you-are/
9th Circuit Court Upholds Trump’s Deployment of National Guard in Portland
“In her dissent, Judge Susan P. Graber warned that the decision “erodes core constitutional principles, including sovereign States’ control over their States’ militias and the people’s First Amendment rights.” State Attorney General Dan Rayfield criticized the decision, saying that the ruling “sets a dangerous precedent that would allow a president to put Oregon soldiers on our streets with almost no justification.””
https://reason.com/2025/10/22/9th-circuit-court-upholds-trumps-deployment-of-national-guard-in-portland/
Trump Campaigned on Free Speech. That Isn’t How He’s Governed.
“now that Trump’s president, and getting lots of criticism from the media, he’s started calling speech that he doesn’t like “illegal.”
“They’ll take a great story, and they’ll make it bad. I think that’s really illegal, personally.”
He also threatened TV stations: “They give me only bad publicity…maybe their license should be taken away.”
“There’s free speech, and then there’s hate speech,” said his attorney general, Pam Bondi. “We will absolutely target you…if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.”
They will “target” people?
Trump’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman, Brendan Carr, joined in. When Jimmy Kimmel said nasty and incorrect things about Charlie Kirk’s murder, Carr threatened ABC’s TV licenses, saying, like a mafia boss, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.”
Yet months earlier, he’d tweeted: “Dismantle the censorship cartel and restore free speech rights.”
And years earlier, he tweeted that the FCC does “not have a roving mandate to police speech in the name of the ‘public interest.'”
He was right—then.
But power tends to corrupt.
Once Carr was in power, he no longer supported the speech he’d recently promoted.”
https://reason.com/2025/10/22/trump-campaigned-on-free-speech-that-isnt-how-hes-governed/
The Clean Air Act Is Making Our Air Dirtier
“The planned, carefully controlled burns that can prevent megafires—known as prescribed fires—rarely qualify. They are, by definition, intentional and therefore generally fail to meet the Clean Air Act’s requirements for exceptional events. The result is a perverse incentive: The uncontrolled wildfire that blackens the skies is given a regulatory free pass, while the low-intensity prescribed fire that could have reduced the risk of that disaster faces red tape and potential penalties.
As a result, states become reluctant to issue burn permits, and fire practitioners scale back projects rather than risk running afoul of federal standards.”
https://reason.com/2025/10/22/the-clean-air-act-is-making-our-air-dirtier/
What the Japanese Internment Case Teaches About Judicial Deference to Presidential Power
“this supposed civil libertarian also wrote the majority opinion upholding concentration camps for innocent American citizens. And Black did not even express any public regret over his Korematsu ruling in the decades to come. “It is noteworthy,” the legal scholar Stanley Kutner once observed, “that in an interview shortly before his death, Justice Black maintained that both the President and the Court had been right in their wartime actions.”
According to Black, the outcome in Korematsu was dictated by the existence of emergency conditions and the resulting judicial deference owed to the executive branch. “The military authorities considered the need for action was great, and time was short,” Black declared. “We cannot—by availing ourselves of the calm perspective of hindsight—now say that at that time these actions were unjustified.”
Writing in dissent, Justice Frank Murphy, another Roosevelt appointee and ardent New Dealer, argued that the president’s actions were, in fact, clearly unjustified at the time he took them. “It is essential that there be definite limits to military discretion, especially where martial law has not been declared,” Murphy wrote. “Individuals must not be left impoverished of their constitutional rights on a plea of military necessity that has neither substance nor support.””
https://reason.com/2025/10/23/what-the-japanese-internment-case-teaches-about-judicial-deference-to-presidential-power/