5 Reasons Why I'm Cancelling My Subscription to The New York Times 20 Apr 4:28 PM (19 hours ago)

We have lived in Austin for 40 years. And for nearly all of that time, Lorin and I have subscribed to the New York Times. For decades, we took the paper version. When that got too pricey, we switched to the digital-only subscription. Last week, we got a notice of a price increase. Instead of paying $18 monthly, the Times wants us to pay $33!

That’s the last straw.

I love newspapers and the smell of newsprint. I grew up with newspapers. My parents took the Tulsa World, delivered in the mornings, and the Tulsa Tribune came in the afternoon. I read them both religiously. Early in my career, I published articles in both. I’ve been a reporter for four decades. I’ve long considered the Times to be essential to my job. I’ve written for the Times. In the 1990s, I worked as a stringer for the paper and briefly (very briefly) had hopes of landing a job there. I’ve published op-eds in the Times, including one on the silliness of carbon capture and another on N2N, natural gas to nuclear.

But the Times has lost its credibility and its relevance. Its credo was once “all the news that’s fit to print.” That slogan is now almost a laugh line. The Times has devolved into an agenda-driven outlet that refuses to cover anything that doesn’t fit its agenda. Of course, the same could be said of many — or perhaps most — news outlets. The difference is that the Times has long been considered the paper of record. Given that, it should, in theory anyway, strive for evenhandedness. However, the paper no longer publishes anything close to what might be considered “fair,” particularly when it comes to reporting on energy and climate issues.

Here are five reasons why I’m canceling our subscription.

Yes, inflation is here. Prices are rising for everything from eggs to copper, and Tariff Man’s on-again, off-again gyrations are likely to mean higher prices on a whole lot of things. But for the Times to nearly double its price with no increase in access or quality? That’s insulting. And it’s particularly insulting given the myriad of other outlets available at lower cost or for free. (The Times trades under the ticker NYT. It has a market capitalization of about $8 billion and booked a $294 million profit last year.)

The most likely cause of the pandemic was a lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. But the Times, which prides itself on its investigative work, has never published a complete analysis of exactly what happened and why. To be clear, last year, the oped section ran a piece by Alina Chan on five reasons why the pandemic “probably started in a lab.” (In late 2021, Chan and Matt Ridley published Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19. In 2023, Chan was on the Power Hungry Podcast.) In January, the Times ran a piece by Julian E. Barnes acknowledging that the CIA now favors the lab leak theory. (Barnes covers security and intelligence-related issues for the paper.)

Read the rest of this piece at Robert Bryce Substack.

Robert Bryce is a Texas-based author, journalist, film producer, and podcaster. His articles have appeared in a myriad of publications including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Forbes, Time, Austin Chronicle, and Sydney Morning Herald.

Photo: The New York Times building in the early 1900s, via The New York Public Library in Public Domain.

The "Great Bones" of Rust Belt Cities 18 Apr 4:28 PM (2 days ago)

I went to St. Louis over the weekend, and I was reminded how much I love the way St. Louis neighborhoods look. The city has wonderful vernacular architecture that leads to beautiful neighborhoods at a human scale. That’s not true everywhere, since St. Louis has lost a lot of character through abandonment and demolition, and the scars of highway construction exist throughout the city. But St. Louis is perhaps the quintessential city with “great bones”.

If you’re not familiar with St. Louis, take a look at the image above, and this one below:

A view of homes in St. Louis’ Shaw neighborhood. Source: stlouisneighborhoodsguide.com

Over the years I’ve heard urbanists of all types say that Rust Belt cities were primed for a comeback, someday, because they have “great bones”. But how can we define “great bones” and make it a strategy for growth? This is an especially good question given the work-from-home era we live in now, and where we work and live aren’t necessarily connected anymore.

As for me, I view “great bones” as the quality of the built environment of a city. It’s subjective, yes, but there’s some agreement among people about community quality. Given a chance, people will choose neighborhoods (and I think we all choose neighborhoods or communities, not entire cities or metro areas) that provide us with the housing we like, good schools for our children, parks, shopping amenities, social gathering spaces, and a welcoming environment. The desire for public transit, walkability and multimodal accessibility, and the mix of housing will vary with each person, as would the level of public-facing or private-facing view wants to give.

I laid out my so-called “Big Theory” of American urban development several years ago, and brought it up again last month. I think how people look at whether a place has “great bones” or not falls somewhere into the Big Theory framing. Essentially, people prefer the kind of built environment of particular times in history, and the infrastructure and amenities that come from them, and I think they come in a general order. The strongest preferences are for new places among the public because they’re, well, new. Contemporary housing and commercial development designs, upgraded roadway and utility infrastructure that’s not in danger of deterioration. There’s also a preference for much older places that have a development character that’s difficult to replicate in our cities today. Lastly there’s a vast middle type of built environment. It’s new enough to be missing the character of older places, and old enough to be missing the contemporary comforts you might want.

For me, a good proxy for assessing development quality and character is looking at U.S. Census housing data. A table that’s been included in the Census and American Community Survey data for decades is Table S2504: physical characteristics of occupied housing units. I look specifically for Census estimates on when housing structures were built, and that gives me a sense of what kind of “bones” a place may have.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Pete Saunders is a writer and researcher whose work focuses on urbanism and public policy. Pete has been the editor/publisher of the Corner Side Yard, an urbanist blog, since 2012. Pete is also an urban affairs contributor to Forbes Magazine's online platform. Pete's writings have been published widely in traditional and internet media outlets, including the feature article in the December 2018 issue of Planning Magazine. Pete has more than twenty years' experience in planning, economic development, and community development, with stops in the public, private and non-profit sectors. He lives in Chicago.

Photo: A view of St. Louis’ Central West End neighborhood. Source: stlouisneighborhoodsguide.com, courtesy of The Corner Side Yard.

Train in Vain 17 Apr 4:28 PM (3 days ago)

Ten thousand years from now, future archaeologists will be allowed back into the wasteland that was once known as California.

They will find many wonderous things but what they come across in Central Valley will astonish them – mile after mile after mile of concrete pillars, crumbling decks, arched bridges seemingly connecting nowhere to nothing and straight line after straight line.

Some will state that it must have been an attempt to create an alien spaceport, others will note that the various segments point to different constellations in the night sky and posit that it was an effort to tap into the great universal presence.

Digging will uncover broken fragments of bronze plaques, leading one archaeologist to insist that all of the structures need to be looked at as one monument, a vast linear temple to the god Hi-Spe.

Then another will neuralink into the tattered and tawdry remains of what is now called the internet and, after months of searching, find the California High Speed Rail Authority’s 2008 Business Plan read it and say:

“Are you kidding me? Really? No wonder the civilization collapsed.”

Wednesday, the state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office drove the 48^th final nail into the coffin of the project, stating categorically that if the project cannot find another $7 billion dollars by next June it completely and utterly grinds to a halt.

“There is no specific plan to meet that roughly $7 billion gap, we also think there is some risk that gap could grow,” Helen Kerstein of the LAO told legislatures Wednesday. “This isn’t a way out in the future funding gap. This is a pretty immediate funding gap.”

She added that the project “could come to a complete halt in 15 months without the funding increase.”

The latest news even shocked some Sacramento Democrats. Well, not shocked (they already know) but at least caused them to actually criticize the project.

“The timing of the project review seems totally out of whack with when we need to be making decisions,” said Assemblywoman Cottie Petrie-Norris (D–Irvine.) “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome.”

The rail Authority – which was supposed to present a fully updated business plan to the legislature but hasn’t yet - has exactly zero practical suggestions as to how to to find the money, saying under its breath that maybe the state (which already has a $76 billion deficit this fiscal year) should help or that maybe it could get some federal funding (actually, the feds are looking for ways to get their $4 billion back) or that private funding will finally – after 17 years of beating the corporate bushes to find anyone to invest and failing – come to fruition.

Read the rest of this piece at The Point.

Thomas Buckley is the former Mayor of Lake Elsinore and a former newspaper reporter. He is currently the operator of a small communications and planning consultancy and can be reached directly at planbuckley@gmail.com. You can read more of his work at thomas699.substack.com.

Photo: courtesy The Point.

Can Democrats Exploit Trump's Tariff Chaos? 16 Apr 4:28 PM (4 days ago)

As with many political movements, MAGA represents a fragile coalition of groups that often have little in common — and, at the extremes, may even detest one another.

This tension has been brought into clearer focus by Trump’s recent exemption of tech products from tariffs, a decision likely influenced by the oligarchs in the President’s corner. After all, firms like Apple depend largely on Chinese manufacturers, while Wall Street investors still see the Middle Kingdom as a potential source of future profits. In contrast, smaller firms — such as those who import toys or furniture —enjoy no such protection.

Clearly, the tariff proposals are far less popular than Trump’s moves on such things as the border, gender and the crackdown on universities. Indeed, tariffs are opposed by most Americans and are clearly eroding his support base even as many back protecting US manufacturing.

It is too early to see the impact of tariffs on ordinary people, but it’s not hard to see that higher prices for household utensils, clothing and even food are likely to affect them. Perhaps most disruptive will be the cost of imported cars — a mainstay of many families — which could rise several thousand dollars. Inflation did much to undermine Biden’s Administration, and Trump could suffer a similar fate.

Of course, these exemptions might be mitigated over time as companies adjust to domestic manufacturing or even break their dependency on China. Some companies — such as Nvidia — are already responding by promising to build up to $500 billion worth of artificial intelligence infrastructure in the US over the next four years. The problem, though, may be timing; it takes three to five years to build a new semiconductor plant, and the results may not be felt for several more.

Nevertheless, with these exemptions, Trump risks appearing as though he is giving preferential treatment to his wealthy donors. In theory, this should provide an opening for Democrats. Trump’s great achievement over the last decade has been to win over working-class voters; for the first time in decades, Americans are more likely to identify the GOP with the people than the Democrats. But Trump’s polling on his handling of the economy — a proxy for tariffs — is now underwater, and the Democrats have an opportunity to reassert themselves as the party of common sense.

Read the rest of this piece at UnHerd.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Photo: White House, Public Domain.

The Profoundly Misunderstood Housing Affordability Crisis 15 Apr 4:28 PM (5 days ago)

Over the last half-century, more restrictive urban planning policies have been associated with undermined housing affordability for the middle class. Given the primacy of housing costs in household budgets, this also means that these restrictive policies, especially urban containment, have been associated with greater overall poverty. Some research even suggests that rigid regulation has taken a heavy toll on the economy.1

Unfortunately, much of the present housing affordability discussion profoundly misses what is probably the biggest issue — metropolitan area (market) restrictions on urban fringe development (the theological term is “urban sprawl.” Instead we here about smaller lot sizes (as if lot size matters much), parking (as if people will give up their cars and walk), historic preservation and a host of minutia that cannot hold a candle to the effect of blocking development in the one part of the market) that defines the land value base for the entire enclosed area — the urban fringe.

Fundamentally, urban containment seeks to stop the expansion. of urban areas (sprawl) and increase urban population densities. The international planning orthodoxy uses strategies such as greenbelts, urban growth boundaries, rural (large lot) zoning on urban peripheries, and compact city policies.

Generally, land values in the physical city (built-up urban area) increase toward the urban center and stronger commercial centers (all else equal).2 Urban containment disrupts this pattern, causing abrupt land value spikes at urban growth boundaries and greenbelts — as well as higher land prices throughout the encircled area, including the inner city. This drives up land prices, which tend to become the most expensive factor of production where there is urban containment (Figure 1), as is indicated in Vancouver and Toronto, compared to Winnipeg.

It’s rather like eggs. When there is a shortage of hens, the prices of eggs rise. When there is a shortage of land the price of housing rises, often at very high rates.

Much of this can be traced back to the British Town and Country Planning Act of 1947, which established large greenbelts around urban areas, in which it was illegal to build houses, leading land and house cost escalation.

London School of Economics professor Christian Hilber told The Wall Street Journal: “What is striking is that the countries at the top [of home-price growth] are all Commonwealth countries that copied elements of the restrictive British planning system.” This is evident not only London, but also Vancouver, Toronto, Auckland, and all of Australia’s major markets. This also extends to many markets throughout the world where similar policies have produced similar consequences (Portland, Seattle, Denver, Miami and virtually all of California and a number of European markets).

Each of these strategies reduces the land available for development of middle-income housing in the forms most households prefer (ground-oriented, such as detached, semi-detached, or row houses).

The impact of urban containment on land values is illustrated in Figure 2. The land value increases within the urban growth boundary (UGB) are the “urban containment effect.” These regulations make it all but impossible to profitably build tracts of housing affordable to middle-income households in many markets.

According to prominent urban planners Arthur C. Nelson and Casey J. Dawkins: “Urban containment programs can be distinguished from traditional approaches to land-use regulation by the presence of policies that are explicitly designed to limit the development of land outside a defined urban area while encouraging infill development and redevelopment inside the urban area.”

They also emphasize that: “If a gap in land values on both sides of the boundary does not emerge, either the boundary is too large in the near term or there is too much development potential remaining in rural areas regardless of any land-use restrictions.”

Regrettably, proponents of the international planning orthodoxy were right—urban containment is associated with materially higher land prices. The planning retort is that people can live at higher densities, such as in high rise apartments or condos. The problem is that’s not how most households prefer to live and many consider this a lower standard of living. Households are leaving the most expensive areas not only because of the high price to income ratios, but also because of an association (perceived or real) between higher crime rates and higher densities, not to mention pathetic education performance.

The preference for lower densities is illustrated by the much lower urban densities in major metropolitan counties attracting net domestic migrants between 2020 and 2023 (2,150 per square mile), compared to the much higher urban densities of major metropolitan counties losing domestic migrations (11,500 per square mile)

More than five decades ago, legendary planner Sir Peter Hall (London School of Economics) concluded that “perhaps the biggest single failure” of British urban containment had been its failure to prevent losses in housing affordability.3 Notably, this was before the comprehensive urban containment policies were adopted in Portland and many other markets in Canada, Australia, the United States and elsewhere.

This is consistent with economic principle. Former principal urban planner at the World Bank, asserts that Alain Bertaud: “arbitrary limits on city expansion” (such as urban growth boundaries and greenbelts) result in “predictably higher prices.”

Worse off due to planning? Ultimately, the purpose of urban planning should be about people. Fabled urbanist Jane Jacobs offered the test: “If planning helps people, they ought to be better off as a result, not worse off.” Paul Cheshire, Max Nathan, and Henry Overman of the London School of Economics put said “The ultimate objective of urban policy is to improve outcomes for people rather than places; for individuals and families rather than buildings.”

In recent years, the densification agenda of urban planning has become more evident. The solution, say some planners is (to repeat The New York Times headline) “Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build.” No matter how many “builds” in a headline,” it does nothing to reform the regulations in Portland, Seattle, California and elsewhere where houses that are affordable cannot be legally built where it matters. Moreover, in many markets land prices have been driven up so much that houses cannot be profitably built at prices affordable to middle-income households

Meanwhile, households are taking housing affordability policy into their own hands, by leaving the dysfunctional urban containment markets and heading to where housing and the standard of living is more affordable.

In Canada, between 2019 and 2023, large markets (Census Metropolitan Areas) experienced a net loss of nearly 275,000 domestic migrants. Smaller markets (Census Agglomerations) gained nearly 110,000, while the rest of the country gained 165,000 (Figure 3). This contrasts sharply with 2004–2018, when large markets gained 19,000 and smaller markets 77,000, while the balance of the nation gained 97,000.4

In the United States, since 2010, large metropolitan areas have experienced increasing out-migration. Between 2020 and 2023, all metro areas over 1 million people lost net domestic migrants, while all classifications below 1 million gained them (Figure 4).

The bottom line is that without material reforms to urban containment regulations, such that the competitive market for land is restored, any serious improvement in housing affordability is unlikely. The housing markets of California and Australia, as well as Vancouver, Toronto, Portland, Seattle and so on and so on seem likely to deteriorate, and certainly not to materially improve.

Addendum: As this article was in production, The New York Times published an article by well-known housing reporter Conor Dougherty suggesting the need for more “sprawl” to solve the US housing crisis. Long friendly to density advocates, he has now admitted that densification alone would not solve the problem. He is right.

1. For example, see: Hsieh, Chang-Tai and Moretti, Enrico, Housing Constraints and Spatial Misallocation (May 2018). CEPR Discussion Paper No. DP12912.

2. William Alonso (1964), Location and Land Use: Toward a General Theory of Land Rent (Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press).

3. Peter Hall, et al (1973), The Containment of Urban England, Volume 2.

4. See: Financial Post.

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a Senior Fellow with Unleash Prosperity in Washington and the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg and a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University in Orange, California. He has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris. His principal interests are economics, poverty alleviation, demographics, urban policy and transport. He is author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and author of Demographia World Urban Areas.

Photo: Vancouver, BC (by author).

‘American Oasis’ Review: The Lure of the Desert 14 Apr 4:28 PM (6 days ago)

Hating the Southwest, particularly its burgeoning cities such as Phoenix, is de rigueur in American media. Jon Stewart has called Arizona “the meth lab of democracy.” Hunter S. Thompson described hell as an “overcrowded version of Phoenix.” Fran Lebowitz, the epitome of New York progressive arrogance, said: “I don’t think anyone needs Arizona. . . . Putin: here take Arizona, leave Ukraine.”

It’s a tendency that Kyle Paoletta rightfully finds annoying. In “American Oasis,” Mr. Paoletta, a journalist and critic, focuses on the region spanning California to Texas and argues that the Southwest, if not a mistake, is poised for ecological and social dislocation.

Having grown up in Albuquerque, N.M., the son of affluent professionals, Mr. Paoletta now questions whether newcomers “who have sought to master the Sonoran Desert with air conditioning and aqueducts” can really call the region home.

Yet these are precisely the people who continue to migrate to this supposedly miserable corner of the continent, building what amounts to a new America. Budding sophistos such as Mr. Paoletta may move to the dank Northeast, but since 2010 Arizona’s population has grown by more than one million—the eighth-fastest growth among U.S. states. More than two-thirds of that growth has been attributable to people moving to Arizona from other states, primarily far-more-temperate California.

The reasons are clear. These migrants are not coming to exploit cattle, cotton or copper but to find opportunities in industries, such as aerospace and semiconductor manufacturing, that were once dominated by California. Exploiting the indigenous population is not high on the agenda of someone moving from Los Angeles or Long Island, N.Y. In most cases, their contact with native peoples is limited to the casinos.

Nor are the newcomers uniformly ignorant or unskilled, as many on the coasts would believe. California and New York may be hemorrhaging recent college graduates, but Las Vegas, Phoenix and Tucson—once seen as retirement cities—are now attracting more people, especially millennials, who are ready to buy homes and start families.

Mr. Paoletta’s narrative also misses the fact that many people moving to the Southwest are themselves minorities. He only has eyes for the activists and the cultural rebels—the advocates of Chicanismo, for instance, or the National Welfare Rights Organization and Black Lives Matter—who complain about the encroachments of the diverse newcomers. His focus is not on the upwardly mobile minorities but the “Latino and Indian underclass living without utilities along gravel roads.”

It’s not surprising, then, that Mr. Paoletta praises the “sanctuary movement,” even though most Americans, including many Latinos, were not so happy with the Biden open border. Somehow the pushback against unvetted mass migration missed the author except as proof of racism. In his view, the promise of equal rights and opportunities offered by the Statue of Liberty is “illusory” and immigration status should not matter.

In reality, despite the hoary racist past, minorities are moving en masse to Arizona and other Southwestern areas. Most either choose or hope to settle in the suburbs. Rather than fighting “the man,” they are more likely to look into how they can become him and have more in common with their middle- or working-class white neighbors than the professional ethnic progressives.

Typically, Mr. Paoletta despises master-planned communities. But these are the places where many minorities reside or hope to reside. More than 95% of all U.S. suburban growth since 2010, notes Wendell Cox, a demographer, has been driven by people of color — hardly fodder for a woke revolution. Almost half of Latinos in Arizona voted for Donald Trump. As the number of second- or third-generation Southwesterners increase, they could easily move further to the right, as is already happening in Texas.

“American Oasis” quite rightly closes with a discussion of water. As the old saying goes, “whiskey is for drinking; water is for fighting over.” Ever since the Hohokam people settled in Arizona some 2,000 years ago, growth and survival in the Southwest has been about access to water. Droughts are always a threat; one that occurred early in the previous century lasted a decade.

Mr. Paoletta regards the water issue as being related to “climate,” although it’s long been obvious that the region would have to learn to live with less. The author correctly salutes efforts, both in Phoenix and Las Vegas, to curb per capita water consumption, but then denounces dispersed developments and favors density. Never mind that steel-and-glass towers create a heat-island effect, generating more heat than low-rise landscaped development.

Discussions of climate issues have become a distraction, a barrier to addressing the region’s real challenges. Mr. Paoletta, for instance, rejects the idea of desalinization, something that has been impactful in other dry regions, notably the Middle East.

Yet there are reasons to be hopeful. As the region grows, Southwestern culture will evolve. The treatment of ethnic minorities in the past may have been horrendous, but that’s only part of the story. The days of quasiracist politics in these states have largely passed; Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada repeatedly send left-leaning senators to Washington. Mr. Paoletta concedes the region is becoming “a pluralistic society already in full flower.” Today you can find Turkish or Vietnamese food in Tucson, a city once known largely for taco and burger joints.

The Southwest has many problems. But it is also where millions of Americans are forging the nation’s future. Multiracial suburbs are eclipsing ghettos and reservations. New ways of building houses and communities to deal with heat and water conservation are emerging. Rather than sunbaked oddballs or brutal exploiters, the people of the Southwest are creating a new multiethnic society in the desert. For this, they deserve a far more balanced depiction than found in “American Oasis.”

This piece first appeared at: Wall Street Journal.

France and America's Cold War 13 Apr 4:28 PM (7 days ago)

French president Emmanuel Macron had an unusually good relationship with US president Donald Trump during the latter’s first term. There are numerous photos of them smiling and laughing together as the businessmen-turned-presidents coordinate global policy. During a visit to Paris, Mr. Trump watched a Bastille Day military parade and later decided he wanted a similar event at home.

The ‘bromance’ did not last. Mr. Trump increasingly acted without, and even against, European interests in his economic and foreign policy dealings. In late 2019 the US president supported the Turkish military’s operations against the Kurds in Syria; a move which frustrated other NATO members as the Kurds were a crucial ally in the fight against ISIS. Mr. Trump’s decision led Mr. Macron to say that NATO was suffering “brain death.” While the French president did not mention the United States, everyone knew what he meant, given the US’ traditional role as leader of the military alliance. The next time the two met in London Trump quipped that he would give ISIS fighters to European countries to deal with, prompting Macron to respond, “Let’s be serious,” and urge the US not to abandon the fight in Syria.

In hindsight the two look practically chummy compared to their current relationship. The returned president has entered the White House with fire and fury, launching (and quickly abandoning) trade wars against multiple countries and even threatening to annex some of America’s allies.

Even before Mr. Trump returned to power Mr. Macron had originally called for a pan-European army in September 2017, to muted response. Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 eleven countries joined the French-led European Intervention Initiative, a military organization meant to coordinate European forces. On 28 February 2025 the French president used some of his strongest language yet, saying that Europeans cannot accept a “happy vassalage” from Washington. This statement was in reference to the longstanding Cold War order wherein Washington dictated world policy and Europeans nodded along as the US defended Western Europe from the USSR. Furthermore, America’s high military spending allowed Europeans to allocate their money to infrastructure and generous welfare states, ensuring that they enjoyed the highest living standards in the world.

Mr. Trump’s isolationist policies, combined with Russian threats to European security, have finally woken sleeping Europeans to the reality of their situation. A poll taken in March found that three-quarters of Germans do not believe the United States is a trustworthy partner (an all-time low). A similar poll found that 73% of French citizens no longer consider the United States an ally. There is widespread sentiment across Europe that America is at best an untrustworthy partner, possibly a rival, and potentially an enemy.

How abysmal are relations between America and Europe? One shocking (and under-reported) incident tells a dramatic story. In a press conference at Mar-a-Lago on 7 January, Mr. Trump refused to rule out using military forces to annex Greenland. In response, the French government quietly began negotiations with Denmark, asking if the European country would allow French troops to station themselves on the island to deter an American invasion. The Danish government ultimately rejected the idea. However, the fact that French officials seriously believe the United States may invade their allies and fellow NATO members demonstrates that Europeans have lost all faith in the US as a partner.

After spending roughly eighty years under the American aegis Europeans may finally have the will to defend themselves from foreign threats. Defense spending across European Union member states remained level between 2005-2014 at around €150 billion. Following the Russian annexation of Crimea that spending more than doubled to €326 billion and is expected to increase another €100 billion by 2027. This alone is not enough in the face of a nuclear threat. Russia currently possesses an estimated 5,889 nuclear weapons, something which President Vladimir Putin has regularly reminded his adversaries.

This is where France takes center-stage, as Mr. Macron jockeys to replace the United States with France as the shield of Europe. In a speech given on 5 March the French president declared that “France has maintained a nuclear deterrence since 1964,” and “that deterrence needs to apply to all our European allies.”

Since taking office Mr. Macron has adopted a similar stance to foreign policy as Charles de Gaulle, the legendary leader of Free France during World War 2 and president of the republic from 1959-1969. De Gaulle famously urged the French nation to pursue its own independent foreign policy. He famously vetoed Britain’s entry into the European Economic Community because he believed the island nation was too dependent on the US. The old general did not oppose the United States but firmly believed that France could not be subject to another country’s power. Under de Gaulle France developed an independent strike force for its nuclear weapons, something which US President John F. Kennedy openly mocked (when France lent the Mona Lisa to the United States, Mr. Kennedy quipped that the US would address its woeful gap in culture by developing an ‘independent artistic force’).

De Gaulle’s foresight seems more prescient than ever. With the fourth-largest nuclear arsenal in the world, France has the ability to rattle any other power and has clearly done so, given Putin’s icy response to Macron’s proposal to create a nuclear shield for Europe. What separates France from Britain, the other non-Russian European country with nuclear weapons, is that France has a fully-independent military whose Rafale jets, Triomphant-Class submarines, missiles and detection technology are all manufactured within the country.

While Britain builds its own nuclear warheads, the Trident II D5 missile bodies are leased from the US and maintained at Kings Bay Naval Base in Georgia. Britain’s dependence on US defense manufacturing is currently a major cause for concern in London given how much of its military capacity relies on a currently unreliable partner.

Given its military strength, France is a natural choice for leader of Europe as Russia threatens the east and the US retreats from the world. While many French voters will tell you Mr. Macron is no de Gaulle, the president is currently attempting to draw upon Gaullism to create a new order. The former general dogmatically asserted that a united Europe was the only defense against dominance by the United States and the Soviet Union. His calls to arm and oppose greater cooperation with the US were often met with derision from a younger generation tired of the old man stuck in a World War 2 mindset. Now his cryptic words appear prophetic: “No country without an atom bomb could properly consider itself independent.”

In an increasingly divided world, France aims to become the military leader of a strong Europe. Though Europeans themselves might wish to live under ‘happy vassalage,’ the threats posed by the United States under president Trump and Russia under President Putin are forcing a continent to remake itself. It is Mr. Macron’s aim to make France the preeminent leader of this emerging Europe.

Dr. Gary Girod is an assistant professor of history at Oklahoma Panhandle State University. He is the author of Domestic Surveillance and Social Control in Britain and France during World War I (Routledge: 2024) and host of The French History Podcast, a large-scale digital and public history project with over 200,000 followers on social media.

Photo: White House Archive via Flickr in Public Domain.

Trump is Right to Take On the Free Trade Fundamentalists 11 Apr 4:28 PM (9 days ago)

It’s easy to dismiss Donald Trump’s haphazard tariff barrage as silly and self-defeating, especially after so many days of global market turmoil. But critics among liberal Democrats and Republican free traders still need to address the overriding goal behind the seeming madness. The key strategic objective of Trump’s approach is simple: restoring American industrial power. Opponents of the US president ignore this at their peril.

It is true that the American economy continues to outperform those of Europe and the UK, especially in terms of tech, communications and finance. Yet the situation for blue-collar professions and working-class communities has not improved with the pace of globalisation. Between 2004 and 2017, the US share of world manufacturing shrank from 15 to 10 per cent. Since 2000, notes an Economic Policy Institute study, China’s export barrage has cost as many as 3.7million US jobs.

The ‘China shock’ is not just an American but a global phenomenon. Today, China boasts nearly as many factory exports as the US, Japan and Germany combined. Overall, Europe’s industrial sector continues to decline, losing 850,000 manufacturing jobs between 2019 and 2024. Germany could lose around half of its 800,000 auto jobs to Chinese competition by 2030.

To be sure, the early stages of globalisation reaped enormous benefits, both for Western consumers and for developing countries. But China’s admission into the World Trade Organisation in 2000 changed the dynamic. Here was a huge country, with enormous human capital, which adopted a highly mercantilist drive to dominate industries, first at the lower end of manufacturing and then, increasingly, in the most sophisticated sectors.

Wall Street bankers and tech oligarchs may be untroubled by the consequences of Beijing’s mercantilism, as they have little contact with America’s working and middle classes. The poorest have increasingly been forced to subsist on expanding welfare benefits which, in turn, subsidise the affluent for whom they work for a pittance as nannies, gardeners and day labourers.

For the working classes, manufacturing and related fields, like energy and logistics, represent an escape from economic marginalisation. Overall, manufacturing jobs pay $54,000 annually on average, well above the $47,000 average in services. These jobs also come with health insurance and steady employment.

Geography plays a role here. Apologists for the outgoing trade regime often ignore that its impact was felt most acutely in particular regions, like the American Midwest. Researchers John Russo and Sherry Linkon describe how the closure of a steel mill in Youngstown, Ohio – the first of a wave of closures in the region – undermined the sense of worth and optimism among residents. Many can still recall better days, when employment was high, jobs paid well, workers were protected by strong unions and industrial labour provided a source of pride – not only because it produced tangible goods, but also because it was recognised as challenging, dangerous and important.

Similar tragedies have occurred all over the West, away from the elite college towns, leafy suburbs and urban haunts of the upper classes. You can see this in places like England’s Midlands. The UK, the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, now produces less wealth from manufacturing than countries like Mexico, Russia and Taiwan. Deindustrialisation has also blighted much of the former East Germany and Japan’s Kansai region.

Read the rest of this piece: Spiked.

Photo: Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian, via Flickr, in Public Domain.

Big Business At The (Inflation Reduction Act) Trough 10 Apr 4:28 PM (10 days ago)

The late economist Milton Friedman famously declared that “nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.”

Friedman’s line comes to mind because a lobbying frenzy is underway in Washington, DC. Some of the city’s most powerful special interests are working to prevent a repeal or reduction of the lavish energy-related tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act. No lobby group is working harder than the American Clean Power Association.

Why is the ACPA pushing so hard? The answer is simple: Its members have collected tens of billions of dollars in federal subsidies, loans, and loan guarantees over the past few years to install solar energy, wind energy, batteries, and other forms of alt-energy, and they don’t want that geyser of federal money to stop. As the Wall Street Journal noted in a recent editorial, “Republicans for the Green New Deal,” thanks to the IRA’s expansion of the investment tax credit (ITC) and production tax credit (PTC), solar and wind developers can “offset as much as 70% to 80% of their costs.” Given that giveaway, it’s no surprise that the ACPA and its members are spending millions of dollars to persuade Congress — and in particular, Republican members of the House of Representatives — to keep the corporate cash flowing.

According to Subsidy Tracker, an excellent database maintained by one of my favorite NGOs, Good Jobs First (annual revenue: $1.9 million), the companies now on ACPA’s board of directors have collected $47 billion in subsidies, loans, and loan guarantees. Most of that sum has been collected over the past decade or so. But that figure represents only a fraction of the public money that the group’s members have vacuumed up over the past few years. Furthermore, and perhaps most galling, is this: About a third of that $47 billion is going to foreign corporations, including companies like Iberdrola, Shell, and Equinor.

Why does this matter? First and foremost, the ITC and PTC are, to use the title of Meredith Angwin’s excellent 2020 book, shorting the grid. The massive subsidies for weather-dependent forms of generation are distorting electricity markets and contributing to the premature closure of the thermal plants needed to assure the affordability, reliability, and resilience of our electric grid.

Second, these subsidies are fueling the landscape-wrecking, bird-and-bat killing, property-value-destroying energy sprawl that comes with the expansion of Big Solar and Big Wind. They are also fueling the insane expansion of offshore wind energy into the known habitat of the critically endangered North Atlantic Right Whale and other marine mammals.

Read the rest of this piece at Robert Bryce Substack.

Photo: Windtech via Wikimedia under CC 3.0 License.

Are the Democrats Drifting Further Left? 9 Apr 4:28 PM (11 days ago)

The Democrats are at a historic ebb and now is a good time to examine what the party believes in, who its main protagonists are and what their agenda is. Amid the fraught divisions in the party, however, one faction is emerging strong: the Big Red One.

That the Left of the party is in the ascendancy is evident at both the local and national level. Rather than let the fallout of Donald Trump’s tariffs speak for itself, the new head of the Democratic National Committee engaged in mad fighting talk. Ken Martin said: “We’re coming. This is a new Democratic Party. We’re taking the gloves off.” Martin draws his support from the likes of prominent anti-Israel figure Attorney General Keith Ellison. He is also a close ally of Left-leaning Minnesota Governor and Kamala Harris running mate Tim Walz, who just released a textbook for students that echoes Critical Race Theory, including an attack on “racial capitalism”.

Martin’s elevation took place in an atmosphere that seemed to one veteran Democrat “like outtakes from a humanities seminar at a small liberal arts college”. And in place of the donor-dominated DNC leadership of the past, Martin has been lionised in the Leftist press, as a “pro-labor progressive” whose positions may offend the party’s donor base. The progressive stranglehold was made even more evident with the election of anti-gun activist David Hogg as Vice Chair of the DNC. Hogg has previously called for abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), defunding police and has expressed hostility towards Israel. This will no doubt alienate more moderate Democrats.

The true leaders of the Big Red One are not party apparatchiks, but populist firebrands like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who also tend to be those with far higher numbers of social media followers than more conventional party leaders. Last year, for example, AOC became the first politician to amass over a million followers on Bluesky, the liberal alternative to X.

The President’s alliance with Elon Musk and other libertarian tech bros no doubt bedevils Democrats of all stripes. But it plays into the hands of those on the Left like Sanders and AOC, who, as Vanity Fair notes, are “packing arenas” with their “oppose oligarchy tour”, where they accuse Trump-aligned oligarchs of being precursors to a new authoritarian, even fascist, regime. Some politicians feel safe enough to cheer Tesla’s decline while being reluctant to oppose the blowing up the cars among their own supporters.

The key threat to the Big Red One’s success will be at the local level. It is here — in Californian cities like San Francisco, Oakland and even Los Angeles — that moderate Democrats have scored wins against progressive regimes. But cities, and particularly their reliable Democratic primary voters, still favour the Left, as we can see in the rise of New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdami, who is a part of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). He has proposed massive expansion of the city’s welfare state.

Another Leftie, Ras Baraka, the Newark deputy mayor running for governor in New Jersey, has indulged in anti-Israel rhetoric and has links to the overtly antisemitic Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. Leticia James, New York’s firebrand Attorney General who won the civil lawsuit against Trump due to the overvaluation of his property, may also seek to win the governorship.

Read the rest of this piece: UnHerd.

Photo: Gage Skidmore, via Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

Forever 20 8 Apr 4:28 PM (12 days ago)

If you let the popularity of an idea – no matter how silly - dictate your stance, then you are not a very good elected official.

If you completely ignore and shoo-away and disparage overwhelming public sentiment on an issue, then you are not a very good elected official.

And, in the latter case, doing so used to mean your job at risk. But that, in the large and depressing part, is no longer the case.

And that is a result of voting districts, at every level.

You can be consistently on the “20% side” of an issue, as it were, and defy the remaining 80% of public sentiment and not be too worried about losing your seat because the district you represent has been drawn in such a way as to make it nearly mathematically impossible.

You can be in favor of paying for trans surgeries, in favor of illegal alien criminals staying in the country, in favor of massive slush fund spending that only goes to your political cronies, you can be in favor of government censorship, and on and on and not worry even though the vast majority of the public – probably even your district – are opposed to them.

In other words, rotten districts are licenses to be crazy because you only have to get through the primary where the 20% miraculously becomes 50% because they are far more obsessed with their issues…they vote…or are voted for…or paid to vote…

Let’s start with Congress.

Out of the 435 seats, about 190 are Democrat automatics. If a combination of Albert Einstein, Cary Grant, and the Buddha challenged the incumbent in any of these seats he would lose, even if he ran as an independent (Run as a Republican? Don’t even bother.)

The same can be said for the 190 ribrock reliable Republican seats.

That leaves 55 seats, or only 13% of the entire House of Representatives, in play in any given year. (Note – if only legal residents and citizens were counted when creating congressional districts, it is estimated that at least 10 Democrat seats would slip at least into the “contestable” pile.)

And if you are in one of those safe seats you can do anything you want, no matter what the public thinks.

On the Senate side, it’s slightly different as they are statewide elections that far more closely represent the actual will of the voters. At this moment in time, about 15 states can reliably predicted to return two Democrats, about 18 to return two Republicans.

That leaves about 34 seats or so theoretically in actual play, a far larger percentage than in the House.

Read the rest of this piece at The Point.

Photo: courtesy The Point.

If Carney Brings Canada Closer to Europe, Financial Ruin Would Follow 7 Apr 4:28 PM (13 days ago)

U.S. President Donald Trump’s mindless, and frankly pointless, comments about Canada becoming the 51st state have stirred up latent Canadian patriotism. But it also may result in Canada, which is already economically moribund, further aligning itself with the permanent European Union bureaucracy.

A tilt towards Europe would be natural for Liberal Leader Mark Carney, the former pre-Brexit head of the Bank of England. He’s an advocate of the very environmental, social and economic policies that have led the EU — and, to some extent, Canada — into economic and social decline.

Carney is the ultimate product of the Euro-Atlantic elite, with affiliations with the World Economic Forum, the Bilderberg Group and the Group of Thirty. Recently, he travelled to Europe in a search of “reliable allies” — that is, people who think alike. He has identified as a “European” in the past, and holds British and Irish citizenship.

In office, we can expect him to epitomize the bureaucratic spirit of the profoundly dysfunctional EU. The central organizing principle of the EU is disregard for nation-states. Recent antidemocratic moves to remove troublesome populists in Romania and take out a leading presidential aspirant in France suggests Europe’s most outspoken defenders of democracy frequently toss out results when disappointed.

The rest of the European agenda is no bargain, either. It prioritizes an ever-expanding welfare state, as well as climate, social and immigration policies now rejected in the United States. Its politics, and economics, centre on stasis.

This is a swan song Canadians need to resist. Under the government of former prime minister Justin Trudeau, Canada was already succumbing to the essentials of Euro-politics: high trade barriers, net-zero climate policies, essentially open borders and the systematic undermining of the country’s past.

Climate is a particular challenge. Carney has a long history, including as United Nations special envoy for climate action, of being at the forefront of steering investment to preferred “green sectors.” American investors have already moved away from such commitments.

Read the rest of this piece at: National Post.

Photo: Michael Wuertenberg, via Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

Governor Targets More Apartment Construction, So of Course Fewer Are Built 6 Apr 4:28 PM (14 days ago)

On her first day in office, Oregon Governor Tina Kotek signed an executive order calling for the construction of 36,000 new homes per year. She was especially hoping for lots of new apartments because, as everyone knows, driving is evil and people who live in apartments drive less than people who live in single-family homes.

It should come as no surprise to anyone who understands how well central planning works that apartment construction in Portland, where close to half of Oregonians live, is now at its lowest level in more than a decade. There are several reasons for this, but among them are several idiotic government policies that have discouraged more construction.

For example, Portland passed an inclusionary zoning ordinance requiring that developers of projects with 20 or more apartments set aside at least 20 percent of them for low-income families or 10 percent for very low income families. As a result, developers are building 19-unit apartments on land that could support 20 or more.

Another is that, in 2019, the Oregon legislature — with strong support from Kotek, who was then speaker of the house — passed the nation’s first statewide rent control law. As every economist knows, rent control is one of the best ways to create a housing shortage.

The Atlantic recently cited an economic study that found that when the number of progressive (read: central planning) voters in a city increases, the number of housing permits falls. As another Atlantic article noted, the five states with the highest rates of homelessness are all run by Democrats.

Read the rest of this piece at The Antiplanner.

Randal O'Toole, the Antiplanner, is a policy analyst with nearly 50 years of experience reviewing transportation and land-use plans and the author of The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook, and Your Future.

Photo: CoStar via Willamette Week.

Ways Out of California's Forest of Problems: Part 2 4 Apr 4:28 PM (16 days ago)

The second of two reported essays on the issues facing California. Read the first installment here.

California’s wide range of problems – including declining schools, widening inequality, rising housing prices, and a weak job market – show the urgent need for reform. The larger question is whether there is the will to change.

Although the state’s remarkable entrepreneurial economy has kept it afloat, a growing number of residents are concluding that the progressive agenda, pushed by public unions and their well-heeled allies, is failing. Most Californians have an exceptional lack of faith in the state’s direction. Only 40% of California voters approve of the legislature, and almost two-thirds have told pollsters the state is heading in the wrong direction. That helps explain why California residents – including about 1.1 million since 2021 – have been fleeing to other states.

Unhappiness with the one-party state is particularly intense in the inland areas, which are the only locales now growing and may prove critical to any resurgence. More troubling still, over 70% of California parents feel their children will do less well than they did. Four in 10 are considering an exit. By contrast, seniors, thought to be leaving en masse, are the least likely to express a desire to leave.

In some ways, discontent actually erodes potential support for reform. Conservative voters, notes a recent study, are far more likely to express a desire to move out of the state; the most liberal are the least likely. “Texas is taking away my voters,” laments Shawn Steel, California’s GOP National Committee Member.

New Awakenings

Given the demographic realities, a successful drive for reform cannot be driven by a marginalized GOP. Instead, what’s needed is a movement that can stitch together a coalition of conservatives, independents (now the state’s second-largest political grouping), and most critically, moderate Democrats.

Remarkably, this shift has already begun in an unlikely place: the ultra-liberal, overwhelmingly Democratic Bay Area. For years, its most influential residents – billionaires, venture capitalists, and well-paid tech workers – have abetted or tolerated an increasingly ineffective and corrupt regime. Not only was the area poorly governed, but the streets of San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, and other cities have become scenes of almost Dickensian squalor.

Over the past two years, tech entrepreneurs and professionals concerned about homelessness and crime worked to get rid of progressive prosecutor Chesa Boudin. Last year, they helped elect Dan Lurie, scion of the Levi Strauss fortune, as mayor, as well as some more moderate members to the Board of Supervisors. Lurie, of course, faces a major challenge to restore San Francisco’s luster against entrenched progressives and their allies in the media, academia, and the state’s bureaucracy.

Similar pushbacks are evident elsewhere. Californians, by large majorities, recently passed bills to strengthen law enforcement, ditching liberalized sentencing laws passed by Democratic lawmakers and defended by Gov. Gavin Newsom. Progressive Democrats have been recalled not only in San Francisco but also in Oakland (Alameda County) and Los Angeles, with voters blaming ideological-driven law enforcement for increasing rates of crime and disorder.

Read the rest of this piece at: Real Clear Investigations.

Photo: Redwood National and State Parks/California.

Climate Change Is Driving California’s Golden Road to Decline: Part 1 3 Apr 4:28 PM (17 days ago)

This is the first of two essays on issues facing California.

“From the Beginning, California promised much. While yet barely a name on the map, it entered American awareness as a symbol of renewal. It was a final frontier: of geography and of expectation.”

— Kevin Starr, “Americans and the California Dream, 1850-1915”

California’s economic, academic, media, and political establishment still embraces the notion of the state’s inevitable supremacy. “The future depends on us,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said at his first inauguration, “and we will seize this moment.” Others see California as deserving and capable of nationhood, a topic that has resurfaced with Trump’s presidency as it reflects, as a New York Times column put it, “the shared values of our increasingly tolerant and pluralistic society.”

Critics say this vision is at odds with the facts on the ground. Rather than the exemplar of a new “progressive capitalism” and a model for social justice, California both accommodates the highest number of billionaires and the highest cost-adjusted poverty rate. It has the third highest gap, behind just Washington, D.C., and Louisiana, between middle- and upper-middle-income earners of any state. Nearly one in five Californians – many working – lives in poverty (using a cost-of-living adjusted poverty rate); the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) estimates another one-fifth live in near-poverty – roughly 15 million people in total.

“California” is a model that no longer delivers. To be sure, California has a huge GDP, paced largely by high real estate prices and the stock value of a handful of huge tech firms. It retains the inertia from its glory days, particularly in technology and entertainment, but that edge is evaporating as tech firms flee the state and Hollywood productions are shot around the world. For all its strengths, California has the nation’s second-highest rate of unemployment with lagging job growth, particularly in comparison to its neighbors and chief rivals, notably Texas, Arizona, and Nevada.

The signs of failure are evident on the streets. Roughly half the nation’s homeless population lives in the Golden State, many concentrated in disease- and crime-ridden tent cities in Los Angeles or San Francisco. Barely one in three state residents – and only one in four younger voters – now considers California a good place to achieve the American dream. Increasingly, California is where this dream goes to die.

‘San Francisco Gentry Liberalism’

The roots of California are long and deep. In August, for example, the New York Times reported how its development into a one-party state controlled by progressive Democrats has made it the country’s center of political corruption. “Over the last 10 years,” the Times reported, “576 public officials in California have been convicted on federal corruption charges, according to Justice Department reports, exceeding the number of cases in states better known for public corruption, including New York, New Jersey and Illinois.”