The Bear’s Lair

The Bear’s Lair: Bring Back Imperial Preference!

Canada’s prime minister Mark Carney flew to London last week for talks with Britain’s Kier Starmer, both of them upset about President Trump’s aggression, populism and protectionism. Starmer’s immediate instinct, to snuggle ever closer to the corrupt rotting carcass of the European Union will do Britain no good, nor will Carney’s instinct to create a […]

The Bear’s Lair: Reagan, McKinley or Doughface?

Those still supporting globalist free-trade high-immigration policies are accused of “Zombie Reaganism,” though that policy mix is more Zombie Bushism, derived from the gimcrack “Washington Consensus.” Now Zombie Reaganites, notably Dan McLaughlin of “National Review” have accused President Trump’s followers of “Zombie McKinleyism” – support of high tariffs and protectionism generally — and suggested they […]

The Bear’s Lair: Time to move to Gross Private Product

The Atlanta Fed’s advance estimate of Gross Domestic Product for the first quarter has recently turned sharply negative, to caterwauling glee from the usual suspects in the media and the Blob. Their rapture is economically irrational; GDP was deliberately designed to include government spending, thus flattering orgies of waste such as the Biden administration. It […]

The Bear’s Lair: Will the Germans never learn?

Germany’s voters last week produced a massive demand for greater freedom, with the nationalist AfD’s share of the vote more than doubling to 20.8%. The outgoing government parties all did badly, the SPD losing 9% of the vote, the Greens 3% and the free-market FDP damaged so badly by its participation in the socialist coalition […]

The Bear’s Lair: We need a Bill of Rights to stop AI surveillance

Fifteen hundred of the participants in the January 6, 2021 demonstration at the U.S. Capitol, almost all of them non-violent, were imprisoned through a disturbing use of modern surveillance technology. Twenty years earlier, no such universal punishment would have been possible, even had the government, then far less authoritarian, wanted to impose it. Numerous people […]

The Bear’s Lair: What can go wrong?

Editor’s Note: The Bear’s Lair is happily continuing for the foreseeable future as we were never dependent on USAID funding. Our sincerest condolences to our suddenly impoverished fellow writers. President Trump has had a very successful first few weeks in office, issuing a blizzard of Executive Orders that not only reversed much of the damage […]

The Bear’s Lair: DeepSeek shows us that Big is Bad

Just as Oscar Wilde said it would take a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Nell, so one cannot help giggling that a Chinese inventor with a small team and modest resources has by his open source DeepSeek AI system outsmarted the behemoth “geniuses” that came up with the $500 […]

The Bear’s Lair: The apocalyptic danger of the center-right

Western civilization has declined a long way since its 1991 triumph with the fall of most of Communism. The hard left bears little responsibility for this decline; they have had only a modest share of power. Even the center-left does not bear all the responsibility, their tenure has included some decent governments such as that […]

The Bear’s Lair: Don’t Do It, Mr. President!

This column has written several times on recommended policies for President Donald J. Trump, who will be inaugurated today. However, Trump is erratic, and the people around him are often more so. Not only do we need good policies over the next four years, but we must avoid some superficially attractive bad ones, some of […]