The Bear’s Lair

The Bear’s Lair: John C. Calhoun would have loved H1B

H1B visas are not slavery. However, they place their recipients in an inferior, immobile tier of the labor force that by preventing them from moving freely between employers, allows employers to exploit them at wages below the U.S. market level. In this respect, they serve the same economic function as antebellum slavery, providing a non-market […]

The Bear’s Lair: Emerging Markets in a Protectionist World

Emerging markets were huge beneficiaries of the fall of Communism and the globalization trend that followed it in 1991-2008. Since then, the story has been much darker for poor countries in all regions of the world, with many “emerging markets” ceasing to emerge and relapsing back into long-term poverty. With President Trump’s advent, more protectionism […]

The Bear’s Lair: The Rise of a Neo-Communist Europe

The European Union was always a somewhat anti-free-market association, one reason why the then more liberal United Kingdom should not have joined it. In recent years, however, it has gone beyond the mild social democracy baked into its constitutional arrangements, and has become more authoritarian, more oriented towards central planning through its regulations, and recently […]

The Bear’s Lair: Don’t throw Lina Khan out with the bathwater

The Biden Administration has generally been startling in its lack of originality on economic policy, with one exception: Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan. Khan has reversed the FTC’s long-standing positive attitude to mergers and acquisitions, taking a highly skeptical attitude to them, based partly on her own anti-capitalist ideology. While the incoming Trump administration […]

The Bear’s Lair: The Strange Death of Liberal America

George Dangerfield’s 1935 “The Strange Death of Liberal England” set out how increasing unrest and inept government in 1910-14 led to the collapse of the Liberal Party that had ruled Britain for most of the 19th century. A similar book could be written today about the collapse since 2000 of the centrist, well governed “Liberal” […]

The Bear’s Lair: Scott Bessent must be the anti-Soros

The background of Scott Bessent, President-elect Trump’s nominee for Treasury Secretary, contains warning signals for fans of Trump and the U.S. economy, in that he worked for George Soros, for whom he was instrumental in the highly profitable 1992 trashing of the pound. For Trump, he must pursue an anti-Soros agenda, sweeping away the remnants […]

The Bear’s Lair: Ending the perpetual war

One enormous potential advantage of President Trump’s re-election is that it may enable the United States to end the perpetual war in which it has been engaged since 2001. That war has caused U.S. public debt to spiral from 30% of GDP to over 100%, destabilized large sections of the world turning them into unproductive […]

The Bear’s Lair: Should we follow Ron Paul and End the Fed

The great Ron Paul is associated with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and is well known for wishing to abolish one of the least effective government entities: the Federal Reserve. As the Department of Education and other hallowed government entities become one with Nineveh and Tyre, Paul’s question should be asked, whose answer bears […]

The Bear’s Lair: An agenda for Elon Musk

Before President Donald Trump’s substantial re-election, Elon Musk had promised to head a “Department Of Government Efficiency” that might cut $2 trillion from the Federal budget, and even floated the idea of bringing in the great Dr. Ron Paul, who at 89 is an encouragement to us all. That seems an eminently attractive goal, entirely […]

The Bear’s Lair: Brits Must Choose their Betrayal for 2029

The Conservative Party, of which Kemi Badenoch has just been elected leader, has been betraying its supporters since 1834. The new Reform party has not yet begun betraying its supporters, but undoubtedly will if it selects parliamentary candidates centrally. Those Brits wishing to achieve the distant miracle of having their country competently governed therefore have […]