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 of the Biden administration, but also made some changes that had been needed for decades. Inevitably, there were also a few mis-steps. However, both Trump’s temperament and belief system could lead to damaging errors in the future, and the delicate and infuriating process of passing legislation through Congress may worsen matters further. There are thus many things that could go wrong and turn what should be a stellar Trump second term into a disappointment, or even a fiasco. Continue reading →

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 billion Stargate announcement. Large bureaucracies subtract value, government subtracts even more value and ivory-tower HR wokery subtracts most of all. Small scale entrepreneurialism, fiercely independent of conventional pieties, is necessary not merely to “beat China” but to produce Industrial Revolutions. Continue reading →

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 of Bill Clinton in the United States, and even bad center-left governments, such as Tony Blair’s or Joe Biden’s, offered hope of redemption through an opposition victory. Most of the damage, which has ranged from decline almost to cataclysm, came from governments of the center-right. It is the slimy center-right, opportunistic and unreliable, who must be fought for civilization to succeed. Continue reading →

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 them truly destructive. Today, on this day of huge rejoicing for Trump supporters, I though it worth submitting a checklist of policies that Trump might be tempted to adopt but shouldn’t. Continue reading →

The Trump Presidency will be a race between two gigantic opposing forces. On the one hand, the lunatic asset prices that now prevail, both in stocks and real estate, have a very long way to fall – in the Austrian economic sense, there is a gigantic amount of malinvestment that must be liquidated. This fall will be a huge drag on the general economy. There will also be a modest deflationary force from ending the absurdly bloated government spending and handouts of the Biden years. Protectionism will raise prices and produce positive economic effects only in the long term. Only deregulation offers big short-term gains. The key question is whether those gains will be sufficient to ensure that the electorate grants us a further term of sound economic management after 2029. Based on the Biden-era experience, the alternative would be true long-term disaster. Continue reading →

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 rent to their users, reducing employment opportunities for the domestic “free” population and incidentally raising the capital values of the properties where they are used. Whatever one’s views on the optimum overall level of immigration, the H1B program should be abolished, as should its H2 and H2B sisters. President George H.W. Bush, who introduced them, was an economic illiterate. Continue reading →

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 seems likely, and emerging markets may become collateral damage in what will mostly be a battle between the rich. There are however ways forward to prosperity, which emerging market governments must follow, as they have notably not done recently. Continue reading →

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 in its nullification of the Romanian election outright anti-democratic. In Europe, the age of neo-Communism is upon us; non-European countries and companies would do well to give the region a wide berth. Continue reading →

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 should reject the ideology, they should continue the merger-skeptic approach. In general, corporate bigness is bad, mergers subtract value, oligopolies rip off consumers and the innumerable studies showing that a particular merger will not harm consumers are bought and paid for by lobbyists. One can hope that Trump’s new FTC chairman Andrew Ferguson, currently a Republican representative on the FTC, has learned much from his chair. Continue reading →

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” polity that President Bill Clinton bequeathed to George W. Bush in January 2001. Whether President-elect Trump now succeeds or fails, there is no chance of a return to that liberal consensus. Instead, a choice will be made in 2028 and thereafter between authoritarian progressivism and a new populist conservatism. It is to be hoped that the American electorate chooses wisely. Continue reading →