Category Archives: News commentary

Last week, the Economist published an article about when the New York Times lost its way. The article traces it to a June 2020 opinion piece by conservative U.S. Senator Tom Cotton that provoked such outrage among Times staffers that the editorial page editor, James Bennet, was forced to resign. Since Bennet now writes for the Economist, and in fact was the author of this article, it is easy to see why he would consider that incident to be a turning point for the Gray Lady.

In 2020, the Economist argued that countries should take advantage of the pandemic to enact draconian policies aimed at reducing climate change.

While it is easy to argue that the New York Times lost its way long before that incident, I have a different question: When did the Economist lose its way? The weekly magazine that calls itself a newspaper was founded 180 years ago based on the principles of free trade and free markets. Yet it seems to have forgotten those principles today, advocating for more and more government control of the world and national economies. Continue reading →

Auto workers are on strike. Actors are on strike. Writers are on strike. The latest is that workers on Canada’s St. Lawrence Seaway are on strike. As Peter Zeihan observes in the video below, these strikes are a symptom of the labor shortage that isn’t going to go away anytime soon.

Zeihan doesn’t say so but any time advocates of some government subsidize project say, “This project will create lots of jobs,” you should immediately translate that in your mind as saying, “This project is going to make labor shortages even worse.” The jobs argument never was a good argument for doing things that required government subsidies, but now it is one more reason not to do major projects that require government subsidies.

The horrible war in Palestine raises an important question. Strife in the Middle East is often portrayed as Muslims vs. Jews. But what if religion had nothing to do with it? What if it is really just a question of property rights?

A home bombed by Israel in the 2014 Gaza War. Photo by Muhammad Sabah.

Before Israel was founded in 1948, many members of the Zionist movement — those advocating a return of Jews to Palestine — understood the importance of property rights. Groups such as the Jewish National Fund began buying land in what became Israel as early as 1901. Eventually, they owned 13 percent of the land within Israel’s current borders. Another 7 percent was own by private individuals, 4 percent by Arabs and 3 percent by Jews. Continue reading →

Were it not for the 2021 infrastructure bill, the Antiplanner would probably be enjoying high-speed internet now. But thanks to the bill, which included $65 billion to extend broadband internet to underserved areas, I probably won’t get it until 2028.

Camp Sherman is in a rural area that is mostly out of cell phone range. CenturyLink, the local phone company, provides DSL service that is slow and unreliable. An internet speed test reports download speed of less than a megabit per second, about 1/250th of what I could get elsewhere and for less money. Continue reading →

U.S. fertility rates have fallen to just 1.6 per woman. This has led some to fear that the United States may face the same kind of demographic collapse that is besetting Japan.

While some may cheer that this makes overpopulation less of a problem, low fertility rates translate to serious economic problems. As demographer Peter Zeihan notes, people in their 20s and 30s spend lots of money, people in their 40s through 60s save money that can then be used for investments in improved productivity, but older people large retire from the economy. The young consumers drive economic growth and the middle-aged savers fund that growth. If the ratio of younger people to older people falls too low, then the economy stops growing, which reduces economic mobility and security. Continue reading →

Why do we still have a postal service? In 2021, the agency cost federal taxpayers around $18 billion in operating and capital subsidies. Plus, in 2022, Congress bailed it out from having to pay $56 billion of employee health care obligations, meaning federal taxpayers are now obligated to cover those costs.

Around 250 years ago, mail was the closest thing the prospective nation had to the internet. When the Continental Congress was forming the fledging U.S. government, it decided in 1775 that America’s mail should be carried by a federal agency, not the states or private enterprise. One reason for creating a federal post office was to bring the country closer together, as distances would be less important if it cost the same to mail a letter across the country as across the street. This was critical as the land area of the original 13 states was far bigger than any European country other than Russia. Continue reading →

Mike Myers, the director of Portland’s community safety program, is in charge of reducing gun violence and increasing street safety. This job paid him $208,263 last year, and he manages to do it while working at home. Home, for Myers, happens to be a gated community in Las Vegas, 750 miles from Portland.

Click image to review a copy of this report.

Perhaps it is only a coincidence that Portland has seen the fastest-growing homicide rates in the highest in the nation and the city suffered a record number of homicides in 2022. Or perhaps there are some jobs that just can’t be performed as well at home, at least if that home is hundreds of miles away. Continue reading →

“Nobody wants to be in a large, crowded city during a pandemic, but what about afterward? Don’t they miss bright lights? Theater? All-night diners?” asks MoveBuddha, a relocation service. “So far, the answer has been, ‘no.'” The company’s data show that net migration continues to be away from major cities and to small towns and exurban areas.

Click image to review this report.

The only cities over 250,000 that saw positive net in-migration actually prove the rule that people are leaving large, dense cities. Honolulu saw 2.19 in-migrants for every out-migrant, but the city of Honolulu covers the entire island of Oahu, of which only 37 percent is urbanized, so many of those in-migrants may have gone to rural parts of the city. The second-most was Anchorage at 2.17 in-migrants for every out-migrant, but, like Honolulu, Anchorage covers a huge area that is rural. In fact, less than 4 percent of the borough of Anchorage is considered urban. The only other two large cities that are gaining more in-migrants than out-migrants are Tulsa and Charlotte. At fewer than 2,000 people per square mile Tulsa is one the lowest-density big cities in the country (and also one of the most affordable), while Charlotte isn’t far behind at about 2,500 per square mile. Continue reading →