Peter Pan Tariffs for Companies that Never Grow Up

When Hamilton made the infant industry argument, he at least assured us the industry would advance to adulthood.

By Phillip W. Magness & David J. Hebert.

"Of all the arguments for protectionism, the infant industry argument probably has the strongest theoretical appeal. By protecting a new industry from its more developed foreign competition, the story goes, tariffs give domestic producers the time to grow, learn, and become efficient enough to stand on their own. Domestic consumers feel the short-term pains of higher prices, but they enjoy the long-term gains of job growth and lower prices as the new industry blossoms.

It’s no secret that tariffs have driven significant price increases over the last year and a half. A study from the New York Federal Reserve finds that tariffs “contributed 2.9 percentage points to goods price inflation” and that without tariffs those prices would have slightly declined. Tariff defenders, looking for a new reason to claim these higher prices are only temporary, have reimagined the infant industry argument. Now it’s being used to support trade barriers in industries that are over a century old, but the promise is exactly the same: Domestic firms need the protection so they can compete, innovate, and cut costs until prices come back down even further than they were before the tariffs.

Michael Brendan Dougherty recently made such an argument in National Review, arguing that “tariffs can, over time, bring prices below where they started.” When economist Don Boudreaux called the argument “bizarre,” Dougherty replied that critics had failed to acknowledge the dynamic process by which markets respond to tariffs “by adapting and cutting costs.” Although he is light on specific details, he posits that the changed incentives of a “paradigm shift” in tariff policy will spur domestic competition, leading to the theorized price reduction. Of course, firms would still respond to the dynamic processes of domestic competition without a tariff wall, but the point stands.

From there, the reworked infant industry argument becomes the standard version advanced more than two centuries ago by Alexander Hamilton and his disciple Friedrich List. When Hamilton made this claim in 1791, his argument may have seemed suitable for a new nation seeking to firm up its economy and security against established European powers.

Others at the time pointed out that special interest groups—a manifestation of the “violence of faction” so thoroughly dissected in the Federalist Papers—had already begun to coalesce around the fledgling iron industry in Pennsylvania, clamoring for protective tariffs. Two years earlier, James Madison had warned about a “premature policy of stimulating manufactures” driving tariffs too high. In the end, Hamilton recommended and Congress enacted a far more moderate tariff schedule than his theoretical musings portended. American iron manufacturers received a consolation prize of a higher tariff on their competitors than the rate for most general imports. Hamiltonians have been touting the infant industry argument ever since.

Nearly 250 years later, those same infants apparently have yet to advance into adulthood. Steel, the direct successor to the founding-era iron manufacturers, remains a singular focus of President Donald Trump’s protectionist tariff policies, just as it was under former President Joe Biden. And former President George W. Bush before him. Indeed, steel has been a recurring beneficiary of protectionism for most of America’s existence.

This extended period of protectionist infancy suggests that the argument needs a new name. We propose the “Peter Pan industry argument” for companies that never grow up because tariffs make sure they never have to.

The question tariff advocates rarely ask is: Why do some American producers have higher costs than foreign rivals even in the face of lower-cost foreign competition? The answer comes down to specific rules and choices within particular firms and industries. Tariffs, and protectionism in general, address none of these. No industry illustrates this like steel, but it is far from the only one.

In 1947, United Steelworkers won a contract provision known as Section 2-B. Among other things, this barred mill managers from changing established work practices unless new technology required it. Steel companies tried to get rid of this in 1959, finding it difficult (given union incentives) to establish that technology required change. In response, 500,000 steelworkers went on strike for 116 days. This strike sent buyers abroad, causing 1959 to be the first year the U.S. imported more steel than it exported. One of the then-new technologies that was delayed was basic oxygen furnaces, which could produce steel far faster and cheaper than the open-hearth furnaces that were so common. In 1965, only about 17 percent of steel made in the U.S. was made using the basic oxygen furnace. Japan produced 55 percent of its steel with this faster, more efficient method.

Change finally came from a steel customer. Vulcraft, a maker of steel joists, grew tired of paying Big Steel’s prices and waiting for Big Steel’s deliveries. In 1969, free from steel unions and preconceived notions, the company looked for new steel-producing technologies and found the answer in the electric arc furnaces that had been adopted in much of the world throughout the 1950s and ’60s. Vulcraft’s parent company later renamed itself Nucor, and minimills like the ones it pioneered now make most of America’s steel.

So the modern steel industry was built by a frustrated steel buyer who found a way around protected companies. In other words, the U.S. steel industry has lagged behind the technologies found around the world.

We could go on, but the broad point here is that the “relatively higher domestic production costs that made the tariff ‘necessary’ in the first place,” as one critic put it, are often the result of preventing competition in the first place. It’s odd to suggest that further preventing competition through tariffs will somehow alleviate the ills of already-prevented competition.

Tariff advocates fail to acknowledge that the ability to import steel also comes with the benefit of access to cheaper steel for steel-using industries, such as manufacturing. A 50 percent tariff on steel further closes the release valve that imported steel offers. Buyers of steel are then left to purchase more of the more expensive domestic steel. Because new steel mills take years to bring online, this causes delays and longer delivery times for manufacturers.

We don’t have to wonder what happens when a country lowers its tariffs on materials used by manufacturers. India did this in the ’90s, and researchers found that newly available inputs accounted for 31 percent of the new products that Indian manufacturers introduced. And what happens when the U.S. imposes tariffs on steel? Downstream U.S. firms become less competitive. This is why American businesses clamor for exemptions to tariffs, especially for tariffs on materials like steel.

Perhaps all this could be forgiven if tariffs advanced national security concerns, as tariff advocates assert. They point out that an adversarial nation could cut off supplies of critical materials during wartime and cripple America’s ability to defend itself. Unfortunately, tariffs fail there too.

First, this conflates production with access. While domestic production does ensure domestic access, access can be secured without production. In the case of steel, the Commerce Department reports that in 2025, the U.S. imported steel from 79 countries, with Canada being our top foreign supplier. The top 10 sources of steel are responsible for 77.8 percent of America’s steel imports. None of those countries were considered adversaries—at least not until the tariff crusades pushed these friends away. What’s more, according to the American Iron and Steel Institute, only 23 percent of finished steel in the U.S. was imported in 2024. Far from being exposed to foreign states’ whims, American access to steel is incredibly resilient.

Second, this view ignores the positive effects of trade and globalization on national security. The Center for Strategic & International Studies finds that increased trade between countries reduces the likelihood that they’ll go to war against one another. Globalization helps ensure that domestic access continues unabated should war break out, thanks to the diversity of trading partners.

When Hamilton made the infant industry argument, he at least assured us that the industry would at some point advance to adulthood and stand on its own. Steel, like so many other Peter Pan industries, has proven Madison right. These industries have refused to grow up, and it’s time to stop pretending that tariffs will fix that."

The regulatory dark matter beyond Washington’s graveyard of rules: 83,141 ghosts and counting

By Clyde Wayne Crews of CEI. Excerpt:

"The clocks have turned back, the days are growing darker, and Washington’s regulatory shadows lengthen. Washington’s policy ghouls are waking up to the fact that some of the ghastliest regulatory chills come not from ordinary notice-and-comment regulations published in the daily Federal Register and entombed in the 186,000-page Code of Federal Regulations, but from something murkier and more frightening: federal agency guidance documents.

Guidance haunts us in many guises, even after Halloween: memoranda, circulars, advisory letters, FAQs, statements of policy, notices, opinions, directives, news releases, blog posts, and other frightful proclamations. These instruments of regulatory dark matter can steer business behavior and effectively regulate without going through formal notice-and-comment rulemaking.

They aren’t published in the Federal Register or collected in the Code of Federal Regulations, yet they can bind the living in a bureaucratic crypt all the same.

The abyss stares back

Since 2015, I’ve attempted to informally inventory these cryptic chronicles and shadowy scrolls, hoping for policymakers to devise an official, permanent portal for them.

This fall, the Darklore Depository unearths 83,141 spooks linked on agency websites, compared with 70,401 a year ago and 108,023 in 2024. These figures (maintained at https://bit.ly/2TfWzZ2 and presented as a Supplement at the end of this article) are undercounts, not a census of every federal guidance document in existence. Many unmarked tombs remain hidden, including documents that may lurk in tan filing cabinets across government.

The top five departments and agencies appear below. Letters and legal interpretations account for much of the regulatory leviathan at the Department of Transportation. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) ranks No. 2, led by its Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), with 8,101 entries, and the Food and Drug Administration, with 2,237.

he tens of thousands of documents compiled here may reveal more about what we don’t know about guidance than what we do. Before Trump’s 2019 Executive Order 13891, “Promoting the Rule of Law Through Improved Agency Guidance Documents,” required public disclosure of guidance on agency web portals, transparency was abysmal. My 2015 “Mapping Washington’s Lawlessness” survey dug up just a few thousand documents. The House Oversight Committee’s 2018 report, Shining Light on Regulatory Dark Matter, exhumed “only” 13,000.

After Trump’s order, however, roughly 73,000 documents emerged from the shadows (see the right-hand side of the Supplement below). Even after Joe Biden buried the full corpus of Trump’s streamlining directives, the accessible tally climbed above 100,000 during his term. The lesson? Even a simple disclosure mandate can bring regulatory corpses into the light.

Some guidance dates back to the 1970s, including material from the Federal Highway Administration and the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Other agencies post none at all, or disclose only recent guidance. The Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security, for example, lists guidance and frequently asked questions dating only from the 2020s. Similarly, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Ocean Service lists guidance dating from the 2000s.

The Department of Agriculture, among the top five, gave its landing page a facelift in 2026, with breakdowns by issuing agency and 289 documents issued in 2026. Other agencies exhibit rigor mortis alongside incompleteness. The Department of War, for example, references the Office of Management and Budget’s 2007 Good Guidance Practices and its own formal rule on guidance, yet its listed total has remained frozen at 935 for the past two years. (Any agency maintaining a public landing page not yet included in this inventory is invited to share it.)"

Gina Hinojosa Wants To Freeze Electricity Rates in Texas. New Jersey Shows Why That Won't Work.

In New Jersey, a rate freeze touched only part of the bill, and in some cases left ratepayers with higher bills than before.

By Tosin Akintola of Reason. 

"When Democrat Gina Hinojosa is sworn in as Texas governor in January, one of her first acts, "within an hour of taking the oath of office," she recently told The Texas Tribune, will be to "declare a high-cost emergency in the state of Texas and issue an emergency executive order to: one, suspend the gas and diesel tax; and two, freeze electricity rates." 

Hinojosa—who tied increases in property taxes and electricity bills to Republican Gov. Greg Abbott's policies—promised during her campaign that if elected, she would "direct the Public Utility Commission to freeze the rates residential customers pay until we have laws to ensure that data centers and other high-load users pay for themselves." 

With Texans seeing a 3.3 percent increase in the average electricity price for residential customers between August 2025 and August 2026—roughly in line with the national increase—the state's electorate clearly found Hinojosa's pledge compelling. However, it's unclear if Hinojosa actually has the power to follow through on her campaign promise. 

In Texas' decentralized market, retail providers, not regulators, set electricity prices. This means Hinojosa has very little authority over residential prices, and her order would not lower costs. But as Click2Houston.com points out, Hinojosa could still impact prices; she could use her influence over the state budget "to push lawmakers toward her priorities," including forcing data centers to pay more. Of course, this would do little to address the primary cause of nationwide electricity spikes: transmission and distribution charges. 

Instead of Texas imposing price controls on the free market, Hinojosa could learn from the mistakes of New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill, a fellow Democrat who has failed to meaningfully lower electricity prices in her state despite signing an executive order that declared a state of emergency and froze rate hikes by the state's utilities. 

Sherrill realized that even if she froze rates, it wouldn't erase the factors driving higher electricity prices, such as the supply and transmission costs providers pay. In June, to offset the increases utilities typically pass on to customers, Sherrill signed off on a budget authorization that allocates $500 million to provide ratepayers short-term relief. Yet in October, a CBS News report found that even after the rate freeze, utility costs in the Garden State remained high, with one resident remarking her electricity bill had "nearly doubled."

In July, the consulting firm E3 released a report—commissioned by Sherrill for the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities—that found that changes to state policy mainly affect distribution, which is "roughly a quarter" of the charges on residents' electricity bills, and that "no single reform or modernization option" could be presented as a standalone fix. 

It's not just New Jersey that has tried (and failed) to bring down utility costs by freezing electricity rates; last July Georgia's Public Service Commission unanimously approved an agreement to freeze base power rates for at least three years. A year after the freeze was implemented, the average electricity price for residential customers in Georgia rose by 2.3 percent. Meanwhile, in October, Virginia Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger called for a six-year freeze on residential electricity rates as a condition for approving the proposed $67 billion merger between utilities Dominion Energy and NextEra Energy. 

Regardless of where it's proposed, a rate freeze is a superficial fix for a problem that requires less government thumb on the scale, not more. 

At least one Democratic governor has declined to use rate freezes as a temporary panacea for rising energy costs. In a March appearance on CBS 2's "The Point," New York Gov. Kathy Hochul was asked if she thought a "two-year moratorium or freeze on utility rates statewide" was "doable." She quickly rejected the idea, favoring an "all-of-the-above approach to find more sources of energy to help drive down [costs]." 

What rate freezes like Hinojosa's miss is that states have little direct impact on electric prices. As the E3 report notes, "Most of a typical bill…is set in federal and regional markets with limited ability at the state level to influence those costs." 

Still, that doesn't make the idea behind these policies—that government should interfere in the market—any less harmful.

Without the price signals they receive from electricity rates, utilities can't properly plan for upgrades, expansion, or future demand. Freezing electricity rates clearly polls well as policy, but it works better on the campaign trail than in practice."

How a Lifelong Carbon-Taxer Helped Discredit Climate Policy

By John R. Puri of The National Review.

"The economist William Nordhaus died on October 30. In 2018, Nordhaus won the Nobel Prize in Economics for developing an economic model of climate change. For decades before then, he was an early advocate of addressing climate change through a global “carbon tax.” He was championed by climate activists for taking this stand, but ironically, his prize-winning research led serious policymakers to reject their maximalist approach to slashing emissions.

By aggregating other economists’ studies, Nordhaus estimated that the most probable paths of emissions would likely damage the world economy by a few percentage points of GDP by 2100, rising with each degree of global warming. That would amount to many trillions of dollars each year, giving activists ammunition to push for hugely expensive policies today.

Yet Nordhaus simultaneously modeled the economic costs of the policies necessary to mitigate climate change — and those were enormous as well. As it turned out, eliminating so many emission-producing activities as to reduce global warming to 2 degrees Celsius would cost tens of trillions of dollars more than allowing emissions to continue unrestricted. After incorporating more realistic policy costs, as most interventions are far from economically ideal, the projected cost of forcing temperature growth down to 2 degrees was more than twice as high as unmitigated emissions leading to 4 degrees of warming — $350 trillion versus less than $150 trillion by 2100.

By comparing the costs of global warming to the higher costs of mitigation, Nordhaus settled on an “optimal” amount of warming: 3.5 degrees of warming under ideal conditions, or 3.75 degrees under realistic ones. Such a path would allow global emissions to rise for decades into the future before falling gradually, reducing temperatures by no more than 0.5 degrees from the baseline. To achieve this, he recommended a modest carbon tax rising from under $50 to less than $100 per ton. An alternative path of net-zero emissions would instead require a tax of several hundred dollars per ton.

Crucially, for the carbon tax to work, it would need to be imposed uniformly across the entire world. If just one country tried to mitigate emissions unilaterally, it would bear all the costs while producing minimal climate benefits for the world. Using models similar to Nordhaus’s, policy analysts estimate that eliminating all U.S. emissions would make temperatures in 2100 only a fraction of a degree lower. Eliminating emissions from all industrialized countries wouldn’t fare much better.

In an ideal world, it might make sense for countries to unite around Nordhaus’s 3.5-degree goal. In the real world, however, his model at once showed the futility of individual nations targeting emissions and the relative acceptability of likely warming. In fact, no further intervention may be necessary: Under current policies and trends, global warming by 2100 is now projected at 2.6 degrees relative to pre-industrial levels, or 2.9 degrees on the high end. Under Nordhaus’s model, that may shave 2–3 points off world GDP by 2100, or about a single year’s worth of economic growth.

Nordhaus may be remembered by the left as a carbon taxer, but his true contribution was bringing rigorous cost-benefit analysis to a policy field that was sorely lacking it. In doing so, he showed that a net-zero policy failed the assessment worse than doing nothing at all, and that tolerating a good deal of global warming would be better in the long run for human welfare than overreacting today." 

The authors of The Everywhere Millionaire fall short of celebrating the success and instead fall prey instead to the usual disappointing platitudes about wealth & inequality

Review by Ben Johnson. He is a Partner and member of the founding team at Vitruvian Partners, a growth-focused private equity and growth capital firm. He wrote it for Centre for Enterprise, Markets and Ethics.

"Economists Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick have made a great contribution to our understanding of wealth and social mobility in the USA with a new dataset shining a light on the ‘Main Street Millionaires’: a population rarely discussed but vital to an understanding of modern America and the long-term yield of Reagan-era supply-side reforms. For fans of freedom and capitalism their evidence is exhilarating. A book using the same evidence could be titled: The American Dream Is Alive and Well. Rejoice! It is a puzzle that they fall short of celebrating the success and instead fall prey instead to the usual disappointing platitudes about wealth, rising inequality and power politics, citing that business owners hold congressional seats at roughly ten times their share of the population, and their policy influence tends to fly under the radar because they are less visible than tech billionaires or Wall Street executives. They add that substantial tax and regulatory benefits flow to private business owners and are rarely debated publicly, partly because most people don’t realise how large this group is. Now they will.

Zidar and Zwick identify roughly 3m American private-business owners worth more than $5m, with mean wealth of around $25m. It is tempting to assume Musk, Bezos and the other billionaires are dragging the average up. In fact, by the authors’ analysis, this group collectively holds more than 13 times the wealth of the 400 richest Americans, the billionaires listed in the Forbes 400. The interesting new finding is the thickness of the ranks beneath the billionaire tail. That in itself is enough to commend the authors and their work as a major contribution.

Rich in Examples

These people are also everywhere. Our mental map of American wealth is too often coastal: Manhattan hedge funds, Palo Alto founders, Beverly Hills entertainment money. Zidar and Zwick find a substantial car dealer, HVAC magnate or franchise owner in virtually every congressional district, many in what coastal Americans condescendingly call ‘flyover country’, making fortunes from gutters, toilet-paper distribution, hamburger buns, urinal cakes and waxing salons.

The book opens with the Brockway family, whose fortune came from Florida car dealerships. Their daughter’s 2023 wedding reportedly cost about $60m and lasted five days in Paris. Guests flew in by private jet, Versailles was hired for a party, the Paris Opera hosted the rehearsal dinner, there were fireworks by the Eiffel Tower and Adam Levine performed. To snobby English tastes, their consumption and lifestyles can be gauche, though this reviewer, a committed Americanophile, delights in their unapologetic enjoyment of their just rewards, and regrets missing an invitation.

Many such case studies bring the phenomenon to life. My favourite may be Nancy Mueller, who began making quiches for parties in California and kept going until Nancy’s Specialty Foods was the world’s largest frozen-quiche producer; after selling it she commissioned a super-yacht and sailed around the world. Ex-Marine Dick Portillo began with a hot-dog stand in 1963, despite by his own account not knowing how to cook a hot dog, sold the business for around $1bn and acquired a 130-foot yacht called, inevitably, Top Dog. It reminds me of the thrill, as a young Goldman Sachs banker newly arrived in Manhattan from the UK, when I saw the yacht ‘EBITDA’.

All this is loud and occasionally tasteless. It is also evidence that America manufactures capitalists on a scale few of us understood, which deserves celebrating before it is processed into another seminar about inequality and taste.

There is a great achievement here in putting together the data. Working inside the US Treasury, Zidar, Zwick and their collaborators joined up tax records on businesses, owners and workers that had sat in separate parts of the system, a painstaking exercise which required a visit to a retired systems engineer in Utah to understand the coding of various archaic US government databases.

Context

For a British reader, the book’s references to S corporations and pass-through businesses need translation. Income passes through the entity and the tax is payable by its owners, an idea familiar to anyone who, like me, has spent years as an LLP member. What surprised me was the scale: roughly 95% of American businesses are pass-throughs of some form, while Britain’s 51,000 LLPs are estimated to be under 1% of the Companies House register.

The context for this is Reagan’s 1986 Tax Reform Act, which moved the top personal rate significantly below the corporate one, incentivising businesses to operate through tax-transparent pass-through entities. S corporation filings rose 36.5% in 1987 alone, and pass-throughs went from 20.7% of American business income in 1980 to 54.2% by 2011. The research cannot establish causality. But policies compound, and Reagan’s reforms are a plausible part of why so many wealthy proprietors now live inside that architecture.

‘The Rich’ Who Start Small

The nature of this wealthy population and the source of their spoils sit awkwardly with the celebrated Piketty rentier-class critique of modern extractive capitalism. Admittedly, around 70 cents of every dollar of pass-through income accrues to the top 1%, consistent with the familiar power law of distribution. Yet these top profits cluster not among the heirs of a gilded age but among working-age owners of mid-sized, closely held firms.

That is recognisable to me after decades in private equity. Few of the hundreds of entrepreneurs and business owners I have met resemble the caricature of ‘the rich’, and their businesses are frequently heroically dull: industrial distribution, vertical software, niche clinics, specialist manufacturing. A founder spends 20 or 30 years learning an industry, surviving recessions and reinvesting cash until five employees become 500. A plumber earns an income; someone who employs 200 plumbers owns an asset. Somewhere along the way the entrepreneur becomes one of ‘the wealthy’. What is striking is that, in contrast to the vogueish Silicon Valley mantra of ‘Move Fast and Break Things’, these lifelong builders have followed a humbler logic: move slow and make things.

In a previous (2019) assessment of another financially very successful group, Daniel Markovits’s The Meritocracy Trap described an elite trained through expensive schools, selective universities and the uber-demanding professions, and an unending, accelerating treadmill of elite performance from childhood to late career, with all its associated performance anxiety.

By comparison, the owner of the world’s largest frozen-quiche company may have accumulated rather less cultural capital than a Yale professor or McKinsey partner, but she ended up owning rather more yacht.

The book’s mobility data should also make some parents think twice when insisting on another maths tutoring session for little Jonny, and planting dreams of Big Law in a ten-year-old Mary. Of Americans born between 1980 and 1982 who rose from the bottom fifth of the income distribution to the top fifth, 9% became business owners, nearly three times the 3.7% rate for their whole cohort; only 1.3% of them attended an Ivy Plus college, barely above the 0.9% for the cohort as a whole. And the top tenth of test scorers become founders only 1.3 times as often as those at the median.

Rent-Seeking and the Creation of Wealth

Which brings me to the book’s final section. Zidar and Zwick document some real rent-seeking, from car dealers’ franchise protections to the regulatory privileges of alcohol distributors. None of this should trouble a serious defender of capitalism; Adam Smith knew perfectly well that businessmen can and do conspire against the public. He also knew that, as in those two examples, the state is often bound up in their conspiracy against the public. What matters is the distinction between wealth created through competition and wealth maintained by suppressing it, and the authors’ own evidence suggests much American wealth is of the first kind.

Success Deplored

However, the authors sadly decline to celebrate the success story their data has revealed. They are tempted by the too familiar political syllogism: high inequality is undesirable; successful entrepreneurs increase inequality; their success therefore contributes to an undesirable outcome. Quod Erat Demonstrandum. Their narrative assumes what this dataset ought to make us question. Even the book’s own jacket copy has its subjects ‘both growing the economic pie and grabbing bigger slices for themselves’. A novel dataset, then, matched by a rather less novel failure of political nerve.

Britain suffers from the same confusion, and I see it constantly in discussion of private equity, where ‘vultures’ and ‘asset strippers’ turn up in populist speeches and beneath articles in the Financial Times alike. There are bad deals, and excessive leverage can destroy companies. But the business community knows that you cannot indefinitely compound investors’ money in a competitive market by circulating a shrinking pile of stripped corporate carcasses. At some point the businesses have to be built, organically and through growth-oriented acquisitions, to become more valuable.

Our usual categorisation of ‘the rich’ is almost useless economically, lumping together an heir living off property, a protected monopolist, a surgeon and an entrepreneur who employs 2,000 people and sells for £500m. Treat them as interchangeable and policy will eventually lose track of what it is trying to discourage.

Malcolm Offord exposed the confusion neatly in a Scottish television election debate this year. He recounted having arrived in London, from inauspicious beginnings, with £2,000 of debt, and later going on to employ large numbers of people (through his years at the private equity firm Charterhouse) and pay a total of £45m in tax. He asked the Scottish Green co-leader Ross Greer: ‘Do you want more people like me, or fewer people like me?’ Greer’s rather extraordinary answer was ‘Fewer people like you.’

Since the early 1990s the number of American private-business-owning decamillionaires ($10m+) has more than doubled and the number of centimillionaires ($100m+) almost quadrupled. Some start with hot dogs. Some with car dealerships. One started with party quiches. Eventually there are private jets, $60m weddings and yachts called Top Dog (and EBITDA). Hallelujah!

The great surprise in the numbers is not that yesterday’s rich became richer. It is how many new rich people keep being created, and in how many unexpected places. The American dream, on the authors’ own evidence, is alive and remarkably well. They should permit themselves to enjoy it."

Three Decades of Fiscal Progress in Sweden

By Dan Mitchell.

"Sweden is a classic example of a government that has a mix of bad policies (bloated public sector) and good policies (school choice, partially privatized pension system, repeal of death tax).

Today, let’s focus on a negative feature that is becoming less negative. And not just for a handful of years.

Using IMF data, here’s a look at what’s happened to the burden of government spending over the past three decades. Sweden has been complying with my Golden Rule.

It may not seem overly impressive to have government grow 3.5 percent annually, especially when compared to Switzerland.

But what matters most is that 3.5 percent spending growth is lower than 4.3 percent GDP growth.

And even though that may not seem like a big gap, what’s key is that the gap has existed for 30 years.

To see how modest amounts of annual progress can translate to major long-run improvements, here’s the same chart, but modified to show what’s happened to the overall spending burden and overall debt burden.

As a libertarian, I’m horrified that government is consuming 49 percent of GDP in Sweden. But that’s a huge improvement compared to having 60 percent of the economy being diverted to government.

And because the burden of government spending is declining, it’s no surprise that government debt has dramatically declined. And those are the numbers for gross debt. Net debt has declined even more, dropping from 46 percent of GDP to less than 14 percent of GDP.

To get where it needs to be, Sweden needs to maintain current levels of spending restraint for…well…um…another 100 years or so. But a journey of a 100-plus years begins with the first three decades.

P.S. I started my analysis in 1996 because the IMF had debt data starting that year. Looking just at spending data, Sweden started moving in the right direction a few years earlier.

P.P.S. For a look at overall economic policy developments in Sweden, feel free to peruse my four-part series (here, here, here, and here)."

US Immigrant Share Ranked in the Bottom Third of Wealthy Countries in 2024

By David J. Bier of Cato. Excerpts:

"According to Census Bureau and United Nations data, the immigrant share of the US population (14.8 percent) ranked 54th worldwide among 206 countries in 2024. Among the 51 wealthiest countries—nations with a GDP per capita PPP greater than $50,000—its ranking has fallen from the 43rd percentile in 2000 to the 24th percentile in 2024. Its ranking for per capita growth in its immigrant population since 2015 was similarly low: the 29th percentile. The US accounted for most of the net increase in the worldwide immigrant population in the 1990s but accounted for only 17 percent of it since 2020." 

"Australia is slightly above the trendline and is roughly where the United States would be expected to be based on its GDP per capita. The United States is about 76 million immigrants short of Australia’s share of immigrants."