‘Communion’ Review: The Veep’s Progress

JD Vance recounts his conversion to Catholicism and explains what he calls a ‘Christian approach to economics.’

By Barton Swaim. He reviewed the book Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith.

"You might have thought the esteem in which he holds working folk, together with his disdain for elites who presume to know what other people need, would have led Mr. Vance to appreciate laissez-faire economics, presuming as it does that ordinary people generally know how to use their own resources more wisely than faraway eggheads. And maybe he almost did plump for free markets at one time. Early in the book, in a passage I’m tempted to think he forgot to cut, he makes the point that religious questions often involve hidden complexities. Mr. Vance draws a comparison with minimum-wage laws, which, he notes, seem like a great idea but “could do more harm than good” by dissuading employers from hiring more workers. His lesson: “The complexity counsels some humility in the face of difficult questions.”

That bit appears in Chapter 2. By Chapter 11, “A Dismal Science,” Mr. Vance has cast humility aside. Straw men populate the book’s later chapters, particularly on economic questions. He equates the free-market outlook with amoral indifference to anything apart from abstract economic-growth numbers. Reciting stories of people trampling one another to buy new tech products on Black Friday, Mr. Vance observes that “from the view of classical economics, they’re doing something far more ‘productive’ than reading a book or spending time with their children.”

Having several years ago read Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical “Rerum novarum,” in which the pope sought to enunciate an economic outlook that avoided both socialism and capitalism, Mr. Vance attempts to express his own “Christian approach to economics,” which amounts to little more than the prescription that economic actors should exercise kindness, mercy and generosity. Employers, Mr. Vance accordingly thinks, should pay workers a fair or living wage. He doesn’t say who would define “fair” and “living”—Labor Department bureaucrats?

In one passage of egregious sloppiness, Mr. Vance quotes a paper by Vanessa Brown Calder, formerly of the Cato Institute, in which she explains the perverse effects of mandatory parental-leave benefits. “A review of states and countries with government-mandated paid leave programs indicates they harm young women,” Ms. Calder writes. “This is because parental leave policies are associated with an increase in leave-taking and childbearing, which leads to lost labor or increased health care costs for companies.” Mr. Vance fulminates: “Never have I read a purer distillation of our worship at the altar of commerce.” If he had read the paper more carefully, or even the next sentence, he would have noticed Ms. Calder’s argument: that mandated parental-leave laws discourage companies from hiring women at all, and that a host of other reforms would give them the freedom to start families without encouraging firms to penalize them."

When Food-Stamp Fraud Crosses State Lines

Since 2024, Michigan has paid more than $4 million in food-stamp funding to people with out-of-state addresses

Letter to The WSJ. 

"The Journal’s editorial board is right to celebrate the decline in food-stamp enrollment due to work requirements and efforts to combat fraud ("The Food Stamp Rolls Decline—Hurray,” Review & Outlook, June 8). To put a finer point on the fraud that the Trump administration is trying to root out, consider what my organization recently discovered in Michigan.

We found that since 2024 Michigan has paid more than $4 million in food-stamp funding to people with out-of-state addresses. That’s despite a law requiring that program recipients live in-state. The problem has grown worse each year. Out-of-state payments rose from $1.6 million in 2024 to $1.9 million in 2025. The number of out-of-state recipients is on track to rise from nearly 3,200 last year to 3,700 this year.

Under Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Michigan has refused to share food-stamp data with the Trump administration. When will states like Michigan finally get serious about protecting taxpayers from waste, fraud and abuse?

Jarrett Skorup

Mackinac Center" 

Who Wants to Be a Trillionaire? The SpaceX IPO is a credit to Elon Musk and American capitalism

WSJ editorial. Excerpts:

"The company raised $75 billion in its public debut, nearly three times more than the previous largest IPO (Saudi Aramco in 2019). It will need that money and multiples more to achieve Mr. Musk’s ambition of colonizing Mars and mining asteroids."

"Mr. Musk’s wealth largely consists of shares in SpaceX and Tesla."

"Mr. Musk’s wealth is a tribute to U.S. entrepreneurship and innovation, which are byproducts of its free-market system."

"Mr. Musk, an immigrant from South Africa, launched the rocket company in 2002 with money he made from his PayPal startup."

"NASA awarded SpaceX a contract to supply the International Space Station. SpaceX later developed reusable rockets that greatly reduce launch costs"

"Its success, which came through trial and failure, has ended U.S. reliance on Russia to transport astronauts to the space station and launch American satellites."

"In 2015 SpaceX launched Starlink, an internet satellite company that has helped Ukraine resist Russia’s invasion and dissidents living under authoritarian regimes like Iran to communicate."

"SpaceX has created thousands of jobs in working-class communities"

"Its workers . . . receive stock options, which has allowed them to share in the company’s success." 

"the IPO has made millionaires of 4,400 SpaceX current and former employees" 

The Deceptive Statistics Behind California’s Wealth Tax

Saez and Zucman have spent years using dubious assumptions to push the case for confiscation

By Phillip W. Magness. Excerpts:

"For years the pair (Emmanuel Saez of UC Berkeley and Gabriel Zucman of the Paris School of Economics) have relied on selective accounting methods and questionable assumptions to tilt the scales in favor of confiscatory wealth taxes."

"Under the U.S. system, taxes are generally assessed on income earned over the course of a year. Since 1920, federal tax law has followed the realization principle, meaning that income must actually be realized as earnings before it can be taxed. Messrs. Saez and Zucman instead propose taxing estimated changes in a person’s net worth—including unrealized capital gains that exist only on paper. If a billionaire’s stock portfolio rises in value, they want to tax the appreciation even if the assets are never sold."

"Unrealized gains are notoriously volatile and speculative. They can disappear overnight with a market downturn. Federal courts have long viewed taxes on unrealized gains as constitutionally dubious"

"The underlying wealth estimates are deeply unreliable. Because billionaire tax returns are private, Messrs. Saez and Zucman rely heavily on outside estimates of billionaire wealth. One of their favorite sources is the Forbes 400 list."

"wealthy Americans to exaggerate rather than minimize their fortunes"

"these estimates are systematically inflated."

"the pair has repeatedly asserted that the ultrarich pay a combined federal, state, and local tax rate of only 23%, supposedly lower than the 24% working-class Americans pay."

"Messrs. Saez and Zucman’s own earlier research told a very different story. In a 2018 paper published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, their own data files showed that the top 0.001% pay an average combined tax rate of roughly 41%."

"they changed their approach and assigned the full burden of the corporate tax to shareholders alone."

"this maneuver dramatically lowers the apparent tax rate paid by billionaires." 

"they artificially inflate the tax burden borne by lower-income Americans . . . omit the EITC from their calculations."

"Jason Furman finds that the bottom 20% of Americans face an overall combined tax burden of approximately 11%"  

Mamdani vs. Bodegas

His socialist supermarkets could put New York’s little grocers out of business

By Faith Bottum of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"Many bodega owners say the mayor has betrayed them by pushing ahead with his plan to create city-owned supermarkets. The government “should be working with us,” says Francisco Marte, 59, owner of Green Earth Food in the Bronx and president of the Bodega and Small Business Association of New York. “That type of business run by the government, they never succeed. They always fail, and they fail big and with a lot of money that could have been used for something better.”"

"But five grocers are already within a two-block radius of that proposed Harlem store, with 10 more within five blocks."

Private Property, Liberalism, and Human Flourishing

Private property enables individuals to pursue happiness through their own free choices. It also shields our individual and institutional projects from arbitrary power

By Alexander William Salter. Excerpt:

"For thousands of years, human living standards were basically stagnant: in inflation-adjusted terms, world GDP per capita fluctuated around $1,500 per year. In the nineteenth century, commercial innovations, including widespread protection for private property rights, gave rise to the Industrial Revolution. This resulted in history’s only sustained reduction in human poverty. In the United States, for example, GDP per capita in 1800 had risen to approximately $2,500 per year. It more than tripled over the next century, to $8,000 per year. Near-continuous economic growth yielded a figure of nearly $50,000 per year by 2000, and nearly $70,000 today. 

Other western nations that embraced capitalism enjoyed similar increases in material prosperity. Asian nations, such as Japan, South Korea, and (more recently) China, have also benefited from embracing private property rights. These successes strongly suggest there is something universal about the relationship between private property and economic wellbeing. It’s not culturally contingent.

Our historically unprecedented level of wealth only exists because private property enables an extensive division of labor. Exponential gains in per capita GDP would be impossible, and indeed, they have never occurred in a sustained way without productivity-enhancing specialization and trade. This decentralized process for creating and exchanging wealth requires coordination. As Ludwig von Mises recognized, private property rights are vital. Without private property, trade and markets could not exist. And without markets, there would be no market prices—critical indicators of resource value in varying lines of production. Profit and loss accounting could not be meaningful without prices, meaning businesses would have no reliable way to ascertain whether they were satisfying consumer wants. It is the system of market prices, adjusting in response to supply and demand changes, that gives commercial society its unique power to create wealth. Private property is the keystone: it holds the whole market edifice together.

The greatest benefits of the price system often emerge during times of turbulence. When war between the United States, Israel, and Iran choked off shipping through the Strait of Hormuz in early 2026, the price of crude oil spiked. Refiners, shippers, and drillers across the world rerouted and searched for new supply, responding to the price shock without needing to know anything about geopolitical stakes or possible resolutions. The price carried the knowledge so that they did not have to. 

It may seem strange to use hardship to illustrate the importance of private property and prices. But in fact, it reveals why they matter. Oil became scarcer as a result of the war. That made everyone in the world poorer. Nothing can change that so long as the conflict continues. Instead, the price system allows economic actors oceans apart to find and pursue least-cost adaptations. Non-market and non-price rationing work poorly on this scale. At least with property and prices, we know where we need to change.

Private property buttresses the market process in several other ways. Building on Mises, F. A. Hayek realized that prices allowed households and firms to benefit from each other’s private and often tacit information. The price system, founded on private property, thus functions as a powerful communication and feedback system. Ronald Coase argued that market values for owned resources allowed conflicting parties to resolve their disputes by bargaining. Armen Alchian, William Allen, and Harold Demsetz pointed out that firms’ property rights to their residual income aligned the interests of producers with consumers, and that the firm itself, as an organizational form, was possible only because private property allowed for the necessary contractual structures. The immense productive capacity of contemporary capitalism, which we often take for granted, relies on practices rooted in private property.

Human flourishing obviously depends on more than material wealth. “Man does not live by bread alone.” Yet he does need bread to live. The material abundance created by markets keeps us fed, sheltered, clothed, literate, healthy, and entertained. It also provides the means for us to pursue meaningful artistic, intellectual, and moral projects. Private property is the reason we can have all of these things."

The house doesn’t always win: Why prediction markets aren’t gambling

By Steve Swedberg of CEI. 

"“If it talks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it must be a duck.” That phrase is not reserved for ducks. It is often invoked about prediction markets, where some view them as akin to gambling. Prediction markets, after all, are exchanges where participants buy and sell contracts tied to future events, including elections, economic data releases, and regulatory decisions.

The similarities to gambling are easy to see. Both involve risk and uncertainty. Both can result in gains or losses depending on whether participants correctly anticipate future events. People put money on uncertain outcomes, some participants are chasing profits, and winners collect at the expense of losers. To many, that sounds a lot like gambling.

If that were the full picture, calling prediction markets gambling would be reasonable. Indeed, that perception has fueled calls for greater scrutiny, including the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s (CFTC) recently proposed framework to clarify the regulatory treatment of prediction markets.

At the same time, states including Nevada, New Jersey, and Maryland have argued that prediction markets must cease and desist or obtain casino-style gambling licenses to operate within their borders. Platforms such as Kalshi dispute that view and argue that federal regulation by the CFTC preempts state gambling laws, with courts so far issuing mixed rulings.

But stopping at the similarities obscures the features that matter most. The question is not whether prediction markets resemble gambling in some respects, but whether those similarities are their most salient features.

There is a reason why “the house always wins” is an adage for casinos: most gambling institutions are structured around a house that profits regardless of the outcome. The house acts as the counterparty to bettors and sets odds designed to ensure a profit margin, commonly known as the “vig.” This built-in advantage means the casino’s interests are fundamentally at odds with those of its customers.

Prediction markets operate differently because participants trade with one another in a peer-to-peer exchange, meaning that market participants take opposite sides of a contract instead of wagering against a bookmaker. While platforms may charge transaction fees, they do not take directional positions on outcomes or profit when users lose. Instead, they function as neutral marketplaces that match opposing views about future events.

Because of this structure, prices emerge from continuous competition among traders with differing information and beliefs. As new information arrives, participants can adjust or exit positions, allowing expectations to be rapidly incorporated into prices. In structure and operation, this mechanism more closely resembles a futures exchange than a casino floor — a distinction recognized in a CEI-led coalition letter on prediction market regulation.

The distinction between prediction markets and gambling becomes clearer when examining their economic function. Like most financial markets, they attract risk-takers who speculate on differences in expectations in search of profit.

That alone does not make prediction markets equivalent to gambling. These speculators play an essential role in stock, commodity, and futures markets by providing liquidity and improving price discovery. This structure shapes how prediction markets incorporate dispersed information.

Prediction markets can also serve a hedging function. Hedging is the practice of reducing exposure to risk by taking a position that gains value if an adverse outcome occurs. As CEI Director of Finance Policy John Berlau notes, businesses and organizations exposed to political, regulatory, or economic risks can use prediction markets to take positions that offset uncertainty in those areas, much like a farmer can hedge against crop failures or an airline can hedge against fuel price volatility.

In this respect, prediction markets more closely resemble other financial markets, such as futures, options, and foreign exchange markets.

Yet risk transfer is only part of the story. Unlike the recreational activity of gambling, prediction markets generate a powerful asset: real-time forecasting data. As Berlau has noted, prediction markets allow participants to translate dispersed knowledge about elections, sports, and other events into prices that reflect collective expectations.

Empirical research finds that these prices are as accurate as — and in many cases more accurate than — polls, expert judgment, and alternative forecasting methods in high-liquidity markets. The accuracy of these forecasts depends on the process of price discovery through which new information is incorporated into prices.

A London Business School study found that about 3 percent of traders account for most price discovery. That does not mean that the other 97 percent of traders are unhelpful. On the contrary, the remaining traders provide the liquidity necessary to maintain prediction markets and incorporate information into prices.

This structure closely resembles equity, foreign exchange, and commodity futures markets, where a small group of informed traders sets marginal prices while broader participation facilitates price discovery. By aggregating dispersed information into a single market signal, prediction markets can help traders, businesses, policymakers, and the public make better-informed decisions in the face of uncertainty.

The debate over prediction markets is not ultimately about wagering but about whether policymakers will regulate an institution according to its appearance or its function. Prediction markets transfer risk, aggregate information, and generate forecasts that can improve decision-making across society.

Treating them as gambling risks imposing regulatory burdens that could limit experimentation, forecasting innovation, and the development of new information markets. When regulators mistake a forecasting tool for a casino game, innovation becomes the first casualty."