In the latest news on tariffs, the US Court of International Trade struck down the tariffs that President Trump has imposed under the auspices of the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). Going further, the court issued what is known as a “summary judgment,” which in this case effectively means that the court finds that “no reasonable jury could reach a different conclusion.”

As of now, it seems the tariffs are invalidated, though there will almost certainly be confusion and chaos at the ports as everyone tries to figure out how much money is owed, by whom, and to whom.

While this ruling is a welcome development for those of us who understand free trade, it is still a surprising ruling. 

First, the Supreme Court has ruled time and again that Congress has the authority to delegate its powers to the president in certain situations. This means that the claim by some that “Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution says this is the realm of Congress, therefore if the president enacts tariffs, it is by definition unconstitutional,” is an argument that the Supreme Court has already explicitly rejected. 

Marshall Field & Co. v. Clark, for example, saw the Court uphold the Tariff Act of 1890, which directed the President to suspend duty-free importation of sugar, molasses, coffee, tea, and hides if the President believed that “any country producing and exporting [those products], imposes duties or other exactions upon the agricultural or other products of the United States, which . . . he may deem to be reciprocally unequal and unreasonable.”

As another example, in J.W. Hampton, Jr. & Co. v. United States, the Court upheld the Tariff Act of 1922, which required the President “to increase or decrease tariff rates as necessary to ‘equalize . . . differences in costs of production’ between articles produced in the United States and ‘like or similar’ articles produced in foreign countries.”

One difference between then and today, though, is that in those situations, the President had explicit orders from Congress to adjust tariff rates as necessary to accomplish a given end that Congress determined.

Congress has also passed several laws granting the President “emergency powers” in areas that would typically be within the purview of Congress. The Trading with the Enemy Act, passed in 1917, authorizes the President to, among other things, restrict trade with foreign nations with which we are currently at war. Then there’s the Trade Act of 1962, of which Section 232 was used by President Trump to impose tariffs in 2018. Further, there’s the Trade Act of 1974; President Bush used sections 20 and 301 to impose steel tariffs in 2002 and President Obama used section 421 to impose tariffs on Chinese tires. None of these were challenged as “unconstitutional.” While this list is most certainly not exhaustive, it should serve as a basis to explain that Congress has, in the past, delegated powers to the President and that there is at least some precedent for this happening.

But then there’s IEEPA. Of particular importance here is that no president has ever used it to impose tariffs. Trump in 2025, almost fifty years since its passage, is the first to do so. Thus, it was always going to invite challenge.

The President’s declarations of national emergencies were always shaky. Trade deficits do not constitute an emergency; they are an accounting identity and as such they impose zero harm on the United States whatsoever. And while he never followed through with it, are we really to believe that the fact that Americans now consume media filmed or created in another country is a “national emergency?” 

Complicating this, though, is that the Supreme Court has previously sided with the President when it comes to declarations of national emergencies. In both Al Haramain Islamic Foundation, Inc. v. US Dept. of Treasury and US v Groos, the Court held that its own justices “owe a unique deference to the executive branch’s determination that we face ‘an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security’ of the United States.” In part, the president (presumably) has access to information that is privileged and relevant that the Court simply does not have. The Court likely also does not want to open Pandora’s box by hearing a challenge to a national emergency declaration. Doing so would effectively nullify The National Emergencies Act altogether, which was enacted because Congress reasoned that, as a body deliberately designed to be slow-moving, they might not be able to act quickly enough during genuine emergency situations.

In the end, is this the be-all-end-all court ruling that will defeat these tariffs once and for all? Clearly, the answer has to be “no,” as the administration will no doubt appeal. But Trump may have overplayed his hand with these tariffs, and usurped power from Congress that was not actually given. If that is true, then the Trump tariffs are unconstitutional. We will have to wait and see what subsequent courts, like the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and possibly even the Supreme Court have to say on this.

Still, this ruling is a surprise. A pleasant one, to be sure, but a surprise nonetheless.

Over the years, I — like all defenders of free trade — have had countless conversations with protectionists who are tenacious in searching for weaknesses in the case for free trade. What follows is a composite of some key exchanges in many of those conversations. Every point below that “Protectionist” makes is one that real people have served up to me on several occasions. Except for the composite nature of this conversation between “Protectionist” and “Boudreaux,” nothing is fictional.

Protectionist: Over the past half-century, American industry has been hollowed out by international trade. We don’t make things anymore. That’s why we need protective tariffs.

Boudreaux: You’re factually incorrect. US industrial output hit its all-time peak in February of this year, higher by 155 percent than it was in 1975, when America last ran an annual trade surplus and 19 percent higher than in 2001, when China joined the WTO. Also, US industrial capacity is at an all-time high, and 147 larger than in 1975 and 12 percent larger than in 2001. Tariffs only —

Protectionist: Sorry for interrupting, but I don’t believe those government statistics. Bureaucrats are politically biased, with no incentive to get things right.

Boudreaux: Do you hear yourself? You don’t trust government officials to competently gather and report economic statistics, yet you do trust government officials with the power to coercively obstruct your and other Americans’ peaceful commerce with foreigners. How does that make sense?

Protectionist: I know what I see. Boarded-up factories, ruined lives, nothing made in America. You’re telling me that my own eyes are lyin’. I’m telling you that I believe my eyes and not free-traders’ lies, damn lies, and statistics.

Boudreaux: How many boarded-up factories do you actually see — in reality, not in photos — on a regular basis? If what we literally see with our eyes is the only guide to reality, then my eyes, seeing not a single shuttered factory, tells me that no such things exist. Whose eyes should be believed? Even if you happen regularly to encounter such sights, these aren’t the norm in the US We need statistics to get an accurate picture of the economy.

 Now it’s true that statistics can mislead, but they can also reveal and enlighten. It’s foolish to leap from the fact that statistics are sometimes used deceptively or carelessly to the conclusion that all statistics are unreliable. Indeed, you yourself rely on statistics whenever you assert, as you often do, that nineteenth-century US economic growth was fueled by tariffs. After all, your eyes weren’t around in the 1800s to do any observing. Your argument depends on you knowing that, in that era, US tariffs were often high and America’s economy grew at a rapid pace — both bits of knowledge being statistical.

Protectionist: Look, all I know is that America had high tariffs in the high-growth nineteenth century. Hard to argue with that!

Boudreaux: Actually, even beyond pointing out that you commit the sophomoric error of mistaking correlation for causation, it’s quite easy to argue with your assertion. Phil Gramm and I, in our new book The Triumph of Economic Freedom, look at annual growth rates of US industrial production in the nineteenth century. We find that industrial output grew faster in periods when tariff rates were falling than in periods when tariff rates were rising.

But beyond this fact, America back then was economically quite free, very entrepreneurial, and so large that most economic activity was purely domestic. International trade played a relatively minor role in nineteenth-century US economic growth. A greater role was played by immigration. According to the economic historian Robert Higgs, the US in the latter half of the nineteenth century experienced “the greatest volume of immigration in recorded history.”

If you conclude that the co-existence in nineteenth-century America of protective tariffs and rapid economic growth proves that protective tariffs fuel economic growth, then you logically must also conclude that the co-existence in nineteenth-century America of enormous immigration and rapid economic growth proves that enormous immigration fuels economic growth. Should we return today to the immigration policy that reigned in the US in, say 1870, when our borders were almost completely open?

Protectionist: Let’s stick to tariffs, shall we? When I go to Walmart and Target, or buy stuff on Amazon, all the labels read “Made in Vietnam,” “Made in Bulgaria,” “Made in Mexico” — never “Made in America.” Nothing today is made in America. My eyes don’t deceive me.

Boudreaux: No, but your limited knowledge does. Those labels don’t mean what you think. In today’s global economy, the great majority of the manufactured goods that you consume consist of parts and ideas from around the world, including the US. A “Made in” label on some good tells you only where that good’s final assembly occurred. Bath towels at Target labeled “Made in Turkey” might well be made of cotton grown in Texas, dyed with pigments from Germany, woven on a loom made in India, and shipped to the US on a freighter made in Korea that is carrying a shipping container manufactured in Denmark. That label would be more accurate if it instead read “Final Processing Done in Turkey” — or, more accurate still, “Made on Earth.”

Because the final processing of most consumer goods is a relatively low-value-added task, Americans’ high wages make it worthwhile for manufacturers to have those tasks performed by lower-wage non-Americans. But goods labeled “Made in Turkey” or “Made in China” frequently contain more inputs made in the USA than in the country named on the label.

Protectionist: Well, maybe some parts of the US are doing okay economically, but you can’t deny that the rust belt has been devastated by the decline of manufacturing there.

Boudreaux: I do deny it. Manufacturing output in the Rust Belt hasn’t declined, at least not in the past twenty years. The St. Louis Fed has quarterly data on real manufacturing output by state going back to the first quarter of 2005. Even in the Rust Belt, manufacturing output over the two decades from then through today (the fourth quarter of 2024) has risen. The inflation-adjusted aggregate manufacturing output of Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Wisconsin is today 14 percent higher than it was twenty years ago.

What has declined over the past twenty years is the share of the total workforce employed in manufacturing jobs. But this trend didn’t start twenty years ago, or thirty years ago, or even fifty years ago. It started seventy years ago, in 1954. Indeed, this decline has slowed somewhat since China joined the WTO in December 2001. From January 1954 through November 2001, manufacturing employment as a share of total nonfarm employment fell at an average monthly rate of 0.165 percent. From December 2001 through today (April 2025), that rate of monthly decline slowed to 0.146 percent.

If you’re looking for a culprit to blame for the loss of blue-collar jobs, don’t look at trade and offshoring — again, US industrial output is now at an all-time high — look instead at labor-saving technology. Look instead at the very same economic force that a century earlier caused the loss of agricultural jobs. Human ingenuity, much of it American, that improves technology is to blame, not trade.

Protectionist: Whatever. If higher tariffs here can restore manufacturing employment, ordinary Americans will be made better off.

Boudreaux: Do you have children?

Protectionist: Huh? Don’t change the subject.

Boudreaux: I’m not changing the subject. Do you have children?

Protectionist: Three. Two in college, one in high school.

Boudreaux: I applaud you. What do they study?

Protectionist: I still don’t see what this has to do with trade…. The oldest is graduating with a degree in finance, and my daughter is studying nursing. My youngest wants to be a musician.

Boudreaux: You have every reason to be proud! But not one of your kids seems to want to work in a factory.

Protectionist: Straw-man argument. I didn’t say that every American wants to work in manufacturing, just that more do.

Boudreaux: How do you know that? What do you do for a living?

Protectionist: I’m an accounts manager for a furniture wholesaler — I know, it’s not a manufacturing job. But look, I also know that we have a shortage of manufacturing jobs because, well, we hear all the time that Americans want more manufacturing jobs.

Boudreaux: Not everything you hear is true. Unemployment today is low and real wages are at an all-time high — two facts that, together, are practically impossible to square with the frequently repeated assertion that ordinary Americans are suffering because of a lack of manufacturing-employment opportunities. The reality is that manufacturers are having a difficult time finding and retaining workers. The average number of monthly manufacturing job openings since this century began is 365,000, but today (March 2025) that number stands at 449,000.

Nearly all parents want their kids to grow up to be the likes of doctors, lawyers, and architects, not welders, pipefitters, and assemblers on a factory floor. And that’s also what their — and your — kids want.

Protectionist: Your elite disdain for regular people is repellent.

Boudreaux: You mistake me. I have no such disdain. I admire manufacturing workers, as I admire anyone working in an honest job. My late father, whom I admired beyond words, spent his career laboring in a shipyard. But I don’t want such a job, and my dad would have thought me crazy if I’d quit college to work alongside him. Those lost manufacturing jobs for which you have nostalgia were generally difficult, dangerous, and unpleasant — I know, because I worked in that same shipyard during the summers when I was in college. It’s a blessing that there are fewer and fewer such jobs.

Protectionist: Yeah, but you overlook—

Boudreaux: Now I must apologize for interrupting you. It’s getting late. Perhaps we can resume this conversation sometime in future.

Republicans in Congress are moving along with their “big, beautiful bill” to extend tax cuts, create some new tax provisions, and reduce the rate of growth in some spending programs. The Medicaid “cuts” that reduce the rate of growth in future spending have attracted particular attention. Here, I want to focus on what Congress could do with Medicaid and premium subsidies for exchange policies for low-income Americans. A bigger package could align incentives better and cut spending growth just as much, while also undercutting some of the claims being made against the current version of the bill.

Right now, the bill gets a lot of its projected savings from a future work requirement for Medicaid recipients. There’s a real question about whether the costs of implementing a work requirement outweigh the benefits — states will have to hire staff to do the checking — but the evidence from Arkansas, which already has such a requirement, is more positive than you may have heard.

A better way to slow the growth in Medicaid is to leave it up to states whether and how to impose work requirements, but to equalize the federal match rate between “traditional” and “expanded” Medicaid. Traditional Medicaid is targeted toward the very poor who are generally unable to work full-time: the elderly, the disabled, and single parents of young children. Expanded Medicaid under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) is available to everyone making up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level in states that have chosen to offer it. The federal match rate for expanded Medicaid is 90 percent — or $9 in federal taxpayer money for every $1 that states kick in — while the match rate for traditional Medicaid is variable but consistently much lower, about 63 percent on average.

Ridiculously, the federal government offers states more money to provide health coverage to relatively wealthier and more able-bodied residents than it offers them to provide coverage to the truly needy and disabled. Almost as bad, Obamacare’s design makes it so that in the 10 states that haven’t expanded Medicaid, many residents don’t qualify for any subsidy, including the premium tax credits that are available to much higher-income Americans to buy coverage on the exchanges.

Along with reducing and harmonizing the Medicaid match rate, Congress could expand Obamacare premium subsidies to Americans below the federal poverty line. That move would incentivize states to shuffle Medicaid recipients off government insurance and onto the regulated private market, and further vindicate those states that have stood strong and refused Medicaid expansion. Overall health spending could go down because Medicaid has extremely strict cost-sharing limits, and many states require no cost-sharing at all, such as copayments, for any Medicaid recipients. As a result, Medicaid recipients seek a lot of healthcare.

I ran some quick numbers to see how to make the math work. If Congress moved to a 65 percent across-the-board Medicaid match, that would cut federal Medicaid spending by $49 billion based on fiscal year 2023 actual data (the most recent complete data). Note that this match is an increase on the traditional Medicaid match, but a reduction compared to the expanded Medicaid (Obamacare) match. But the CBO then standardly assumes that states only backfill half of the lost federal revenue from a decline in Medicaid match rates. As states cut, the federal match would go down, too. So a $49 billion cut would ultimately amount to about $65 billion in federal spending reductions.

Now subtract the cost of premium tax credits to close the coverage gap in states without expanded Medicaid. A Commonwealth Foundation report estimates this would cost $27 billion a year. Combining all these reforms should save the federal government around $40 billion a year, maybe a bit less when accounting for some movement of people from Medicaid to the Obamacare exchanges.

This is more than what the CBO predicts the work requirement will save the federal government in its first year, but the CBO’s estimate also doesn’t include state administrative costs in implementing the work requirement. Once those costs are considered, my alternative proposal looks even better.

To give states flexibility to slow the growth of Medicaid, the bill should explicitly allow them to do more cost-sharing and experiment with work requirements (since there may be less burdensome ways to implement a work requirement). Congress should also consider changing the match altogether to a block grant, a longtime goal of fiscal conservatives.

In short, these proposals will help make healthcare for the poor more rational, while reducing the deficit:

1. Equalize federal subsidies to states for providing healthcare to the poor;
2. End coverage gaps that exclude the very poor from subsidies;
3. Give states more flexibility and autonomy to slow the growth of Medicaid;
4. Encourage Americans to move from government-provided insurance to private insurance, albeit in a subsidized and highly regulated form.

Every year, since 1992, the UN General Assembly votes on a resolution brought forth by Cuba’s government regarding the need to end the US embargo. Each time the resolution is brought, Cuba’s government attributes the country’s economic hardships — such as shortages, rationing, and limited access to goods — to the long-standing US embargo, which it frames as a form of “economic warfare.” In its 2023 estimate, Cuba claimed the embargo has costits economy a total of $1.34 trillion, adding roughly $13 million in losses each day over the past year. This is an enormous number — and just as enormous a pile of rubbish.

The Cuban government attributes the figure to lost export revenues, trade reallocation costs, and disruptions in production and services. While these categories may sound reasonable at first glance, the regime assumes that all such disruptions are caused by the embargo, not by its own dysfunctional socialist policies. To top it off, the government even attributes emigration and talent loss — 4 percent of the total cost — to the embargo, as if decades of central planning and political repression had nothing to do with people fleeing the country.

Finally, it assumes that all losses in tourism are due to the embargo and not the nationalization of hotels, bars, and restaurants (in the 1960s) or the tight price controls and rationing (which continue today). Together, these fudged numbers account for 45 percent of the total cost, and that assumes the rest is based on “true” number.

The point of this exercise in statistical deception is to shift blame. 

Cuba used to be one of the richest countries in Latin America. Its living standards — in the 1920s — even matched those of some poorer American states. Globally, Cuba was among the wealthier nations. Today, it lingers near the bottom of international rankings. To deflect blame for the disastrous effects of the socialist policies implemented by Fidel Castro after 1959 — and largely maintained ever since — the regime points to the US embargo. It wasn’t Castro and his successors who slowed Cuba’s growth and impoverished the nation by global standards. No, it was the Americans and their embargo that kept the Revolution from bearing its true fruits.

The problem is that there is no doubt that embargoes make nations poorer! The US embargo clearly makes Cubans poorer — this is a near consensus. But by how much? As long as that question lingers, Cuba’s government can get always with promoting rubbish studies that serve to legitimize their rule.

Fortunately, there is now a way to disentangle the effects of different factors explaining Cuba’s economic evolution since 1959. Alongside João Pedro Bastos and Jamie Bologna Pavlik, we separated the effect of Cuba’s socialist policies from those of the embargo and those of Soviet aid to the country.

This was possible thanks to two new advances. The first was a new series for GDP per capita in Cuba that is consistent over time and which can be matched with Soviet transfers to the country; this way, we can evaluate Cuba with and without transfers.

The second is a relatively novel method in economics — the synthetic control method, which can be used to estimate the causal effect of an intervention (i.e., a treatment just like in a laboratory experiment). It consists in constructing a weighted combination of control units (here: other countries) that approximates the characteristics of the treated unit before the intervention. For Cuba, the intervention is Fidel Castro’s socialist policies. This “synthetic control” serves as a counterfactual — what would have happened in the absence of the treatment (i.e., Cuba continues with a non-socialist and non-democratic regime as was the case before 1959). The difference between the observed outcomes of the treated unit and its synthetic counterpart after the intervention provides an estimate of the treatment effect.

Combined, this allows us to observe the trajectory of Cuba’s economy net of Soviet transfers but still accounting for the effects of the US embargo. By 1989, our results show that Cuba was approximately 55 percent poorer than it would have been in the absence of both socialism and the embargo. In other words, even before the collapse of Soviet support, the costs of central planning and isolation had already taken a severe toll on Cuban living standards.

So, what about the embargo? After stripping out the Soviet subsidy, we can use trade data to simulate how much trade openness was lost due to the embargo. Trade openness — measured as the ratio of total trade (exports plus imports) to GDP — plummeted after 1960 as Cuba was cut off from its most natural trading partner and was forced to reallocate to less efficient trading partners (European countries, Soviet bloc countries, other developing nations). Simply put, Cuba was forced into inefficient trade relationships. This, in turn, affected productivity.

By reapplying the synthetic control method using trade data, we can construct a counterfactual level of trade openness in the absence of the embargo. The resulting gap provides a measure of lost openness attributable to the embargo, which can then be converted into a cost figure by using standard estimates of the growth effects of trade openness. This approach yields an estimate of the economic cost of the embargo independent of domestic policies.

So how big a deal is the embargo? At worst, it accounts for about 10 percent of the economic gap attributable to the combination of the Revolution and the embargo; at best, it explains less than 3 percent. In other words, yes — the embargo has made Cubans poorer, and it may even have helped the regime endure longer by providing a convenient scapegoat. But it simply doesn’t explain much. The true source of Cuba’s decline is the regime’s own policies. These policies placed the country on a trajectory that dragged it from the top tier of global rankings to the bottom.

Next year, when yet another resolution condemning the embargo is tabled before the UN General Assembly, let us hope at least one journalist will point out the absurdity of the regime’s estimates. Let us some representative in the Assembly will state what truly needs to be said: the embargo may be unwise, but the primary cause of Cuba’s poverty is the repressive socialist regime that has extinguished the economic freedom of its people.

Self-driving cars may not be widespread just yet, but it’s only a matter of time before they become a normal part of everyday life. Though some are looking forward to the technology and others are apprehensive about it, everyone agrees that transportation will never be the same again.

While all technological innovations have benefits, what’s particularly interesting about this one is that it comes with a wide array of positive second-order impacts, many of which are vastly underestimated. Self-driving cars are not just an opportunity to avoid having to focus on the road; they are an opportunity to transform society for the better.

To understand just how beneficial this technology is likely to be, let’s look at three hidden ways it can improve our lives.

1) Better Traffic

Traffic is one of the biggest problems faced by modern cities. In addition to being a massive waste of time, it also causes stress and leads to terrible fuel mileage. Fortunately, self-driving cars have the potential to radically reduce traffic by optimizing driving patterns.

Autonomous vehicles have a few advantages over humans that allow them to improve traffic flow. For one, they can drive in a perfectly optimal way, accelerating and decelerating with a logical rigor that isn’t subject to human error. What’s more, autonomous vehicles can talk to each other. When these features are combined, the potential is huge.

“Connected autonomous vehicles excel in eliminating uncertainties arising from human driving behaviors,” researchers note in a 2024 paper. “Consequently, they alleviate the issue of ‘phantom congestion’, a phenomenon that significantly impacts traffic efficiency, safety and sustainability while simultaneously enhancing overall traffic flow stability and safety.”

“Phantom congestion” is traffic that arises from simple human errors in driving — like braking too quickly — rather than from an identifiable cause like an accident or construction. With self-driving vehicles, this source of traffic will be a thing of the past, and traffic that is unavoidable will be handled much more optimally.

With less traffic, people will have more time, less stress, and better mileage. And better mileage doesn’t just mean fuel savings; it also means fewer emissions going into the environment for every mile travelled.

But the hidden benefits hardly stop there.

2) Improved Road Safety

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) estimates that 39,345 people died in traffic accidents in the US in 2024. That number has fluctuated in recent decades, but in general it has remained stubbornly high — a sobering reminder that driving is one of the most dangerous activities that we do on a regular basis. For children and youth, traffic accidents are one of the leading causes of death.

The good news is that self-driving vehicles can help us mitigate the risk of traffic accidents — a lot. According to a 2015 NHTSA report, 94 percent of crashes have driver error as the “critical reason” for the crash. While that number has been questioned in recent years, it’s clear that eliminating human error has the potential to make our roads considerably safer. That means fewer lives lost, fewer injuries, less traffic from accidents, less strain on emergency services, and, from a financial standpoint, lower insurance premiums.

3) A Stronger Economy

One of the biggest changes that will likely emerge with self-driving cars is the rise of self-driving trucks and taxis, which will seriously disrupt the $1.8 trillion transportation industry in the US. With no more need to hire a driver, moving people and goods from one point to another will become considerably cheaper, and lower transportation costs also means lower costs for any product that relies on transportation, which is just about everything.

Imagine if instead of individual taxi and Uber drivers, there were companies that managed a fleet of self-driving taxis. The car would drive itself to the pick-up location, drive you to your destination, and then drive off to the next job. True, you would still have to pay to cover the vehicle expenses and the company’s operations, but you wouldn’t have to pay for a driver’s time, which is no doubt a significant part of the current cost of a taxi ride.

Add in the economic benefits of better traffic and road safety, and you’re looking at a technology that could make a real difference for global prosperity.

What about Drawbacks?

While self-driving cars come with many benefits, there are also legitimate concerns around them that are worth taking seriously. Cars that can talk to each other are great, for instance, but what if I don’t want my information being shared? Privacy is important, and it will be necessary to find ways of preserving it in the self-driving era.

Another factor to consider is ethics. Since accidents can’t be fully eliminated even in a self-driving world, autonomous vehicles have to be programmed to make sudden trolley problem-style decisions — do I hit the cyclist or risk the driver’s life? If cars are programmed to always prioritize the driver, there could be some genuine concerns about how that will play out on the streets.

Economically speaking, the downside of self-driving trucks and taxis is thousands of truck drivers and taxi drivers finding themselves out of work. Adjusting to the new economic reality is probably best — we don’t want to preserve obsolete industries in perpetuity — but it’s understandable to be worried about how that transition will take place.

Having said that, the benefits to be gained from self-driving cars seem to far outweigh the downsides. So let’s not let fear get in the way of technological progress; instead, let’s push forward and find ways to manage the hard parts.

The results will be well worth it.

The retreat of DEI may be one of the biggest political and cultural reversals in recent history. Corporate America is running from its DEI trainings and programs in droves. Wall Street has soured on it. Many states, and now the federal government, have declared war on it. And many ordinary Americans are tired of it.

Yet the rot of DEI goes deeper than most people know, and it still has a veneer of respectability in academia. Of course, university administrators are running for the hills when it comes to publicly talking about DEI in the face of mounting legal and political challenges. But they haven’t changed their minds on the issue. They are busily at work rebranding DEI offices and positions as quickly as they can.

DEI Exposed: How the Biggest Con of the Century Almost Toppled Higher Education does just what the title promises: it exposes DEI for the con game it is. Dr. Stanley Ridgley has written a scathing criticism of DEI in higher education. This book is not for the faint of heart and will persuade no DEI enthusiasts or sympathizers. Ridgley’s contempt for DEI offices, publications, platitudes, and practitioners is palpable.

The initial chapters explain how professional scammers exploit the psychology that makes “marks” susceptible to being conned out of huge sums of money. He quotes Road Hustler on the formula for cons and scams:

1. finding a suitable victim
2. gaining the victim’s trust
3. persuading the victim to commit to a scheme that will benefit him or her
4. getting money from the victim
5. finally, placating the victim in order to quell any uneasy feelings about the situation

He argues that paid DEI advocates use this exact formula. These grifters have found easy “marks” in the bleeding hearts of insecure university administrators and faculty who were more than happy to use other people’s money (mostly students’ and taxpayers’) to assuage their consciences and to polish their virtue-signaling bona fides.

Ridgley brings plenty of examples to bear. The most prominent DEI advocates sign million-dollar book deals and charge tens of thousands of dollars per speaking engagement. The run-of-the-mill DEI university official — nearly always with a six-figure salary — can sometimes have close to a half million-dollar compensation scheme going. Undoubtedly, significant amounts of money have been transferred from universities to DEI grifters.

Ridgley points out the egregious case of the University of Michigan. 

From the launch of its DEI programs in 2016, UM has spent a mind-numbing two hundred and fifty million dollars on its diversity programs, according to an expose by the New York Times Magazine. Although UM may be the most prominent example of DEI grift, there are plenty of other shocking examples. “UVA pays more than $1 million in salary and benefits to its top two DEI sinecures….By comparison, Virginia’s governor Glenn Youngkin is paid $175,000.” (emphasis original). At Ohio State, over thirty DEI positions were paid between $100,000 and $300,000. To add insult to injury, Ridgley goes into what these universities get from their highly paid DEI bureaucrats: zilch and a headache to go with it.

Despite abusing the phrase “do the work” and claiming to be “exhausted” from their crusade to root out racism, sexism, ableism, and any other -ism du jour, DEI officials are quite cagey about what they do or how their work should be assessed. In fact, many are critical of work itself. Ridgley quotes a volume about Chief Diversity Officers in Higher Education about how they see work. 

Here are a few gems:

We choose not to subscribe to the societal and academic pressure that says your value is in your production. Rather we remind each other that we are valuable just as we are, and we can redefine productivity in a holistic way that acknowledges contribution beyond publication and material output.

“We’ve done so by acknowledging our ‘whole” self and redefining productivity.”

Hence, our renewed sense of urgency in changing what contribution to the work and productivity looks like for practitioners. We are continuously constructing and fostering spaces that empower others to embrace their authentic selves. However, it is rare to encounter individuals intentionally creating similar spaces for us as professionals. Organizations such as the Nap Ministry, is an example of how many Black professionals are creating spaces for respite and self-care amidst being overworked and overextended. The Nap Ministry creates ‘sacred spaces where the liberatory, restorative, and disruptive power of rest can take hold.’ 

I had my doubts about the whole “Nap Ministry” and its leader, the “Nap Bishop.” Surely this must be made-up hyperbole. But these are, in fact, real. Author and consultant Tricia Hersey does, in fact, have a website that markets her Nap Ministry and she does, in fact, refer to herself as the Nap Bishop. 

Nor does this appear to be only a fringe isolated internet crank. Apparently, she finds plenty of interest in her work. She writes about taking a two month “Sabbatical” in 2024 to rest from her apparently busy schedule:

(in 2023 I had 30 bookings, flew close to 100,000 airline miles, boarded 26 round trip flights. I lectured in Amsterdam and participated in a theater festival in Melbourne, Australia, was in residency as a scholar-artist at NYU for the Fall 2023 semester) (Italics original)

Sounds a bit like my and a few of my colleagues’ travel schedules — but with a lot more money and, apparently, sabbaticals, as well as quite a bit of napping. Her mantra “rest is resistance” and the successful grift of Tricia Hersey highlights yet another danger of the prevalence of DEI ideology and its practitioners: deep anti-intellectualism. 

The reactionary nature of DEI and critical race theory against western civilization includes rejecting logic and reason. Instead of these, DEI advocates highlight psychological, emotional, and mystical experiences. They even created their own “academic” genres of “Testimonios” and “autoethnography.” These genres elevate one’s personal experiences, impressions, and musings to the level of “scholarship,” of truth even. Yet besides being deeply subjective (and thereby highly susceptible to confirmation bias), these methods also facilitate pure fabrication.

Part of DEI’s self-defense mechanism when they are called out for race-baiting and hate crime hoaxes, is that such things could have been true. Therefore, their reaction as if these things were true and did in fact happen, are justified. Such an approach, besides being deeply anti-intellectual, turns out to also be quite costly.

Duke University ended up paying out $20 million dollars apiece to three of its lacrosse players who were accused of raping a dancer. At the time of the allegations, Duke didn’t even attempt an investigation but immediately condemned the students and sided with the accuser based upon racial and social characteristics. Besides being exonerated by DNA evidence, the accuser admitted just last year that she had made up the accusation.

In another prominent case, an employee at a local bakery ran after a minority student from Oberlin College who shoplifted something from the bakery. Two of the shoplifter’s friends helped the shoplifter “pummel the clerk protecting his business” and were all arrested. Oberlin, however, instead of apologizing to the Bakery, immediately took the side of the minority students and accused the Bakery and its employees of rank racism and hate. These accusations led to years of protests, boycotts, threats, and other unpleasantness. Oberlin College eventually had to pay $36.6 million to that local bakery.

DEI programs consist primarily of grifters who do little. They encourage a “virtuous victimhood” mentality in students, they attempt to re-educate those who are not part of the program, and they fail to address real abuse – especially antisemitism. The failure of the DEI establishment to protect Jewish students from threats and abuse over the past year and a half led directly to the removal of three ivy league presidents. But that was just the tip of the iceberg. 

Universities have begun a winnowing process that will likely continue for the next few years. Let’s hope the wheat of academic inquiry and excellence make it through while the chaff of DEI grifters and sinecures blow away with the winds of social and political common sense. Ridley applies an apt quote from GK Chesterton to explain what is wrong with the DEI mindset and to counsel a better way forward:

Are there no other stories in the world except yours; and are all men busy with your business? … How much happier you would be if you only knew that these people cared nothing about you! How much larger your life would be if yourself could become smaller in it; if you could see them walking as they are in their sunny selfishness and their virile indifference! You would begin to be interested in them, because they were not interested in you. You would break out of this tiny and tawdry theatre in which your own little plot is always being played, and you would find yourself under a freer sky, in a street full of splendid strangers.

In a remarkable feat of modern physics, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider have managed to recreate one of humanity’s oldest fantasies: turning lead into gold. By smashing lead atoms together at near-light speeds, the resulting collisions generate immense heat and energy — conditions so extreme that they momentarily produce a flurry of exotic particles and even atoms with the same number of protons as gold. Could it be that the alchemists’ long-elusive dream — transmuting the worthless into the sublime — has at last been realized? And not in cluttered stone laboratories thick with incense and delusion, but in the sleek, humming vacuum tubes of a particle collider hidden miles under the Swiss Alps?

But there’s a catch: these gold-like nuclei exist for only the tiniest sliver of time — less than a millionth of a second — before they decay or transform into something else. They don’t last long enough to form stable atoms, much less shiny gold bars. That’s because what’s being created in these collisions isn’t ordinary, stable gold. Instead, these are unstable isotopes — nuclei that may contain 79 protons (which defines gold) but often the wrong number of neutrons, or too much internal energy to hold themselves together. Lacking the necessary stability, and with no time to capture electrons and form full atoms, these proto-gold particles quickly disintegrate into other elements or radiation. It’s an awe-inspiring display of physics at the edge of possibility, but it’s a far cry from the practical transformation of lead into gold dreamed of by ancient alchemists.

But what if that limitation could somehow be overcome? What if science unlocked a way to create gold that didn’t vanish — gold that was stable, persistent, and reproducible? Thousands of years of mystical yearning, from Egyptian priests to Renaissance alchemists, might suddenly be realized in a laboratory. Let’s conduct a gedankenexperiment — a thought experiment — to explore what might happen if the ancient dream finally came true.

The Physical Limitations 

The first step in our thought experiment must be a sober look at the costs and logistics of artificial gold creation. Producing an ounce of gold through nuclear transmutation — whether in particle accelerators or hypothetical future reactors — would currently require astronomical energy input. High-speed collisions between heavy nuclei demand immense power, cryogenic cooling systems, rare materials, and highly specialized infrastructure. Even if science finds a way to stabilize the gold nuclei created in such collisions, the process remains incredibly inefficient: billions of collisions might yield only a few atoms of usable gold. Time is another factor — each collision and its byproducts must be precisely controlled and monitored, which means even producing milligrams of gold could take days or weeks under constant operation.

In contrast, modern gold mining — while environmentally and socially fraught — is relatively cheap per ounce when spread over large-scale operations. Open-pit mines and chemical leaching processes can yield ounces of gold at a cost ranging from hundreds to low thousands of dollars, depending on geology and location. Artificial synthesis, by comparison, could run into the tens of millions of dollars per ounce at current technology levels. Additionally, there are safety considerations: working with high-energy particle beams, radioactive decay products, and precision instrumentation carries serious physical and radiological risks. Before the fantasy of lab-made gold can be treated as a practical alternative to mining, these profound differences in cost, time, energy, and danger must be reconciled — or radically improved.

A critical challenge in our thought experiment is scalability. Even if stable gold could be produced artificially, the infrastructure needed to do so at meaningful volumes would be staggering. Unlike mining operations — which have evolved over centuries to exploit rich deposits efficiently — nuclear synthesis requires highly specialized facilities, vast amounts of energy, and delicate precision. Producing even a few ounces would likely involve multiple synchronized particle accelerators or advanced reactors, none of which currently exist for that purpose, and whose construction and maintenance would carry prohibitive costs.

Equally important is the issue of purity and isotopic composition. Naturally occurring gold is made almost entirely of one stable isotope, Au-197, prized for its inertness and consistency. Lab-synthesized gold, on the other hand, might contain unstable isotopes or trace levels of radiation, making it unsuitable for use in jewelry, electronics, or central bank reserves without extensive and expensive purification. If artificial gold couldn’t meet the same metallurgical standards as mined gold, it would remain a scientific novelty rather than an economic competitor.

Taken together, these tradeoffs suggest that while artificial gold creation might be scientifically fascinating, it is currently far from commercially viable. The promise of alchemical transformation still faces massive practical, technical, and economic barriers before it could rival — or even supplement — the ancient practice of pulling gold from the earth.

Clues from the Past

With those parameters in place, let’s now turn our attention to historical analogies that might provide a template for this sort of change. There are a few past examples where commodities once considered precious, strategic, or culturally essential became suddenly abundant, obsolete, or economically irrelevant due to scientific or technological breakthroughs. These cases help build a mental model for the potential disruption of gold — but they also come with limitations. Most lacked the deep monetary, psychological, and geopolitical entrenchment that gold possesses today.

Whale Oil → Kerosene & Petroleum

In the 18th and early 19th centuries, whale oil was a prized commodity, used primarily for lighting. Entire coastal economies, particularly in New England, depended on the dangerous and labor-intensive whaling industry. This changed rapidly with the invention of kerosene and the discovery of petroleum in Pennsylvania in 1859. These alternatives were cheaper, more scalable, and didn’t rely on dwindling whale populations. As demand plummeted, the whaling industry collapsed, leading to economic decline in towns that had thrived on maritime oil. Meanwhile, petroleum-rich regions saw a surge in economic activity, and artificial lighting became vastly more accessible, democratizing productivity after dark.

Natural Rubber → Synthetic Rubber

Natural rubber was once a strategic resource, essential to industrialization and modern warfare. It came almost exclusively from Amazonian and Southeast Asian plantations, giving colonial powers immense leverage. During World War II, synthetic rubber was developed using petrochemicals to meet military demands when access to natural rubber was cut off. Postwar, synthetic rubber production continued to expand, gradually displacing natural rubber in many uses. While not rendered obsolete, natural rubber lost its monopoly and strategic cachet. Its pricing and geopolitical significance diminished, replaced by flexible global production chains centered around chemistry, not trees. Both, however, are still in use, with the price of synthetic rubber more closely correlated with world oil prices than the natural variety.

Diamonds → Lab-Grown Disruption

Though diamonds were never a standardized monetary asset like gold, they carried immense cultural, emotional, and sometimes financial weight. The commercialization of lab-grown diamonds through HPHT and CVD processes has led to a sharp divergence in price: lab-created stones have dropped 60–90% in value since 2016. Traditional players like De Beers initially resisted but now sell lab diamonds at lower prices to preserve the premium of natural stones. Gen Z consumers increasingly favor lab-grown options for their affordability and ethical advantages, undermining the mystique of “real” diamonds. Industrially, lab-grown diamonds dominate — over 99% of the market — due to cost and versatility. As a result, investment demand has nearly vanished, and resale value is highly uncertain. In contrast to gold, diamonds had no universal standard or role in reserves, but their fate suggests that once scarcity is replicable, long-term value erodes — especially if emotional or cultural ties are weak.

Let’s assume all the economic hurdles are overcome — and yes, pun gently set aside, atom-smashing gold pans out: Let’s further suppose that our historical paradigms are generally representative. What would some of the knock-on effects be if stable, abundant lab-made gold became a reality?

Short-Term Implications (0–6 months)

If stable, artificially created gold were suddenly viable, the immediate impact would be financial chaos. Gold prices would collapse almost overnight — possibly falling 50 to 80 percent — as investors and institutions dumped physical holdings and gold-backed ETFs in a panic. The psychological shock alone would trigger a rush for alternative stores of value, briefly sending silver, platinum, and palladium soaring. However, those rallies would be volatile and short-lived: if gold can be synthesized in a hadron collider, then silver, platinum, and palladium — each just a handful of protons and neutrons away in atomic mass — are well within striking distance in the nuclear transmutation landscape. Exchange rates would shift as well: gold-exporting countries like Ghana and Russia would see their currencies depreciate sharply, while commodities priced in gold would become erratic. Cryptocurrencies — particularly Bitcoin — might rally as narratives of engineered scarcity and digital permanence gained new urgency. Central banks with large gold reserves would suffer paper losses and balance sheet distress, while economies reliant on gold exports would experience swift and painful current account shocks.

Medium-Term Implications (6 months–2 years)

Within a year or two, the gold price would stabilize at a new, dramatically lower level — likely just above the marginal cost of artificial production unless its output were somehow tightly regulated. Gold’s historic monetary premium would vanish, and it would lose much of its investment allure. Meanwhile, industrial and luxury demand would shift: if synthetic gold proved unsuitable for high-end jewelry or electronics, demand for purer natural metals like platinum or rhodium might recover. The broader monetary landscape would begin to change, with central banks rethinking reserve strategies and looking beyond gold for hedging purposes. Assets like real estate, art, or crypto would likely absorb capital formerly allocated to gold. The mining sector would be reshaped: gold mining operations would collapse, equities in major gold producers would plummet, and investment would flood into other extractive industries with growth potential, such as lithium and rare earths.

Long-Term Implications (2 years and beyond)

Over time, gold would be reclassified as an industrial or luxury commodity rather than a monetary asset. Like copper or nickel, it would be valued for its physical properties but no longer serve as a hedge or store of value. Its role in central bank vaults would fade, replaced by alternative assets — potentially crypto, digital commodities, or even algorithmically scarce instruments designed for monetary roles. Countries that had hoarded gold, like China or Germany, would lose strategic leverage, while those pioneering and controlling synthetic gold technologies could rapidly see geopolitical ascendance. More broadly, the event would force a philosophical and economic reckoning: scarcity, once tied to the natural world, would become a question of code, governance, and confidence. Trust in tangible wealth would erode, prompting a shift toward engineered forms of scarcity, permanently altering how value and stability are perceived in global finance.

Other Effects Over Varying Time Frames

Beyond financial markets and central bank policies, the artificial creation of stable gold would ripple outward into nearly every corner of the global economic and geopolitical order. Gold-backed monetary frameworks — including symbolic or partially collateralized systems promoted by BRICS or envisioned in alternative trade settlements — would unravel overnight. Even proposals for gold-linked stablecoins or a new Bretton Woods-style regime would become instantly obsolete, stripping credibility from monetary systems premised on natural scarcity. The psychological blow would be just as profound: gold has long symbolized permanence and intrinsic value. If it suddenly became synthetic and plentiful, it could shake confidence not only in gold but in other physical stores of value, prompting a cultural pivot toward digital assets, intellectual capital, or algorithmically enforced scarcity.

The political and societal consequences would be no less destabilizing. Many developing nations depend heavily on gold exports to fund government budgets and maintain social cohesion. A collapse in gold’s value could drive unemployment, fiscal crises, and even regime change in politically fragile states. Meanwhile, cultural norms would be disrupted: in countries like India, where gold is deeply tied to weddings, dowries, and social status, abundant synthetic gold could democratize jewelry access but also undermine centuries-old traditions. At the same time, nations that control or lead in artificial gold production would gain a new kind of strategic leverage — akin to mastering uranium enrichment or dominating semiconductor supply chains. Industries that revolve around gold’s physicality — vaulting, bullion transport, and gold-backed lending — would face obsolescence or radical transformation. And inevitably, such a paradigm shift would provoke a wave of conspiracy theories and populist backlash, with claims that global elites orchestrated the disruption to destroy sovereignty, wealth preservation, or traditional monetary values.

Although we’ve taken a small step closer, true alchemy — whether in the historical sense of chemical transmutation or the Star Trek-style replicator fantasy — is still a long way off. Yet as history shows, when scarcity collapses, so too can the systems built upon it — economic, political, and cultural alike. From whale oil to diamonds, once-prized commodities have been dethroned by technological advances, often with far-reaching consequences. If gold is next, the ripple effects could redefine our concepts of value, trust, and stability. Whether this transformation brings prosperity or disruption will depend not just on science, but on how wisely we respond. As with all Schumpeterian creative destruction, disruption at the elemental level in the world of commodities will bring both upheaval and opportunity.

Many Americans now view the United Nations unfavorably, with only 52 percent expressing a positive opinion—a five-point decline since 2023. Public belief that the United States benefits from its membership in the UN is also waning.

Reflecting this growing dissatisfaction, Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) has reintroduced his 2023 bill, the Disengaging Entirely from the United Nations Debacle (DEFUND) Act, at the first session of the 119th Congress. The bill calls for the termination of US membership “in the United Nations, and in any organ, specialized agency, commission, or other formally affiliated body of the United Nations.” Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) has reintroduced the House version of the DEFUND Act.

International organizations like the United Nations are neither sacrosanct nor immune from criticism. However, the proposals by Sen. Lee and Rep. Roy would, if enacted, unintentionally harm America’s national security interests.

Proponents of the DEFUND Act cite a range of concerns, including claims that the UN undermines US sovereignty and that the US’s outsized funding of the UN wastes taxpayers’ money. There are many valid criticisms of the UN, both from member states and from UN staff within the organization past and present. 

Regarding sovereignty, Sen. Lee argues that the US has “ceded incrementally greater sovereignty to the United Nations under … illusory ‘customary international law.’” Yet the US Constitution provides a check: while the president may sign treaties, only the Senate can ratify them, ultimately determining whether the US is legally bound.

Indeed, the United States refused to join the League of Nations after World War I because the Senate declined to ratify the treaty. The US has a long history of withholding ratification from major international treaties. Notable examples include the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), Kyoto Protocol (1997), Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC).

On the ICC specifically, the US has taken vigorous steps to defend its sovereignty. Not only did it decline to ratify the Rome Statute, but in 2002, Congress passed the American Service Members’ Protection Act, often referred to as the Hague Invasion Act. This law authorizes the president to use “all means necessary and appropriate” to secure the release of American or allied personnel detained by, or at the request of, the ICC. More recently, the US has moved to impose sanctions on the ICC.

Rep. Roy also argues that the billions of dollars the US contributes to the UN annually are squandered. Sen. Lee echoes this view, stating that “Americans’ hard-earned dollars have been funneled into initiatives that fly in the face of our values—enabling tyrants, betraying allies, and spreading bigotry.” He also emphasizes that most US contributions are voluntary and that Congress, holding the power of the purse, should decide how these funds are allocated—or not.

As with any collaborative enterprise or governance by committee, some initiatives will inevitably be less efficient than unilateral efforts. Still, a Government Accountability Office study of a UN peacekeeping mission in the Central African Republic found that if the US had acted alone, the mission would have cost $5.7 billion—compared to the UN’s $2.4 billion price tag. The US share of that mission’s cost was only $700 million.

The most compelling reason for the US to remain in the UN is the value of its permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council (UNSC)—a position that comes with veto power. The strategic importance of this role cannot be overstated.

Consider the Soviet boycott of the Security Council in 1950. In protest of the UN’s refusal to recognize the People’s Republic of China, the Soviet Union vacated its seat. During this boycott, North Korea invaded South Korea. With the Soviet Union absent, the Security Council passed resolutions condemning the invasion and authorized the first UN multinational military intervention. Recognizing the scale of its miscalculation, the Soviet Union never again boycotted the UNSC.

A similar situation could arise if the United States withdrew. Without our presence, we could not rely on allies to represent US interests in future crises. Abandoning international discourse would mean forfeiting influence when it matters most.

While Sen. Lee and Rep. Roy may be acting out of conviction, their push to withdraw the US from the UN would risk repeating Cold War-era missteps—and could undermine our national security at a time when global stability is anything but guaranteed.

Investor and podcaster Eric Weinstein recently argued that free speech is overrated. While supporting the idea of the First Amendment, he said that free speech alone was insufficient to combat bad ideas. As he put it, “This whole concept of the marketplace of ideas doesn’t actually work because marketplaces have market failures and very fit dangerous ideas can’t be simply rebutted by better ideas.” He called the notion that good ideas consistently beat out bad ideas in the marketplace of ideas a “liberal fantasy.” To truly drive bad ideas out of the public square, he says, we need to get back to “shunning” people with bad ideas.

There are two big problems with the notion of shunning people who hold the wrong ideas.

For one thing, the people who are shunned aren’t always the ones with dangerous or awful ideas. Far more often, they’re just the ones whose ideas are currently unpopular. In the 1950s, supporters of civil rights for black Americans were shunned and had their businesses blacklisted by the influential White Citizens’ Councils. In the 1960s, supporters of gay rights were shunned. In the madness of 2020, virtually anyone who didn’t vocally support Black Lives Matter and “Social Justice Fundamentalism” (Tim Urban’s excellent term for wokeism) risked their friendships, their social standing, and their livelihoods. Shunning is often done by those who wield cultural power; in such instances, it is a tool, not for punishing people with bad ideas, but for punishing people whose ideas are not currently in vogue. As blogger and gay rights activist Andrew Sullivan writes, “Got a text this morning from a friend of over thirty years informing me not to interact with him in any way if our paths cross in Provincetown this summer, as they usually do. Shunning and ostracism are integral to the LGBTQ+ movement.”

The second big problem with shunning is that, when we shun people, we rob them of the best opportunity to learn why their ideas are wrong. This is especially true of people who harbor bigotry towards a certain out-group, be it Jewish people or black Americans or Republicans. The most effective way to help these people let go of their prejudice is not to socially ostracize them, but to create conditions for them to meet and befriend those they are prejudiced against. 

Psychologists call this “intergroup contact theory” and it works extremely well. As Mónica Guzmán (senior fellow at Braver Angels, a national nonprofit that focuses on reducing prejudice between political groups) writes in her book I Never Thought of It That Way:

“Research keeps showing us that the more you mingle with people in your ‘otherized’ out-groups, the less prejudice you’ll feel against them. In fact, a study of 515 other studies found that chatting in person with someone from an out-group cut down prejudice 94 percent of the time.”

So if we can’t shun people out of their bad ideas, is there something else that can stop bad ideas from taking hold of our society? Yes. Contra Weinstein’s claim that the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work, the truth is that good ideas consistently beat out bad ideas.

Weinstein’s notion that good ideas cannot be relied on to rebut dangerous ideas would come as a surprise to Martin Luther King Jr. King didn’t build his movement by using cultural power to shun his enemies, or by using governmental power to limit their ability to speak against him. That would have been impossible, since the political and cultural power was concentrated in the hands of his enemies at the time. Instead, King used a weapon mightier than either of these: freedom of speech. He spoke up. He debated white supremacists and more ‘moderate’ whites who claimed to support his goals but said that King’s timing was wrong. He wrote books. He marched and protested. Over and over again, he and his fellows leveraged freedom of speech to rebut the dangerous ideas of Jim Crow and to change the hearts and minds of an entire generation.

Indeed, it was King’s opponents who had to resort to exerting social and governmental pressure when they could not rebut King’s arguments in the marketplace of ideas. During the Montgomery bus boycott, black drivers were arrested on trumped-up charges so that they wouldn’t be able to help with the boycott. In Stride Toward Freedom, King writes that White Citizens’ Councils “took open economic reprisals against whites who dared to protest their defiance of the law, and the aim of their boycotts was not merely to impress their victims but to destroy them if possible.” City governments sought injunctions to stop King and his supporters from engaging in lawful protest.

Both King’s reliance on free speech and his opponents’ reliance on intimidation and coercion reveal a central truth about the marketplace of ideas. In a free marketplace, good ideas beat out bad or dangerous ideas as a matter of course. As the great Enlightenment thinker John Milton wrote in Areopagitica:

“And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously, by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter. Her confuting is the best and surest suppressing.”

Or to put it another way: when truth and falsehood are allowed to battle in a free and open marketplace of ideas, truth ultimately wins.

It’s in some ways not surprising that Weinstein is making his argument now. Weinstein recently noted that “X/Twitter has become unbelievably anti-Semitic.” He made his comments about the marketplace of ideas in the context of people who cheered Hamas’ brutal October 7, 2023 attack on Israeli civilians.

He also may have made his comments with the past several years in mind. Our society just dealt with a decade of the Great Awokening, during which all kinds of ridiculous ideas became ascendant. As social psychologist Jon Haidt wrote in 2022, “the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid.” If we restrict our analysis to the short-term, it can certainly look like the marketplace of ideas has failed us.

But that’s a mistake. The virtue of philosophical liberalism (including epistemic liberalism, or the marketplace of ideas; political liberalism, or democracy; and economic liberalism, or capitalism) isn’t that it produces perfect outcomes in the short-term, but that it produces excellent outcomes in the long-term. 

Opposing the marketplace of ideas because the past 10 years our society has been gripped by some truly awful notions is like opposing democracy because a bad candidate won an election. It’s akin to opposing capitalism because Sam Bankman-Fried made a bunch of money before he was caught. 

If we want to judge the marketplace of ideas, the real question isn’t whether bad ideas can gain a foothold for a time. The real question is: in the long-term, does the marketplace of ideas consistently and reliably crowd out bad ideas and replace them with better ones? 

The answer to that question is unequivocally ‘yes.’ As Jonathan Rauch documents in Kindly Inquisitors, advocates for gay rights used free speech to poke holes in homophobic arguments and fight for the dignity of LGBT Americans. We’ve seen it with the civil rights movement. We’ve seen it with women’s suffrage. We’ve seen it in science and medicine, too: the reason that we now treat headaches with Advil rather than leeches, and the reason that we now know that the Earth orbits around the sun rather than vice versa, is because more true ideas crowded out less true ideas.

The marketplace of ideas is one of the great vehicles by which our society becomes better tomorrow than it is today. Contrary to Weinstein’s argument, the best way to rebut bad and dangerous ideas is with good ideas.