Policy

For many liberal Americans, the European Union is the perfect elite model: a non-elected, highly credentialed bureaucracy that embraces and seeks to enforce the environmental, social and cultural zeitgeist of the urban upper classes. It is, as the establishment Council on Foreign Relations puts it, a “model for regional integration”.  read more »

For most of the last century, Los Angeles loomed as the next great American city, a burgeoning paradise riding the shift of world power west. It seemed posed to leave New York and London in the dust, the engines of growth inexorable. There was the city's dominance of the entertainment and aerospace industries, which incited migration from both the rest of the country and abroad, and all this promise was symbolized by a spread of suburban single-family houses that seemed to embody the ideal American dreamscape.  read more »

My latest column is now online in Governing magazine. It’s a very tough look at northern red state governments and how they have not delivered economic results. I specifically mention Kansas and Indiana.  read more »

California Senator Wiener has taken Governor Newsom’s recent Executive order to ban the sale of gas-powered vehicles and hydraulic fracturing one step further with his introduction of SB 467 to obliterate the California economy. The bill is so broad and ambiguous that the results of its passage would lead to a total production ban in California and increase energy costs upon those that can least afford it.  read more »

The national consciousness regresses to the level of the toddler, casting everything in stark terms of good and bad.

We are here to guide public opinion, not to discuss it.
Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, 1804

By the calendar, the American republic is mature, but it’s becoming rapidly ever more infantilized. In everything from schooling to Covid-19 to race and global warming, we seem to be looking for simple, easy answers that a toddler might appreciate but healthy adults know are too pat to be true.  read more »

With some energy literacy, folks may realize that there may not be a silver bullet answer for all of humanity’s energy needs. Whether you ultimately drive an internal combustion engine vehicle or an EV, and get exposed to electricity from wind, solar, coal, natural gas, nuclear, or hydro generation, will depend on you or your community’s wealth.

Most people in the world want both prosperity and nature, not nature without prosperity. They are just confused about how to achieve both.  read more »

The Democratic Party has always been a loose confederation of outsiders — poor farmers, union members, populists, European immigrants and southern segregationists. As the actor Will Rogers said in 1924: “I am not a member of any organised political party. I am a Democrat.” Yet despite being unwieldy, it was often effective, and usually beat the more homogeneous country-club-led Republicans.  read more »

While much of the focus is on the Covid-19 pandemic, the geography of Europe’s knowledge intensive jobs is being reshaped. For the fifth year, the European Centre for Entrepreneurship and Policy Reform (ECEPR) has in collaboration with Nordic Capital, a leading Nordic private equity firm, mapped the locations of knowledge intensive jobs of Europe. The brain business jobs index examines jobs in four knowledge-intensive industries—the tech sector, information and communications technology (ICT), advanced services, and creative professions.  read more »

For months the conventional wisdom among Democrats, amplified by their obliging claque in the media, was that lockdowns played an essential role in containing COVID-19. The great heroes, in addition to Anthony Fauci, were hardline governors like Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer, California’s Gavin Newsom and, most of all, New York’s Andrew Cuomo.  read more »

Over the past few years California’s plight has taken on mythic proportions — a cautionary tale of progressive woe among conservatives, but a beacon for a future enlightened capitalism among its woke supporters. The current battle over the potential recall of the preening governor, Gavin Newsom, likely will enhance these extreme interpretations on both sides, but likely will not be sufficient to make the changes needed to restore the state’s legendary promise.  read more »