Brothers Judd Blog – If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)

A FASCIST INTERLUDE CAN SAVE YOU, BUT THEN YOU NEED TO LIBERALIZE FULLY:

December 13, 2025

Exploring The Chile Project (J.P. Bastos, 12/11/25, EconLib)

The government of Salvador Allende is also the subject of many misconceptions. Edwards recognizes that part of the confusion stems from the fact that Allende was from the Socialist (and not from the Communist) Party, which led authors to mistakenly portray him as a relatively moderate candidate even though, in Chile, the Socialists were much more to the left and had close ties with Cuba and North Korea.2

The book offers a detailed overview of Allende’s economic policies. For instance, Edwards reveals that the government’s grasp over the economy went significantly beyond the well-known nationalization of U.S.-owned copper mines. It also nationalized the banking sector and enforced its right to take control, for an undetermined period, of hundreds of factories producing goods “in short supply.” This short supply was often staged by unions stopping the factory floor and creating artificial shortages. He notes that every import required a license, with some tariffs reaching 250 percent. He also describes how perverse and arbitrary mechanisms were used to set price controls, which led to confiscation of goods, often imposed huge fines, and, sometimes, sent “speculators” to prison. […]

Recurring in Edwards’ narrative in the third and final part of the book is that, despite the breadth of the reforms implemented during the regime, much else was also done after the return to democracy to deepen and extend the reforms. This continuation was often undertaken by center-left politicians. This insight invites reflection on the role Chicago Boys. On the one hand, their ideas undoubtedly charted the path to greater economic freedom, much needed in Chile after Allende’s populist policies.

On the other hand, Chile’s experience highlights the limitations to economic growth and prosperity under a dictatorship. Recent empirical research has analyzed this issue in Pinochet’s Chile from two different sides. Escalante (2022) shows that the Chilean GDP per capita underperformed for at least the first 15 years following the coup. Arenas, Toni, and Paniagua (2024) also question the timing of the “Chilean miracle”, arguing that it only really developed following the return to democracy. Indeed, other Latin American development “miracles” (in Uruguay and Costa Rica) occurred without a similar story of a liberalizing autocrat.

Christmas

REALITY ON 34TH STREET:

December 12, 2025

Playing Santa Does Strange Things to a Man. What It Did to Bob Rutan Was Even Stranger.: Bob Rutan is legendary among the tight-knit fraternity of Macy’s Santa Clauses. Like many of these men, playing Santa changed Bob. Profoundly. His story is one of struggle and failure, heartbreak and grace and—yes—the magic of Christmas (David Gauvey Herbert, Dec 4, 2025, Esquire)

Bob learned the ropes. Don’t pester kids about eating vegetables. Go light on the rouge or risk looking like a drunk. Nix the loud “ho ho ho,” because the sound carried into the other cottages, destroying the illusion of Macy’s and the One True Santa. And if a patron gets aggressive—and they sometimes did—do not physically engage unless a child, or an elf, is in peril.

Based read in conjunction with Mick Herron’s Usual Santas

Energy

…AND CHEAPER…:

December 12, 2025

Nuclear Fusion Took Big Leaps in 2025. Here’s What Mattered Most (Gayoung Lee, December 10, 2025, Gizmodo)

2025 witnessed a surge in fusion research from both established and newcomer stakeholders. Scientists reported increased fusion energy outputs compared to previous years, improved reactor hardware, and a wide range of experimental and theoretical developments supporting different parts of fusion energy. Here are the most notable advancements in fusion from the past 12 months.

One Economy to Rule Them All

AFTER ALL, THEY REFLATE:

December 11, 2025

Are bubbles good, actually? (Tim Harford, 11th December, 2025)

There is a solid theory behind the idea that investment manias are good for society as a whole: it is that without a mania, nothing gets done for fear that the best ideas will be copied.

Entrepreneurs and inventors who do take a risk will soon find other entrepreneurs and inventors competing with them, and most of the benefits will go not to any of these entrepreneurs, but to their customers.

(The dynamic has the delightful name of the “alchemist’s fallacy”. If someone figures out how to turn lead into gold, pretty soon everyone will know how to turn lead into gold, and how much will gold be worth then?)

The economist and Nobel laureate William Nordhaus once tried to estimate what slice of the value of new ideas went to the corporations who owned them, and how much went to everyone else (mostly consumers). He concluded that the answer — in the US, between 1948 and 2001 — was 3.7 per cent to the innovating companies, and 96.3 per cent to everyone else. Put another way, the spillover benefits were 26 times larger than the private profits.

Latin America

THE CRYING ENDS:

December 11, 2025

Two Years of Milei: The Reform Agenda Moves Forward in Argentina (Marcos Falcone, 12/10/25, Cato at Liberrty)

As of September, the economy is growing at 5 percent on a yearly basis. Poverty, which exceeded 40 percent before Milei took office and peaked at 52.9 percent in the first half of 2024, is now down to 31.6 percent. Monthly inflation, which often surpassed 10 percent in the pre-Milei era and reached 25 percent in December 2023, now hovers around 2 percent. Both exports and imports are rising rapidly.

Technology

SCROLLING IS READING:

December 11, 2025

If You Quit Social Media, Will You Read More Books?: The internet is training us to expect optimized experiences (Jay Caspian Kang, Dec 10, 2025, The New Yorker)

I have felt the panic myself, and so, this past July, with a book deadline looming, I got off of social media. The break started with X, which was my biggest problem, but, by the end of August or so, Instagram, TikTok, and pretty much anything that allowed me to argue with strangers had been deleted from my phone. Before this, I was spending roughly ten hours a day looking at my phone or sitting at my desktop computer. I didn’t need that number to come down, but, when I checked my weekly status report, I wanted all the brightly colored little bars that track the number of hours I’d spent on time-wasting apps to be relocated to the word-processing app that I use to write my books.

The plan worked, more or less. I finished a draft of the book on time. But the other imagined effects of a social-media detox never quite materialized, at least not in a noticeable way. I was especially hoping that I would start reading more books, because I have found that enviable prose prompts me to try to write my own, not necessarily out of a sense of inspiration but rather out of fear that if I don’t hurry up and start typing, I’ll fall behind. And yet, the chief effect, I found, was that I simply didn’t know what was happening in the world. That was nice enough, but all those books I had hoped to read never found their way into my hands.

Republican Liberty

RETURNING LAWMAKING TO THE LEGISLATIVE BRANCH:

December 10, 2025

Supreme Court win for Trump in FTC case would restore the Founders’ design (Ilya Shapiro, Dec. 8, 2025, NY Post)

Justice Neil Gorsuch reiterated the need to revive the nondelegation doctrine to stop Congress from handing vast, standardless power to bureaucrats.

Kavanaugh, meanwhile, seemed eager to draw a line between agencies that enforce the law and courts created by Congress that exercise judicial authority.

Given the court’s trajectory, none of this should be a surprise.

Over the last 15 years, the justices have steadily chipped away at Humphrey’s Executor in a string of separation-of-powers cases, while reaffirming Chief Justice William Howard Taft’s principle from Myers v. United States (1926): Because the Constitution vests all executive power in the president, he must be able to remove the officials who exercise that power in his name.

Health

NO BODY’S PERFECT:

December 8, 2025

Why Some Doctors Say There Are Cancers That Shouldn’t Be Treated (Gina Kolata, Dec. 8, 2025, NY Times)

The idea that finding a cancer early is not always a good thing is not easy for many patients and their families to accept. And it is true that lives can be saved by treating cancer early.

Autopsy studies repeatedly find that many people die with small cancers they were unaware of. A review of these studies in prostate cancer reported that the cancer can appear in men as young as their 20s. The older the men were, the more likely they were to have undetected prostate cancer. By their 70s, about a third of white men and half of Black men had undetected prostate cancer.

A study of thyroid cancer in Finland found that at least a third of adults had undetected tumors. Less than one percent of people die from thyroid cancer

The problem is that it is impossible to know if someone’s cancer will be deadly or not. And if the cancer is gone after treatment, there is no way to know if it needed to be treated.

But there’s a way to know on a population level if an increase in diagnoses is a false alarm or a danger signal, said Dr. H. Gilbert Welch of Brigham and Women’s Hospital of Harvard Medical School. Look at the number of deaths from that cancer. If more lethal cancers are being found, there should be more deaths. But if the death rate remains steady as the incidence of that cancer spikes, many of those patients did not need to receive diagnoses.

That happened, for example, with thyroid cancer in South Korea. The incidence of thyroid cancer soared with the introduction of widespread ultrasound screening. But deaths did not increase. It was estimated that 90 percent of the cancers that were discovered and treated in women did not need to be found.

Well aware of such incidents, Dr. Vishal R. Patel of Harvard, Dr. Welch and Dr. Adewole S. Adamson of Dell Medical School in Austin, Texas, asked whether the current spike in diagnoses in younger people of those eight cancers is tied to more deaths.

It is not, they reported in a recent paper examining trends over the past three decades.

For all but two of the eight cancers whose incidence has soared in younger people, death rates are flat or declining.

One Economy to Rule Them All

BAN GAMBLING:

December 8, 2025

Lost Vegas: Everyone inside America’s most flailing destination city has a theory for what’s wrong. Now I have my own. (Luke Winkie, Nov 18, 2025, Slate)

The Mehaffeys escorted me past the blinking slot machines and into the pit, where we sidled up alongside a gaggle of players peering over the wheel—watching the silver ball zip along the rim. John explained the math: A standard roulette table has 36 numbers—half red, half black. Hit your number, and you’re paid 35 to 1; bet on a color, and you double your money. Quantitatively speaking, a roulette wheel fashioned this way would be totally fair. “Theoretically, over a million spins, you’d get 100 percent of your money back,” said John.

Where the house maintains its edge is in the two additional numbers foisted upon the roulette wheel, a single zero and a double zero, both painted green. With those digits in place, betting on red or black is no longer a 50/50 proposition, and if a player is lucky enough to score a win on a 7, or a 12, or a 28, they’re still making what they bet back by a multiplication of just 35—despite the fact that those green spaces allow for 38 potential outcomes. All this is to say that each zero added to a roulette table increases the revenue it scrapes from players by 2.7 percentage points. So, in a moment of incredible audacity, the power brokers of Las Vegas decided to sharpen their advantage, festooning a gauche and unsightly triple zero to their wheels, plundering our wallets more efficiently than ever before.

Why would anyone put up with those bad odds? That’s not quite the right question to ask. Later on in the day, I watched a bachelor party descend upon a triple-zero wheel, despite that, right next to them, bathed in fluorescent light, a double-zero table—encircled by empty seats—waited for customers. The serene, vodka-buzzed tourists either didn’t know or didn’t care that they were inches away from a much better deal. Vegas happily feasted upon that ambivalence all night long.

Vegas seems to have exported its triple-zero philosophy across the Strip. Another casualty is blackjack, which remains the most popular casino attraction in the city. Historically, the game has followed a golden rule. If you are dealt 21—an ace and a 10—you’ve hit blackjack, and your wager is paid out on a 3-to-2 ratio. (A $100 bet nets $150, and so on.) But Vegas has since altered the rules. Now, on most tables, blackjack is rewarded with a 6-to-5 equation; that same $100 kicks back only $120, significantly curtailing just how lucky someone is allowed to get. Again, it’s not hard to see why Vegas casinos made the change. “They’re tripling the house edge,” John told me. “It went up from about 0.66 percent to 2 percent.”

Even if a gambler is willing to tolerate these perversions of tradition, the price of admission in Vegas has skyrocketed. According to John’s research, in 2020, 38 casinos in the greater Las Vegas gambling market featured tables dealing 3-to-2 blackjack capped at a $5 minimum bet. (As in, to play, you need to risk at least $5 per hand.) These days, that group has dropped to six casinos. Prowl through the Strip after dark, sift through the pits, and you’ll feel the difference. Most table games in 2025 force patrons to sacrifice painful amounts of cash to its maw—$25 minimums are basically standard. Fifty-dollar minimums aren’t uncommon either. Even more deviously, some Vegas properties force customers to pay a premium to access friendlier rules. I came across exactly one ultra-rare single-zero roulette wheel on the Strip, which felt a little bit like uncovering the hutch of the last surviving dodo. Naturally, it was stowed away in a high-limit room.

John told me that Vegas initially ratcheted up its minimums during the pandemic in reaction to the crunch of COVID-era gambling. Social-distancing mandates limited the number of players that could gather at casino tables, so operators made up the difference in scale—squeezing more money out of the few gamblers risking infection to play. It is less clear why those juiced wagers stuck around once the coronavirus receded, outside of the obvious: Gamblers are willing to pay them.

Oliver Lovat, a real-estate consultant at the Denstone Group who serves as an adviser to several Vegas casino properties, said I needed to understand that cheaper games are no longer economically prudent in the city. Between inflation, upkeep, and labor costs—including a Nevada minimum wage that jumped to $12 last year—Lovat argued, the salad days of low-minimum blackjack have been legislated out of the fray. After all, it is telling that no matter how much Vegas tourism declines, the city’s gambling revenue continues to tick upward. In August, gaming revenue on the Strip increased by 5.5 percent. Downtown, it was by over 8 percent, and the Boulder Strip was up almost 10.

“It’s not viable to run a $5 blackjack table anymore. You will lose money running $5 blackjack,” Lovat said. “Now, some places still have it. But they’re running it at a loss.”

One Economy to Rule Them All

LIBERALISM WORKS:

December 6, 2025

Why Americans are feeling poorer even though they’re not (John Burn-Murdoch, 12/07/25, Financial Times)

Green’s figure raised more than a few eyebrows among economists who study these sorts of questions for a living — $140,000 is almost 70 per cent higher than the median US household income. A series of careful analyses of the data he invoked to make his case revealed mis-steps in his calculations that led him to a figure far higher than any reasonable method could produce. But his article nonetheless struck a chord with some, who felt that even if the precise numbers were off they pointed to a larger societal truth: the increasing sense of financial precarity among the middle class.

As someone who crunches numbers for a living, the temptation would be to ally myself with the former camp and dismiss the appeal to vibes, but I happen to think both responses are legitimate. Having dug into the data, I can provide some evidence-based squaring of the circle.

Where Green and his supporters are on to something, is the share of income the middle class spends on essential categories, which has risen significantly over both the long and shorter term. Add together the increased portion of incomes accounted for by healthcare (up by 3 percentage points over recent decades), childcare (up 2 points), housing (up 4 points) and food (up 1 point in recent years), and total spending on these unavoidable costs has climbed from just over a third of middle class disposable income to half of the total.

But this squeeze from essentials has not led to an increase in the share of income American households spend in total across all categories, which is broadly in line with the historical average — even slightly down on where it was when all of these things were cheaper in real terms. This has been made possible primarily by dramatic falls in the price of clothes, electronics, household appliances and other mass-produced tradeable goods, which have more than offset the rise in essential services.

Notably, this pattern is not isolated to the US; it’s common across high-income countries. And there’s a good reason. Rather than the increasing burden of essential costs suggesting living standards are being eroded, if we take a step back, it’s an indication that people across society are becoming more prosperous.

You Missed