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)

2025

One Economy to Rule Them All

EARLY STAGES:

This Is Not Late-Stage Capitalism (John Aziz, 8 Jan 2025, Quillette)

In fact, since Lenin’s day, capitalism has ascended to newer and higher forms. Lenin was wrong—imperialism was not its highest stage. Western economists developed new ways to balance the dynamism and economic opportunities of capitalism with the human desires for stability and predictability, and the need for jobs for the general population. In the wake of the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes published his seminal treatise proposing that governments adopt countercyclical economic policy: spend more heavily to create jobs and build infrastructure when unemployment is higher and the private sector is depressed and cut back when the market is booming and unemployment is already low.

One of the most influential critiques of communism was written by Friedrich Hayek, whose concept of informational efficiency highlighted capitalism’s unique strengths. In his 1945 essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” Hayek argues that the price system in a market economy is an unparalleled mechanism for coordinating dispersed knowledge. In a capitalist economy, prices reflect millions upon millions of individual decisions about supply and demand, and therefore act as signals that guide resource allocation dynamically and efficiently.

There is no such informational network in a centrally-planned communistic system. The knowledge needed to run an economy is not just statistical or aggregate; it is local, dynamic, and often tacit. For example, a small business owner’s understanding of their customers’ preferences or a farmer’s knowledge of local soil conditions cannot be easily centralised or standardised. The market leverages this dispersed knowledge through competition and price adjustments, whereas central planning is inherently rigid and prone to inefficiency.

Aside from a change in emphasis from government spending to monetary policy as the main countercyclical mechanism in the 1970s, capitalism with a few countercyclical adjustments has ruled the day from World War 2 until the present.

As we produce wealth ever more cheaply–thanks to declining costs of labor and energy–and spreadownership ever more widely–thanks to universal savings accounts–we aren’t even to the midway point yet.

Brothers Judd

STARKVILLE:

The growing appeal of the ‘Live Free or Die’ state (Jeff Jacoby, January 7, 2025, Pundicity)

For years, Massachusetts has been forfeiting more residents to other states than it attracts from other states. As far back as December 2003, a study co-produced by MassINC and the University of Massachusetts warned: “Massachusetts has been losing in the competition for people. … [T]he rate of loss has been accelerating over the last five years.” Two decades later, the picture is no prettier, especially with regard to New Hampshire. Between 2018 and 2022, according to the Census Bureau, 22,047 Massachusetts residents moved to New Hampshire — significantly more than the 19,189 who moved to Florida, the 18,933 who went to New York, or the 14,818 who relocated to California. By now, so many Bay Staters have pulled up stakes and headed north that former Massachusetts residents account for more than 25 percent of New Hampshire’s population. In 2021 and 2022, notes demographer Kenneth Johnson, nearly 44 percent of migrants to New Hampshire came from Massachusetts.

People move for all kinds of reasons, of course, but it would be hard to deny that what prompts so many to abandon Massachusetts and make a new start in New Hampshire is its lower cost of living and its much lighter tax burden. “With no income or sales tax, New Hampshire’s tax burden is a fraction of what it is in Massachusetts,” the Boston-based Pioneer Institute noted in July 2022. The contrast between the two states’ approach to taxes grew even sharper later that year, when Massachusetts voters unwisely approved a steep annual income surtax on earnings above $1 million, which raised the top marginal tax rate in the state to 9 percent.

Now New Hampshire has upped the ante. It has scrapped its last vestige of taxation on investment income and given tax-weary Massachusetts residents even more reason to flee.

Environment

THE DAMAGE DONE:

Ancient Lead Poisoning May Have Contributed to the Roman Empire’s Downfall (Paul Smaglik, Jan 6, 2025, Discover)

Now a team of researchers has provided hard evidence linking pollution and ancient intellect. They identified the level of pollutants in three ice cores that dated between 500 B.C.E. through 600 C.E. — the era spanning the rise of the Roman Republic through the fall of the Roman Empire. Then they compared those levels with how lead pollution affected the general public during its peak in the 1970s, before it was banned from gasoline.

The lead in the air in Roman times was enough to affect IQs then by about a third as much as in the late 1970s, when the U.S. Clean Air Act went into effect and about twice as much as in the early 2010s, according to the study.

“Elites and non-elites in cities and rural areas alike were affected by the background air pollution — no one could escape the health effects,” says McConnell.

Identitarianism

JUST YOUR AVERAGE TRUMPIST:

How Crazy Was The Las Vegas Cybertruck Bomber? (Tom Scocca, January 6, 2025, Defector)

The striking feature of Livelsberger’s writing was how ordinary it sounded. One of the two messages released by officials opened with a note-for-note cover of Trump’s central campaign message: “We are the United States of America, the best country people to ever exist! But right now we are terminally ill and headed toward collapse.” What followed was a litany of standard doomer and/or influencer populism, the sort of grievances that the Trump movement runs on and which Elon Musk retooled X to concentrate and amplify.

“The top one percent decided long ago they weren’t going to bring everyone else with them,” Livelsberger wrote. “You are cattle to them.” And: “A lot of us are just sitting around waiting to die. No sunlight, no steps, no fresh air, no hope. Our children are addicted to screens by the age of two. We are filling our bodies with processed foods.” And: “Focus on strength and winning. Masculinity is good and men must be leaders. Strength is a deterrent and fear is the product.” He complained about homelessness, called DEI a “cancer,” and declared (while endorsing Donald Trump) “We are done with the blatant corruption.”

His other message was just as familiar, in a slightly different key—the apocalyptic operator key of Steve Bannon and the most militant participants in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol:

Military and vets move on DC starting now. Militias facilitate and augment this activity.

Occupy every major road along fed buildings and the campus of fed buildings by the hundreds of thousands.

Lock the highways around down with semis right after everybody gets in. Hold until the purge is complete.

Try peaceful means first, but be prepared to fight to get the Dems out of the fed government and military by any means necessary. They all must go and a hard reset must occur for our country to avoid collapse.

Was this the tone of a mentally ill person? Yes. Was it the tone of the controlling faction of the Republican Party? Also, unquestionably, yes.

Identitarianism

iDENTITARIANISM IS TEXAN:

The New Orleans killer was an all-American loser Shamsud-Din Jabbar’s story is all-too familiar (Alexander Nazaryan, January 4, 2025, UnHerd)

He was Texan-born and -raised, an Army veteran who spoke with an East Texas drawl, forced to shack up at a trailer park after his career and love life went sideways. In short, he was as American as gas-station apple pie, loaded with carcinogens and carbohydrates, wrapped in a plastic sleeve that will be floating shortly in a waterway near you.

America put Jabbar together, America took him apart.

Domestic terrorism is frightening precisely because it incubates within the body politic. If a terrorist is a foreigner, it can be said that he failed to appreciate the resplendent magnitude of America’s promise. He had never donned a beer helmet. He didn’t understand the glories of Must-See TV. Or else he understood it all too well, swelling with murderous resentment. But the domestic terrorist is an autoimmune disease, assailing the very system that nurtures him. Jabbar hardly spent the last several months training at some terror camp in the Hindu Kush; until recently, he had worked at consulting firms such as Deloitte, where, according to The Wall Street Journal, “he was paid the equivalent of nearly $125,000 a year.” This guy’s network was LinkedIn, not Al Qaeda.

Anglospherics

CAN’T BEAT BEING AN ANGLOSPHERIC ISLAND NATION:

The US Invasion That Worked: Why the Dominican Republic Isn’t Cuba (Howard Husock, January 03, 2025, AEIdeas)

It was then, four years after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion meant to topple the Communist Castro regime in Cuba, that Lyndon Johnson dispatched Marines to the Dominican Republic, another island nation some 600 miles east of Cuba. Architecture was not the only similarity between the countries. The DR, like Cuba, had long been run by a local dictator, Rafael Trujillo. After his 1961 assassination and a military coup that deposed the country’s first elected president, civil war broke out; one side was led by pro-Castro forces, who had commandeered the major radio station. Faced with the prospect of another Cuba in the Caribbean, Lyndon Johnson dispatched the Marines. As with Vietnam, the left objected, as per folk singer Phil Ochs’ protest song, “The Shores of Santo Domingo,” where he sang “up and down the coast, the generals drink a toast.”

In reality, the Marines, who left the next year, ushered in an era of democracy and prosperity; there have been free elections since 1966. During the same period there’s been a striking economic divergence between the DR and Cuba. The World Bank writes most recently,

The economic growth of the Dominican Republic has tripled the regional average over the past two decades, resulting in 2.8 million people rising out of poverty, a middle class that now surpasses the poor population, and an improvement in access to basic services, housing and education.

Cuba, with a nearly identical 11 million population, saw its GDP fall by 1.9 percent in 2023. It has had trouble keeping its electric grid functioning. And, of course, it is a Communist dictatorship—ranked 178th in economic freedom by the Heritage Foundation.

Pity the Frenchified Haitians.

Anglospherics

THE rIGHT IS THE lEFT:

Why Milton Friedman Still Matters (Paul Krause, 1/03/25, Voegelin View)

One of the most disturbing trends in American society is the drift toward economic totalitarianism. More and more Americans are speaking fondly of excessive government control over economic life, an erosion of economic liberty which will have dramatic consequences for our other freedoms.[…]


The assault on freedom begins with economics because economics touches everything in life and economics is the primary means by which strong families emerge and with strong families the political, social, and religious freedoms we enjoy. Without family vitality, there is no societal vitality. This, too, was something that Friedman keenly understood.

Friedman stated unequivocally that our political and spiritual loves and liberties were very much contingent upon economic freedom, “The economic controls that have proliferated in the United States in recent decades have not only restricted our freedom to use economic resources, they have also affected our freedom of speech, of press, and of religion.” Today, we all sense this reality that Friedman saw over 50 years. As our economic freedoms deteriorate so too are their efforts to restrict our political and religious liberties.

The majority of the intellectual class has convinced itself of human perfection in some form or another. This is the basis of all totalitarianism—the incessant, even violent, effort to remake human nature into a perfect end-state. Yet Friedman stated that lovers and champions of freedom have always recognized this paradox about humanity and freedom: the imperfection of humanity is the greatest pillar for the freedom of humanity. As he writes, lovers of freedom “conceive of men as imperfect beings.”

Freedom is good, though we know it is imperfect because we ourselves are “imperfect beings.” Good things are always ruined by the fanatical dreams of perfection. The bait and switch of the tyrannical lust of totalitarians is that they blame our imperfection on a system rather than seeing imperfection in ourselves. This gives them the license to dismantle the goods we have from freedom through the phantasmagoric promise of a perfect future.

The Biblical, anti-Rational, recognition of Man’s imperfectability is the Anglospheric difference.

One Economy to Rule Them All

ONE ECONOMY TO RULE THEM ALL:

Why Are There No Trillion-Dollar Companies in Europe?: Large companies don’t just happen. They are born, fostered, and grown in low-tax, high-opportunity societies. (David Hebert, January 1, 2025, Daily Economy)

The same can be said about tech giants. They will want to locate themselves where most of their customers live and, with a massive customer base with one of the highest rates of adoption of technology in the world, locating in the US makes good business sense.

But this explanation falls short, too. Notice that it presumes that these tech giants exist and are simply deciding where to locate. The truth is that these tech companies did not descend upon the world like mana from heaven; they had to be created and built from the ground up. The real questions we must ask, then, are 1) what makes the US so fertile for economic growth and 2) what makes Europe so reticent for growth?


It is no secret that the US remains “the land of opportunity.” Even just logically, we can tell that it is based on immigration patterns. The US remains one of the most immigrated-to countries in the world. In fact, the UN reports that 20 percent of the total immigrants in the entire world are in the United States. But this still invites a question: why do so many people want to live in the United States when they could live elsewhere?

There are many factors, but chief among them are economic in nature. First, we can look at average wage rates across countries. The US remains one of the highest-earning countries in the world. Lest we think this is a fluke or a historical accident, cross-national studies confirm that simply living in the US actually causes wages for workers to increase.

The newly-awarded Nobel Prize economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson evidenced this by looking at the city of Nogales, a city at the border between Mexico and Arizona. What is unique about this situation is that the city’s people share a common heritage and culture; in fact, there are families that were split in two when the wall was first erected. Because of their shared heritage, the only real difference lies in which side of the fence, running right through the middle of downtown, one lives. The US side is much, much wealthier than the Mexican side. In fact, in 2012, the fire department on the US side of Nogales famously helped the Mexican side put out a fire by “exporting” water over the fence. They could only do this because of their dramatically higher wealth.

We can also look at the ease with which one can start a business.

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