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)

Orrin Judd

Identitarianism

DISCONTENT IS MONSTROUS:

The Good Life According to Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” (Chandler Collins, July 13, 2026, Center for Faith & Culture)

The human quest for happiness and virtue is one of the most important themes of Shelley’s Gothic novel. Upon reflecting on his origin and purpose, the creature recognizes that he “was formed for peaceful happiness.” He says, “During my youthful days discontent never visited my mind, and if I was ever overcome by ennui, the sight of what is beautiful in nature or the study of what is excellent and sublime in the productions of man could always interest my heart and communicate elasticity to my spirit.” If you ask anyone if they desire to be happy, they will likely respond with a resounding “yes.” The medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas pointed out that “man naturally desires happiness,” but what exactly does it mean to be happy? Shelley does not provide a clear definition of happiness in “Frankenstein,” but she does associate happiness with peace, contentment, and the sense of delight.

One Economy to Rule Them All

THE NEXT PRESIDENT HAS IT EASY:

Why the US economy stays strong despite Trump’s shockwaves (Alan Shipman, July 16, 2026, Asia Times)

The US also channels a higher proportion of its GDP into business investment and research and development than the EU. Europe was spending 270 billion euros less than the US on innovation in 2021, with this spending concentrated on its century-old car industry rather than new technologies.

Since 2025, AI has been the focus of US investment. This has helped the US maintain its hold over global technology and digital platforms. Rapid uptake of AI across US industry has also widened the margin by which its labor productivity growth is outpacing Europe’s.

Output per hour in professional services has increased by over 18% since 2019 in the US compared to just 5% in the EU.


Economy-wide productivity gains have allowed US real wages (wages adjusted for inflation) to edge higher since 2019. This has sustained consumer demand while also enabling the strong profit growth that has lifted US share prices to record levels. In contrast, average real wages in the EU have barely grown over the past 20 years while corporate profits in Europe remain subdued.

The US technological lead could be dented by Donald Trump’s immigration clampdown, which extends to skilled scientists and students. Research suggests annual GDP growth rates in the US could currently be as much as 0.8 percentage points lower than if net unauthorised immigration had stayed on its pre-2025 trend.

One Economy to Rule Them All

SUMMERTIME AND THE LIVIN’ IS EASY:

The World Cup Is Putting American Abundance on Display: Four policy lessons we can take from our visitors’ viral moments. (Scott Lincicome, Jul 14, 2026, Human Progress)

Yet, as The Economist points out, both sides also seem to agree on a few things: First, Europe is growing more slowly than America, thanks in large part to the economic dynamism and tech-fueled productivity here. Second, even Krugman’s pro-Europe data (see chart above)—along with many other sources—show Americans to have higher average wages and more disposable income (yes, even after accounting for out-of-pocket healthcare costs) than the average European in most places (yes, there are exceptions), due to our superior labor productivity and their leisure choices. Third, and most importantly, both sides want to support their reading of the data with an “eye test”—i.e., visiting each place and just looking around—that the economists believe will confirm their own American/European wealth story.

Hilariously enough, thousands of European World Cup tourists—along with ones from Japan and other countries, too—have performed just that test, mere days after the economists proposed it. And the result is an absolute rout for Team America:

There are many reasons for the foreigners’ astonishment. (A big one, in my opinion, is that these folks are seeing parts of Real America, especially in the Sun Belt and Midwest, that foreign tourists rarely visit, yet—as we’ve discussed here repeatedly—allow not-rich Americans to live very comfortable lives.) And, to be sure, not all the astonishment is genuine.

But a lot of it obviously is, and at its root lies the Great American Prosperity Machine. Deal with it, haters.

Deflation

NO ONE HAS IT HARDER THAN THEIR FATHER DID:

Capitalism Gets a Bum Rap (Emma Camp, July 13, 2026, WSJ: Free Expression)

Recently a video went viral showing the inside of a 1958 GE refrigerator. The appliance restorer behind the camera starts the video by declaring that “they don’t build things like they used to.” He then shows off some unusual features, like rotating shelves. Just about all the commenters seemed to think the reason modern refrigerators aren’t as nice as the one in the video is, you guessed it, capitalism.

“They made everything worse while making everything more expensive,” reads one comment with more than 46,000 likes. Another comment with thousands of likes declared that “capitalism is literally built on the premise that things are not reliable.”

This couldn’t be more wrong. This particular fridge was almost certainly far more expensive than a comparable appliance today. While I couldn’t track down the price for that exact model, I did find an ad for a similar-looking refrigerator in a 1958 Sears catalog. That refrigerator is listed at $399.95, around $4,600 today. A quick internet search reveals that most refrigerators today are much less expensive than that. When Wirecutter, a product-review website, made a list of the best refrigerators on the market earlier this year, only one of them came within $1,000 of the 1958 refrigerator’s price tag.

If you’re looking to drop $4,600 on a fridge for some reason, you’ll end up buying a luxury product. A similarly priced smart fridge is nearly 10 cubic feet larger than the 1958 one. It has a built-in ice maker (including a setting for making clear cocktail spheres), a special viewing window and a drawer with a “chilled wine” setting.

If that doesn’t convince you that appliances today are better than their midcentury counterparts, modern refrigerators are also much more energy efficient. And contrary to complaints that modern appliances are built to break, the longevity of our refrigerators has barely budged in 30 years. In 1990, 38.2% of family refrigerators were more than 10 years old. In 2020, it was 35.1%.

Health

FIRST, DO NO HARM:

Common knee surgery may do more harm than good (Dr. Elisabeth Rosenthal, July 13, 2026, CBS News)

Researchers who followed patients for 10 years after they received either the actual procedure, arthroscopic knee surgery to trim degenerative cartilage tears, or merely “sham surgery” — a skin incision — for knee pain, found that the surgery provided little or no benefit and was, in fact, associated with accelerated osteoarthritis and higher rates of reoperation. That generally meant a total knee replacement.

“I don’t know how I would defend this procedure at all,” said one of the study’s authors, Teppo Järvinen, an orthopedist and head of the Finnish Centre for Evidence-Based Orthopaedics.

Founding

THE KEEPING OF IT:

Nondelegation Without Chaos (John O. McGinnis, 11/03/25, Law & Liberrty)


If one theme unites the Roberts Court’s work in administrative law, it is a counter-reformation that recenters the Constitution’s basic architecture for the administrative state. Congress is to legislate; the president and his subordinates are to execute within a hierarchical, accountable executive; and courts are to exercise independent judgment in interpreting the laws. That settlement, grounded in the Constitution’s Vesting Clauses, animates a series of linked doctrines returning power to the institutions to which the Court believes the Constitution originally entrusted it.

The Roberts Court’s vision for the separation of powers points toward a stricter nondelegation doctrine. Delegation is Congress’s practice of permitting agencies to regulate conduct under broad authorizations that allow the executive substantial policy choice. These delegations have included authority to regulate in the “public interest” without further defining that term or directions to an agency to pursue an objective stated at a high level of generality, such as promoting public health, without indicating how much harm is consistent with protecting the public health. Such broad delegation threatens to make the executive the lawmaker by giving over to that branch the essential policy choices the Constitution entrusts to Congress. […]

The Framers recognized that the legislative power was the most important of all the powers delegated in the Constitution, because it was the only federal authority that could directly affect their domestic liberty. Legislative power—prescribing rules that bind private conduct—belongs only to Congress, and for good reasons. That assignment channels lawmaking through a deliberative, laborious, publicly accountable process. Justice Neil Gorsuch’s dissent in Gundy v. United States articulates this structure crisply: Congress must make the policy decisions; the executive may “fill up the details” or find facts that trigger rules Congress has created. That is the Constitution’s path to stable rules, fair notice, and political accountability.

Israel/Palestine

The Word Zionism Is Dead: From the start, it’s meant too many things. It’s time to move on. (Nadine Epstein, Mar 18, 2026, Moment)

I am editor-in-chief of a magazine with a great Jewish legacy, and I have never once in my life used the terms Zionist or anti-Zionist to describe myself or anyone else. Why? When I use a word, I want to know where it’s been and how it’s going to be understood, and with anything Zionism-related, that’s a nearly impossible task.

And so I am going to propose something that may sound radical. It is beyond time to strike the words Zionist and Zionism from modern political discourse and relegate them to history, where they belong. They have outlived their usefulness both as concepts and as terms. This means we must immediately cease labeling ourselves and others as Zionists and anti-Zionists, and use the word Zionism only when referring to the historical political movement. […]

If we believe in the right of people to form nations, which at this point of human development most of us do, then Zionism has long been a moot point. Given Israel’s right to exist, I would go a step further and say that the label Zionism has become outright dangerous. The use of the term by its very nature keeps the question of existence unnecessarily alive. It’s like a scab that keeps forming and reforming and never heals. The Zionist family of terms has increasingly become polarizing for the American public, and even worse, it is unnecessarily splintering the American Jewish community, all at a time of rising antisemitism. Wherever I go, and I travel in many circles, I hear the words Zionist and anti-Zionist invoked and hurled with equal God-like certainty, terrifying self-righteousness and perilous imprecision.

The American Jewish community is as mystified by the meaning of Zionist and Zionism as the broader public. Look at the 2026 survey conducted by the Jewish Federations of North America: Only one-third of American Jews said they identified as Zionist. At the same time, nearly nine out of ten said they supported Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state.

A Zionism that does not intellectually make the case for Palestinian self-determination is not worth honoring.

Books Puritan Nation

PURITAN EPIC:

The Bookkeeping of Memory: Judgment and Justice in True Grit (LuElla D’Amico, July 13, 2026, Chgurch Life Journal)

Indeed, Mattie’s moral inheritance on the open road is one of grit—and I will pause here, as English professors are often apt to do, to invoke the Oxford English Dictionary definition of the word itself. One 1874 definition, appearing almost precisely during the period in which the novel is set, defines “grit” as “coarse material such as gravel, sand, etc., that is spread on roads to improve traction.” In other words, grit is not merely toughness. It is the very thing that allows one to continue forward movement across unstable ground. What Mattie seeks throughout the novel is precisely this kind of moral traction amid grief, violence, uncertainty, and the lawlessness of the frontier. Unlike Huckleberry Finn, who vacillates morally and spiritually throughout his journey, or even Dorothy Gale, whose central longing is simply to return home, Mattie is governed above all by a stern sense of justice. She values duty, competence, self-command, and moral clarity. Her journey across the frontier is therefore not one of self-discovery so much as a continual testing of character. Thus, True Grit reimagines the American road narrative through Mattie Ross’s Stoic discipline, turning the frontier journey not into a story of self-discovery but a testing ground for justice, endurance, and moral self-governance.

Moreover, there is a chosen buoyancy to Mattie’s narration that is important to acknowledge. For all the violence of the text, True Grit is persistently comic without ever becoming silly. As American humorist Roy Blount Jr. observes, “Charles Portis could be Cormac McCarthy if he wanted to, but he’d rather be funny.” And indeed, McCarthy’s roads (think Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men) usually end in apocalypse, nihilism, or at minimum a man staring silently into the void somewhere in Texas, wishing he were anywhere but in America or in existence at all. Portis’s roads, by contrast, still permit justice, laughter, and a fourteen-year-old Presbyterian girl who is somehow the most competent person in the territory, and in her own head, in the world. In classical comic terms, the world of True Grit bends not toward despair but toward restoration, of self and the reader.

One Economy to Rule Them All

THE lEFT IS THE rIGHT:

Have You Heard the Good News? (Clifford S. Asness and Michael R. Strain, 07.01.25, The Free Press)

Horseshoe theory is the idea that the far left and the far right converge toward each other, even if they’d both vigorously deny it. Populism, as practiced by both the left and right ends of the horseshoe, has never just been about telling people popular things, such as “ice cream is delicious.” Rather, it’s telling people: “Ice cream is delicious, and you aren’t getting your fair share of the ice cream because you are a helpless victim living in a rigged ice-cream system, and here are the people responsible that we will take to task for you, and by doing so restore your rightful ice cream.”

That was more or less the sales pitch of the populist of the moment: socialist Zohran Mamdani, who clinched the Democratic nomination in the New York City mayor’s race by arguing the city needed revolutionary change. And, with some names changed, it’s a huge part of the MAGA pitch, too.

Today, both the progressive left and the MAGA right seem to run on imaginary—or at best, horribly exaggerated—grievance.

Populism pits “the people” against “the elites.” It requires the finger-point and the class conflict. And it requires things to be very bad, or else there’s not much for the populist leader to fix.

It is also about zero-sum grievance. It’s about telling people they are getting the shaft and our side is the one to unshaft you, extracting vengeance for you along the way. It’s inherently anti-republican (small r), replacing constitutional, individual, and minority protections and rights with the will of the 51 percent (often fewer are needed) who you can convince about your “populist” revanchist policies that will undo all real or imagined past wrongs done to them.

Now, there is nothing wrong with a good grievance—that is, if the grievance is justified and the solution to the grievance reasonable. The left can justifiably point to Americans without health insurance. The right can justifiably point to a border that was consciously left open for many years. Examples abound.

But today, both the progressive left and the MAGA right seem to run on imaginary—or at best, horribly exaggerated—grievance. The uniting theme is that the average American has it terrible these days, and only their chosen end of the horseshoe can fix it. People will go to extremes only when they are convinced things are terrible—and there’s a cottage industry, again both press and politicians, working on selling that story. […]

Wages are the most important component of the flow of financial resources households can use for consumption and savings. But households receive resources from other sources as well, including government transfer payments, social insurance receipts, and businesses. Overall household income tells the same story as wages: Real household income has never been higher than it is today.

And not just for families at the very top. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), families in the 51st to 90th percentiles of the wealth distribution had an average wealth of $1.3 million in 2022, the most recent year data are available. That’s up from around $500,000 in 1990, after adjusting for inflation.

Consumption is an even better indicator of prosperity than income or wealth. It’s how much we all actually get to enjoy life (economically speaking). Spending on personal consumption is at a record level. Now, it might be fair to argue that this consumption is a big part of the looming debt problem America must eventually reckon with, but that would be a howler of an argument from either end of the populist horseshoe, as both the progressive left and MAGA right seem to be big fans of ignoring this issue.

When assessing the best time to be alive, it’s important to give special attention to low-income Americans. The CBO’s income data show that inflation-adjusted post-tax-and-transfer income for the bottom 20 percent of households more than doubled from 1990 to 2021. Real income grew more for low-income households than for the median household. The inflation-adjusted wealth of families in the bottom 25 percent was also at an all-time high in 2022. These families saw their average real wealth triple from 1990 to 2022.

Misery requires ideology.

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