Happy New Year! We’ll try to be happy even though bad ideas remain. Ever since the Trump era began, we’ve continued to fight over what is conservatism. I believe in the central tenets of limited government, strong foreign policy, free markets, and pro-family, pro-life social policies.* All of these principles allow people to flourish, and […]

Yes, I sometimes like alliteration. We’ve been chronicling the trials that Mr. Trump’s tariffs have caused the broader economy, and I have regularly warned about the political ramifications of Mr. Trump not meeting the real political market demand of reducing prices. In today’s post I want to highlight two issues. The first is Mr. Trump’s […]

Daniel Kahneman (1934 – 2024) Source: nobelprize.org/ Most Bereans at the Gate (BATG) readers will know the name Daniel Kahneman. As a psychologist, he won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 and has been known informally as the ‘grandfather of behavioral economics’.  He, along with Amos Tversky and others, examined how people made decisions […]

Numerous online commenters are sharing the chart above, which shows that since Liberation day, manufacturing jobs have been declining, not growing. Note the scale; this isn’t a huge drop (~50k+ jobs out of over 12.5M), but it’s down–not up–and Mr. Trump promised all these manufacturing jobs (“we’re bringing them all back”). The question is why. […]

In what universe should the United States suggest a “peace plan” that gives Russia more Ukrainian territory than it has been able to win on the battlefield? Or that Ukraine, after being invaded repeatedly by a much larger Russia, should have the size of its armed forces limited? And that its security should be guaranteed […]

Since my last post was pretty gloomy for Republican-leaning voters, consider this comment from Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson, who continues to push a per employee tax on Chicago businesses, even after the city council’s finance committee soundly rejected it (from the WSJ): Yet Mr. Johnson is doubling down. “The corporate tax is in this budget. […]

A big focus area for me in my day job as dean of the business school is to prepare our students for leadership in the market. This includes a large focus on entrepreneurship and innovation. One of the key lessons we push early on is the idea of listening to the market, following Eric Reis’s […]

So reads a headline in The Economist magazine in discussing how CEOs of major corporations have to deal with Donald Trump. Mr. Trump, notorious of wanting adulation, demands supplicants give laudatory remarks about him to gain or stay in his good graces. This morning I read in the WSJ an op-ed by Kevin Warsh on […]

As we predicted here at BATG, consumers feeling the pressure of higher prices related to tariffs are expressing significant disillusionment with Mr. Trump’s economic policies. And as we talked about last week, the election results resonated with concerns over affordability. Even many conservative commentators are warning Mr. Trump to stop trying to tell people that […]

I confess–this morning I feel like one of my students that’s just sitting down at the computer @ 11p.m. and they have a seven page paper due the next day, and they really don’t know know where to begin. My problem is I am really still struggling to process and understand some things that on […]