Most days, the Wall Street Journal OpEd page runs multiple unsigned editorials next to the letters and across from the opinion columns. Last Friday, however, the Editorial Board gave its entire platform to a single composition, titled “Elizabeth Warren Has a Plan, Oh My.”

The editorial’s thesis is to “show where the American left wants to go” by presenting Senator Elizabeth Warren’s (D‑Mass.) campaign platform for president, which “exceeds what the socialist dreamers of a century ago imagined.”

The guts of the editorial are 26 bullet points each describing Warren’s policy initiatives, including “Wealth tax,” “Medicare for all,” and “Free college.” After listing Sen. Warren’s various “plans for that,” the WSJ Board concludes:

All this adds up to such an expansion of government that the temptation is to dismiss it as fanciful. But Ms. Warren is a shrewd and disciplined politician who isn’t supporting these ideas on an ideological whim … The question for Democrats: Is this the agenda they want to put forward in 2020?”

For my part, I’d add that Republicans are little better than Democrats on this score, at least in practice (if not in campaign rhetoric). Last month, for example, large bipartisan majorities in Congress passed a $1.43 trillion spending bill—up $50 billion over the previous year—that also raises the legal vaping age to 21. Our Republican president quickly signed the package. The upshot is that both parties collaborated on a spending bill defined by principles of Big Government and the Nanny State.

Setting aside the limited scope of the Editorial Board’s case, I have a bone to pick with one of their policy arguments against Sen. Warren.

Specifically, the editorial’s last bullet point, titled “Miscellaneous,” includes Warren’s pitch to “give congressional staff ‘competitive salaries.’” If the WSJWSJ‘s‘s institutional voice is to be believed, then lawmaker spending on congressional staff reflects the “expansion of government” and even “socialism.”

I share the Board’s concern regarding overweening government, but I think the editorial misses the mark on Congress’s support personnel. Though perhaps counter-intuitive, investment in congressional staff is an essential complement to the WSJ’s avowed goal—that is, checking the “expansion of government.”

Of course, Big Government today is largely coterminous with the administrative state. From 1995 to 2017, the executive branch issued over 92,000 rules, compared to 4,400 laws enacted by Congress. The regulatory agencies behind all this lawmaking didn’t materialize from thin air; rather, they were created by legislation, and Congress paired these “delegations” with an oversight framework.

Passed during the administrative state’s adolescence, the 1946 Legislative Reorganization Act established Congress’s strategy for supervising the regulators. The Act tasked issue-specific committees with a duty to conduct “continuous watchfulness” over administrative policymaking. To execute this mandate, the Act provided committees with professional staffs.

By design, therefore, committee staffers are crucial cogs in Congress’s oversight machinery, and this understanding served as conventional wisdom among lawmakers through much of the last century. Yet this prevailing sense abated during the 1980s and, ultimately, disappeared by the mid-1990s.

What happened? A shifting power landscape on Capitol Hill led to the decline of staff, both in status and number.

After World War Two, committees were the most consequential institutions in Congress; now, parties fill that role. Part of the reason for this change is demographic: The parties became more homogenous with the demise of southern Democrats and northeastern Republicans. At the same time that party rank-and-file were taking on hive-minds, opportunistic party leaders gamed the House and Senate rules to centralize power in their hands.

For ascendant party leadership in Congress, strong committees were a roadblock to the consolidation of authority. To weaken committees, party leaders sought to weaken committee staff.

Matters came to a head in 1995 on the first day of the 104th Congress, when Speaker Newt Gingrich and Republican leadership slashed committee staff by one-third, and the Senate soon followed suit. Because it was in the interest of both parties’ leaders to subdue committees, staffing never recovered

For example, there were 2,115 professional personnel in House and Senate standing committees in 2015, or less than two-thirds the total in 1991 (3,528). To be fair, party leaders invested in some parts of Congress–themselves. From 1995 to 2011, House and Senate leadership staff increased 35 percent and 38 percent (respectively).

Simply put, Congress doesn’t have the tools to oversee the administrative state it created. The WSJ grows a false narrative when its Editorial Board opines that Warren’s plan for congressional staff reflects an “expansion of government.” In a less sincere tone—his real purpose was power—Rep. Gingrich advanced the same arguments when he dropped the ax on committee staff in 1995. Though untrue and often disingenuous, it makes for a great talking point to claim that Congress should lead by example by starving itself in the name of fiscal prudence. Anyone who claims otherwise is branded as a spendthrift. That’s why staffing levels have never recovered.

In conclusion, I’ll turn to R St. Institute’s Casey Burgat, who’s been sounding this alarm for a while. He warns:

As the size and complexity of the federal government has continued to grow, Congress has deprioritized spending within the offices most responsible for legislating and conducting Executive Branch oversight.

After bailing out two of the “Big 3” Detroit automakers, President Obama called in his markers during the summer of 2011. That’s when his administration announced an agreement with major car manufacturers to increase federal fuel economy standards to 54.5 miles per gallon (MPG) by 2025.

At the time, fleet averages (including cars and light-duty trucks) were about 27 MPG; doubling that figure in 14 years was a tall order requiring technological breakthroughs that might or might not happen.

Accordingly, the 2011 agreement included an escape hatch. The plan stipulated for a “mid-term review” process, by which regulatory agencies could revisit their fuel efficiency targets and change course if necessary.

Under the agreement’s terms, the mid-term review was due by April of 2018. All the parties to the original accord understood that the mid-term review would entail a process that unfolded up to the 2018 deadline in order to best inform the final decision with the latest data.

If Hillary Clinton had won in 2016, the process would have occurred as initially expected. But then Trump won, and the Obama administration scrambled to finish a mid-term review during the outgoing president’s lame-duck session.

After a six-week rulemaking conducted with breakneck speed, Obama’s agencies completed their mid-term review with only eight days to spare before Trump occupied the White House. To no one’s surprise, the Obama administration affirmed its original 54.5 MPG (by 2025) target.

About a month after President Trump took office, his administration announced it would reconsider Obama’s lame-duck determination. Ultimately, the Trump administration proposed to freeze the fuel efficiency standards at their 2021 targets through 2025. That proposal, however, has yet to be finalized. When it is made final, it will be challenged in court by progressive state attorneys general and environmental groups.

With this context in mind, let’s turn to Europe, which has more stringent fuel efficiency standards than we do. To be precise, the European Union regulates tailpipe emissions of greenhouse gases, the control of which is effectively coterminous with the regulation of fuel efficiency.

Current regulations for the EU translate to fuel efficiency standards that are roughly commensurate with what the Obama-era standards would have required by 2023, based on my eyeball approximation of this New York Times chart comparing the two regimes.

So, how’s that working out for Europeans?

Not well, according to last Thursday’s fascinating Big Read in the Financial Times by Peter Campbell. The sub-headline says it all: “rather than embrace the new technology, consumers seem more interested in larger, petrol-fueled cars.”

The article starts with a charming story about how the European Union’s regulatory framework affected a recent automobile purchase in Spain:

When Blas Arambilet tried to buy an electric car in April, something strange happened.

Months after ordering a white Kia e‑Niro from his local Barcelona showroom, he received a call from the dealership. Kia could not deliver the car this year, a salesman explained, because it needed to book the sale in 2020 in order to help meet tough new targets for [fuel economy].

In sum, car companies are delaying delivery of their least polluting cars, and their purpose is to game compliance with the European Union’s fuel economy regulations. Perversely, emissions-conscious consumers—the very buyers whom the EU’s fuel efficiency rules are supposed to favor—are the first to feel the unintended consequences.

But it’s not just environmental-minded buyers who stand to lose out. According to the Financial Times, sports car enthusiasts might be denied their need for speed:

[Daimler] is expected by many dealers to cut production of its most polluting models. In its crosshairs is the Mercedes AMG range, its highest specification models that have supercar acceleration and the body of a family saloon. A reduction of 75 percent in the availability of some [of these] models … is expected by several retail executives … 

More broadly, the general car-buying public is in for a bumpy ride. Per the FT:

“There is going to be an imbalance between what consumers want and what manufacturers want to sell them,” say Robert Forrester, chief executive of the dealership group Vertu … [V]anishingly few buyers are turning to electric cars … [they’re instead] switching to heavier sports utility vehicles.

For their part, carmakers are playing a dangerous game of chicken with regulators. The FT reports that manufacturers would be on the hook for $27 billion in fines were they to sell the same mix in 2021 as they did last year.

In an understatement, one anonymous industry insider told the newspaper that “the regulation is not aligned with what is happening in the market.”

Inconvenient delivery dates for super fuel-efficient cars are merely the first mile of a long and uncomfortable road trip, but what’s the destination? A dramatic and government-imposed scarcity of what the Financial Times calls “American-style SUVs”—that is, the cars that buyers want—seems likely unless either consumer preferences or EU regulators pull a u‑turn. 

Because these “American-style SUVs” engender higher profit margins, they are essential to many automakers’ bottom lines. To the extent manufacturers are not permitted to sell these “gas guzzlers,” there will be pileups in the sector, in the short term at the very least, as the industry is compelled to change lanes to a new business model.

The upshot is that consumers and automakers will be left in the dust if EU regulators keep their pedal to the metal with fuel efficiency requirements that remain grossly out of “alignment” with what buyers want. Could it happen here? 

It’s a “solemn” and “sad” affair, impeachment: there are so many reasons to wear black. That’s what the pols and pundits tell us, anyway. Tonight’s House vote will unleash a host of plagues: stoking partisan furies, rattling the markets, and— worst of all from this town’s perspective—distracting Congress and the president from doing “the people’s business.” We’re in for a period of “squandered months during which official Washington is pulled apart,” U.S. News’s Kenneth Walsh warned in late September: brace yourself for “The Coming Impeachment Paralysis”! 

Some of us don’t find that prospect particularly terrifying, but your mileage may vary. In any case, after last week’s legislative onslaught, can we finally put this particular hobgoblin out to pasture—or wherever it is that worn-out hobgoblins go? For better or worse, it’s just not true that “nothing gets done” during an impeachment.

“Hidden by impeachment: ‘One of Trump’s best weeks yet,’” the Washington Examiner’s Paul Bedard crowed on Friday. In the midst of the impeachment drive, the president just keeps putting points on the board, including “a new U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade deal,” confirmation of his 50^th appellate judge, “government family leave,” and—cue “Also Sprach Zarathustra”—Space Force! The New York Times hailed the $738 billion “defense” bill, which includes paid parental leave for over 2 million federal workers, as “part of a year-end burst of bipartisan legislating that has broken out this week, even as the Democratic-led House moves toward impeaching Mr. Trump.”

That impeachment paralyzes the government isn’t true now, and it wasn’t true in past impeachment struggles either. The 93^rd Congress passed, and Richard Nixon signed, four major bills in between the House’s formal approval of the inquiry in February 1974 and the president’s resignation six months later. One of those laws, the Impoundment Control Act, you may have heard about in recent weeks: President Trump may have broken it when he held up military aid to Ukraine this summer. Of course, Watergate became all-consuming before the House voted for an impeachment inquiry. If you start the clock closer to when Nixon’s troubles really took off—say with the Saturday Night Massacre in late October ’73—you can add another half-dozen, including the War Powers Resolution (passed over Nixon’s veto) and the Endangered Species Act.

More recently, President Clinton signed four major bills during his impeachment “journey,” even while soul-searching for “the rock-bottom truth of where I am and where we all are,” after his fling with an intern. In October 1998, the “people’s business” included the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and the Iraq Liberation Act. For my money, the people would’ve been better off without most of those, particularly the latter, which became a vital talking point for Iraq hawks in the run up to George W. Bush’s disastrous war. But if, like House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, you measure legislative “productivity” in terms of big bills passed, that was a fairly productive session.

It’s true, nothing much is likely to get done for a month or so after the holidays, while the Senate holds President Trump’s impeachment trial. “The legislative and executive business of the Senate shall be suspended” while it’s ongoing, per the Senate Rules. But maybe we could use a break.

Last night, the House Judiciary Committee began debate on the two articles of impeachment unveiled earlier this week by HJC chairman Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D‑NY). Despite recent talk about cluttering the articles with Emoluments Clause and Mueller probe accusations, in the end the Democratic leadership decided none of those charges sparked joy. The articles set for markup today focus exclusively on the Ukraine affair and President Trump’s response to the impeachment inquiry it launched.

The decision to Keep Impeachment Simple, Stupid was a smart call. The two articles confine the case against Trump to a digestible set of facts. Equally important, they avoid framing the president’s conduct in criminal-law, focusing instead on misuse of official power and violations of public trust.

The first article, on “Abuse of Power,” accuses Trump of conditioning a state visit and delivery of military aid on the Ukrainians announcing an investigation of his 2020 rival Joe Biden. In so doing, Article I charges, Trump misused the powers of his office “for corrupt purposes in pursuit of personal political benefit.”

I could have done without the far-fetched and irrelevant claim that Trump “compromised the national security of the United States” by holding up aid. But Article I does better at avoiding what I’ve called the “Overcriminalization of Impeachment.” Trying to shoehorn Trump’s conduct into one or more federal statutes invites a hypertechnical debate over federal bribery, extortion, and campaign-finance statutes that’s quite beside the point. The president doesn’t have to violate the law to commit an impeachable abuse of power. Historically, according to a comprehensive report by the Nixon-era House Judiciary Committee, “allegations that the officer has violated his duties or his oath or seriously undermined public confidence in his ability to perform his official functions” have been far more common than allegations of federal crimes.

In this case, there’s a fairly close parallel between Article I and one of the articles of impeachment that drove Richard Nixon from office (he quit before the full House could vote). The second article of impeachment against Nixon, passed by the House Judiciary Committee in July 1974, focused on abuse of power, and the first item it listed was the administration’s attempts to order up IRS audits on political opponents, including people who worked for or supported his opponent in the ’72 election, Sen. George McGovern. In that case, the notion that the president simply had a high-minded interest in rooting out corruption didn’t sell.

The second article against Trump tracks the case against Nixon even more closely. Article II charges President Trump with “Obstruction of Congress” based on his “indiscriminate defiance” of lawfully issued congressional subpoenas in the impeachment inquiry. It draws heavily on the third article of impeachment the House Judiciary Committee passed in July 1974, adopting some of its language verbatim. Like Nixon, Trump “interposed the powers of the Presidency against the the lawful subpoenas of the House of Representatives, thereby assuming to himself functions and judgments necessary to the exercise of the sole power of impeachment vested by the Constitution in the House of Representatives.”

Nixon Article III was the most controversial of the articles lodged against the 37^th president, passing HJC by the narrowest margin of the three. But the Judiciary Committee’s Report on the Nixon impeachment made a strong case that Nixon’s defiance was unprecedented and dangerous: of dozens of federal officers who’d been the subject of impeachment investigations up till that time “not one of them challenged the power of the committee conducting the investigation to compel the evidence it deemed necessary.” And Nixon’s obstruction wasn’t nearly as flagrant as the policy of categorical stonewalling Trump announced.

In this case, then, the articles rest on pretty firm constitutional ground. Of course, impeachment is “a mixed operation of law and politics,” and constitutional analysis can only take you so far. In this case, even more than past partisan impeachments, “the decision will be regulated more by the comparative strength of parties, than by the real demonstrations of innocence or guilt.”

Yesterday, Vox’s Ian Millhiser posted an interesting article on how President Trump’s judicial nominees are changing the federal courts.

I’ve no argument with Millhiser’s underlying thesis: A lot of (great) judges have been appointed during Trump’s administration.

The causes for this are obvious. There’s a Republican in the White House, and Republicans control the Senate, so the appointment process is well-oiled. In addition, past Senates (under both parties) changed the body’s rules so as to ease the confirmation of a president’s nominees.

Where I take issue with Millhiser is with his understanding of the judicial power. He writes:

In an age of legislative dysfunction, whoever controls the courts controls the country … [Judges] have become the most consequential policymakers in the nation … The judiciary is where policy is made in the United States.

This can’t be right.

By its nature, the judiciary is weaker than either of the political branches. As Hamilton wrote in Federalist 78, courts have “no influence over either the sword or the purse,” unlike Congress and the president. Approvingly, Hamilton quotes Montesquieu’s assertion that “Of the three powers … the judiciary is next to nothing.”

Millhiser might reply: “Well, ‘next to nothing’ in the judiciary is more than ‘doing-nothing’ in Congress.”

And, perhaps, he’d have a point. But he’d still be mistaken overall, because the president is the undisputed policymaker-in-chief in modern American government.

Last week, in The Hill, I used the ongoing impeachment proceedings to make this very point:

Why have the House and Senate, through the impeachment process, become willing cogs in the oily machinery of the 2020 presidential contest?

The answer involves a tectonic shift in American government, from a functioning separation of powers to one that is out of whack … Over the last century, Congress has given away, or “delegated,” much of its policymaking initiative to the executive branch … Through these grants of authority, Congress created an alphabet soup’s worth of regulatory agencies collectively known as the administrative state.

As … Congress lost the capacity to oversee its delegations … modern presidents have seized undisputed supremacy over the administrative state by increasing control over agency budgets and regulatory management.

Policy now flows from the White House.

Congress couldn’t pass immigration reform, but President Obama achieved the same results with DACA. Congress denied President Trump funding to build a border wall, but then he exercised his delegated authority to declare an “emergency” and funded the wall unilaterally.

In this context—where the president calls the shots and Congress is beholden to party leadership—half the legislature always is unbothered with unbound executive authority whenever “their guy” occupies the White House.

It’s a vicious feedback loop. The more powerful the president becomes, the more our party-centric Congress rationally believes that the Oval Office is the most efficient means to implement the planks of a given party’s platform.

The full article, titled “This Isn’t Your Founding Fathers’ Impeachment,” is available here.

Donald Trump ran and won by opposing many traditional Republican candidates and ideas. However, for two years or more, his administration seemed a lot like a traditional Republican administration though its President behaved rather differently than other presidents of either party. Now intellectuals are coming forth with manifestos articulating Trump’s revolution three years after the barricades were stormed. For example, we have For Real American Greatness, A Tech New Deal.

Readers interested in policy will be disappointed, even frustrated with this manifesto. It has one concrete proposal – prohibit Facebook’s Libra cryptocurrency. The rest is a mixture of mood, allusion, and “the future that awaits Americans” if the new conservativism is accepted. Presumably this document adumbrates the changed outlook of the new conservatives, and policy wonks will follow with their concrete proposals.

Let’s begin with five words in the title: American Greatness, tech, and New Deal. Conservatives embracing the New Deal, not as fact but as ideal, might seem strange. But many believe the Reaganite small government philosophy no longer sells on election day so new (old) ideas are warranted. How about American Greatness? Ok, but that’s not a new idea either: recall the American Greatness conservativism of 1997? They too rejected “the antigovernment, ‘leave us alone’ sentiment” and weren’t “unfriendly to government, properly understood.” The earlier American Government conservatives ended up wanting wanted to govern Iraq, not Facebook. Maybe with “tech” things will turn out better, though neither crusade has shown much concern for collateral damage.

Make no mistake, the new conservatives believe in government: “America’s innovative power and technological leadership are vital strategic assets. They must be safeguarded and leveraged with a new framework of policy and politics by the people, for the people, and of the people.” I am not certain how one uses a framework to safeguard and leverage “America’s innovative power and technological leadership.” But our authors are clear that private innovation and technological leadership are mere assets in the service of public power. Concretely, the talents and property of individuals are to be “leveraged and safeguarded” for collective ends. Indeed, our authors note that “like all corporations, tech firms exist at the sufferance of US law.” That would indeed imply a certain leverage for those who make law, at least. That does have a New Deal sound to it.

Our authors assert this change in outlook and doctrine is a necessary response to changes in the world: “Trump is a consequence of deeper causes that neither politics nor anything else can now reverse.” What might those causes be? I am not certain. The next sentence states:

Our digital technology has formed a new social and psychological environment that reshapes our very souls—our perceptions, sensibilities, and our habits of the heart.

Did Trump reshape our souls through his tweets? Or did a plurality recognize their souls were being reshaped and turned to Trump for relief?

Beyond this confusion, it’s interesting that self-identified conservatives would put so much weight on discontinuity. You can hardly continue past practices if people have had their souls reshaped. You could reach back beyond the immediate to the distant past, and the authors do gesture toward “America’s founding documents” in their conclusion. But then you would be fostering significant change if not revolution. You would hardly be a conservative. Perhaps we might conclude, if we know something about Leo Strauss and the Claremont Institute, that the authors are actually advocating we consult the documents of the second (and real) Founding, the New Deal mentioned in the title.

A leading if not dominant view now sees politics as constituted by “the distinction between friend and enemy.” Our authors have written a political document in that sense; tech companies are not their friends.

But thanks to the domineering influence of Silicon Valley’s own woke vanguard, the Right now recognizes that top tech companies are sowing threats to our most basic ways of political life.

Enemies threaten us in some way. Or in this case, many ways:

Speech controls are seen on the Right to betoken a deep anti-constitutionalism; the leading tech role in “woke capital” evinces a sweeping anti-Americanism; commitments to globalism at any price, even partnering with Chinese government researchers to develop tools with military applications, reveal anti-Western attitudes; and, finally, artificial-intelligence projects surpassing or consuming the capabilities and consciousness of users lay bare an anti-human philosophy.

Say what you will about this document, it is not short on political aspirations. Tech people are said to be against the Constitution, against America itself, against Western civilization, and against humanity while helping the Chinese develop their military. No wonder tech needs regulation!

The authors would have been more persuasive had they been more specific in their indictment of the tech companies. Perhaps their intended audience knows the specifics already and needs no persuasion. But their assertions are far from obviously correct.

Consider only the “anti-constitutional” charge against the companies. A lot of history and Supreme Court doctrine says the First Amendment does not constrain tech platforms. In line with their expansive view of government, our authors seem to think the private property of shareholders in Facebook and other companies are “our public square.” That seems implausible, and within the American framework, deeply anti-constitutional. Such demands carry little force absent arguments for what is after all, a significant change in the line between public and private.

In the end, our authors’ essay is not adequate to their aspiration toward a new American nationalism. After all, the nation’s elites, if not its citizens, are divided not least about what it means to be an American. But our authors’ strong view of the nation and its values is held by a minority, the people who are expected to affirm the mood of this essay. But our authors cannot and would not wish to impose their view of the nation on the majority of their fellow citizens that do not share that mood. They must persuade the unconvinced and that they have barely undertaken in this parade of unsupported assertions. Moreover, their heavy demonization of tech people will inevitably divide rather than unite Americans around any national ideal, including their own. For American Greatness fails on its own terms.

But perhaps its terms are misconceived. America is not an organic whole led by benevolent guardians toward national greatness. Our government is rather a set of institutions created to enable individuals to pursue their aspirations in justice and peace. Inevitably our success is measured by individual liberty not collective attainments, by mostly private rather than mostly public efforts. Such individualism will not satisfy collectivists urging identity politics or national greatness. But that individualism has been and will be the true source of American greatness.

The Cato Institute offers lots of great Christmas gifts — Pocket Constitutions (also a good gift for Bill of Rights Day!), books, apparel, even Cato-branded Lands’ End merchandise. But I have my own holiday recommendations that I’ve made before.

I decided one year to give a young colleague a post-graduate course in political science and economics — P. J. O’Rourke’s books Parliament of Whores and Eat the Rich. So I went to my local Barnes & Noble to search for them. Not in Current Affairs. Not in Economics. No separate section called Politics. I decided to try Borders (RIP). But first — to avoid yet more driving around — I went online to see if my local Borders stores had them in stock. Sure enough, they did, in a couple of stores just blocks from the Cato Institute. Checking to see where in the store I would find them, I discovered that they would both be shelved under “Humor–Humorous Writing.” Oh, right, I thought, they’re not books on economics or current affairs, they’re humor.

Yes, P.J. is one of the funniest writers around. But what people often miss when they talk about his humor is what a good reporter and what an insightful analyst he is. Parliament of Whores is a very funny book, but it’s also a very perceptive analysis of politics in a modern mixed-economy democracy. And if you read Eat the Rich, you’ll learn more about how countries get rich — and why they don’t — than in a whole year of econ at most colleges. In fact, I’ve decided that the best answer to the question “What’s the best book to start learning economics?” is Eat the Rich.

On page 1, P. J. starts with the right question: “Why do some places prosper and thrive while others just suck?” Supply-and-demand curves are all well and good, but what we really want to know is how not to be mired in poverty. He writes that he tried returning to his college economics texts but quickly remembered why he hated them at the time–though he does attempt, for instance, to explain comparative advantage in terms of John Grisham and Courtney Love. Instead he decided to visit economically successful and unsuccessful societies and try to figure out what makes them work or not work. So he headed off to Sweden, Hong Kong, Albania, Cuba, Tanzania, Russia, China, and Wall Street.

In Tanzania he gapes at the magnificent natural beauty and the appalling human poverty. Why is Tanzania so poor? he asks people, and he gets a variety of answers. One answer, he notes, is that Tanzania is actually not poor by the standards of human history; it has a life expectancy about that of the United States in 1920, which is a lot better than humans in 1720, or 1220, or 20. But, he finally concludes, the real answer is the collective “ujamaa” policies pursued by the sainted post-colonial leader Julius Nyerere. The answer is “ujaama—they planned it. They planned it, and we paid for it. Rich countries underwrote Tanzanian economic idiocy.”

From Tanzania P. J. moves on to Hong Kong, where he finds “the best contemporary example of laissez-faire.…The British colonial government turned Hong Kong into an economic miracle by doing nothing.”

You could do worse than to take a semester-long course on political economy where the texts are Eat the Rich and Parliament of Whores. So, bookstore owners, leave them in the Humorous Writing section for sure, but also put copies in the Economics, Politics, and Current Affairs sections.

Still time to buy them for Christmas and educate all your family and friends while they think they’re just being entertained!