In honor of Earth Day, Dominic Parker reflects on the decades of market-based solutions the US has employed to clean up its air and watersheds. Eugene Volokh follows a Texas defamation case brought by FBI Director Kash Patel, just as he launches a new one against The Atlantic. And Nadia Schadlow writes about how rhetoric and mean tweets obscure what is really driving differences among Brussels, London, and Washington.
Freedom Frequency
When Earth Day was declared in 1970, polluted water and air, as well as swelling world population, were seen as serious problems. Smog and burning rivers made for bleak and compelling symbols, writes Hoover Senior Fellow Dominic Parker, but even by the 1960s there were signs of progress. What’s more, he writes, ecological gains owe much to powerful market-based remedies such as incentives, cap-and-trade arrangements, and personal choice. In the ensuing years since the first Earth Day, world trade not only shifted US manufacturing toward cleaner industry—aerospace, healthcare, electronics—but led other, lower-income countries to clean up their own industries, he writes. As for the dreaded population explosion, free trade provided new labor opportunities in developing nations, slowing population growth without using state-mandated family limits. Today, Earth Day points to worries about climate change—and even there, Parker writes, market forces that encourage innovation will be the key to nurturing environmental progress. Learn how market-based remedies helped improve America’s air and water quality.
Revitalizing American Institutions
As he launches a new claim of defamation against The Atlantic for its reporting, FBI Director Kash Patel has lost an earlier court battle in Texas, writes Senior Fellow Eugene Volokh on his blog. Last year, former FBI Assistant Director Frank Figliuzzi criticized Patel during an appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, suggesting Patel had “been more visible at nightclubs” than at FBI headquarters. Patel sued, claiming the comments constituted actionable defamation. On Tuesday, Houston judge George C. Hanks Jr. dismissed the claim, saying Figliuzzi’s statement was made using “nonactionable rhetorical hyperbole,” and that no viewer “of reasonable intelligence” would have taken the statement literally. Hanks also said Figliuzzi would have to pay his own attorney’s fees and costs. How Judge George C. Banks decided the case.
Determining America’s Role in the World
Writing in the Financial Times, National Security Visiting Fellow Nadia Schadlow argues that while TruthSocial storms and fiery rhetoric have impacted US-European relations this year, they mask the real divides between American and European policymakers, laid bare by differences that emerged after the US-Israeli attack on Iran. “The Iran war reveals that the US and Europe operate from fundamentally different assumptions about risk, responsibility and results—about what makes the international system work, or not,” Schadlow writes. “Recognizing these differences is the first step towards rebalancing the alliance.” Read more about what this means for future US-EU relations. [Subscription required.]
The Economy
When job loss leads to a long spell of unemployment, it causes a big blow to self-esteem, a lasting drop in living standards, and serious hardship for the job loser’s family. Is there a low-cost way to help the newly unemployed navigate the search process and find rewarding new work? Yes, say Michèle Belot and Philipp Kircher, who work as economists at Cornell University, based on their insightful new study. Senior Fellow Steven J. Davis, host of Economics, Applied, discusses the study and underlying thinking with the authors. Why having an online friend could help struggling job seekers.
Healthcare
Two measures developed by Hoover scholars that became law last year have enabled 10 million recipients of subsidies under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) to better take charge of their own healthcare journeys. One of the new provisions in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act allows recipients of certain “bronze” and “catastrophic” plans offered through the ACA to use Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) for the first time. The changes also allow all HSA holders to use their accumulated funds to pay for primary-care service fees, also known as primary-care practice membership or subscription fees. The ideas came to Hoover fellows Lanhee J. Chen, Daniel Heil, and Tom Church, members of Hoover’s Healthcare Policy Working Group, as they began an effort in 2023 to assist policymakers in developing new ideas in the healthcare space. Find out what ACA recipients can do thanks to Hoover-developed legislation.
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