The Commerce Department announced this week that six more companies are set to join the federal government’s rapidly expanding corporate portfolio, bringing the total to 30 by our count (see table below). Perhaps most striking about the announcement is how unremarkable government ownership is becoming.

The seven nonbinding letters of intent would provide up to $874 million in CHIPS and Science Act research and development incentives. Six recipients would be new additions to the portfolio. The seventh, GlobalFoundries, already has a proposed Commerce stake attached to a separate $375 million quantum foundry award. Commerce says a minority, noncontrolling equity stake in each company will be a condition of final funding.

Zoom out and the pattern is more striking. Since December, the CHIPS Research and Development (R&D) Office has announced 19 final or proposed company awards totaling up to $3.8 billion. They cover 18 companies because GlobalFoundries has two separate projects. Three agreements are final, while 16 remain letters of intent. All 19 have been publicly tied to equity.

Many cities have recently repealed or amended zoning laws that previously served to drive up housing prices. 

One recent study looks at 

how zoning regulations in the Boston metropolitan area of Massachusetts have affected the long-run supply, prices, and rents of single-family and multifamily homes (apartments).

For one, 

loose density restrictions paired with multifamily zoning in the same neighborhood increased the average number of housing units per lot. … Looser height restrictions did not affect housing supply or prices, even when paired with multifamily zoning. These findings suggest that density restrictions limit housing construction in the Boston metro area while height regulations do not.

[The] research also finds that differences in housing prices and rents across boundaries primarily stemmed from strict zoning regulations increasing the average size of housing units. … [Thus,] zoning regulations have increased the size of housing units and driven up housing prices and rents in large portions of the Boston metro area.

Eliminating these distortions would allow for better, market-driven outcomes.

Cross-posted from Substack.

Companies looking to do business with the Pentagon under President Trump are receiving some remarkably blunt instructions. At an acquisition reform event last November, Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg put contractors on notice. “The contractors that are willing to change with us will prosper and grow; those who don’t and resist it will be gone.”

Feinberg’s warning could be read as a demand that complacent contractors improve. But a LinkedIn post shared by George Kollitides, head of the Pentagon’s Economic Defense Unit (EDU), gives it a more troubling meaning.

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Almost exactly four years ago, amid an energy crunch triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, my colleague Alfredo Carrillo Obregon and I argued that Puerto Rico was overpaying for energy because the Jones Act restricted its access to American energy supplies. The evidence at the time was indirect but compelling, based on a comparison of Puerto Rico’s fuel imports to those of the nearby, Jones Act–unconstrained Dominican Republic. 

The US, we found, accounted for a meager 0.02 percent of Puerto Rico’s LNG imports in 2019 versus 10.8 percent of the Dominican Republic’s, and by 2021 the Dominican Republic’s share had risen to 96.4 percent while Puerto Rico’s had fallen to 0.002 percent. Propane and fuel oil also showed a stark divergence. The logical conclusion, based on sourcing decisions by market participants, was that Puerto Rico was almost certainly overpaying for energy it could have bought more cheaply from the country it’s part of—if not for the Jones Act.

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New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has just published details of how he plans to fulfill his campaign pledge to open five city-owned grocery stores across the city. On Monday, he released his “Recipe for Affordability” proposal and a call for grocery store operators to manage the coming stores. That confirms that rather than government-managed locations, these city-owned stores will really just be delivering a trumped-up subsidy.

The stores will carry a core basket of produce, meats, and other groceries placed on average 30 percent below market prices. But American supermarkets net just 1 to 4 percent profit margins on sales, so you can’t wring out a 30 percent discount just by forswearing profits. The proposal is therefore quite candid that the difference will be made up by taxpayers. It promises to “offer subsidies that will lower grocery prices” and admits that “sustaining these lower prices will require targeted public investment.”

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A key rationale for drug prohibition is the belief that outlawing drugs makes them less available and more expensive, thereby shrinking consumption.

Decades of evidence, however, suggest this impact is modest, partly due to the “waterbed effect”: enforcement efforts aimed at shrinking the market mainly cause it to shift, in various ways, without much impact on its overall size. Just as pushing down on one part of a waterbed merely forces the water somewhere else, rather than reducing the overall quantity.

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The bar exam is intended to be a test of minimum competency. Yet those who administer it have, time and again, demonstrated a lack of the minimum competency required to do their jobs effectively. 

When I sat for and passed the Colorado Bar Exam in July 2019, like many test takers, I approached the entire ordeal with precise, systematic planning. Seven years later, most of the fine details have faded. I cannot recall the exact Denver venue where I spent two full days answering questions on subjects I haven’t thought about since. Nor can I explain the mechanics of committing abstract legal concepts to rote memory just to regurgitate them in the exact format examiners demanded. What remains vivid is the immense financial and logistical toll required simply to sit in that room.

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