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Self in Society Roundup 61
Immigration horrors, Trump's authoritarianism and economic insanity, YIMBY and zoning, education funding, Foucault, and more.
by Ari Armstrong, Copyright © 2025
July 5, 2025
Trump's Immigration Horrors
Detention Camps: The U.S. government currently is holding some 30,000 people in detention camps who have no criminal record. This is shameful, and our descendants properly will liken this to the Japanese internment camps.
Prison without Cause: Cato: "At least 50 [Venezuelans] reported that they arrived in the United States legally before being subject to arbitrary arrest, detention and rendition to El Salvador without due process." Donald Trump should be impeached and removed from office for this, and he and everyone else involved in this should be prosecuted for kidnapping and wrongful imprisonment.
Torture Camps: The Eighth Amendment clearly bars cruel and unusual punishments. But cruelty is the point for Team MAGA. NPR: "Kilmar Abrego Garcia . . . says he was brutally beaten and subjected to psychological torture while held in one of [El Salvador]'s most notorious prisons."
Political Targeting: New York Times: "Task Force Vulcan['s] . . . agents and prosecutors were asked to unwind some of the charges they had brought against MS-13's highest-ranking leaders even as they diverted resources into prosecuting a defendant whose ties to the gang were far more tenuous" (Garcia). Meanwhile: Evidence suggests "a corrupt pact between the Salvadoran government and some high-ranking MS-13 leaders, who agreed to drive down violence and bolster Mr. Bukele politically in exchange for cash and perks in jail."
Gratuitous Violence: NPR: Alejandro Barranco is "a 25-year-old U.S. Marine veteran whose two younger brothers are active duty Marines." Recently he watched as "masked federal immigration agent repeatedly punched his father in the head and neck during a workplace raid." Shameful. We can't even make room for a hard worker who gave us three Marines?
The Cruelty Is the Point: NBC: "ICE detains Marine Corps veteran's wife who was still breastfeeding their 3-month-old." How is it that a woman married to a Marine vet, with two U.S. citizen children, cannot get legal authorization to stay in the U.S.? This is insanity. This is cruelty for the sake of cruelty. By the way, preventing breastfeeding mothers from breastfeeding can cause severe health problems.
Betrayal of Allies: Rebecca Kheel: "Afghan Ally Who Was Detained by ICE Now Facing Fast-Tracked Deportation."
Betrayal of Asylum Seekers: Christianity Today: "ICE Goes After Church Leaders and Christians Fleeing Persecution."
Invasion Order: Ilya Somin: On July 2 "District Court Judge Randolph Moss issued an important decision blocking Donald Trump's January 20 'invasion' executive proclamation, which sought to foreclose nearly all pathways to legal migration and asylum applications for migrants crossing the southern border."
Trump's Authoritarianism
Trump vs. the Declaration: Ilya Somin points out that many of the complaints listed in the Declaration against the king also apply to Donald Trump.
Transparent Corruption: New York Times: "Pardoned Jan. 6 Rioter Who Threatened Police Joins Justice Dept." This is just corruption for the sake of corruption, flat-out nihilism.
Authoritarian Moves: Jonathan Chait: "Trump floated the notion of arresting New York City Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani. . . . Trump threatened to prosecute CNN. . . . The president mused about the prospect of financially punishing Elon Musk for criticizing the Republican megabill. . . . Paramount, the parent company of CBS, settled a groundless nuisance lawsuit Trump had filed."
Schmitt's Influence: Andy Craig: "The embrace of authoritarian notions isn't just a matter of base emotional impulses dressed up in formalistic language. There's a deadly serious set of ideas behind it, revealing the disturbingly widespread influence of Carl Schmitt, a German jurist and political philosopher who became a prominent propagandist during the early years of the Nazi regime. . . . Trump himself has surely never studied Schmitt. But those around him, influencing him, and shaping the movement which supports him, certainly have. Many say so openly, which puts them in the notorious company of Vladimir Putin's pet 'philosopher,' Aleksandr Dugin."
Trump and Dugin: Robert Zubrin: "In his new book, The Trump Revolution: A New Order of Great Powers, Dugin celebrates the election of America's 47th president as the culmination of his life's work." Dugin is the preeminent fascist of our day and perhaps the most dangerous person in the world.
Trump's Economic Insanity
Trump's Tariffs: Brad DeLong: "Trump's erratic trade policies are much more than a political circus. They seriously and significantly do threaten to unravel the invisible networks that have powered American prosperity for decades."
The Trump Debt: Cato: "The Senate's Big Beautiful Blunder Could Increase the Debt by $6 Trillion."
Ag Labor: Kelly Lester: "Mass Deportations Are Putting America's Food Supply at Risk."
YIMBY
Zoning: Somin: "Exclusionary zoning—defined here as regulatory restrictions on the types of housing that can be built in a given area—is a major factor in the national housing crisis, that has increased housing costs, prevented millions of people from 'moving to opportunity,' and impaired economic growth and innovation. opportunities." Here's my son and I doing some YIMBY activism on July 4.
California YIMBY: The state passed a law limiting environmental red tape and the like when it comes to building housing.
Red-State NIMBY: Rogé Karma: The Sun Belt housing market "includes cities such as Miami and Phoenix and Dallas and Austin, which are building a seemingly endless supply of cheap housing under what appear to be looser regulations. But lately, you're seeing prices spike in the same areas. . . . [T]hese places that seem so different are actually suffering from the same affliction. I was surprised to find that the zoning regulations in some Sun Belt cities weren't actually that much better than those in the coastal cities—that a lot of laws on the books were very similar and very restrictive. The way that Sun Belt cities were able to get around it was just by sprawling, and now that they're starting to hit the limits of their sprawl, those same laws are a lot more binding."
Texas YIMBY: But Texas is turning things around! Texas Tribune: "To attack the state's high housing costs, Texas lawmakers moved this year to clear red tape and regulations. . . that critics argued get in the way of building new homes. . . . Texas legislators overrode city zoning rules to allow smaller homes on smaller lots in some places and apartments and mixed-use developments along retail and commercial corridors in Texas’ largest cities. They also dramatically weakened a state law that property owners have used to block new homes from being built near them."
Quick Takes
Means-Test Social Security: Cowen points out that setting the federal budget is hard. "What do you want to cut?" he asks. Fair question. The problem with cutting Medicaid is it will drive more long-term costs and more emergency-room visits, which are funded either through taxes or through scarcer services for everyone else. I do think this will destroy some hospitals. One way to cut health expenses is to stop tax-preferencing employer-paid insurance and legalize plans that cover only high-cost non-routine care. But Republicans aren't doing that. What I would cut is Social Security, by means-testing it. It is crazy that we tax relatively poor young workers to subsidize (in part) wealthy retirees.
Vaccines: Atlantic: "Robert F. Kennedy Jr. used his address to a global vaccine summit to disparage global vaccination." The U.S. government's anti-vaccination stance certainly will kill people. See more from the Atlantic. Amesh Adalja is not happy.
Ed Funding: In comparing test results from Colorado, Mississippi, and Alabama, I argued that pedagogy matters more than school funding. Along these lines, consider this factoid from Dominic Pino via Cowen: "New York's education spending per student is highest in the country, at about $35,000. Florida spends about $13,000 per student. Florida fourth-graders rank third in the country in reading and fourth in math. New York fourth-graders rank 36th and 46th."
School Choice: Matt Bateman has thoughts. I'm perhaps more skeptical than is Bateman (he's somewhat skeptical) of the long-term benefits of tax-subsidized "private" education. Such funding invariably comes with strings and radically affects incentives while limiting approaches. I have no problem with enabling people to spend their own dollars how they want (Bateman also likes this). If government must subsidize, I'd rather funds went straight to families with minimal strings.
Maybe Sales of Some Federal Lands Is Okay? Alex Tabarrok thinks so. I'm a lot more sympathetic to government-controlled wilderness lands, or government-transferred lands held in some sort of public trust, than I used to be, mainly because I'm more sensitive to the problems of arbitrarily transferring ownership of land used by many people to one or a few people. But damn the federal government owns a lot of land out west!
Foucault: Classical liberals tend to take a very dim view of Michel Foucault. But Aaron Ross Powell, interviewing Mark Pennington, urges us to reconsider. The basic idea is that routines and webs of ideas can create a sort of "power" that some people wield over others. Okay, but we still have to distinguish those sorts of "power" from physical violence. Fwiw here's my quick take: We can and should seek to discover universal truths, but we also should be wary of how narrowly self-serving doctrines often get mistaken for (or intentionally conflated with) universal truths. When it comes to political theory simple answers usually are wrong.
TikTok Rabbit Hole: Axios writers found it easy to get Full MAGA content.
Heat Deaths: Cowen: "Europe has more heat deaths per year than the United States loses to gun deaths." Jack Nicastro blames regulations.
Mandatory Misgendering: Erin Reed: "The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals released a baffling conclusion: that forcing a transgender female teacher to misgender herself in the classroom is somehow not a first amendment violation." My quick take: That outcome is ridiculous, obviously. However, teachers do not have an absolute First Amendment right to say whatever they want in the classroom. It would make a lot more sense to require schools to allow people to identify how they want than to forbid schools to do so. If, in a market system, the law were silent on such matters, schools would be free to set such policies, and teachers would be free to seek employment in friendly schools. I think ultimately we should move toward gender-free language as much as possible. Gendered language in most contexts is stupid.
Fertility Crisis: Atlantic: "The worldwide population decline is set to begin decades ahead of [UN] expectations." It is, again, astonishing to me how fast we've gone from "Population Bomb" to "fertility crisis."
Weather Warning: Scientific American, May 13: "Trump’s National Weather Service Cuts Could Cost Lives."
AI and Mental Engagement: An MIT study (see Axios) worries that people who use AI are less mentally engaged. But Tyler Cowen responds, "Most forms of information technology, including LLMs, allow us to reallocate our mental energies as we prefer. . . . If you look only at the mental energy saved through LLM use, in the context of an artificially generated and controlled experiment, it will seem we are thinking less and becoming mentally lazy. . . . But you also have to consider, in a real-world context, what we do with all that liberated time and mental energy." Related: Cowen also notes that songs and films are getting longer, a point against technology reducing our attention spans. Related: Kids becoming more tech-savvy may be one reason why "educational requirements are becoming less strenuous" (see the Economist).
Appliance Durability: Many people claim appliances are getting less reliable and shorter-lived. But "appliance lifespans have decreased only modestly," and then due mostly to regulations (see Tabarrok).
Drug War Violence: Yes, the American-led drug war creates extraordinary violence in Latin America.
Helen Lewis: I enjoyed watching Helen Lewis's interview with Nick Gillespie, her earlier interview with Jordan Peterson, and a 1971 discussion of feminism featuring Norman Mailer as the foil.