The US semiquincentennial (that is, half of 500 years) will be July 4 of this year, but economists celebrated a 250th anniversary of their own on March 9, marking the original publication date of Adam Smith’s An Inquity into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. It’s of course fundamentally impossible to sum up a truly great work that runs more than 1,000 pages (in the edition on my bookshelf) in a quick sentence or a few hundred words. Below, I collected some of my posts over the years about aspects of Adam Smith’s work: just looking at the titles gives a sense of his breadth and insight. But here’s my own radical thought about Smith’s main insight: He was reconceptualizing, what should be meant by, yes, the “wealth of nations.”

Up until Smith’s time, the wealth of a country referred, explicitly or implicitly, to the wealth of its rulers: their stores of gold, the property they owned, the land over which they ruled, the number of soldiers, and so on. Smith offered a radicially different view. Smith argued instead that the wealth of a country was embodied in the abilities and efforts of its ordinary workers and in the consumption levels of average people. Maybe this seems obvious to you? But you are, after all, living in a world shaped by Smith’s great book.

From this point of departure, Smith then dug down into what made average citizens well-off. Yes, Smith pointed out that the operation of decentralized market forces were part of a higher standard of living. Look at the real world, then and now, and it’s impossible to deny the truth of that claim. But Smith also digs down into taxes, spending, education, trade, the role of money, and many other issues. Anyone who claims that Smith was an advocate for unfettered market forces is, to put it bluntly, ignorant and wrong.

It should be possible both to acknowledge that market forces can be extraordinarily powerful and productive, and to seek a deeper understanding of why and how this might be so, and also to acknowledge that market forces have both benefits and costs. The Wealth of Nations is, like the title says, an “inquiry” into these issues. Actual readers of the Wealth of Nations have long recognized the nuance, wide-ranging nature, and openness of spirit in Smith’s discussion. To illustrate the point, here’s the closing paragraph (chopped into smaller paragraphs for readability) of an essay by Jacob Viner based on a speech given on the 150th anniversary of The Wealth of Nations (“Adam Smith and Laissez Faire,” Journal of Political Economy, April 1927, 35:2 pp. 198-232).

Adam Smith was not a doctrinaire advocate of laissez faire. He saw a wide and elastic range of activity for government, and he was prepared to extend it even farther if government, by improving its standards of competence, honesty, and public spirit, showed itself entitled to wider responsibilities. He attributed great capacity to serve the general welfare to individual initiative applied in competitive ways to promote individual ends. … He helped greatly to free England from the bonds of a set of regulatory measures which had always been ill advised and based on fallacious economic notions, but he did not foresee that England would soon need a new set of regulations to protect her laboring masses against new, and to them dangerous, methods of industrial organization and industrial technique. Smith was endowed with more than the ordinary allotment of common sense, but he was not a prophet. But even in his own day, when it was not so easy to see, Smith saw that self-interest and competition were sometimes treacherous to the public interest they were supposed to serve, and he was prepared to have government exercise some measure of control over them where the need could be shown and the competence of government for the task demonstrated.

His sympathy with the humble and the lowly, with the farmer and the laborer, was made plain for all to see. He had not succeeded in completely freeing himself from mercantilistic delusions, and he had his own peculiar doctrinal and class prejudices. But his prejudices, such as they were, were against the powerful and the grasping, and it was the interests of the general masses that he wished above all to promote, in an age when even philosophers rarely condescended to deal sympathetically with their needs. He had little trust in the competence or good faith of government. He knew who controlled it, and whose purposes they tried to serve, though against the local magistrate his indictment was probably unduly harsh. He saw, nevertheless, that it was necessary, in the absence of a better instrument, to rely upon government for the performance of many tasks which individuals as such would not do, or could not do, or could do only badly.

He did not believe that laissez faire was always good, or always bad. It depended on circumstances; and as best he could, Adam Smith took into account all of the circumstances he could find. In these days of contending schools, each of them with the deep, though momentary, conviction that it, and it alone, knows the one and only path to economic truth, how refreshing it is to return to the Wealth of Nations with its eclecticism, its good temper, its common sense, and its willingness to grant that those who saw things differently from itself were only partly wrong.

Here are some of my previous posts over the years about aspects of Adam Smith’s work, looking at both The Wealth of Nations as well as his 1759 book which established his reputation at the time, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. The highest compliment I can pay is not that a work is correct, but that it is endlessly interesting, and Smith’s work reaches that level.

• “Adam Smith on Those Who Wish to Dominate Others” (March 6, 2025)
• “Does the Invisible Hand Work For Honor, Too? A Thought from Montesquieu” (August 22, 2025)
• “Adam Smith and Pin-making: Some Inconvenient Truths” (August 23, 2022)
• “Adam Smith: On the Disposition to Admire the Rich and Neglect the Poor” (December 27, 2021)
• “Adam Smith as a Practical Development Economist” (June 23, 2020)
• “Gifts and Consumer Durables: A Meditation with Adam Smith” (December 24, 2020)
• “Thought on Sumptuary Laws: Adam Smith to Plastic Bags” (March 4, 2020)
• “How Adam Smith’s Idea of the Division of Labor Led to the Digital Computer” (Aust 23, 2019)
• “Joan Robinson on Poets, Mathematicians, Economists, and Adam Smith” (December 31, 2018)
• “Adam Smith on the Conversable Spirit” (January 1, 2018)
• “Adam Smith on the Benefits of Public Education” (September 1, 2017)
• “Adam Smith: The Plight of the Impartial Spectator in Times of Faction” (August 15, 2017)
• “Adam Smith on Human Capacity for Self-Deceit” (July 28, 2016)
• “Adam Smith on Beggar Thy Neighbor” (May 3, 2017)
• “Adam Smith’s Watch-Making Example: Technological Progress Before the Industrial Revolution” (November 3, 2016)
• “Adam Smith on Teaching and Incentives” (August 29, 2016)
• “Adam Smith and the Economics of U.S. Independence” (July 4, 2014)
• “Division of Labor: GM, Toyota and Adam Smith” (February 10. 2014)
• “Adam Smith’s Support for Regulatory Financial Firewalls” (October 17, 2013)
• “Thoughts on the Diamond-Water Paradox” (August 22, 2013)

Want more? Here are links to two articles from the Journal of Economic Perspectives, where I work as Managing Editor, on Smithian topics:

• Persky, Joseph. 1989. “Retrospectives: Adam Smith’s Invisible Hands.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 3 (4): 195–201.
• Ashraf, Nava, Colin F. Camerer, and George Loewenstein. 2005. “Adam Smith, Behavioral Economist.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 19 (3): 131–145.

The post The Wealth of Nations: What’s It all About? first appeared on Conversable Economist.

The US Postal Service has been losing money every year for about two decades, and borrowing money to keep the mail running. Now it has hit the debt limit imposed by Congress. Elena Patel of the Brookings Institutiontells the US side of the story in “What’s next? The US Postal Service’s fiscal crisis: When universal service outlives its financing model” (March 13, 2026) and provides some international perspective in “Postal systems worldwide confront the same financial pressures” (March 10, 2026).

Here’s an overview of the situation. The US Postal Service has a legal monopoly on the delivery of first-class mail. The idea was that the profits from first-class mail could then provide a cross-subsidy to support universal, six-day-a-week mail delivery. But as electronic communication has soared (email and text, in particular), first-class mail has dropped by more than half in the last two decades.

Luckily for the US Service, shipping and packages are up, and also pay a lot more than delivering letters. As a result, total revenue for the US Post Office has been roughly flat. However, because the US Postal Service does not have a monopoly on package delivery, these revenues are less likely to create a profit-stream that can cross-subsidize other Post Office operations.

However, about two-thirds of total USPS spending is on labor compensation and benefits, and while revenues have been flat, total costs have edged up over time.

So what’s to be done? The simplest step is probably for Congress to let the US Postal Service borrow more money, although that of course doesn’t actually address the problem.

Congress could admit that the old model of relying on first-class mail to generate funds for universal six-day service doesn’t work any more. Thus, Congress could let the Post Office shift to, say, delivering first-class mail to everyone, but only three days per week: for example, half the country would get Monday, Wednesday, Friday delivery, while the other half would get Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday delivery. Perhaps package delivery could continue to be daily, everywhere. Or if Congress wants to keep the universal six-day service, it could pay for it with a direct appropriation of perhaps $6 billion per year.

It’s also common to point out that if you take out the cost of obligations to retirees, the US Postal Service would actually be running at break-even, or a little better. But of course, if one could just remove the cost of obligations to retirees, federal, state, and local budgets all over the country would also be a lot closer to break-even. But at least in theory, Congress could take over these retiree costs.

The same decline in first-class mail is happening everywhere. What are other high-income countries doing about it? Patel notes:

In March 2025, Denmark’s state-owned postal operator PostNord announced it would traditional nationwide letter delivery, citing a roughly 90% decline in letter volumes since 2000. … 

In July 2025, the United Kingdom’s regulator approved reforms to the universal service affecting Royal Mail, a privately owned operator, in response to declining letter volumes and sustained financial pressure. The changes preserve six-day First Class delivery but allow Second Class letters to be delivered on alternate weekdays rather than six days a week …

In September 2025, persistent losses and falling letter volumes in Canada led the federal government to instruct Canada Post to begin a structural transformation, authorizing the conversion of four million door-to-door delivery addresses to community mailboxes,

I have no easy answer for the US Postal Service. But it’s been clear for some years now that it’s longstanding business model isn’t workable.

The post The US Postal Service Hits Its Debt Ceiling first appeared on Conversable Economist.

Donald Trump is not the first ruler who thought he could push around Iran, which used to be known as Persia, and before that was an area of the world ruled by the Akkadians, the Sumerians, the Assyrians, the Medes, the Scythians, the Babylonians, the Archimedeans.

The Persians won their empire beginning in about 552 BC when they defeated the Medes, who ruled what is now northern Iran and Mesopotamia. Then the Persians turned west and conquered and annexed Babylonia, now Iraq and part of Turkey, around 540 BC. From there, they turned south to conquer Egypt around 525 BC, and then they turned east and went after what is now India in 518 BC, occupying the northwest regions for about two centuries. Turning west again, the Persians went after the Greeks in 499 BC, finally occupying Cyprus and some of the Greek regions in Asia Minor, but failing to take Athens and Sparta. That campaign lasted from about 492 to 490 BC. Then they put down revolts in Egypt and Babylonia from 486 to 484 BC. But then in 480 BC, the Greeks revolted and took back Macedonia, but lost Athens. In 477 BC, another Greek revolt rose up, and fighting went on until 449 BC, at which point, the Persians lost what is now Turkey and their last foothold in what would become Europe.

So go back and have a look at those years, beginning in 552 BC through 449 BC. That’s a fucking century of war fought by the Persians to take and control and then lose empire.

Trump keeps talking about the Iranians being “at war” with the U.S. for 47 years. The Persians thought nothing of fighting wars, not fake Trumpian wars, that lasted two years, five years, ten years, war after conquering armies and taking land. A couple of centuries later, the Persians would go up against Alexander’s armies, fighting dozens of battles between 334 and 327 BC, with Alexander himself dying in Babylon in 332 BC at the age of 32.

History marches on, and on, through the Parthian empire, conquering Romans and others, through the Sasanian empire that controlled Persia for four centuries. That would be four centuries of battles, one after the other, against Romans and more Babylonians and Armenians and…I’m losing my ability to follow it all, and I’m only in the third century AD, and they’re still fighting Romans and Kushans – the empire that is now Afghanistan, parts of India and Pakistan and Uzbekistan and Nepal and Tajikistan.

Are you getting the drift here? Trump has got himself not into a new forever war but has just become the latest fool to toy around with a forever war that has been going on for several thousand years. You have to wonder if anyone in the White House or the Pentagon bothered to get out the Encyclopedia Britannica and look up “Iran” or “Persia.” Correction: you don’t have to wonder because you already know the answer.

They didn’t.

It’s even questionable, now that they’re moving several thousand Marines into the region on a ship and the words “boots on the ground” have re-entered the lingo, if they bothered having a look at a fucking map of Iran. Here’s one:

See all that dark brown stuff running from the far north in Iran, down to the gulf and around the Strait of Hormuz and all the way to Iran’s southern border? Those are mountains, which range in height from more than 15,000 feet all the way through dozens and dozens that exceed 12,000 feet, down through more dozens in the 10,000-foot range…

Do you know what mountains mean militarily? They are very, very difficult to cross. You can fly over them, of course, but in Iran once you fly over one mountain range, there’s another. And then another.

And if you look up Iran in the Encyclopedia Britannica, you will immediately come across the word “arid.” That means not much water. In fact, the flat regions of Iran are deserts. So, if you want to invade Iran, you’ve got to bring your own water, which you have to do anyway, because drinking the local water will make American soldiers sick.

Well, at least we have some experience there. In Iraq and Afghanistan, we had to bring our own water to drink. If you were with the American military in Iraq and Afghanistan, which I was in 2003 and 2004, everywhere you looked, you saw pallets of bottled water. Many, many pallets of water. Which had to be driven into the country, or more often, flown into Iraq and Afghanistan on military transport aircraft.

That would be the same military transports that move soldiers around, and move food for those soldiers, and move their ammunition, and their artillery cannons, and their Humvees…

And everything else.

Iraq is 169,000 square miles with a population in 2003 of 27 million people. Afghanistan is 653,000 square miles and in 2001 had a population of 20-25 million people.

Iran has 93 million people, and there are 636,000 square miles of it.

We couldn’t conquer little 170 thousand square mile Iraq with its 27 million people. We definitely didn’t conquer the 20 million or so people of Afghanistan.

It’s overwhelming, writing about war. Any war. Any time. In ancient history, or twenty years ago, or today, no matter where the war is, or why it is being fought, or by whom against whom.

Our way of fighting wars ever since the war we fought in Vietnam, which by the way, we also lost, is to invade the country with our “overwhelming force” and our “warrior ethos” and immediately set up a series of little Americas where our soldiers can stay when they are not out in the country we have invaded actually fighting the enemy. We call them “basecamps,” and we build big berms around them, and we put up concrete walls and we string miles of razor wire, and we build concrete bunkers to protect ourselves, and at least in the last couple of wars, our soldiers did not go outside the basecamps unless they were in heavily armored vehicles that were built to be as impervious as possible to IED’s, which the enemy used to kill American soldiers.

We didn’t have to worry about drones back then, but as the war in Ukraine has taught us, now we very much have to worry about drones, which can knock out an armored vehicle like a tank that costs several million dollars with a drone that costs a thousand dollars or even less.

Russia has tens of thousands of drones. Ukraine has tens of thousands of drones. The two countries – one huge, with a huge population, the other small, with a comparatively tiny population – have fought each other to a standstill. Drone warfare largely accounts for this.

Iran has many thousands of drones. They are so good at drone warfare that they taught the Russians how to use drones in war and how to manufacture them. Their drones are delta-wing affairs with large warheads that can fly below radar and are very, very difficult to shoot down. Iran is using their Shaheed drones, which cost about $20,000 to $50,000 each, against U.S. targets around the Middle East, and against oil and gas facilities belonging to Gulf nations and to Jordan.

We do not have thousands of drones. We have some very, very expensive drones such as the Reaper, which cost millions of dollars. If you want to know how things are going with the U.S. military and our foray into drone warfare, you can read this article from Aviation Week, published in its March 9-22 issue, sent to me by a friend.

(A subscription to the online version of Aviation Week is $139.00, or I would provide a link.)

In case you can’t read the text, it describes a training exercise for the 82^nd Airborne Division which was provided with 42 unmanned aircraft surveillance drones, of which they were able to get only four (4) “up at any point in time,” according to the article. The four drones identified some of the targets they were dispatched to find, but only 42 percent of the targets were hit by mortars in the training exercise. Crucially, the four drones were able to identify 399 more targets that were not hit because, according to the article, “the sheer volume of the targets identified by the reduced number of airborne drones exceeded the unit’s ability to summon mortar, artillery, or air attacks within the eight-day event. We just couldn’t shoot because the fires apparatus or our own human bandwidth – cognitive bandwidth – wasn’t there to process it and get it done.”

Have another look. They were issued 42 drones, of which they could use only four, and the article tells us that the drone could stay airborne only 28 to 29 minutes, and then “took 2.5 hours to recharge.” The article goes on to say that the infantry soldiers did not carry enough recharging capacity, so they had to wait for vehicles to arrive with generators to provide power, and “the vehicles struggled to continue to generate electrical power when repositioned to different locations.”

Everything I’ve read about the war in Ukraine has said that drone units have to “reposition” constantly in order to avoid being hit by enemy drones which are continually surveilling their locations so they can hit them with mortars and artillery and…enemy drones.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this article describes a disaster in U.S. military drone capability. But not to worry – two of the Trump sons have started a company, or invested in a company, to provide drones to the Pentagon. The company is still getting going, but again not to worry, they’re already making money.

What we learn from all that history about all those wars and the current stories we are reading about Trump’s war on Iran, including the story in Aviation Week, is this: Wars are gigantic machines for the production of solving problems that are almost never solved adequately, so the wars are lost, one after another, by either side, it doesn’t matter which, because the side that “wins” loses too in blood and treasure. Wars also serve another purpose: to make profits for companies which produce war making materials. Wars achieve that goal almost every time. In the time of the Persians and the Greeks, someone was manufacturing bows and spears and slings and swords and shields and armor and helmets and catapults and other apparatus that threw huge stones. Empires were made and unmade, and people got rich even back then.

It never stops. More wars, more weapons, more military problems. Donald Trump has a huge problem right now. With all the bombs and missiles and jet planes and aircraft carriers and destroyers and submarines at his disposal, Iran has a coastline that runs hundreds of miles along the gulf, from which they can shoot missiles or launch drones at anything in the water that floats, most especially oil tankers carrying 20 percent of the world’s oil to countries such as Japan and China and Indonesia and yes, the United States and Europe. And Iran has the Strait of Hormuz, which makes drone launching and missile shooting by Iran even easier, because it’s only 21 miles wide, and those oil tankers are the proverbial sitting ducks of warfare.

One of the ways you can solve military problems is with alliances. In the Corinthian war, Persia allied itself with Athens and Corinth and Thebes to fight Sparta and the Peloponnesian League…and they won! In Evagoras I’s revolt, which ran from 391 to 376 BC -- that’s 15 years of fighting – Persia allied itself with old enemy Athens and one of the empires it conquered earlier, Egypt, to take over the island of Cyprus. Don’t ask me why they wanted to fight 15 years over Cyprus. That would take more history than I have time for. But they did it! They made allies out of enemies and won yet another war in a long, long series of wars.

With the exception of Israel, Donald Trump didn’t bother making alliances before he went to war against Iran, and now when he wants other countries ally themselves with his war effort and help him protect the Strait of Hormuz…well, let’s just say they’re not standing in line to volunteer.

One of the many things that Donald Trump does not understand is that these ancient civilizations, of which Iran is certainly one, made war over anything, or any reasons, including that some ruler killed another ruler’s brother or cousin. For centuries, war is what they did.

Having some asshole with orange hair lobbing missiles and bombs at them is nothing new. Used to be big stones and slings and arrows? Now it’s modern slings and arrows? It’s still outsiders doing nasty stuff to people who have lived there not for centuries, but for thousands of years. Trump is just another newcomer with an ego itch to scratch, like an Alexander with a fake tan.

Wars are overwhelming because so many people have died for such ridiculous reasons. Trump is just another ridiculous reason in a long, long list of them. To the Iranians, he’s not even a ruler of a rival empire, except in his own mind.

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As we enter Week Three of Trump’s idiot war against Iran, we can see with an increasing amount of confidence that we’ve lost. Oh, Iran hasn’t crushed us with its military. That’s not going to happen. It can’t. Our two militaries are entirely mismatched in a head-to-head confrontation.

The problem is that we are not fighting that kind of war.

There’s a running joke/gallows humor that generals always fight the last war. There’s some truth to that, but that’s not really what happened here. Even our most MAGA generals would have known that attacking Iran like this was a strategic and logistical nightmare waiting to happen. But they followed their orders.

Now we are trapped in a war we can’t end.

Trump thought he could end it whenever he wanted, but Trump is a pig-stupid dumbfuck and thought a lot of things.

He thought he would be able to just swoop in, drop a bunch of bombs, kill Iran’s leadership, and declare victory.

He thought Iran’s government would collapse and be replaced with American puppets.

He thought their military would surrender.

He thought the blessed oil would keep flowing.

He thought the war would be quick and stay contained to Iran’s borders.

His generals knew that wouldn’t be the case. The intelligence community, what’s left of it, knew that wouldn’t be the case. Every single expert on the Middle East knew that wouldn’t be the case.

But Trump knew better. The diaper-wearing imbecile with advanced dementia knew better, and he was egged on by people who either knew better but didn’t care or by people just as fucking stupid as he is.

Now we are trapped in a war we can’t end.

We could withdraw all of our military from the Persian Gulf tomorrow. We could stop bombing Iran and issue a public apology. Too late. At this point, it won’t make a difference. Iran is not going to stop.

It’s important to understand that Iran was willing to make a deal. Despite Trump being a massive lying piece of shit, Iran would really have preferred not to be bombed. So they were willing to make incredibly painful concessions. The negotiations that Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff were conducting? They were working. But they weren’t supposed to, and that was a problem. The solution, of course, was a surprise attack in the middle of negotiations. Possibly the least honorable and most scumbag move a nation can undertake. But that’s who we are now.

Putting aside the fact that Iran’s new Supreme Leader has a significant grudge against the US and Israel for killing his parents, his wife, and his son in a sneak attack, Iran has every incentive to keep fighting. So even if Trump cuts and runs, the war will continue.

Here’s the calculation: Iran was obviously overwhelmed within hours. Its leadership killed. Its military squashed. Infrastructure across the country shattered.

And yet, they still retaliated. And they continue to retaliate. Iran has rained death on several Gulf states and closed the Strait of Hormuz, beginning a global economic cardiac event. If Iran continues, it will, in fact, cause a full-blown economic heart attack in every corner of the world. This is the war we were not ready to fight. We should have been ready to fight it, but we were not. Why? Because Trump is a pig-stupid dumbfuck and the people around him are grossly incompetent. They knew what Iran could and almost certainly would do. But they just ignored it and went to war anyway.

Just to be extra clear how extraordinarily stupid these fucking morons are, we had minesweeper ships in the Middle East just a few months ago. We sent them away to be decommissioned. The newer ones are in the Pacific, twiddling their thumbs. Please recall, the regime has been planning this attack for months and could have sent these ships in anticipation. Hopefully wouldn’t need them, but only a fucking imbecile wouldn’t plan for mines at all.

Now, we have mines, drones are still flying, and the Strait of Hormuz is closed.

Iran has no incentive to stop until everyone understands their actual power. It’s not their army or their navy or their air force. It’s their ability to inflict so much economic pain on the world while also terrorizing the Gulf states that attacking them with anything less than a full multinational occupation force is clearly seen as a terrible idea.

The Trump regime is beginning to realize this and has been demanding other nations send their navies into Hormuz to escort tankers, something our own Navy is currently not willing to do because it’s too dangerous. So far, everyone appears to be telling Trump to go fuck himself. I cannot think of another time the United States has called for military aid and every ally has refused. It’s an unheard-of humiliation for Trump, but absolutely unsurprising.

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You may or may not recall, but Trump has spent the last decade treating our allies, every single one of them, like absolute dirt. He calls them losers and leeches and our enemies. He’s waged trade wars against them. Canceled treaties. Abused their citizens traveling here. Threatened invasions and sided with hostile nations against them.

After all, America is all-powerful and doesn’t need allies! That’s what “America First” means, right? We stand alone and force our will onto the world, the way Trump forces himself onto underage children. So cool! So tough! Fuckin’ A for ‘Murika!

Now we are trapped in a war we can’t end, and Trump went crying to everyone he’s been spitting on for a decade, begging for help. Gee, I can’t imagine why they hung up the phone.

Japan not planning Hormuz escort mission, PM Takaichi says

Federal politics: Australia will not send navy ship to Strait of Hormuz, minister says — as it happened

Germany to Trump: We won’t help you reopen the Strait of Hormuz

UK will not be drawn into wider war in Middle East, says Keir Starmer

While it’s true that reopening the Strait is in everyone’s best interest (except Iran), our former allies are not going to send their men and women to die for Trump's arrogance and pig-stupid dumbfuckery. More importantly, they know that Trump will literally throw away the lives of thousands of his own military and countless civilians for no reason other than to benefit himself:

If you were another country, would you put your troops in harm’s way for that fucking guy? I think not.

On top of all that, Trump has no plan. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s listening to warmongering fucksticks telling him that setting fire to everything will show how strong he is. He’s listening to Nazi Ghoul Stephen Miller tell him that war will allow him to declare unlimited “national emergencies” to seize control of elections and outlaw dissent and shut down all opposition.

But Trump is also seeing the stock market fluctuate wildly and oil prices rise. He’s seeing polls weighing heavily against him. He’s seeing condemnation coming from all corners, including his own people.

Trump, of course, is lashing out in panic, demanding the press only report good news. He’s now threatening to shut down media outlets that continue to report the truth about the regime’s pig-stupid dumbfuckery and how unprepared it was to fight an extended war.

Good luck with that? I’m sure Bari Weiss’s CBS will comply, and Fox News has been cheerleading the entire time. But few other news outlets not already MAGA-fied are going to throw themselves on that grenade. Maybe if the regime had taken the time to construct a narrative before launching the war, the press would be more willing to carry water. It certainly worked for the Iraq invasion.

But they didn’t, and no one is going to pay attention to Trump’s childish temper tantrum. So much winning!

So here we are. Stuck in a war we cannot win, without allies, against an enemy we have left with no choice but to wage economic war on the world. Our economy was already struggling, and when the price of gas continues to rise, it will stall completely. When fertilizer runs short, the price of groceries will skyrocket, leading to even more economic stress. When gas becomes even more expensive as Trump continues to do pig-stupid dumbfuck things like knock Iran’s oil production offline, our economy will fall into a tailspin and Trump will not be able to blame Democrats or migrants or Trans kids. He’ll try to blame Iran, but no matter how loudly he screams it, we’re all going to remember that he started this war on a whim. Iran is not the hero of the story, but they surely aren’t the aggressor.

I don’t really know for sure what comes next. I do know that there is no scenario where the United States doesn’t lose. Even if Iran were to completely capitulate tomorrow, it would take weeks to clear the Strait of Hormuz, and the economic damage is compounding every day. Every week they refuse to stop fighting, the Strait stays closed, and the damage gets worse.

Iran is, perversely, holding most of the cards here. A land invasion would be catastrophic, and the Strait would stay closed for months, ensuring a deep global recession. And in the end, there is zero guarantee we would topple the regime. We would literally destroy our own economy for nothing.

No matter what happens, this will end in utter humiliation for the United States and its fascist leaders. The regime deserves no less, but we deserve better. Our military deserves better. The people of Iran deserve better.

When the regime falls, and it will, all of these filthy war criminals have to be put on trial. We will dig through their communications, and we will know why they launched this war. Bribes from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE? Trump’s desperation to bury the Epstein files and be hailed as a “wartime president?” Was Trump, suffering from severe dementia, manipulated by Lindsay Graham and other neo-con warhawks?

We will know, and they will all pay for what they’ve done and the lives they stole to feed their monstrous egos and greed. But for now, all we can do is watch1 this regime of soulless monsters play war and hold them accountable for the evil they’re committing.

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There are 231 days until the most important midterm election in American history. The regime is afraid, and they should be. We are legion, and they are weak. Stay strong. You are never alone.

Iran has Donald Trump right where they want him: Trapped in the Strait of Hormuz like an oil tanker wearing a suit and red tie and a pair of Florsheim’s. How is he going to end the war that he alone is responsible for? He bragged and he bragged and he bragged about how powerful the U.S. military is. The navy is the biggest, has the most ships, can be “projected” anywhere in the world. The air force has the most bombers, the only ones with stealth capability, the best bombs, the best air defense missiles, the best of everything. The army is the most “lethal” ever, has the best weapons and the best training.

He said everything but the word “cakewalk” in his announcement that he had begun bombing Iran on February 28. He gloated when Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed, along with the head of the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps, the defense minister, the chief of staff of Iran’s armed forces, and the head of the national defense council – practically the entire command structure of Iran’s military and government.

This war was supposed to go like his other recent military adventures. He took out the president of Venezuela in a matter of hours and installed his own puppet leader who is turning over the country’s oil infrastructure to U.S. companies. He said he knocked out Iran’s nuclear program with a two-week bombing attack. He bombed the Houthis. He’s been blowing alleged drug boats out of the water in both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. He’s done counterterrorism bombings in Somalia, Nigeria, and Syria.

Up until now, he snapped his fingers and Hegseth jumped and bombs fell and no Americans were killed and there was no disruption to the American economy. It was like magic.

Now, Americans are being killed and wounded, Iran is still fighting, and he can’t make up his mind what’s happening. He says the war will end “soon,” we’ve already “won,” we need to “go further,” we still need to “finish the job.”

But what will “finish the job” look like? Iran’s regime didn’t collapse. They fought back with missile and drone strikes on 12 countries and American military installations in the Middle East.

And they closed the Strait of Hormuz. Twenty percent of the world’s oil stopped flowing.

Oil prices went up, then they went up further. Gas prices are up. Air travel is disrupted. The American economy is threatened right along with the rest of the world’s economy.

Donald Trump’s poll numbers tanked. His approval rating has never been lower. His disapproval has never been higher. Support for his war against Iran is down. Only Republicans are standing by him on the war.

More Republicans have announced resignations from Congress. Democrats are flipping state elections from New Hampshire to Arkansas. In North Carolina, 200,000 more Democrats voted in the Senate primary than Republicans. In Pennsylvania, Democrats won two special elections. At the House Republican retreat in Trump’s golf resort in Doral, Florida, one House Republican member of Congress told a reporter that “No one thinks we’re keeping the majority except for the speaker.”

What happens if the midterm elections go as expected and Republicans lose control of the House? Trump will be impeached. Not one Republican bill will reach the floor.

What happens if Democrats win control of the Senate, as more prognosticators are predicting by the minute? Trump’s court appointments from district through appeals to the Supreme Court are a dead letter.

Trump fired Kristi Noem. Now Bondi’s position as attorney general is looking weak. The director of the Trump Kennedy Center just resigned. Trump wanted Fed Chair Powell prosecuted. A federal judge just stopped that prosecution in its tracks with a 27-page opinion rejecting subpoenas for the Federal Reserve Board.

The proverbial rats are jumping off the proverbial ship. How is Trump going to convince Iran to stop attacking oil tankers and let shipping resume? Say “I’m sorry” and stop the bombing?

Regime change is coming, all right. Donald Trump’s.

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The wars carried out by the United States against Iraq and Afghanistan are not perfectly analogous to Trump’s war on Iran, but they are close enough. In both Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military went in and quickly overwhelmed the opposing forces – Saddam’s army and the Taliban. The attack on Iraq was such as success, that President George W. Bush took a victory lap on a U.S. aircraft carrier wearing a navy flight suit and standing beneath a gigantic banner that read “Mission Accomplished.”

Then came the hard part.

Insurgents in both countries nibbled away at American forces and resolve with IED attacks, ambushes, shelling American bases using mortars and light artillery. The opposition took a toll, one that the U.S. could not endure in the field with its military or economically at home. The wars cost American taxpayers $6 trillion in direct costs with trillions more that will come due over the next several decades in veterans’ medical and disability and retirement benefits.

That’s just the dollars. A total of more than seven thousand American service members were killed over 20 years in the two wars. Each of those soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen and airwomen was someone’s son or daughter, spouse, mother or father, brother or sister.

The cost of sustaining those wars in both blood and treasure became too much. The U.S. has largely pulled out of Iraq and is completely gone from Afghanistan. Another way of putting it is, we lost.

Trump’s war on Iran is only in its second week and its costs are soaring. In a closed-door briefing with lawmakers on Tuesday, Pentagon officials estimated that the first six days of the war cost $11.3 billion. The war has already hit its 12^th day, and it’s reasonable to assume the same amount has been spent in the second six-day period, so by Sunday thereabouts, we’ll be in a twenty five billion dollar war. Already, Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson admits that he’s going to have to put up a spending package for the war that one of his Republican colleagues told The Hill “will be very expensive.” House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries has not said whether he and House Democrats will back additional spending for the war. Any spending package for the war will be “supplemental,” which means that it will not be covered by taxes but instead will be added to the national debt that currently stands at $39 trillion and counting.

But those are the dry dollar totals. The real costs of this war are being paid not only by American citizens, but by people all over the world. Trump and his drum-pounder Secretary of Flexo-Macho Pete Hegseth and their Israeli counterparts have fired missiles and dropped bombs on Iran for almost 14 days, and what do we have to show for it? A new Iranian leader who is worse than the last one and a government and military establishment committed to outlasting the assault by the U.S. and Israel on their country. It was always going to cost Iran dearly in blood and treasure if the U.S. and Israel attacked, and it has. But they live there. Iran is their country, not ours. When Trump is gone and Netanyahu is no longer Israel’s leader, Iran as a country and as an Islamic republic will still be there.

Iran is showing us every day how they will survive. All they have to do is keep the Strait of Hormuz closed, and not only the U.S. and Israel but the entire world will have to absorb costs that no countries appear ready to endure.

The New York Times published two stories today on how badly the war is hurting the world’s economy. “This really is the big one,” David Goldwyn, a former U.S. diplomat and U.S. Energy Department official told the Times, describing the effect of shutting down oil trade out of the Gulf. The Saudi chief of the world’s largest oil and gas company, Aramco, said consequences of this war will be “catastrophic.”

The Times story lists many of the countries whose economies depend on Gulf oil and gas. Taiwan gets more than 60 percent of its oil through the Strait of Hormuz. A quarter of its natural gas comes from Qatar, which had to shut down its gas production after Iran struck two of its gas facilities last week, according to the Times. The Philippines, which gets more than 90 percent of its oil from the Middle East – meaning the Gulf – has gone to a four-day work week to conserve energy. Bangladesh, which has converted near all its energy production to gas-burning power plants, is shutting down universities and is trying to cut its transportation costs. Bangladesh produces containerships full of stuff that is sold in Target and Walmart stores. Those costs will go up.

Europe is getting hurt. Great Britain imports Middle East oil and is affected. Over there on the east side of Europe, Putin is rubbing his hands together celebrating every bomb the U.S. and Israel are dropping on Iran. Trump has already “eased” – don’t you love that word? – sanctions on Russian oil to keep oil markets from crashing even deeper. That means more money for Putin to prosecute his war in Ukraine. CNN is reporting that Russia is helping Iran with “drone tactics,” using what they have learned fighting Ukraine to help Iran fight for its survival. Russia has for years bought Shaheed drones from Iran and used Iranian technology and expertise to set up its own drone production facilities. It’s only a matter of time before Russia begins supplying Iran with drones they once imported from that country.

The new and very angry leader of Iran, Mojtaba Khamenei, recently ordered the mining of the Strait of Hormuz. Iran has struck more than a dozen oil tankers in the Gulf since the war began, and two are currently on fire in waters off Iraq. A third, a containership, was struck near the port of Dubai by an Iranian drone and is disabled.

The price of oil hit $100 a barrel again today, and Iran warned the world that prices could go up to $200 a barrel.

That could be a gigantic bluff, but maybe not. Iran doesn’t have to do much more than it has been doing to continue costing the world hundreds of billions of dollars in increased energy costs and reduced industrial production and trade. The oil tankers that are on fire in the Gulf were said to have been hit by small Iranian boats loaded with explosives. Iran can keep doing that for days, weeks, months if necessary. All they have to do is sit there overlooking the Strait of Hormuz and lob an occasional Shaheed drone at an oil tanker sitting off its coast. More than 150 oil tankers have dropped anchor in the Persian Gulf region since February 28, with as many as 200 more tankers and containerships stalled in the Arabian sea waiting for the Strait of Hormuz to reopen.

Iran had already inflicted a lot of damage on U.S. forces stationed on bases in the Middle East. The Pentagon was finally forced to admit that in addition to seven dead soldiers, 140 have been wounded, eight of them seriously. Iran has rocketed and sent drones into airports, hotels, apartment buildings and other commercial structures in a dozen countries around the Middle East, turning our attack on Iran into a regional war. Even though the Pentagon has announced that the pace of Iran’s missile launches has dropped, Iran can keep doing damage to U.S. bases and other Middle Eastern nations for a long, long time.

It is not costing Iran $2 billion a day. The missiles we’ve been firing at Iran cost in the millions, as do the defensive missiles we’ve had to shoot at missiles fired by Iran at U.S. facilities. Iran’s missiles are comparatively cheap, and its Shaheed drones cost somewhere between $20,000 and $50,000 to build, and they have built tens of thousands – so many, in fact, that they were selling them to Russia until Iran helped Russia build its own Shaheed factories.

This war is a matter of simple math, and no matter how you add things up, it’s not favorable to the United States and the rest of the world. Iran has the geography of its control of the Strait of Hormuz that costs it exactly nothing, and what we have is a diminishing stock of very, very expensive weapons that take a long time to manufacture and a president who keeps calling his war an “excursion,” as if the war he launched against Iran is a trip to a golf course or a picnic on a Florida beach.

The president of the United States has no fucking idea what he’s doing. He started a war during an election year that was already looking bad for his party and is now looking terrible. He doesn’t know why he started his war on Iran. He doesn’t know how he’s going to end it, or what ending the war will even look like. The new leader of Iran knows that all he has to do is sit back and keep the Strait of Hormuz closed, and the pressure of oil prices on the world’s economy will cause Donald Trump to make one of his “deals” to end a war that he should have never started and will be seen in the eyes of the world as having lost.

Iran is in the driver’s seat in this war. Bad for U.S. Bad for Trump. Bad for Republicans in midterm elections. Terrible for families in U.S. and Iran and around the Gulf that have lost sons and daughters and husbands and wives and mothers and fathers. A stupid war started by a stupid man for stupid reasons not even he can figure out.

This war will go down in history. So will the man who started it, as the biggest loser of this century.

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