My friend Terrence Goggin, who writes the excellent Substack newsletter “West Point History Professor” — and yes, he did teach me history at the Academy back in the stone age — published an excellent column today on the possibility of Trump using ground troops to open the Strait of Hormuz by taking the Iranian city of Bandar Abbas, which sits right on the Strait and has an airport with an 11,000 foot runway. You can read his column here.

Basically, he describes what he calls a “wargame scenario” whereby the U.S. would use Marines headed to the region on the USS Tripoli and another Marine Expeditionary task force to take the Bandar Abbas airport and take control of the high ground overlooking the Strait of Hormuz, so Iran could no longer shoot anti-ship missiles and launch drones at oil tankers moving through the Strait. Goggin goes into a lot of detail, describing the 7,000-foot-high mountain range that overlooks the Bandar Abbas airport, specifying that Iranian defenses, including Iran’s army, would have to be defeated in these mountains in order to seize the airport and help control the Strait.

The Trump administration has also been talking about deploying soldiers from the 82^nd Airborne Division’s Immediate Response Force to the region. Reports today say that 750 soldiers have been alerted to deploy with thousands more standing by. There are about 4,500 to 5,000 Marines on the two Expeditionary Task Forces on their way to the Gulf.

Goggin’s column has an artist’s depiction map of what an assault would look like, and a map showing the mountain ranges (plural) that line the southern coast of Iran facing the Gulf. It’s such an interesting take on what kind of plans the Pentagon must be making about now, I decided I would spend some time this afternoon looking at Bandar Abbas on Google Earth maps and see more detail of what U.S. military forces might face if they should try such foolishness.

The first thing that struck me was Bandar Abbas itself. It’s a city of more than 500,000 residents. There are seven universities located there, along with at least two hospitals, including a children’s hospital. Here is what the skyline of the city looked like in 2007. You can be sure it has grown during the last 19 years:

Here is a screenshot from Google Earth showing just some of the mountain ranges immediately overlooking Bandar Abbas:

If you zoom in on the image, you’ll see the names of several dozen villages scattered throughout those mountains. I looked up a few of them. They have populations of 100 to 300. Sometimes the populations are given as “43 families,” which is actually an excellent way to present what U.S. military forces would be facing if Trump tells Hegseth’s Pentagon to make the grave, grave error of committing ground troops into the mountainous region overlooking Bandar Abbas in the hope they would be able to take control of what the military calls “the high ground.” As Goggin points out, the high ground in the case of this area of Iran is mountain ranges of 5,000 to 7,000 feet, all of which overlook the Strait of Hormuz and Bandar Abbas.

Goggin says the naval commander might use B-52 and B-1 bombers to drop glide bombs on gun, missile, and drone emplacements. After that, helicopter gunships would hit the area, taking care of Revolutionary Guard Corps troops still alive after the heavy bombing. Then Marines and soldiers from the 82^nd Airborne would move in on helicopters, with “targeted ground strikes” from fighter jets hitting Iran’s coastal denial forces.

Looking at the map shown above, and Google Earth satellite images of the mountain ranges north of Bandar Abbas, what I saw was hundreds of miles of more mountains, and hundreds and hundreds of villages in the valleys of the mountains. Every village can be assumed to have hundreds of residents who are, shall we say, unfriendly to American forces.

There is an enormous island, Qeshm Island, right in the Strait of Hormuz just off the coast of Bandar Abbas. It’s 85 miles long and 40 miles wide. The island, too, has an airport with a long runway. And it has a population of 150,000 Iranians who will be, shall we say, unfriendly to the idea of Americans coming to their home turf and taking it over and telling them what to do. If we’re going to control the Strait of Hormuz, we’ll have to control that island, too.

To the south of Bandar Abbas are more mountain ranges and dozens and dozens of villages overlooking the Strait of Hormuz, way too many for me to count. We know that Iran has many thousands of Shahed armed drones. I looked up their drones. They have five versions of the Shahed drone. They also have one called the Kaman 22, a “widebody” drone capable of carrying 300 pounds of explosives. Iran has 36 different varieties of drones. They have so many thousands of drones that for the last two or three years, they have been exporting them to Russia.

Here is a photo of a storage facility at a Shahed factory somewhere in Iran:

The U.S. has been trying to target Iranian missile and drone factories, but like Ukraine, most of their weapons factories are hidden underground. It is unknown how many U.S. or Israeli strikes have destroyed Iran’s drone factories, but if I were to guess, they haven’t gotten all of them, and the finished drones themselves have been moved out of the factories and concealed all over Iran.

The Shahed 131, shown above, is only 8 feet long with a 7-foot wingspan and weighs, with its warhead, about 300 pounds, is small enough to be concealed in the living room of a house. Launchers can be hidden in other living rooms. In one of the many, many villages along the Strait of Hormuz, Iranian men could remove a launcher from a house, go around to other houses, pick up a half dozen Shahed drones, and light their rocket boosters and send them on their way to attack targets across the Gulf, targets like ships in the Strait of Hormuz, or targets like U.S. Marines whom the Pentagon and Trump have been maybe insane enough to have walking around on Iranian soil in Bandar Abbas or on Qeshm Island.

After studying Google Earth maps and Iranian drones, I decided to see what Donald Trump said today as he walked out to his Marine helicopter on his way to play golf in Palm Beach, Florida. Here is what he told the press: “I don’t want to do a cease-fire. You know, you don’t do a cease-fire when you’re literally obliterating the other side.” Earlier, on Truth Social – because that’s where you run a war, you understand, on a social media site – Trump said, “I think we’ve won.” He’s still concerned about the Strait of Hormuz, of course, oil having ended the day at $112 a barrel, but he’s not worried. “The Hormuz Strait will have to be guarded and policed, as necessary, by other Nations who use it — The United States does not! If asked, we will help these Countries in their Hormuz efforts, but it shouldn’t be necessary once Iran’s threat is eradicated.” Because of course all those allies of ours are just chomping at the bit to commit their navies and armies to take over and control the Strait of Hormuz, now that we and Israel have bombed the shit out of Iran and gotten them all pissed off at us and Israel and the countries in the Gulf and everybody else but Russia.

Just between you and me, the United States has used oil for decades that has been shipped through the Strait of Hormuz from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait and Iraq and other Gulf nations.

Donald Trump his Secretary of the Push-Up Hegseth have it all figured out. He’s not worried about the 125,000 crack troops of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, or the 300,000 soldiers in Iran’s regular army. Have you read anything or seen anything on the teevee about all our missiles and bombs knocking out Revolutionary Guards or Iran’s regular army forces? I haven’t. An outfit called Human Rights Activists in Iran says that about 1,300 civilians have been killed so far in the war, and about 1,100 military personnel have been killed. They caution that the figure for military deaths is probably low, because such figures are classified. But let’s say it’s ten times higher. That’s still only about 11,000 deaths in the Iranian military out of a total of probably 500,000, when you include Iran’s air force and other services.

So, what are we to think with Trump deciding one day we’ve won the war and the same day saying we have more bombing to do, while he’s got Hegseth ordering the 82^nd Airborne over there and sending fleets of navy ships full of Marines to the Gulf?

And what about all those mountains and villages where Iranian regular army forces could hide, not to mention irregulars that I’m sure some day we’ll be referring to as “insurgents?” What about all those drones, thousands and thousands of them, that are scattered all over the tens of thousands of square miles of Iran?

Let’s be brief: If Trump orders American soldiers into Iran, it will be a bloodbath.

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Trump has been flirting with the idea of using nuclear weapons since he ran for office in 2016. That year, during a townhall with Chris Matthews on MSNBC, when Matthews told Trump, “They’re hearing a guy running for president of the United States talking of maybe using nuclear weapons. Nobody wants to hear that about an American president.” Trump answered, “Then why are we making them?” During the same interview, Trump said, “Would there be a time when it could be used? Possibly. Possibly,” finishing his comments on the use of nuclear weapons by telling Matthews he wasn’t going to “take any cards off the table.”

During a national security briefing at the Pentagon after he took office in 2017, Trump told the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson that he wanted the U.S. nuclear stockpile increased significantly. It was after Trump’s comment on nukes that Tillerson reportedly called Trump a “moron” on his way out of the briefing.

Today, The Economist ran a cover story called “Blind Fury” on why the “War in Iran is making Trump look weaker – and angrier.” They’re right. Trump’s fury is on the rise. I wouldn’t have wanted to be in the room yesterday when TV footage showed explosions at the South Pars and Ras Laffan natural gas facilities being hit in an exchange of missiles by Israel and Iran. The explosions sent oil prices above $120 a barrel before they settled at $109 late today.

Big explosions give Donald Trump bad ideas. There he is in his little dining room off the Oval Office quaffing a Diet Coke and stuffing a burger in his mouth, and all those fireballs belong to somebody else.

The point is this: Everything about this war is pissing him off. He thought it was going to be the one-and-done kind of deal he pulled off in Venezuela. Knock off the Big Leader, wait until they appoint someone who’s intimidated by your power, then make a deal. He came out of his Maduro kidnap with 50,000 barrels of Venezuelan oil and a cash-transfer of $500 million to an account in Qatar that was reported to be “controlled by Donald Trump.” Now we’re hearing that the $500 million was “returned” to Venezuela to be “disbursed for the benefit of the Venezuelan people at the discretion of the U.S. government, an unnamed U.S. government official told Reuters.”

You believe that one, and I’ve got a rare metals mining claim in Nevada to sell you. Do you remember when it was reported that at a fundraising dinner, Trump “asked” the big oil companies to contribute $1 billion for his election campaign? Subsequent reporting revealed that oil executives and companies contributed hundreds of millions in “dark money” to Trump superPACs. You know what dark money is: It’s a rumor. It’s money we don’t know the source of, we can’t watch it moving, we don’t know where it ends up. What we can be sure of is that if it’s dark money, some of it ends up in the pocket of the man who asked for it. Trump cancelled tax incentives for solar and wind energy and gave more than $20 billion in breaks for fossil fuel companies. Do you think they didn’t kick back some to him?

Yesterday, it was announced that the Treasury Department “eased” sanctions on Venezuelan oil. Don’t you love that word, “eased?” What the fuck does it even mean? Before that, Trump’s little money-gofer Scott Bessent was “easing” sanctions on Russian oil. Then the stories started coming that tankers carrying Russian oil were parking in ports and off-loading oil. Eight days ago, it was reported that Russia is making $150 million a day in unsanctioned oil revenues. Then the figure moved up to $230 million a day. Now they’re using the word “billions” to describe the windfall Russia is making on oil.

Who is in charge of Russian oil? Who put in the oligarchs that get all that cash? Where does a goodly portion of it go? Let me see if I can remember…oh yes! Vladimir Putin! Who has Trump been on the phone with since his war began? Uhhh…I’m having trouble here, can you help me? I’ve got it! Putin!

Today, it was reported that Oil-money-boy Bessent may remove sanctions on…wait for it…Iran’s oil that is currently floating around various oceans in tankers. How much of it, you ask? Oh, only 140 million barrels of it. Who is Iran’s only ally in this war besides maybe Belarus? That’s right. Russia.

With all this oil money sloshing around, do you think some of it could be going to you-know-who?

Have you heard of crypto? Does your recollection go back far enough to recall what Trump said when he was in office the first time? He said crypto was a scam and called Bitcoin “not money based on thin air.” We have only one real currency in the USA, and it will always stay that way. It is called the United States Dollar!”

And then came Liberty Financial. Trump’s attitude about Bitcoin and everything else crypto started changing the minute he moved into the White House in 2025 and crypto started flowing, or squiring electrons, or whatever the hell it does. Tens of not hundreds of millions are going into Trump’s pocket in crypto of every sort. That $500 million in Venezuelan oil money that was “returned” could have been $400 million by the time it hit a treasury account. After what Elon Musk’s DOGE boys did at the IRS, Social Security, and Treasury, will you ever trust another figure with a dollar sign next to it released by anything or anyone connected to Donald Trump?

There is only one thing Donald Trump loves more than political power, and that is money. It’s why he got in the game in the first place. Was he a billionaire back in 2014 to 2015 when he first started thinking seriously about running for president? He may have called himself a billionaire, but he didn’t have billions in a bank. Come to think of it, there was only one bank that would do business with him back then, Deutsche Bank, and he owed them money, not the other way around.

So, what is Trump going to do, now that he is loading his buddies’ bottom lines with oil profits ripped from the pockets of his MAGA faithful and pocketing some of it for himself?

The word “unsustainable” begins to enter the picture here. Profits are fine with Donald, so long as they’re going in the right pockets, including of course, his. But there is this other bothersome word that keeps being mentioned: the “economy.” Economies are made of money, but they hate being unstable, and they really, really hate chaos. And that’s what’s going on in the world economy right now: chaos. Trump would love to keep his oil money scam going, but it’s beginning to cost him politically, and even with all the Bitcoin and other crypto cash he’s got stashed away, he’s still got just under three years to go as president, and the Economist, bless its heart, is exactly right. This war is making him look weak.

A quarter of the stories that ran in my newsfeed today were about the MAGA crackup. Another quarter were about his crashing poll numbers. And then there is the quarter of stories about the shellacking Republicans are going to take in November at the polls. A new scary word has begun to be flung about along with “House,” and that is “Senate.” The new guy up in Maine is looking like he’s going to beat Janet Mills in the primary, and he’s young, which suddenly counts a great deal, and it looks like he’ll knock off the execrable Susan Collins. All of a sudden we’re seeing the word “Iowa” and “Senate” together. “Shift by Independents Leaves Iowa race close.” There you go.

Independents don’t like Trump’s war on Iran at all. Not even a tiny bit. Neither do young voters, and young voters are turning out in record numbers in Democratic primaries, which is really, really good, right?

All this means that Trump is going to have to figure out a way to end this war and end it fast. That’s why we’re also seeing the word “offramp” in about half the stories about the war. But the problem with offramps is, they go places. If you take the wrong offramp, you can end up in a bad neighborhood. In fact, Tom Wolfe wrote an entire novel about this unfortunate truth.

Trump’s choice of offramps has gone from narrow to practically invisible. He could have probably declared victory and gotten the hell out of Iran in the first week, or maybe even the beginning of the second. But he can’t now that Iran has closed the Strait of Hormuz.

He’s fumbling around trying out his allies and finding that allies only show up when you’re nice to them. He hasn’t been nice at all. Today Trump made a “joke” about Pearl Harbor as he sat next to his ally, the Japanese premier in the Oval Office. Responding to a question about why he hadn’t notified allies about the attack on Iran before it happened, Trump explained that it wouldn’t have been a surprise. “Who knows better about surprise than Japan? OK, why didn’t you tell me about Pearl Harbor?”

You could have fried an egg on the top of the head of Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi.

So, what’s he going to do? Trump would just love to lob a couple of nukes at Iran, but there is the not-terribly-small problem of world markets. Oil at $200 a barrel? Gas at $8 to $10 a gallon? Mortgage rates through the roof of houses not being built?

World depression, anybody?

So the guy who came into office for the first time over ten years ago itching to increase our nuclear stockpile and do something with the nukes, to the point that General Mark Milley was warning military commanders to call him before they followed any crazy orders given by the guy in the Oval Office who was screaming that he had won the election he had lost and was going to do something about it, damn it!

Thank goodness for crypto. Thank goodness Donald Trump was born with his hand in a cookie jar – or is it Big Mac jar? – and has never pulled his hand out of it.

Here is something I never thought I’d say: Greed is good, especially when it’s Donald Trump’s greed. It’s going to save us…hopefully.

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The Opinionated Ogre Podcast is 100% listener-supported. Please help us continue to inform/amuse/outrage you by becoming a supporting subscriber today for only $5 a month or just $50 a year! $40 a year FOREVER during our Second Anniversary Sale! If not, it’s all good. Welcome to the Ogre Nation anyway!

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Trump is amazed, shocked, OUTRAGED that the allies he’s spent the last decade insulting and undermining politically and economically are not interested in saving him from the disaster he’s trapped the United States in.

and I dig into this clusterfuck, and we’re looking forward to the absolutely massive #NoKings protests coming on Saturday, March 28th.

Bonus segment: I share a really sweet and sappy story about Lila and me.

Come join the Ogre Nation Conversation!

Ogre Nation News Update!

3:07 - 26:17 Welcome to Week Three of Trump’s Idiot War.

26:18 - 28:30 Every day is Trump Corruption Day!

28:31 - 33:28 Epstein Update!

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49:13 - 54:34 Self-care of the Week

54:35 - 1:02:52 Bonus! The Story of Ogre and His Almost-Daughter

1:04:25 - 1:09:27 Aftershow chatter (More Lila stuff)

The Hot Mess Unedited Video!

Trump’s Iran Strategy in Doubt After Israeli Assassinations of Key Figures

Israeli raids have killed another pair of Iranian leaders seen as important to any attempt to halt the U.S.-Israeli air raids meant to destabilize that country.

Those targeted included Ali Larijani, Iran’s top national security official, close adviser to the killed ayatollah and its de facto, most practically minded leader. As Iran experts tell us, if Donald Trump were to want to negotiate an end to this preemptive war, it was likely to involve working with Larijani, who apparently bridges many of Iran’s political divisions.

Also reported dead was Gholamreza Soleimani, the head of the Basij, Iran’s brutal plainclothes militia that is key to any hoped-for organized, popular uprising.

It seems that the continuing efforts to “decapitate” Iranian leadership are exposing some differences between the still nebulous goals sought by Trump or by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and some increased concern about how any end to this Middle East conflict could come about.

Trump keeps repeating that he is seeking a “Delcy” character in Iran, referring to Delcy Rodriguez in Venezuela, to whom Trump has turned after grabbing former leader Nicolás Maduro, to keep that country running in cooperation with the White House view of the world. Larijani was not a senior Shiite cleric and could not succeed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei but had the supreme leader’s ear for policy and was the kind of figure Trump apparently wants as a more practical leader in Iran.

Still, it was Larijani who ordered brutal methods to stop Iranian protests, using Soleimani’s forces, and he apparently oversaw nuclear negotiations as well as plans for managing Iran during a potential war with the United States.

If the complexities of a war that Trump refuses to call a war mount by the day, the kept vow by Israel to kill any new leadership in Iran is certain only to make things more confusing.

Seeking Meaning

We understand what happened, but not what it means.

So, did Israel act alone in this assassination, or did Trump authorize killing another leader that he otherwise might want as a negotiating partner? Was Team Trump working behind the scenes to reach out to Larijani? Does the U.S. have anyone in Iran to talk with? Is anyone in charge here of anything beyond identifying more military targets to hit?

Even with the perspective of only three weeks, it is apparent that Trump thought this was another short-term military raid that would prove Iran so weak it would roll over to whatever demands he made. That’s not working. Iran is defiantly moving against shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, upsetting global oil supplies and prices, and unleashing proxies and cells to attack the U.S. as it sees fit, without organized military.

In combination with what looks to be a global shunning of cooperation to send ships to clear Gulf shipping lanes, Israel’s potentially divisive strategy to stir as much disruption as possible in Iran is further cornering Trump.

Trump neither orders the death of any emerging Iranian figure nor does he disown the action when Israel moves ahead. Indeed, Trump is silent or confusing about what our goals in this war are. Netanyahu sees only advantage in spreading war to Lebanon, the West Bank, and defanging Iran’s missile capabilities, and Trump is unclear about those developments as well.  We’re way beyond talk of nuclear weapons development in labs.

Apart from a war with fuzzy, changing goals, rocketing gas and oil prices are worsening domestic political problems for Trump. It’s obvious that striking Iran is proving to be a critical decision for Trump’s presidency.

The question is whether knocking off successive Iranian leadership leads to anything more than continued warfare.

A Key Resignation

Meanwhile, a key resignation in Washington over opposition to the war in Iran is drawing extra attention. Joe Kent, a former GOP congressional candidate and MAGA commentator who had been named by Trump to lead the National Counterterrorism Center, resigned in protest over the what he said was Israel’s successful lobbying of Trump to launch a war with no imminent threat.

As a major rebuke on the conflict from a member of his administration,  the issue was whether other departures would follow.

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The post Knocking Off Iranian Leaders appeared first on DCReport.org.

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.

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