US president Donald Trump caught America by surprise in late September while gabbing with reporters during a visit to the United Nations: “I’ve said let’s not send out the diesel,” he said. “We make a lot of diesel.”

The impulse is understandable. With prices topping $6 per gallon for a fuel widely used in long-haul trucking, rail transport, shipping by sea, and public transportation, everyone who buys anything is taking a new hit to the wallet. Trump would  like to see those prices come down before the November midterms.

Other writers have ably explained why an export ban wouldn’t lower prices at the pump, but here’s an AI-generated (Microsoft Copilot) summary for your convenience: “[E]xisting pipeline bottlenecks force regions such as New England and the West Coast to rely on waterborne imports; an export ban would trap Gulf Coast supplies in the region and compel refiners to cut daily output, driving up prices for gasoline, jet fuel, and diesel.”

Quite a few chickens are coming home to roost, and to defecate on all our heads while roosting. The idiotic and illegal war against Iran is driving oil prices up. The ill-considered but never-dying Jones Act, which forbids using foreign-built, foreign-crewed, and foreign-owned ships to transport material between US destinations, holds domestic cargo tonnage down.

Fortunately, Trump seems to be reconsidering a ban. Politico reports that federal officials are looking at other measures, such as encouraging states to put their diesel taxes on hold and/or allowing highway use of tax exempt diesel (identified by its red color and normally only allowed for off-highway uses such as agriculture, construction, and home heating).

That would be a welcome reversal from the usual trend.

As Thomas Sowell wrote in 2013, “sometimes it seems as if there are more solutions than problems. On closer scrutiny, it turns out that many of today’s problems are a result of yesterday’s solutions.”

Government perceives, or even creates a problem. In this case, the US government created the problem of high fuel prices with its war on Iran.

Government intervenes in markets to “solve” the problem.

But that intervention creates new, different problems — usually while failing to solve the previous problems.

And those new problems are addressed with yet more interventions.

At every point in that never-ending loop, things get generally worse than they were before the latest intervention, and even in specific areas it’s usually hard to discern any improvement.

The only way to solve these problems is to reverse course and undo the interventions that caused them in the first place.

The effects usually aren’t instant. If the war on Iran ends today, it may be years before the oil market recovers to steady, cheaper output and delivery.

Furthermore, such reversals aren’t politically palatable. No politician likes to publicly admit that he screwed up and has to pull a U-turn from a policy he previously tried to sell the public on. Trump personally seems even more resistant to doing so than most. Admitting that he lost a war, and in doing so screwed the American public over for no good reason, just doesn’t match his previously revealed temperament.

Bu to be clear here, it’s not just Trump. It’s pretty much every politician you’ll ever encounter. They all want to run your life, and they all do so pretty poorly when given the wheel. Trump is just the case of the moment.

The problem is that political government isn’t a workable substitute for a free market. Markets adapt to actual conditions. Politics adapts to the egomania of politicians. So don’t expect any big breaks on fuel prices any time soon.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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“What I want you to do,” US president told a South Carolina rally audience in August, ” is pretend, please, that I’m on the ballot” when it’s time to vote in the 2026 midterm election for US House and Senate seats. He repeated the request multiple times in various venues.

Republican candidates likely hope that voters weren’t listening. As of late September, Trump’s approval rating stood at 29 percent according to an American Research Group poll. Republican candidates are distancing themselves from him,  scrubbing references to his endorsements of them from their web sites, and in some cases performatively coming out against him on various issues.

All year we’ve heard predictions of a “blue wave” in the midterms, with Democrats taking majorities in both houses of Congress.

As of this writing, most forecasts I’ve consulted say that there’s a good chance of a Democratic House come January, but that the Republicans will likely hang on to the Senate.

My own forecast is “don’t get your hopes up for substantial change no matter how the midterms turn out.” That’s just not how American government works. Or at least that’s not how American government USUALLY works.

“Americans like to think of themselves as uncompromising,” historian Shelby Foote noted in Ken Burns’s 1990 documentary The Civil War.  “Our true genius is for compromise. Our whole government’s founded on it. And, it failed,” leading to southern secession and four years of brutal war.

While the conventional wisdom holds that America is politically “polarized,” its two major political parties have converged over the last few decades.

They’ll quibble over the details, but they pride themselves on compromising where big issues are concerned. Their joint raison d’être is to keep the jalopy of government moving down the same road, in the same direction, no matter the cost.

Seldom a month goes by that we’re not told of negotiations on some “must-pass” bill, saved at the last minute when a handful of members from one party “cross the aisle” to put a little more gas in the jalopy’s tank or a plug in one of the jalopy’s flat tires.

In fact, it’s kind of silly to pretend that the two major parties are separate parties. Since the 1890s, when they seized control of elections with “ballot access” laws to exclude competitors, they’ve effectively become feuding factions of a single political party whose mutual hatred of each other is largely fueled by what Freud called “the narcissism of small differences.”

And over the last 50 years or so, the party factions in Congress have painted themselves into the corner of servitude to an increasingly imperial and unbridled presidency. Trump may be the most predatory example, but he’s hardly sui generis. He’s just an extension of a long-term trend.

The Democrats aren’t going to secure veto-proof majorities in both houses of Congress … and even if they did, it’s not obvious they’d make any foundational changes to how American government works.

They’d keep spending more and more money.

They’d keep borrowing more and more money to spend.

They’d keep sticking their noses into every corner of our personal lives and our businesses’ operations.

They’d keep kicking the Social Security can down the road toward insolvency.

Sure, they might impeach and remove a president, but the next president and the president after that would continue down the same road with, largely, complete congressional cooperation — and with a free hand to engage in foreign military adventures despite the Constitution’s assignment of war powers to Congress.

The problem isn’t which party controls the House, the Senate, or the White House, or appoints the most Supreme Court justices.

The problem is political government itself. The framers of the US Constitution hoped to bequeath us a system which wouldn’t devolve into tyranny, but that hope was obviously in vain. George III ruled his American colonies with a much lighter touch than we’ve enjoyed from the US government since the revolution.

For all his failings, Abraham Lincoln got it right when he pointed out that “no man is good enough to govern another man without that other’s consent.”

When we go back to the drawing board, as eventually we must, that should be written across the top as our starting point.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“Yemen’s Houthis,” Euronews reports, “have assured Washington that they would not attack US vessels in the Red Sea, following reports that the US cancelled its planned strikes on the group at the last minute, a senior Houthi official said on Monday” (September 21).

For more than a decade, the US has periodically thrown in with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in its attempts to conquer Yemen and impose rule by “the internationally recognized government,” a Riyadh-based, Saudi-funded puppet regime, usually on the justification that the Houthis are an “Iran-backed” movement and government.

For more than a decade, the Houthis —  formally known as Ansar Allah — have ruled a smaller amount of territory, but a far larger percentage of the country’s population, than that “internationally recognized government,” and recently launched a successful offensive to seize more, and more strategically important, territory. That new territory comprises key points on the coast of, and islands in, the Red Sea around the Bab el-Mandeb Strait.

If Iran’s near-closure of the Strait of Hormuz is a knife to international oil shipping’s throat, Houthi control of the Bab el-Mandeb is a firm grip on international oil shipping’s testicles.

US president Donald Trump, it seems, would rather the Houthis didn’t squeeze. Or maybe he’s just trying to conserve limited military resources for continued war with Iran.

Either way, when Saudi terror kingpin … er, Crown Prince … Mohammed bin Salman requested a new round of US airstrikes, the answer was “no, not this time.”

And either way, that’s the right answer.

The conflict in Yemen has never been any business of the US government’s, and continued US military support of the Saudi regime, going at least as far back as Desert Storm in 1991, has always been a disaster for America.

Among other blowback: In 2016, declassified information established that some of the attackers were materially supported by the Saudi royal family.

I’m not going to try to tell you that Ansar Allah make for “better” governors  of the Yemeni population than some Saudi quisling (I’m an anarchist — do the math). That’s a decision for the Yemeni population to make.

But if we’re going to put up with political government over here, Thomas Jefferson laid out the best foreign policy for that government to pursue: “Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.”

Thanks to president Trump for veering toward that course, this time and on this issue. More, please.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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