Vice President JD Vance speaks to members of the media, after the U.S. and Iran held high-level talks at the Lake Lucerne Summit, at Buergenstock Resort Lake Lucerne near Stansstad, Switzerland, June 22, 2026.
(Nathan Howard/Pool/Reuters)
The hidden hand still works better than the heavy hand.
‘If you get somebody who is willing to actually say what’s going to happen and is more right than wrong,” JD Vance recently told podcaster Michael Knowles, “that’s a very important thinker.”
The assertion immediately evoked a very important thinker. More than three decades before Vance’s birth, Milton Friedman controversially reminded fellow economists that “the only relevant test of the validity of a hypothesis is comparison of its predictions with experience” (yes, that was controversial in certain circles). Beyond this, Friedman, particularly as a public intellectual, offered not airy proclamations but predictions tested by events. For instance, when his profession overwhelmingly ...
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