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This letter was submitted last week to the New York Times, but not published there.

Editor:

Ana Swanson reports on a new paper purporting to find, in Ms. Swanson’s words, “that American workers in communities that were more exposed to competition from Mexican imports saw a significant shortening of their life spans after the trade deal went into effect in 1994” (“‘A Lot of Life Years Lost’: How NAFTA Shortened American Life Spans,” March 13). One of the paper’s co-authors describes this apparent loss of life as “an underappreciated cost of globalization.”

I’m skeptical that freer trade, by causing manufacturing job losses, is to blame for increased mortality. From 1958 through 1980, the average monthly rate at which manufacturing jobs were destroyed was 1.6%, or about 275,000 jobs each month. Yet during NAFTA’s first 15 years – the period studied by the paper – the average monthly rate at which manufacturing jobs were destroyed was lower, at 1.3%, or 206,000 jobs each month.* (NAFTA, by the way – using an estimate from the Economic Policy Institute, an anti-NAFTA outfit – destroyed each month a mere 3,900 jobs.)

Because U.S. life expectancy rose from 69.5 years in 1958 to 73.0 years in 1980 – and because manufacturing’s share of total employment was much higher in those years than it was in the years studied by the paper** – it’s likely that the increased mortality described in the paper was caused by something other than NAFTA specifically, or by globalization generally.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030
571-426-5751 (mobile & text)

* Calculated from data found here.

**

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The latest issue of the Independent Review is devoted to hidden gems in Adam Smith’s Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. I was very happy to accept Robert Whaples’s invitation to contribute an essay surveying Smith’s great 1776 work. Here’s a slice from my essay:

The mercantilists’ confusion about the relationship between money and wealth mirrors their confusion about the relationship between production and consumption. Starting with the correct observation that consumption depends on production—and furthered by the also correct observation that producers earn money for what they produce and sell— the mercantilists leaped to the mistaken conclusion that production is an economic activity superior to consumption. After all, consumption, by its nature, consumes goods, resources, and capital, while production produces goods, resources, and capital. Surely we should do as much as possible of the latter and as little as possible of the former. But because people, left to their own devices, are more eager to consume than they are to produce— people, alas, willingly pay to do the former but must be paid to do the latter— intervention by a wise state is necessary to promote production and control consumption.

Although Smith was aware that individuals (and governments) might well consume excessively, he nevertheless understood— as he famously put it, contradicting the mercantilists—that “consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production” (Smith [1776] 1981, 660). For Smith, a person can indeed consume excessively. But such excessiveness occurs only if and when that person’s consumption today reduces his ability to consume tomorrow by an amount that—when tomorrow arrives— the person will regret. Such a person realizes with remorse that his imprudent consumption yesterday diminished the total amount he’s able over time to consume. Ditto when an organization, including government, consumes: That consumption is excessive today only if it reduces its principals’ ability to consume tomorrow by an amount that the principals will regret.

In short, excessive consumption for Smith is consumption that imprudently reduces an economic entity’s ability to consume over a lifetime. Far from being opposed to consumption, Smith sought to maximize it over time.

The mercantilist attitude toward consumption differs categorically from Smith’s attitude. Whereas Smith understood that consumption is the end of economic activity, with production being exclusively a means to promote this end, mercantilists reverse this relationship, treating consumption as a means of promoting production. Smith could barely mask his contempt for this misunderstanding.

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Alan Dlugash is not wrong about Trump’s tariffs punitive taxes, imposed under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, on Americans’ purchases of imports. A slice:

Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 lets the President impose a temporary 15 percent import surcharge for up to 150 days only when there is a “fundamental international payments problem,” specifically a large and serious United States balance-of-payments deficit, an imminent dollar crash in foreign markets, or an international payments disequilibrium that needs fixing. That language was written in the early 1970s for the old fixed-exchange-rate world under Bretton Woods. Once those rates floated freely after 1971, the crisis the statute targeted simply vanished. Under those rules, the international balance of payments is simply not a problem and is generally acknowledged as such. Even Trump’s own lawyers admitted months ago in court filings that Section 122 has “no obvious application” to ordinary trade deficits. This is not a close call; it is an intentional stretch of a never-used provision the Supreme Court just forced him to swap in after striking down his earlier IEEPA tariffs.

Tariffs are taxes on American buyers and businesses, they raise costs across the supply chain, and they distort free markets exactly the way I have warned for decades. Justifying hundreds of billions in extra costs on companies and consumers with a rule that has been dead letter for fifty years is not clever policy—it is abuse of power that threatens the separation of powers and the rule of law. Courts are already hearing challenges; they should kill this fast. Congress needs to step up, repeal or rewrite these outdated tools, and stop letting any president—Republican or Democrat—play fast and loose with our economy. Limited government and real free markets demand nothing less.

“Farmers hate the Jones Act.”

Joe Lancaster reports on the FCC’s recent decision to dramatically restrict Americans’ access to routers. A slice:

Since wireless routers transmit over radio frequencies, they must be authorized by the FCC to be sold in the U.S.; adding all new foreign-made routers to the “Covered List” means the FCC will not authorize those devices’ transmitters, effectively banning their sale or use.

The announcement specifies that this only applies to new consumer-grade devices and “does not prohibit the import, sale, or use of any existing device models the FCC previously authorized.” It also notes that manufacturers who apply for exemptions on new models can be “granted ‘Conditional Approval’ after finding that such device or devices do not pose such unacceptable risks.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the ban will likely make it more difficult for Americans to get wireless routers.

The problem is that banning all foreign-made routers means banning practically all routers. Most manufacturers, including the three largest, make their products overseas.

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy, continues her noble battle against that cancer of cronyism, the U.S. Export-Import Bank. A slice:

I want to point to a submission for the record by Bryan Riley of the National Taxpayers Union that deserves attention because virtually everything in it has been documented, warned about, and ignored for years.

Riley’s testimony is concise. He makes three points. First, Ex–Im’s mission creep is real: In 2022, the bank bypassed Congress and expanded from export-financing into subsidizing domestic manufacturing through its “Make More in America” initiative — a program with no direct export requirement and no congressional authorization. Second, the bank hides the true cost of its lending from taxpayers by using Federal Credit Reform Act accounting instead of fair-value accounting. Under FCRA, Ex–Im’s projected $16 billion loan book looks like a $600 million moneymaker for the government. Under fair-value, which is the method that accounts for market risk the way a private lender would, it is an estimated $200 million subsidy, or cost. Third, Congress has called for negotiations to eliminate predatory export subsidies since the Carter administration. Decades later, those negotiations have produced nothing.

The mission-creep problem did not begin with “Make More in America.” It is the defining feature of an institution that has spent nine decades attaching itself to whatever policy priority dominates the headlines. In 2019, it was competing with China. Congress gave Ex–Im a seven-year reauthorization and a brand-new strategic mandate: the China and Transformational Exports Program, with a $27 billion target; 20 percent of the bank’s total lending authority.

The Washington Post‘s Editorial Board is correct: “Limitations on build-to-rent homes would reduce supply, which is why many progressives oppose them.” A slice:

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) inserted a provision that would require any build-to-rent homes to be sold within seven years of construction. This is a way many families can afford somewhere to live who otherwise couldn’t afford a down payment, but the seven-year cap means the builders won’t necessarily have enough time to recoup their investments, which will discourage them from starting construction in the first place.

Pro-housing groups from across the country and the political spectrum have warned that it would restrict supply. Even if build-to-rent homes do still get built, the families living in them who couldn’t afford to buy would effectively be evicted by an arbitrary deadline from the federal government.

Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) said the measure demonizes people who want to build rental housing. He initially assumed the build-to-rent provision was such bad policy that it must have been “a drafting error,” only for Warren to clarify that it was actually “quite deliberate.”

Jerusalem Demsas is also critical of Elizabeth Warren’s ignorant obstinance on this housing matter: (HT Scott Lincicome)

Warren seems like a uniquely bad actor in the housing policymaking space.

A hostility towards negotiation and a reluctance to accept that there could be any sort of thing as good faith disagreement.

Good on [Brian] Schatz for standing strong here.

John Stossel, as usual, is right:

Politicians say they can “make the economy work better.”

I once believed they could.

But years of reporting taught me that politicians’ attempts to “fix” the economy usually make things worse.

The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal explains that “the verdict against Meta and YouTube is a victory for the plaintiffs bar, not for children or society.” A slice:

Trial lawyers will now use the L.A. verdict in advertisements to recruit more plaintiffs. They may even use the social-media platforms to advertise. Unemployed? Depressed? Spend your Friday nights scrolling? You could make big money by holding billionaires responsible for your problems.

Trial lawyers and juries may figure that Big Tech companies can afford to pay, but extorting companies is certain to have downstream consequences. Meta and Google are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on artificial intelligence this year, which could have positive social impacts such as accelerating treatments for cancer.

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… is from page 20 of the late Brian Doherty’s great 2007 book, Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement:

For all its occasionally zany radicalism, libertarianism is not a utopian ideology. More than any other set of political ideas, it recognizes and is based on the limits that economic reality and human nature place on attempts to use the state to accomplish grand goals.

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James Pethokoukis writes wisely about AI. A slice:

Set aside claims that artificial intelligence is mere Silicon Valley hype or just a bubblicious story about massive data-center investment. Across Corporate America, firms are spending on AI tools, experimenting with use cases, and—crucially—starting to see results.

That said, it’s too early to expect an obvious productivity boom reflected in big-picture national data. Two things appear true: First, AI is working as a general-purpose technology. Second, it isn’t yet transforming American business.

But the direction is encouraging.

Here’s Colin Grabow on his recent appearance in a 60 Minutes report on the Jones Act.

The Washington Post‘s Editorial Board rightly criticizes the World Bank’s embrace of industrial policy. A slice:

Most silly is the assertion that these bureaucracies can be more competent now than in the past because rising global education levels mean more talent is available. As if the main blocker to global growth is a lack of bureaucrats with doctorates.

Throughout, the bank’s recommendations are carefully hedged. The authors acknowledge there is no silver bullet, that there have been many failures and that politicians need to admit when programs aren’t working so they can abandon them. They acknowledge that knowing exactly what industry to target is more of an art than a science.

Ultimately, the World Bank is arguing that industrial policy will work if governments spurn favoritism, reject rigidity and reward successful outcomes regardless of the politics. All governments have to do is act contrary to their very nature.

In other words, industrial policy won’t work.

Vance Ginn reports on the reality of guaranteed basic incomes. A slice:

AEI shows that the bigger and more credible studies tell a very different story. Among the four pilots with treatment groups of at least 500 participants, which together account for 55 percent of all treatment-group participants, the mean effect on employment was minus 3.2 percentage points. AEI also estimates a mean income elasticity of -0.18, which is consistent with standard labor-supply economics.

In plain English, when people receive more unearned income, work tends to fall at the margin. Shocking, I know. Economics still works.

“Don’t Legislate Morality: Most Americans Can’t Agree on What’s Immoral.“

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… is from page 312 of Vincent Ostrom’s July-August 1980 Public Administration Review paper, “Artisanship and Artifact“:

The greatest evils inflicted upon humanity have been the work of those who are so confident of their effort to do good that they do not hesitate to use the instruments of evil available to them on behalf of their righteous cause.

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Here’s a letter to the Harvard Gazette.

Editor:

Interviewed by Paul Massari, “China Shock” researcher David Autor correctly notes that the decline in U.S. manufacturing employment from 1999 through 2006 was unusually steep (“The Human Cost of Trade,” March 12). Mr. Autor is incorrect, however, to describe this ‘shock’ to employment in a major sector of America’s economy as being “unlike anything we have ever seen.” A somewhat larger ‘shock’ hit agricultural employment exactly 50 years earlier.

As a share of total employment, agricultural employment in 1949 was, at 13.3%, roughly the same as was manufacturing employment, at 13.0%, in 1999. And from 1949 through 1956 the absolute number of agricultural jobs fell by 18%, the same as the 18% fall in the absolute number of manufacturing jobs from 1999 through 2006. But because the workforce was smaller during that earlier period, the 1949-1956 fall in agricultural employment as a share of total employment was, at 26%, steeper than was 1999-2006’s 24% fall in manufacturing employment as a share of total employment.*

Notably, the steep mid-20^th-century fall in agricultural employment had nearly everything to do with labor-saving technology and almost nothing to do with trade. (Although the U.S. ran agricultural trade deficits for most of those years, those ‘deficits’ were overwhelmingly driven by imports of coffee, which was never a major crop in the U.S.)

Mr. Autor can undoubtedly identify details that distinguish the “Farm-mechanization Shock” of the mid-20^thcentury from the “China Shock” of 50 years later. But because the U.S. economy handled that earlier employment shock quite well even as agricultural employment as a share of total employment continued to fall (to less than 1.4% today), skepticism should greet Mr. Autor’s claim that the “China Shock” reveals a need for industrial policy to protect against employment shocks.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

*

Agricultural employment as a share of total employment in the U.S.

Manufacturing employment as a share of total employment in the U.S.

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Richard Reinsch looks back on Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs as their first anniversary nears. Three slices:

At the time, Trump had boldly declared that Liberation Day would “forever be remembered as the day American industry was reborn, the day America’s destiny was reclaimed, and the day that we began to make America wealthy again,” claiming that the tariffs would raise “trillions and trillions of dollars” to reduce taxes and pay down the national debt. “Jobs and factories will come roaring back into our country … and ultimately, more production at home will mean stronger competition and lower prices for consumers,” he added.

Yet today, the promises of those in power must be constantly trimmed to account for their negative side effects. Those with memories longer than a news cycle will recall that the response from the equity, debt, and currency markets to the April 2 “declaration of economic independence” was so immediately and overwhelmingly negative—the S&P 500 declined 10 percent, the dollar fell, and bond prices plummeted—that Trump had to reverse course, suspending the tariffs and then lowering them. Currently, 52 percent of imported items are exempt from tariffs because of trade agreements, exemptions, and carve-outs.

Over the past year, most of us have grown nauseated by the near-constant refrain from tariff advocates that Liberation Day has not led to economic disaster. Elites and globalists are part of a global free trade conspiracy, the argument goes, and don’t know what they’re talking about, especially when it comes to tariffs.

Yes, the tariffs haven’t led to disaster, but we’ve also been dealing with a moving target in tariff rates, tariff-affected goods, delays in implementation, and exemptions. And the need for this breathing space amid the tariffs seems to support the broader free-trade argument against them. Taxes stall commerce, both within nations and internationally among producers and buyers.

…..

To support manufacturing, we should reduce the federal regulations that drain around $350 billion per year from the sector, a burden that, to varying degrees, also constrains every other sector. The energy and capital expensing policies under the Trump administration are steps in the right direction. Trump’s energy policies aim to unleash energy production through deregulation and the easing of licensing and permitting requirements. The capital expensing policy allows companies to deduct the full value of capital investments from their taxes in the first year they are made. These are pro-growth measures. Tariffs are not.

…..

Tariffs are a very blunt form of taxation. They tax not only imported consumer goods but also intermediate capital goods. They lower workers’ real wages by making certain goods more expensive. They reduce the productivity of companies and capital by raising the prices of inputs and other goods used in business while protecting domestic industries, leading to inefficiencies and job losses in other sectors. We were promised liberation. Instead, we have relearned that tariffs are just taxes that slow down our strong economy and weaken America’s power.

The New York Times‘s obituary for Brian Doherty is good. Two slices:

“Libertarians talk a lot about freedom and responsibility,” Katherine Mangu-Ward, the editor in chief of Reason, a libertarian magazine where Mr. Doherty worked for decades, recalled in the magazine’s announcement of his death. “Brian embodied both. His weird, colorful life — filled with comics and festivals and music and books — was a model of life lived freely and openly.”

…..

Mr. Doherty became a libertarian at the University of Florida in the late 1980s, from which he received a bachelor’s degree in journalism. But he traced his political tendencies even earlier, to his reading, as a 12-year-old, of a science fiction trilogy, Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson’s “Illuminatus!”

“One of the specific purposes of that work, according to Wilson,” Mr. Doherty later wrote, “was to do to the state what Voltaire did to the church — that is, reduce it to an object of contempt for all thoughtful people.”

Wall Street Journal columnist William McGurn decries the increasing coarseness of public life in America. Here’s his conclusion:

Vulgar language can be effective in a sharp response, but it dulls with overuse. And too often we disdain politeness as phony rather than respect it as the tribute that vice pays to virtue. Like schoolyard kids forced to shake hands after a nasty fight, Americans could use a healthy respect for good form, even at the risk of being hypocrites.

Cuban-born Martin Gurri writes about Cuba. Here’s his conclusion:

Meanwhile, the Cuban people can only watch as their fate is determined by forces beyond their control.

Will they get a taste of freedom in the near future? I am a pessimist when it comes to toppling totalitarian regimes. Yet in the case of Cuba, special circumstances come into play. Inner rot combined with outside pressure may offer a measure of hope. Every dictatorship has a natural life cycle and an appointed end. I wouldn’t be shocked, therefore, to see the Cubans start their happy dance before the end of this year.

The Editorial Board of the Washington Post is understandably contemptuous of the Western elites who have traveled to Cuba to blame, not communism, but the United States, for the plight of the Cuban people. A slice:

More than a million Cubans have fled since 2021, when the Castro regime cracked down on protest amid a dire economic crisis. While the socialist tourists might blame American sanctions for the island’s decline, Cubans overwhelmingly believe the people who have run their economy since 1959 are more at fault. They also might take a jaundiced view of people coming to the island to support the dictatorship while enjoying a concert and air-conditioned buses.

Pierre Lemieux explains why there’s been no successful overthrow by the Iranian people of their vile, violent oppressors.

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy, talks with GMU Econ alum Romina Boccia about Social Security and its mythical “lockbox.”

“New York Gov. Hochul begs ‘high-net-worth’ refugees to return and be taxed.”

Solveig Singleton explains what shouldn’t – but, alas, what today nevertheless does – need explaining: Consumers will be harmed by government-imposed caps on credit-card interest rates.