Tweet

David Henderson shares economists’ amicus brief in the lawsuit against Trump’s section 122 tariffs punitive taxes on Americans’ purchases of imports.

GMU Econ alum Caleb Petitt deconstructs ships. A slice:

Although Americans have to pay more for ships and shipping, proponents of the Jones Act often justify it as necessary for national security. Importing foreign ships, they argue, could make the United States reliant on foreign shipbuilders and unprepared for disasters and wars. If the United States were to get involved in a war and were cut off from foreign shipbuilders, America would have no shipbuilding industry to fall back on. Essentially, the Jones Act aims to insulate America from reliance on foreign markets.

But this rests on an illusion. The supply chain for domestically built ships extends well outside the U.S. market. This means that the United States is still reliant on foreign markets for producing ships. Americans pay higher shipping costs without gaining the purported benefits of insulation from foreign markets. In reality, Jones Act ships are not U.S.-built; they are U.S.-assembled.

The dataset below substantiates the claim that America relies on foreign producers for components used in the construction of commercial ships. As of April 2025, no Jones Act ship with an American-made engine has been built since 2000, nor one with an American propeller since 2010, nor one with an American anchor since 1998, and there are no ships in the Jones Act fleet with American-built generators. Given this evidence, it is safe to say that modern Jones Act ships rely on components produced abroad, and that the Jones Act has not removed American shipbuilders’ reliance on foreign manufacturers.

Stephen Davies makes clear that “from trade to migration to personal freedom, the conservatives of the global New Right hold a philosophy incompatible with individualism.” Two slices:

This national political economy is not socialist or egalitarian but also not a free market. The best label for it is national collectivism or neo-mercantilism. This means support for protectionism and for a national industrial policy in which governments direct investment. It also means opposition to the trade agreements—regulatory harmonization deals that took a great deal of regulatory discretion away from national governments—that were popular after 1990, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement. There is a particular emphasis on manufacturing and farming, as opposed to globally traded services. There is skepticism or outright hostility toward finance.

Two things should be noted here. Firstly, this vision is not compatible with the form capitalism has taken since the 1970s and the kind of international rule-governed order created since then. Nor is it compatible with the classical liberal ideal of a global market and trading system in which individuals and companies trade with each other in a way that makes national borders as irrelevant as possible. Both of those require global rules, however generated, and a removal of economic decisions from national governments in the case of actually existing global capitalism, and from politics altogether in the second case.

…..

In the New Right version of identity politics, there are “real” or “natural” identities that are derived from things that cannot be chosen. These include such things as the place of one’s birth, the parents and siblings you have, the people you grow up among, the language you speak, in many places your religion, but also your genetic inheritance, your physical sex, your biological nature as an embodied being. This is a prescriptive and determined identity, not a chosen one.

Related to this but distinct is a concern for the household and a feeling that current policy, cultural forms, and economic life all work to undermine it. The family is important in the nationalist right because it is the main channel by which the ideas, beliefs, practices, and narratives of national identity are passed on. One feature of this is a valorization of traditional gender roles. Another is a concern about the birth rate and support for pronatalist policies.

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy, describes Trump’s proposed budget as an unserious one that we should nevertheless take seriously. A slice:

Republicans must choose. They cannot implement endless tax cuts, raise defense spending by 42 percent, and also refuse to reform Social Security and Medicare. Something has to give. Cutting foreign aid, trimming waste, or reducing immigration-related expenses won’t begin to close the gap in any meaningful way.

Democrats face the same reckoning. They cannot be the party of expanded entitlements, climate spending coupled with degrowth demands, student debt relief, and the preservation of every program without pushing America further toward a fiscal disaster. Increasing taxes on the wealthy is not a fiscal plan. The arithmetic does not come close to closing a gap of this magnitude even under the most optimistic assumptions.

Speaking of the “budgets” of the fiscally incontinent U.S. government, Rich Vedder asks: “Why does Congress keep kicking the fiscal can?”

Paul Mueller talks with GMU Econ’s emeritus Nobel laureate Vernon Smith.

GMU Econ alum Michael Peterson explains “why Keynes would have reared AI — and why we shouldn’t.”

Also writing insightfully about AI is my GMU Econ colleague Alex Tabarrok:

Imagine I told you that AI was going to create a 40% unemployment rate. Sounds bad, right? Catastrophic even. Now imagine I told you that AI was going to create a 3-day working week. Sounds great, right? Wonderful even. Yet to a first approximation these are the same thing. 60% of people employed and 40% unemployed is the same number of working hours as 100% employed at 60% of the hours.

So even if you think AI is going to have a tremendous effect on work, the difference between catastrophe and wonderland boils down to distribution. It’s not impossible that AI renders some people unemployable, but that proposition is harder to defend than the idea that AI will be broadly productive. AI is a very general purpose technology, one likely to make many people more productive, including many people with fewer skills. Moreover, we have more policy control over the distribution of work than over the pure AI effect on work. Declare an AI dividend and create some more holidays, for example.

Nor is this argument purely theoretical. Between 1870 and today, hours of work in the United States fell by about 40% — from nearly 3,000 hours per year to about 1,800. Hours fells but unemployment did not increase. Moreover, not only did work hours fall, but childhood, retirement, and life expectancy all increased. In fact in 1870, about 30% of a person’s entire life was spent working — people worked, slept, and died. Today it’s closer to 10%. Thus in the past 100+ years or so the amount of work in a person’s lifetime has fallen by about 2/3rds and the amount of leisure, including retirement has increased. We have already sustained a massive increase in leisure. There’s no reason we cannot do it again.

National Review‘s Jim Geraghty isn’t impressed with the economy so far of Trump 2.0.

Tweet

… is from page 29 of Ludwig von Mises’s 1952 lecture “Capital Supply and American Prosperity” as reprinted in the 2008 Liberty Fund edition of Mises’s 1952 collection, Planning for Freedom:

What begot modern industrialization and the unprecedented improvement in material conditions that it brought about was neither capital previously accumulated nor previously assembled technological knowledge. In England, as well as in the other Western countries that followed it on the path of capitalism, the early pioneers of capitalism started with scanty capital and scanty technological experience. At the outset of industrialization was the philosophy of private enterprise and initiative, and the practical application of this ideology made the capital swell and the technological know-how advance and ripen.

Tweet

Ideally, every government would implement a policy of unilateral free trade. But governments, of course, by their nature testify that reality is very far from ideal. Here’s a letter to a long-time correspondent.

Mr. B__:

Thanks for your email in response to this blog post of mine in which I express support for the World Trade Organization and its predecessor, the GATT (the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade). You reasonably ask:

Why does trade need to be “organized” at all? Why can’t a nation declare itself unilaterally to be a free trade nation? Get rid of trade “negotiators”, for example. What do they need to negotiate when all interferences harm only one’s own citizens? Allow our citizens to buy whatever goods and services they desire from anywhere in the world. After all, economic law does not change at our national borders.

The reason multilateral trade negotiations, such as are conducted under the GATT and WTO, are useful is because governments are mesmerized by mercantilist superstitions. As such, governments believe that the gains that a nation reaps from trade come from its exports, while imports are the cost that that nation unfortunately must endure in order to enjoy the bounty of exporting.

Because every government is bewitched by this absurd misconception, the government of country X correctly understands that the only way that it can persuade other governments to allow their citizens to buy more of country X’s exports is for it, the government of X, sacrificially to allow its own citizens to buy more of other countries’ exports. Given every government’s keen interest in increasing its country’s exports, trade negotiations impel each government to lower its barriers to imports in exchange for other governments lowering their barriers to imports.

In trade negotiations, the chief goal of each government is to increase its country’s exports. Nevertheless, the unintended beneficial result is a lowering of trade barriers by all governments who are party to the trade negotiations. The result, in short, is freer trade. Note that this happy result is brought about by an invisible-hand process; it’s brought about, not because any government values free trade as such, but instead because each government selfishly – and, frankly, rather stupidly – seeks as its end goal to increase its country’s exports.

A government that’s economically informed, wise, and committed to promote the best interests of its citizens would, as you recognize, immediately implement a policy of unilateral free trade. Alas, in practice every government is economically ignorant, unwise, and committed to promote the interests only of powerful of special interests. Given this sad but inescapable reality, freer trade is best pursued, as a practical matter, through mercantilist multilateral trade negotiations among governments each attempting to maximize its country’s exports.

‘Taint ideal. But it’s better than the only other practical alternative, which is each government alone imposing barbarous trade restrictions.

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

Tweet

George Will decries the overt rent-seeking – encouraged by excessive ‘judicial restraint’ – that allows the likes of funeral-home directors in Oklahoma to profit excessively at the expense of consumers and would-be competitors. (Fortunately, the good folks at the Institute for Justice are on the case.) Here’s his conclusion:

And in the 1930s, the court declared that economic liberty is inferior to “fundamental” rights. Hence the pernicious judicial “restraint” of deferring to any government abridgments of economic liberty for which a court can imagine a “rational basis,” even when the abridgment is patent rent-seeking.

In Oklahoma, you can be buried in a cardboard box, or a shroud, or nothing. But not in a casket unless the purchase of it enriches the state’s funeral cartel. Continuing judicial deference to Oklahoma’s casket racket would be dereliction of the judicial duty to take seriously incontestable facts, including undeniable and unsavory legislative motivations.

While we’re on the subject of cronyist occupational-licensing restrictions, Jeffrey Singer rightly criticizes obstructionist restrictions on midwives.

Clark Packard explains that Trump’s “new steel and aluminum tariff rules further increase costs – whether the White House admits it or not.” Two slices:

In an effort to “simplify” compliance, President Trump signed a new presidential proclamation restructuring how its Section 232 “national security” tariffs on steel, aluminum, and copper — and the finished goods made from them — are calculated. The rules took effect today, April 6. For businesses that import anything containing metal, the changes are significant, and not necessarily in the direction the White House is advertising.

……

A simple example illustrates the impact. Consider a product worth $1,000 that contains $200 worth of steel. Under the old system, a 50% tariff applied only to the steel content, resulting in a $100 duty. Under the new system, a 25% tariff applies to the full $1,000 value, resulting in a $250 duty. Despite the lower rate, the total tariff paid is significantly higher. So while the structure may be simpler on paper, it is likely to increase costs for many importers in practice. Software can help manage complexity, but it cannot offset a broader tax base.

So yes, the process has been simplified, but only through making many goods subject to heavier tariffs. It seems unlikely that many US importers will consider this a win. Software can help with complexity, but no amount of computing power will get around this de facto tariff increase.

GMU Econ alums Scott Burns and Caleb Fuller wonder why – given Trump’s belief that trade deficits make people poorer – the president isn’t thanking the Iranian regime for closing the Strait of Hormuz. A slice:

Trump’s tariffs rest on a simple belief: trade deficits are bad. They aren’t, but this dogma is hardly new. Exactly 250 years ago, Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations to dismantle the same myth advanced by the anti-trade warriors of his day: the mercantilists.

By Trump’s mercantilist logic, Iran is doing us a favor by closing the Strait. The U.S. runs a multi-billion-dollar trade deficit in oil passing through the Strait from Persian Gulf nations. By shutting it down, the IRGC is helping tilt the balance of trade in our favor.

In response to this fact (as reported by the New York Times) – “ArcelorMittal, a European steel maker, is donating tens of millions of dollars of foreign steel for President Trump’s new ballroom” – Scott Lincicome tweets:

Every time I think I’ve seen the most ridiculous tariff thing, they totally top themselves.

It’s impressive, really.

Samuel Gregg writes eloquently and insightfully about Adam Smith and the mid-18th-century conflict between the government of Great Britain and her North American colonies. Two slices:

Smith identifies the doctrines and practices of the mercantilist economics that dominated the eighteenth-century European world as gradually putting Britain and the 13 colonies at odds with each other. By virtue of imposing higher costs on trade for American colonists and placing significant restrictions on the colonists’ economic liberty, mercantilist economic policies would gradually cause American colonists, Smith believed, to reconsider the benefits of belonging to the British Empire.

…..

Finally, Smith believed that the mercantilist policies that determined the parameters for trade between America and Britain were characterized by a significant injustice: that the people who benefited the most from these structures were those merchants and companies (like the EIC) with close connections to the government. Britons and Americans alike, Smith thought, should ask themselves whether the interests of such individuals has “been considered more than either that of the colonies or that of the mother country.” The whole “project” of mercantilism, as Smith described it, was “altogether unfit for a nation of shopkeepers; but extremely fit for a nation whose government is influenced by shopkeepers.” Such cronyism was, for Smith, ultimately bad for the long-term economic development of both America and Britain, and, above all, unjust by virtue of being based upon legal privileges and rampant influence-peddling.

Mercatus Center Emergent Scholar Henry Oliver praises not only Adam Smith’s insight but also Smith’s genius of clear expression. A slice:

This is exactly what makes Smith such a pleasure to read. His own principles—no unnecessary words, a “natural order of expression”, and a linear sentence structure—give him true clarity. His sentences do not require you to puzzle them out once you reach the end. For anyone with a serious curiosity about the ways of the world, Smith is of undeniable importance—and he writes with the care all common readers wish to find in long and difficult books.

Although The Wealth of Nations does require a lot of attention, it is not an enemy to its readers’ understanding, unlike so many other great treatises. Smith points his prose carefully, to make all thousand pages as plain and understandable as they can be.

Brent Skorup makes clear “why the FCC shouldn’t have the power to threaten CNN.”

Reason‘s Matt Welch is correct: “Viktor Orbán and his American apologists all deserve to lose.” A slice:

Five days before an election that threatens to unseat the longest-serving and most corrupt government within the European Union, Vice President J.D. Vance kicked off a campaign speech in Budapest Tuesday night by declaring, “We have got to get Viktor Orbán reelected as Prime Minister of Hungary, don’t we?”

This raises some intriguing questions about we.

Does we refer to the American companies doing business in Hungary who were hit with anti-foreigner “windfall taxes” in 2022 to plug Orbán’s latest budget deficits? Maybe it’s the boys from General Electric, who made a historic 1989 investment in the region’s first major privatization deal, only to see their financial wing get pushed out of the country in 2014 when Orbán began renationalizing banks?

We know that we isn’t referring to Hungarian citizens living in America, because those who go vote at their local embassy or consulate are almost certain to back Orbán’s opponent, the front-running Péter Magyar. And we’re damn certain it isn’t the overwhelming majority of Americans who sympathize with Ukraine rather than Russia in the ongoing war next door, given that barely a day goes by without another embarrassing leak of a top official kissing Vladimir Putin’s ring amidst an electoral campaign—very much including the events attended yesterday by Vance—whose main villain has been Volodomyr Zelenskyy.

Tweet

… is from page 49 of Thomas Sowell’s 1999 book, Barbarians Inside the Gates:

The federal government could make a Rolls Royce affordable for every American, but we would not be a richer country as a result. We would in fact be a much poorer country, because of all the vast resources transferred from other economic activities to subsidize an extravagant luxury.

DBx: Remember this reality when someone next points to some crowded government-subsided stadium or a humming tariff-protected industry as evidence that such government interventions make the people as a whole more prosperous.

Tweet

Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal.

Editor:

U.S. trade representative Jamieson Greer is correct that the WTO is flawed and has been less successful than its predecessor, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (“Another Fish Story From the WTO,” April 8). Yet his conclusion that the WTO “isn’t a serious forum” is unjustified.

First, it’s hypocritical for Pres. Trump’s top trade official to complain that the WTO has failed “to create certainty for trade” when for the past year Mr. Trump has imposed, removed, raised, and lowered tariff rates wildly, and often for bizarre reasons, such as his unhappiness with the tone of voice of Switzerland’s president. Because of Mr. Trump’s turbulent tariffs, the monthly average of trade-policy uncertainty for the past year was more than nine times higher than it was from the time China joined the WTO in December 2001 through December 2024.

Mr. Greer is also mistaken to suggest that America erred in allowing China to join the WTO. From 2001 through 2024, China’s average Most Favored Nations tariff rate fell by more than 50 percent, from 15.3% to 7.5%, while the corresponding rate in the U.S. fell by only 13 percent, from 3.8% to 3.3%.

Mr. Greer misleads when he asserts that China “dominates global manufacturing.” While China produces a larger absolute volume of manufacturing output than does any other country, on a per-capita basis – a more-relevant measure – the world’s largest manufacturing country is Ireland. The U.S. is 11th. China is 23rd. With total U.S. manufacturing output today being 11 percent greater than when China joined the WTO – as well as with per-capita manufacturing output in the U.S. today being twice the per-capita manufacturing output in China – Mr. Jamieson’s case that China’s admission to the WTO harmed the U.S. by having “crushed” our manufacturing is, at best, questionable.

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

Tweet

Marty Curran’s letter in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal – a letter written in response to Bernie Sanders’s hysterical warnings of the alleged dangers of AI – is excellent:

Joseph Schumpeter wrote in 1942 about the “creative destruction” that arises from capitalism, entrepreneurism and innovation. The U.S. has faced the Industrial Revolution, the age of steam, steel and railways, the era of electrification and the automobile, the digital age and so on. We’re now in the AI era. In every prior case, innovation disrupted jobs and lifestyles, but our country was always propelled forward, creating more business and more value for people.

Schumpeter predicted that the rise of an “intellectual class” would lead to regulation and the decline of entrepreneurism. Mr. Sanders is proof that Schumpeter was right.

Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley reports on research – especially that of Stephen Rose and Scott Winship – that disprove the incessant claims, made by pundits and politicians of all stripes, that America’s middle class has suffered economic stagnation. Two slices:

Earlier this year, the Journal editorial page told you about a study from the American Enterprise Institute’s Stephen Rose and Scott Winship that pushes back on that glum narrative. This week the Journal’s news department followed up with a front-page story highlighting that research, which demonstrates upward mobility in the U.S. is alive and kicking.

Messrs. Rose and Winship divided households into five categories—poor or near poor, lower middle class, core middle class, upper middle class and rich. Technically, the middle class has been getting smaller, but that’s only because more families have ascended the income ladder.

“We find that the ‘core’ middle class has shrunk—but so too has the share of Americans with income too low to reach the middle class,” the authors conclude. “The shrinking core middle class is due to a booming upper-middle class. Only the relatively worse-off parts of the middle class have shrunk—and by less than the upper-middle class has grown.”

In 1979 the upper middle class was 10% of all families. By 2024 it was 31%. Over the same period, the share of families with income below the core middle class declined from 54% to 35%. “Family incomes rose significantly across the entire income distribution, pushing more families into higher income categories,” the study found. Other studies show similar patterns. Yes, the rich have gotten richer over the decades, but so have the nonrich. “Everybody is doing better,” Richard Fry of the Pew Research Center told the Journal.

…..

Attempts to blame the decline in U.S. manufacturing on China or the North American Free Trade Agreement gets the order wrong. Manufacturing jobs as a share of all jobs began their rapid and steady decline in the 1950s, some four decades before Nafta took effect and five decades before China joined the World Trade Organization in the early 2000s. Factory jobs decreased due to technology advancements and productivity gains—it takes fewer workers than before to produce more goods—not because of misguided free-trade arrangements. Ending those arrangements won’t bring back manufacturing jobs, which have continued to decline despite the sweeping new tariffs Mr. Trump imposed last year.

Blaming low-skill foreign labor for phantom middle-class wage stagnation also doesn’t pass scrutiny. During Mr. Trump’s first term, legal and illegal immigration were increasing before the pandemic. Yet wages were rising, fastest for less-skilled workers, while unemployment and poverty rates dropped to historic lows. According to the economist Michael Strain, U.S. wages have increased by roughly a third over the past three decades, a period that includes large-scale immigration as well as free-trade agreements with Mexico, Canada, Europe, Asia and other partners. “A 34 percent increase in purchasing power over the last 30 years is not reasonably described as stagnant growth,” Mr. Strain notes.

Crémieux tweets: (HT Scott Lincicome)

About 10% of America’s life expectancy shortfall is due to motor vehicle accidents—fixed by Waymo and Tesla. About 18% is overdoses—that’s fading now.

And the lion’s share of the rest is obesity-related.

The Editorial Board of the Washington Post decries the backward logic of pharmaceutical tariffs. A slice:

Meanwhile, the administration’s tariff strategy invites cronyism. Many larger pharmaceutical companies have already entered deals with the administration, though the details often remain hidden from the public. Some might be able to afford discounts on their drugs — and would be happy to offer them if they can get special treatment for other products facing reviews by the Food and Drug Administration.

Also from the Washington Post‘s Editorial Board is this just criticism of Trump’s cruel policy of mass deportations. A slice:

The Trump administration has prioritized quantity over quality in its mass deportation campaign, diverting attention from apprehending hardened criminals to removing people who positively contribute to American society. The case of Annie Ramos is worth looking at closely because it shows the human cost of this misguided approach.

Last week, Ramos, a 22-year-old biochemistry student, arrived at Fort Polk in Louisiana with her husband Matthew Blank, a 23-year-old Army staff sergeant. They came with her Honduran passport and birth certificate to get a military ID and activate her spousal benefits. Instead, she was arrested and is now being held at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement lockup.

Ramos was brought to the United States as an infant, and she did her best to follow the rules as she grew older. Yet she was detained over a 2005 deportation order that was issued in absentia when she was 22-months old.
Ramos applied for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program in 2020, but her application was never processed. She may have arrived here illegally, but clearly she has lived her life in a way that benefits the country. Ramos teaches Sunday school at her church and was months from getting her degree.

GMU Econ alum Nikolai Wenzel draws ten lessons from the works of Adam Smith. Here’s Nikolai’s conclusion:

Tyranny is the midwife of poverty; liberty, of prosperity.

Bob Graboyes is understandably not favorably impressed by Elizabeth Warren’s proposed tax on wealth.

Tweet

… is from page 206 of William Easterly’s brilliant 2025 book, Violent Saviors: The West’s Conquest of the Rest:

But the fatal flaw was that the rulers could not be trusted to put the interests of the ruled above their own self-interest.

Tweet

The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Page reports on inescapable reality revealing the folly of the Trump administration’s promise to create a 100% American farm workforce. Two slices:

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins last summer said the Trump Administration’s goal is to create a 100% American farm workforce. Well, now the Administration is quietly conceding that too few Americans want to work these grueling jobs, and that its policies risk driving up food prices.

…..

Farmers report that crops are wasting in fields because they can’t find workers. DOL warns that shortages are resulting in more food imports, which have become more expensive because of Mr. Trump’s tariffs. Wholesale fresh vegetable prices have risen 48% in the past year, according to the producer price index. Americans no doubt have noticed in stores.

We’re glad the Administration is trying to make it easier to hire guest workers, but how about making the case to voters that the country needs legal immigrants for vital jobs that drive the economy.

The Editors of National Review take stock of Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs punitive taxes on Americans’ purchases of imports. Two slices:

First, Trump promised on liberation day that jobs and factories would come “roaring back” once a deadened U.S. manufacturing sector was protected from foreign competition. Yet after a year of high tariffs, manufacturing has shed tens of thousands of jobs, continuing a slide that began in 2023. Other blue-collar industries that rely on imports, such as construction and transportation, saw similarly weak employment.

Investment in building new factories also declined in 2025. Protectionists might contend that tariffs need more than a year to bring manufacturing home. But American manufacturers overwhelmingly view tariff policy as a headwind to manage, not a boon to celebrate. The uncertainty generated by ever-changing duties has killed their ability to plan new investments. Meanwhile, factories pay higher prices on the 56 percent of U.S. imports that serve as inputs for other products.

Research finds that tariffs are passed on to Americans at rates of up to 96 percent, rather than paid by foreign countries, as Trump claims. Tariffs have raised the prices of imported and domestic goods alike, as dampened competition allows U.S. producers to charge more. Merchandise prices are now around 6 percent higher than they would have been under pre-tariff trends.

Trump also said that the trade deals he negotiated using tariffs had brought in trillions of dollars of foreign investment. Those numbers were always fanciful. Foreign direct investment in 2025 was lower than in previous years, and most of it was in retained earnings rather than in new ventures.

…..

Although Trump’s country-by-country levies were struck down, he is reconstituting his tariff regime piecemeal — first through a temporary 10 percent duty across the board, then through phony investigations into foreign trade practices. Alas, the new tariffs will have the same impoverishing effects as the old ones for no discernible benefit. What were we supposed to be “liberated” from, again?

Bryan Riley tweets: (HT Scott Lincicome)

A Federal Reserve study found that >50% of intermediate inputs used to produce pharmaceuticals in the U.S. are imported. (Mostly from Europe, not China). Putting big tariffs on intermediate goods used by U.S. manufacturers discourages domestic production.

Roger Pielke Jr. looks back on the publication, 20 years ago, of Al Gore’s best-selling sermon, An Inconvenient Truth. A slice:

Climate science, in the years following An Inconvenient Truth, increasingly took on the role of secular exegesis — the interpretation of extreme weather events, polar bear photographs, and pretty much anything-that-just-happened as signs confirming a narrative of planetary emergency requiring repentance.

Arnold Kling ranks Douglass North’s, John Wallis’s, and Barry Weingast’s 2009 book, Violence and Social Orders, as “of all of the works in political theory, I think it is the most under-rated.”

The “post-liberals” attract characters of dubious intellectual and ethical merit, including the one profiled here. (HT Phil Magness)