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… is from page 127 of my late, great colleague Walter Williams’s 1982 book America: A Minority Viewpoint [original emphasis]:

Under natural law, individuals own themselves. From this it follows that an individual has the right to any material goods he produces and to dispose of these goods as he sees fit. But this right is violated when government “redistributes” income. Politicians say that all Americans have a right to food, shelter, and decent medical care. But what they are really saying is that some people have the right to take my money, through government coercion, and give it to others. I would like to know: Under what interpretation of “human rights” do some people have the right to take what another man has produced?

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The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal wisely calls for completely abolishing the Jones Act. Two slices:

The Trump Administration is looking for ways to mitigate rising U.S. gasoline prices caused by the war. That includes suspending the 1920 Jones Act, and ponder that irony: Because of a war, the President may suspend a law that was intended to protect national security.

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America’s shale fracking bounty means the U.S. isn’t hurt as much by oil supply disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz as are Asia and Europe, which depend on the Middle East. Nonetheless, the Northeast and California import much of their oil. California imports about 15% of its refined fuel and 60% of its crude. About 30% of the latter comes from the Middle East.

The Jones Act is a major reason, in addition to California’s anti-fossil fuel policies that have reduced in-state oil production and shuttered refineries. As we recently reported, some shippers are circumventing the Jones Act by routing gasoline from the Gulf Coast to California through a pit-stop in the Bahamas. That’s not fuel or cost efficient.

Waiving the Jones Act could reduce oil shipping costs and fuel prices at the margin in the Northeast and on the West Coast. If President Trump wants to improve affordability, how about calling on Congress to repeal the law, which increases prices during peacetime too?

Also calling for the abolition of the cronyist Jones Act is Anastasia Boden. A slice:

Formally known as the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, the statute requires any ship moving cargo between two U.S. ports to be built, owned, registered and crewed by Americans. What sounds patriotic on paper has proved a disaster in practice. The World Economic Forum has labeled it the most restrictive cabotage law in the world. Worse: It doesn’t work. The Jones Act has shrunk the American shipping industry. Without foreign competition, U.S. shipbuilders have had no incentive to keep costs down. The Congressional Research Service has found that American-built ships can now cost six to eight times as much as equivalent vessels built in foreign yards.

The economics are simple: When vessels are that expensive, American shippers buy fewer of them. The Transportation Department counted 92 oceangoing Jones Act-compliant vessels as of 2024 — a 52 percent decline since 2000. Meanwhile, more than 60,000 commercial ships operate globally.

Trumpian protectionism gets ever-more illogical, as reported here by Eric Boehm.

“But what about China?” – GMU Econ alum David Hebert has solid answers.

David Henderson reflects wisely on Adam Smith’s Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. A slice:

While it seems fairly obvious that trade works within a country, many people at the time Smith was writing were skeptical about trade across borders. Sadly, many people today share that skepticism.

One of Smith’s motives in writing The Wealth of Nations was to slay mercantilism. Mercantilists believed that national governments should set policy to maximize the amount of specie—gold and silver—in a country. To achieve that goal, they advocated increasing a country’s exports and limiting its imports.

What’s wrong with mercantilism? Smith said it well:

To attempt to increase the wealth of any country, either by introducing or by detaining in it an unnecessary quantity of gold and silver, is as absurd as it would be to attempt to increase the good cheer of private families by obliging them to keep an unnecessary number of kitchen utensils.

Smith’s insight is relevant to current issues. On April 2, 2025, which President Trump called “Liberation Day,” Trump introduced his high tariffs on imports from various countries and seemingly based his proposed tariff rates on whether there was a balance of trade with each country. If the US trade deficit with another country was large, Trump wanted a high tariff rate against that country’s imports. What if the United States had a large trade surplus with another country, as it does with the United Kingdom and the Netherlands? Trump did not want to offset this “imbalance” by subsidizing imports from those countries. Logical consistency was never Trump’s strong suit.

What would Smith have said about Trump’s goal of a trade balance? Actually, he addressed the issue succinctly, writing, “Nothing, however, can be more absurd than this whole doctrine of the balance of trade.”

GMU Econ alum Paul Mueller talks about Adam Smith with Dan Klein.

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy, explains what shouldn’t – but, alas, what always does – need explaining: soaking the rich is bad economic policy. A slice:

The problem is not that the government collects too little. It’s that the government spends too much.

In 1950, [Adam] Michel documents, total government spending constituted roughly one-fifth of the U.S. economy. That figure has now risen to more than one-third. Real spending per person quadrupled over that same period. Jack Salmon of the Mercatus Center traced this phenomenon back to determine exactly where the long-term structural deficit comes from, and found that 98 percent is due to spending decisions. About two-thirds of this deficit reflects the compounding cost of interest on debt we’ve already accumulated. The remainder is mandatory program growth, above all with Medicare, which is on a trajectory to nearly triple as a share of gross domestic product (GDP) by mid-century compared with its historical average.

No plausible tax increase can close a gap like that. There’s a hard empirical ceiling on how much revenue the government can actually extract, regardless of what tax rates it sets.

Federal tax revenues have averaged around 17 percent of GDP since World War II despite the top federal tax rate ranging from 28 percent to 91 percent in that time. The revenue share hasn’t moved much, reaching 19.8 percent in 2000 thanks to economic growth, and promptly declining after that.

It’s simple: When tax rates rise, taxpayers work less, shelter their money, and invest differently, compressing the tax base until the yield reverts to its historical equilibrium. Politicians also respond to high taxes by hollowing out the base. Tax carveouts currently reduce federal revenues by about 8 percent of GDP.

Jack Nicastro is keeping track of the assault on Virginians’ gun rights.

I’m always honored to be a guest on Dan Proft’s radio show; yesterday we discussed ESG ‘investing’ and ECON 101.

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… is from page 13 of the 1991 Robert Schalkenbach Foundation edition of Henry George‘s 1886 book, Protection or Free Trade:

Protection, moreover, has always found an effective ally in those national prejudices and hatreds which are in part the cause and in part the result of the wars that have made the annals of mankind a record of bloodshed and devastation – prejudices and hatreds which have everywhere been the means by which the masses have been induced to use their own power for their own enslavement.

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Phil Magness reminds us that tariff powers now claimed by the Trump White House were rejected by the Reagan White House. Two slices:

In his latest bid to salvage his protectionist trade agenda, President Donald Trump imposed a new 10% tariff on all imports to the United States. To justify this move, Trump cited the existence of a trade deficit and invoked an obscure clause of the Trade Act of 1974, called Section 122. This clause allows the president to impose tariffs for up to 150 days; however, its provisions only apply in the presence of a “large and serious United States balance-of-payments deficits.”

Trump’s use of Section 122 is illegal because the United States does not currently have a balance-of-payments deficit. This term referred to a drawdown on official gold and other currency reserves of the United States under the old Bretton Woods currency peg system, which was abandoned in the early 1970s and officially terminated in 1976. Under the current floating exchange rate regime, the U.S. balance of payments is officially zero. Trump errs in trying to change the definition of “balance-of-payments deficit” to mean a common trade deficit, or the situation where the United States imports more goods and services than it exports. Yet as Marc Wheat and I show in a recent article for National Review, this was not Congress’s intention when it passed the Trade Act of 1974.

Trump’s novel reinterpretation of Section 122 faces another problem. He is the first president to attempt to use this clause for a reason. Previous administrations have examined its text in detail and come to the conclusion that Section 122 simply does not apply to common trade deficits.

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Trump’s interpretation of Section 122 s not only a misreading of its terminology—it’s a misreading that past administrations investigated in response to similar trade deficit conditions. As [Martin] Feldstein’s testimony shows, the Reagan Administration explicitly rejected Trump’s current argument and found that a “balance-of-payments deficit” did not exist under the current floating exchange rate system.

Back in September, Roberto Salinas-León eloquently defended free trade against Trump’s protectionist assault. A slice:

In a report by the Fraser Institute (“US Economic Freedom in a Trade War”), Robert Lawson and Matthew Mitchell highlight a slew of unquestionable facts. It is revealing, and sad, that every country “singled out for treating” the US unfairly is, incredibly, more open to trade than the US itself. The effective tariff rate, at one point since the onset of the new trade war, was as high as 28%, comparable to Sudan or Djibouti. While the sting in prices and lower growth has yet to be fully felt across US consumers and producers, the fact remains that income per capita in the 15 countries with the lowest effective tariffs is 4.5 times greater than in the 15 countries with the highest tariffs. The complex gamut of reciprocal tariffs has knocked the US from 56th to 76th place in the world “in terms of freedom to trade,” and out of the top ten in overall economic freedom.

Let us be clear: the economic arguments for tariff walls and protectionism are nothing more than a version of neo-mercantilism, where one nation’s benefit entails another nation’s loss. This is the conviction behind Trump’s oft-cited claim that “we are getting ripped off” and his obsession with the word tariff. But members of his economic team (with the salient exception of Peter Navarro, the worst trade economist “in history”) should know better: wealth creation is based on open competition, innovation, and consumer sovereignty. Tariffs, whether 1% or 100%, constitute new taxes that arbitrarily distort prices, disrupt market signals, and expropriate hard-won earnings from people who simply want to get ahead via open commerce.

The main economic argument in favor of tariffs is the disequilibrium in the balance of trade. The great enemy is, supposedly, the trade deficit. If the US buys more from abroad than it sells outside its borders, then the sellers are literally “stealing” from the buyers. But how can balancing the amount sold with the amount bought lead to fairness, or “reparation” of jobs lost? The balance of trade is not a corporate balance sheet—unless one interprets wealth as a fixed quantity of goods in a zero-sum world.

Scott Lincicome tweets:

The Jones Act is officially so Bad that the only people the lobbyists can find publicly defending the law are internet commenters lol

Jim Geraghty reports that the U.S. economy is now in the doldrums. Two slices:

Friday’s job numbers brought evidence suggesting that the gloomy types accurately saw weakness in the economy that the official numbers obscured. The latest release from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics showed a loss of 92,000 jobs in February, with downward revisions for the two months before that. Employers added just 181,000 jobs in 2025, around 70 percent fewer than BLS’s initial estimate of 584,000, and the revised numbers are getting worse, not better. Hiring Lab, the economic research arm of the jobs site Indeed, has concluded that “the labor market has averaged essentially zero net job creation over the past six months.”

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If companies are growing increasingly risk averse in Trump’s second term, part of the reason is a spectacularly erratic president who has become a one-man force for economic unpredictability and instability. Trump started his second term by launching a trade war against the whole world, subsequently lost a Supreme Court decision on tariffs, threw a public tantrum claiming the court had been “swayed by foreign interests,” and then turned around and imposed new tariffs to replace the old ones under a new justification.

Trump loves intervening in markets as much as his new best buddy, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and at any given moment, any company can find itself denounced on Truth Social as being run by “Leftwing nut jobs.” One day the artificial intelligence company Anthropic has a $200 million contract with the Pentagon; the next, Trump orders “EVERY Federal Agency in the United States Government to IMMEDIATELY CEASE all use of Anthropic’s technology.”

The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal applauds the Institute for Justice for its lawsuit against the Department of Labor for its disregard of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that attempts to rein in the administrative state. A slice:

The Supreme Court held in Jarkesy (2024) that agencies must bring claims rooted in common law and involving “private rights” in Article III courts where defendants are entitled to a trial by jury. The Rosses say that breach of guest workers’ contracts—which DOL is seeking to enforce with penalties—is a common law claim that belongs in federal court.

Chief Justice John Roberts stressed in the Jarkesy majority opinion that government penalties “designed to punish or deter the wrongdoer” are a “prototypical common law remedy.” While the Court didn’t draw a bright line between public and private rights, the Chief noted “even with respect to matters that arguably fall within the scope of the ‘public rights’ doctrine, the presumption is in favor of Article III courts.”

A DOL in-house judge disagreed. The judge held that the Court’s Jarkesy ruling doesn’t apply to the Rosses even though the Third Circuit Court of Appeals last summer invalidated DOL’s use of in-house agency courts in an H-2A case involving a New Jersey vegetable farm. The DOL judge said that ruling doesn’t apply in other judicial circuits.

The Institute for Justice says other federal agencies have also tried to cabin Jarkesy’s holdings. Advocates of administrative tribunals claim they’re more efficient than federal courts, but the Ross case belies this conceit. Their formal administrative hearing is scheduled for September, nearly five years after their DOL audit.

If agencies had to bring cases in federal court, they might be more judicious about which they pursue and less likely to harass innocent businesses. Permitting “Congress to concentrate the roles of prosecutor, judge, and jury in the hands of the Executive Branch,” as the Chief noted in Jarkesy, “is the very opposite of the separation of powers that the Constitution demands.”

GMU Econ alum Paul Mueller explains why Adam Smith remains relevant 250 years after the publication of An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.

Jeffrey Miron shares new evidence that competition, combined with the self-interest that’s oh-so-satisfying for economically clueless pundits to deride, reduces racial discrimination.

Chelsea Follett takes us on a tour of pre-industrial New York City. A slice:

As late as the mid-nineteenth century, pigs roamed freely through New York City streets, acting as scavengers, and nearly every household maintained a vegetable garden, often fertilized with animal manure.

Indoor air quality was no better. A drawing from Mary L. Booth’s History of the City of New York depicts a seventeenth-century New Amsterdam home with smoke from the fireplace swirling through the room. Indoor air pollution remains a serious problem today in the poorest parts of the world, as smoke from hearths can cause cancer and acute respiratory infections that often prove deadly in children. One preindustrial writer railed against the “pernicious smoke [from fireplaces] superinducing a sooty Crust or furr upon all that it lights, spoyling the moveables, tarnishing the Plate, Gildings and Furniture, and Corroding the very Iron-bars and hardest stone with those piercing and acrimonious Spirits which accompany its Sulphur.”

That said, before industrialization, though inescapable filth coated the interiors of homes, the average person owned few possessions for the corrosive hearth smoke and soot to ruin. By modern standards, New Yorkers—like most preindustrial people—were impoverished and lacked even the most basic amenities. According to historian Judith Flanders, in the mid-eighteenth century, “fewer than two households in ten in some counties of New York possessed a fork.” Many were desperately poor even by the standards of the day and could not afford housing. One 1788 account lamented how in New York City, “vagrants multiply on our Hands to an amazing Degree.” Charity records suggest that the “outdoor poor” far outnumbered those in almshouses.

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… is from this recent Substack post by Arnold Kling:

If Constitutional norms are not sufficient to check those in power, the line between a republic and an authoritarian regime gets blurry.

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The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board decries the Elizabeth Warren-inspired, Trump-supported bill that would, among other harmful measures, ban institutional investors from owning single-family rental housing units. Two slices:

The Senate’s 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act is a melange of some 40 bills. Call it a blueprint for a bigger Washington. It establishes multiple grant and loan programs for “affordable” housing while expanding federal power over local zoning. The worst provision is a ban on large investors purchasing single-family homes to rent.

Companies like Amherst and Invitation Homes that buy and then rent single-family homes have become a popular scapegoat for high housing prices. The real leading culprit is the Federal Reserve’s pandemic-era monetary policy. Historically low mortgage rates followed by inflation fueled price appreciation and resulted in a lock-in effect for owners that is constricting the supply of homes for sale.

Large investment firms mopped up foreclosed homes after the 2008 housing crash, placing a floor on prices. They account for less than 1% of the single-family housing stock, and the number of rental homes has declined on net by 900,000 since 2017. They manage fewer homes in pricy markets like Los Angeles (0.3%), Boston (0.02%) and Washington, D.C. (0.07%).

President Trump thinks the investor ban polls well and likes to say “people live in homes, not corporations.” But who does he think lives in rental homes—hedge fund managers? Most tenants are lower-income. The Senate bill could force many of them out of their homes.

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Imagine how a Democratic administration will exploit this sweeping power. How about a nationwide eviction moratorium or rent control? The bill also instructs the Housing and Urban Development Department to establish housing “best practices” for local governments—solar panels on all homes!

Oh, and don’t forget a grant program to reward local governments that “promote dense development” and “mixed-income housing,” an idea Ms. Warren campaigned on during her presidential bid in 2020. She sent out an exuberant press release on Tuesday listing all of the left-wing groups endorsing the bill.

Eager to claim a housing victory, the White House is pressuring Senate Republicans to pass the bill and wants the House to accept it. But why do Republicans want to provide a down payment for Ms. Warren and fellow progressives to expand Washington control over housing in their states?

The Washington Post‘s Editorial Board distinguishes effective from counterproductive ways to decrease the cost of oil and gasoline. A slice:

On the other hand, repealing the Jones Act, which would allow non-U.S. tankers to transport oil between U.S. ports, would immediately have salutary effects. The decrepit Jones Act fleet makes it cost prohibitive to move products from Gulf Coast refineries to the Northeast or the West Coast. The Trump administration is reportedly considering waiving the law, and there is already legislation introduced in Congress to repeal it. That’s a great idea regardless of anything happening with Iran.

David Hogberg explains what shouldn’t – but, alas, what today nevertheless does – need explaining: “Price controls will not help patients.” A slice:

Anthony Lo Sasso of the University of Wisconsin-Madison warns that price controls will give larger pharmaceutical companies a significant advantage. “Even well-intentioned price controls can sometimes reshape market structure in unintended ways,” Lo Sasso said. “Firms with diversified portfolios and global operations may be better able to adapt than smaller companies reliant on only a few products. Generally, policymakers need to consider whether MFN could inadvertently increase concentration even as it attempts to reduce prices.”

Jacob Sullum is correct: “Trump’s new tariff plan still asserts a crisis that does not exist.” A slice:

When imports exceed exports, the difference is balanced by inflows of loans, capital, and other transfers. That is why, as the government’s lawyers conceded during the litigation over Trump’s IEEPA tariffs, a trade deficit is “conceptually distinct” from a balance-of-payments deficit.

Trump has now changed his tune and his terminology.

Many governments are now forging trade agreements to avoid the uncertainties unleashed by Trump’s protectionist ‘policies.’ Jim Bacchus urges these governments to pursue their new agreements within the WTO. A slice:

As the Trump administration imposes a barrage of illegal and unprecedented tariffs on an ever-increasing number of imported products, the rest of the world is showing that it can continue trading despite these tariffs and without the United States. Other countries are lowering trade barriers with each other by concluding new bilateral and plurilateral trade agreements, and exporters are reconfiguring supply chains to route around American protectionism. Regardless of whether the United States remains indispensable to the global economy, international trade continues—and increasingly so—without the United States.

At the same time, these countries should not be doing what they have mostly been doing: forging new trading arrangements outside the World Trade Organization (WTO). Although the temptation to go outside the WTO legal framework is understandable, the better course would be for the other 165 WTO members to redouble their efforts toward trade liberalization within the institution while pursuing a different approach. That approach should be WTO-based plurilateralism that can build up to multilateralism, which is precisely how, over decades, the original General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) evolved into the WTO.

Scott Lincicome tweets:

Industrial policy FTW: “China’s Tariff-Defying Export Boom Leaves Its Factory Workers Behind: Workers who powered a tariff-defying boom tell a grim story of falling wages and vanishing jobs.” https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-03-09/china-s-tariff-defying-export-boom-leaves-its-factory-workers-behind

Sam Gregg reflects on Adam Smith’s deeply human vision. A slice:

The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations are thus, despite their different foci, methodologically similar works. But they are also unified by an overarching goal: that of introducing improvement into the human condition and changing the world for the better. While Smith was devoted to his scholarly endeavors, he was also anxious to advance a reformist agenda: one that removed the economic fetters of the mercantile system and instead allowed people to pursue lives marked by mature liberty, personal responsibility, and virtue, free of subservience to those who, thanks to the mercantile system, had acquired legal and economic privileges from the state.

Underpinning that reform agenda is a profound awareness, revealed in both The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations, of the interdependencies that characterize the commercial societies then emerging in the European world, especially Britain and its North American colonies. Far from being a society of radical individualists, the picture of human relations that arises from Smith’s two books is one in which people are morally and economically dependent on one another.

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… is from page 237 of George Will’s 2021 book, American Happiness and Discontents: The Unruly Torrent, 2008-2020 – a splendid collection of many of Will’s columns over these years; (the essay from which the quotation below is drawn originally appeared in the Washington Post’s print edition on March 26th, 2015):

Actually, Americans incessantly “outsource” here at home by, for example, having Iowans grow their corn and dentists take care of their teeth, jobs at which Iowans and dentists excel and the rest of us do not. LeBron James could be an adequate NFL tight end, but why subtract time from being a superb basketball player? The lesson, says [John] Tamny, is that individuals – and nations – should do what they do better than others and let others do other things.

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In my latest column for AIER I reflect on my now-long career of teaching introductory microeconomics at the collegiate level. A slice:

I’ve taught Principles of Microeconomics (“ECON 101”) regularly now for nearly a half-century. The first such course I taught was in the Fall Quarter of 1982 at Auburn University, my first year of graduate school there (after having received an M.A. in economics earlier that year from NYU). And except for a few years in the 1990s, I’ve taught ECON 101 every semester since, including in many summers. The total number of “micro principles” students whom I’ve taught over these years is likely in the neighborhood of 12,000. Mostly, I teach this course in auditoriums that hold between 200 and 350 students.

I never tire – and I’m sure that I never will tire – of walking into a classroom to introduce mostly 18-year-olds to the economic way of thinking. It’s still great fun and immensely rewarding, for I do regularly see the proverbial light bulbs being lit over many students’ heads.

My ECON 101 course is taught as if it’s the only economic course my students will ever take. Unlike many professors, I do not teach Principles of Microeconomics to prepare my students for Intermediate Microeconomics, which is the next course up in the curriculum. Some such preparation occurs, I’m pleased to report, but that’s all incidental. My chief goal is to inject my students with the rudiments of the economic way of thinking in order to inoculate them against the most virulent fallacies that are likely to try to infect their minds as they go through life.

What does that inoculation look like in practice? It begins with lessons such as these:

• Those of us alive in the modern, industrial world are among the materially richest human beings who ever lived, by far.
• There’s no such thing as a free lunch.
• In economic matters, there are no solutions, only trade-offs.
• Prices and wages set on markets are not arbitrary; market prices and wages reflect underlying economic realities as they also guide buyers, sellers, employers, and workers to better coordinate their plans and actions with each other.
• Profits in markets are not ‘extracted’ from workers or consumers; profits are the rewards for creatively using resources in ways to better satisfy consumer desires.
• Trade across political borders differs in no relevant economic respects from trade that occurs within political borders.
• Collective or political decision-making is done by the same imperfect and self-interested human beings who decide and act in private markets.

The above list is only a sample; it doesn’t exhaust the topics that I cover in the course. But were I to make an exhaustive list of those topics, some of what most other ECON 101 teachers teach would not be found on my list. I long ago stopped drawing cost curves and teaching the theories of so-called “perfect competition” and “monopolistic competition.” Whatever insights into the real-world economy and market processes are offered by these theories, if they exist at all, are too meager to justify the time required to ‘teach’ them. I instead spend far more time than is conventional teaching both basic public-choice economics and international trade.

No student passes my course without learning that real-world market processes must be compared to real-world political processes rather than to ideal political processes. Likewise, every student who passes my ECON 101 course learns that protectionism neither increases nor decreases domestic employment, and that trade deficits are balanced out by capital inflows.

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Phil Magness explains how Justice Clarence Thomas went awry in his dissenting opinion in Learning Resources. Here’s his conclusion:

In 1774, Thomas Jefferson prepared a lengthy legal treatise outlining the causes of the colonies’ protest against the crown. Its text became something of a rough draft for the Declaration of Independence’s list of reasons for their separation from Britain. As Jefferson wrote, “The exercise of a free trade with all parts of the world, possessed by the American colonists, as of natural right, and which no law of their own had taken away or abridged, was next the object of unjust encroachment.” Jefferson followed this indictment with a detailed survey of the acts of the British Parliament that intruded upon American commerce with the world, both by taxation and regulatory restriction. Jefferson clearly situated these offenses under the legislative acts of a parliament in which the colonists had no representation. As he concluded his section on trade restrictions, “The true ground on which we declare these acts void is, that the British parliament has no right to exercise authority over us.”

Justice Thomas and his defenders would be wise to consult Jefferson’s words as they apply to the present tariff controversies.

Also unimpressed with Justice Thomas’s Learning Resources dissent is John Grove. A slice:

By overtheorizing the textual basis of nondelegation, Thomas’s vision would seem to allow Congress to drastically transform the constitutional order authorized by the document’s ratifiers.

Ilya Somin, a GMU colleague over in the Scalia School of Law, writes about the legal challenges to Trump’s latest attempt to unlawfully impose tariffs punitive taxes on Americans’ purchases of imports. Two slices:

Today, the Liberty Justice Center filed, Burlap and Barrel, Inc. v. Trump, a lawsuit challenging Donald Trump’s massive new Section 122 tariffs. LJC is the same group that I worked with on V.O.S. Selections v. Trump, the IEEPA tariff case decided by the Supreme Court last month. I am not one of the attorneys on this new case. But I completely support it and its objectives. This case is the second challenging the Section 122 tariffs, following one filed by 24 state governments, last week.

…..

In a recent Boston Globe article, I explained why the enormous Section 122 tariffs are illegal. In addition to going beyond the statutory text, they also run afoul of the “major questions” doctrine, and nondelegation limits on Congress’ power to delegate its authority to the executive.

Phil Magness tweets: (HT Scott Lincicome)

At a 1984 Senate Finance Committee hearing they asked Marty Feldstein if Section 122 could be used to impose tariffs to counteract the trade deficit. He answered no, and succinctly explained why this was a confusion of terms.

Trump’s new tariffs are illegal.

Mary Julia Koch – a freshman at Harvard in Spring 2020 – remembers the horror of covid hysteria that began six years ago this week. A slice:

But for those beginning adulthood when the virus hit, Covid is impossible to forget. I spent 17 months of college at home, enduring a blur of camera-off Zoom classes and unmuting to “raise one’s hand.” When I returned in fall 2021 for my junior year, Harvard allowed no more than 10 people to socialize in a dorm room at once, despite mandatory vaccination, weekly testing and 10 days of isolation in a hotel room if we got sick. We had to wear masks at all times, including in the dining halls. It was harder to recognize people, communicate with friends and understand lectures.

It didn’t help that my college and a slew of others launched anonymous hotlines for students to report Covid rule violations. Most students shrugged off the mask mandate, but some stared daggers if your mask wasn’t perfectly fitted—or if you flashed a bare face on a walk outdoors. Campus inched closer to a surveillance state than a college community.

Kimberlee Josephson writes wisely about economic productivity.

Ben Zycher, in this recent letter in the Wall Street Journal, expresses his understandable frustration with “science guy” Bill Nye’s poor grasp of the science:

Bill Nye “The Science Guy” invokes everything except science in his criticism of the Environmental Protection Agency’s rescission of its 2009 finding that greenhouse-gas emissions endanger public health (“The EPA Is Wrong About Greenhouse Gases,” Letters, Feb. 25).

Contrary to the EPA 2009 predictions: There has been a decline in smog levels from 1980 to 2024. There has been no trend in hurricane numbers or intensities since 1973. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change finds no change in global flooding. There has been no trend in the EPA heat wave index since 1895, except for the 1930s. Several studies show a decline in net mortality from heat and cold. U.S. wildfires have declined sharply since 1926, and global wildfire acreage declined 24% between 1998 and 2015. Global droughts have declined about 0.5% per decade since 1950. Global per capita food production has increased 40% since 1980. And the latest peer-reviewed research reports no acceleration globally in sea-level rise. The Science Guy’s argument is fact-free.

David Henderson exposes “Ellen Wald’s misunderstandings about gasoline shortages and oil markets.”