… is from page 128 of the 2021 Liberty Fund collection of some of Josiah Tucker‘s writings – a collection titled Josiah Tucker: A Selection from His Economic and Political Writings:
[I]t hath been the Observation of many Ages, that Bigotry and Industry, Manufactures and Persecution, cannot possibly subsist together, or cohabit in the same Country.
DBx: Yes. The more free and open is an economy, the more do the people in that economy flourish.
Terrible news: Reason‘s Brian Doherty has died at the age of 57.
The White House recently released America’s Maritime Action Plan (MAP) to revitalize America’s maritime industry. It proposes a variety of regulatory modifications, subsidies, government financing options, and fees to encourage domestic shipbuilding. Although it includes a wide variety of proposals, two of them, when taken together, show the Trump administration’s hostility to free trade, as well as a general naïveté about the plan.
The first is the proposed “universal fee” on foreign-built ships; the second is the proposed regulatory change to the definition of a “U.S.-built” ship.
The universal fee is laughable in its imprecision. The MAP suggests a fee of anywhere from one to 25 cents per kilogram of imports brought on foreign-built ships. The MAP authors expect the fee to generate anywhere from $66 billion to $1.5 trillion over the next decade.
Essentially, this would be a tax by weight on all foreign commerce, as less than 2 percent of imports are carried on U.S.-flagged vessels, and even those vessels are foreign-built. The Jones Act restricts shipping between ports to U.S.-built, U.S.-owned, U.S.-flagged, and U.S.-crewed ships. On the high end of the proposed range, the fee would be a considerable barrier to trade. The tariffs put in place under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) are projected to generate $1.4 trillion to $2 trillion over the next decade, so the upper estimate of the universal fee ($1.5 trillion) could come close to those tariffs in terms of both trade barriers and revenue.
My GMU Econ colleague Bryan Caplan reports on his epiphany about Trump’s ‘theory’ of trade. A slice:
While I agree that Trump is terribly wrong about international trade, there’s a big difference between being wrong and being confused. While I doubt I’m ready to pass an Ideological Turing Test for Trumpian trade theory, I recently had a weird epiphany on the topic. After said epiphany, I feel capable of articulating roughly what Trump is thinking.
- Above all, Trump wants the rest of the world to buy as much stuff from the U.S. as possible. He wants the world to buy our current output — and he wants them to buy our assets, too! His dream is piles of dollars flowing into the U.S. from all directions.
- If piles of dollars flow into the U.S. from all directions, he thinks this will boost U.S. sales and employment.
- Trump doesn’t know and doesn’t care about the “trade deficit” as economists define it. When he hears “trade deficit,” Trump imagines that U.S. dollars leaving the U.S. exceed U.S. dollars entering the U.S. Foreign investment means U.S. dollars entering the U.S., so on his implicit definition, foreign investment reducestrade deficits.
Why would anyone find this story plausible? Simple: It’s unadorned, old-fashioned Keynesianism. Trump wants to boost aggregate demand. The more money foreigners spend here, the more American business will sell, and the more American workers they’ll hire.
Judge Glock explains that “private credit is still safer than banks are.” A slice:
Private credit rose to prominence following the Great Recession, when new regulations made it harder for normal banks to lend money. The amount of money in private credit has grown by about 300 percent over the past decade. Today, private credit funds control more than $1 trillion in assets. They’ve attracted investors by providing high returns: over 8 percent a year in recent years, a far higher rate than a basket of typical corporate bonds yields.
These funds fill a vital economic need. Commercial and industrial loans constitute only a bit over 10 percent of all bank assets. By contrast, private credit is almost entirely devoted to lending to working companies that need money to grow. Though still a small part of the financial world, private credit now constitutes over 15 percent of all private company debt.
In an increasingly intangible world, private credit is also showing willingness to take on tech and other new-economy companies. According to a survey by a team of academic economists, the most important reason companies could not get bank credit and had to use private credit instead was that the companies lacked physical capital to put up as collateral. According to an estimate from the International Monetary Fund, about 40 percent of private credit was going to technology companies as of 2024.
Most private credit funds are semi-liquid, meaning that investors can withdraw their investments—much like withdrawing a deposit from a bank. But unlike a bank, these funds have withdrawal caps, usually set at about 5 percent of all assets in a fund per quarter. After that amount is hit, the fund can “close the gate,” as funds like those at BlackRock have recently done.
Sydnexis has spent a decade developing atropine eye drops that slow the progression of pediatric myopia, a growing problem. Myopia typically develops in early childhood and progresses until a child stops growing. Genetics plays a role, and screen-time increases the risk. Rates have soared with smartphone use.
The company’s three-year randomized controlled trial succeeded on the key benchmarks the FDA set years earlier, reducing progression by about a third among children under 12 and more among the fastest progressors at the start. Yet the FDA rejected Sydnexis’s drug last October because benefits weren’t “clinically meaningful” in its view.
Why not? Because some children would still need glasses since the eye drops don’t completely stop or reverse nearsightedness. Maybe, but children wouldn’t have go to the eye doctor as often to get prescriptions for new lenses. Severe myopia increases the risk of cataracts, glaucoma and retinal detachment later in life. Reducing nearsightedness can prevent these eye diseases.
In any case, the FDA’s job is to review drugs for safety and efficacy. Let doctors and patients decide whether the benefit is meaningful. The FDA’s rationale echoes the paternalistic mindset of Dr. [Vinay] Prasad. He has scuttled rare disease drugs because, in his view, they aren’t worth the cost since they don’t cure all patients, even if they slow progression and reduce symptoms.
[DBx: Hey, but at least the arrogant, overbearing FDA under Trump isn’t woke, so it must be doing its part to rescue Americans from arrogant, overbearing progressives!]
Zohran Mamdani doesn’t want to soak only the rich; he also wants to soak middle-class New Yorkers. (HT S. Kaufman) [DBx: New Yorkers of a certain age will recall the Crazy Eddie’s television commercials, which I paraphrase here: “Mayor Mamdani! His taxes are INSANE!!!”]
… is from page 48 of Jerry Z. Muller’s 1993 book, Adam Smith In His Time and Ours [original emphasis):
As a moral philosopher, Smith was concerned about the nature of moral excellence. But like many other Enlightenment intellectuals, he tried to begin by describing man as he really is. His conception of man was not as an intrinsically good creature corrupted by society, nor as an irredeemably evil creature except for the grace of God. His project was to take man as he is and to make him more like what he is capable of becoming, not by exerting government power and not primarily by preaching, but by discovering the institutions that make men tolerably decent and may make them more so.
George Will is correct: “America needs immigrants as much as they need liberty’s blessings.” Three slices:
Two dissimilar government agencies have inadvertently combined to clarify the immigration debate. Stomach-turning excesses by Immigration and Customs Enforcement have turned many Americans’ abstract political preference into something uncomfortably concrete. And the Census Bureau has demonstrated that the nation needs immigrants as much as they need the blessings of American liberty.
Given a clear binary choice — for or against deporting immigrants who are here illegally — most Americans favor deportation. However:
One Sunday, a moderately pro-deportation American goes, as usual, for brunch at the neighborhood diner. Jose, who has put waffles in front of this American for 20 years, and who regularly exchanges pleasantries with him about their families, is gone. He has been deported for America’s improvement. Suddenly, the immigration issue has a face, and complexity.
…..
A recent Cato Institute report (“Immigrants’ Recent Effects on Government Budgets: 1994-2023”) says: Immigrants “generated more in taxes than they received in benefits from all levels of government.” They “created a cumulative fiscal surplus of $14.5 trillion in real 2024 US dollars,” including $3.9 trillion in savings on interest that did not need to be paid on debt that was not added.
Immigrants were, on average, more than 12 percent more likely to be employed than the U.S.-born population. Cato: “In 1994, the immigrant share of government expenditures was 18 percent below their share of the population; in 2023, it was 25 percent below.”
…..
As Cato notes, many illegal immigrants who are employed under borrowed or stolen identities have taxes withheld by employers but are ineligible for many government benefits. And they are less likely than others to file returns in order to claim refunds. This is another reason why Cato says:
“Immigrants have created an enormous fiscal surplus for the US government … The $14.5 trillion in savings from immigrants is the equivalent of 33 percent of the total inflation-adjusted combined deficits from 1994 to 2023 without immigrants.”
That fellow having brunch at the diner will still get his waffles. But he will miss Jose, and millions like him, in more ways than he can easily imagine.
Economic coordination does not begin with a giant spreadsheet of given facts. The knowledge that matters is dispersed across millions of individuals. It is local, contextual, and often tacit. A shop owner knows her neighbourhood customers. A machinist senses subtle changes in production. An entrepreneur imagines a product that has never existed before. Much of this knowledge cannot be fully articulated, let alone uploaded into a database.
Most importantly, prices—the signals that guide decisions—are not raw facts about the world waiting to be harvested by an algorithm. Prices emerge from real exchanges based on private property and freedom of contract. When the price of lithium rises, it is because buyers and sellers are competing over scarce resources. The price increase communicates something about relative scarcity, but it also gives people an incentive to adjust in order to conserve, to innovate, to search for substitutes.
Prices are not inputs to the system, but outputs of a dynamic discovery process (see Figure 1). Without the process of exchange and production, without the haggling and bargaining in the market, the knowledge embedded in a price simply doesn’t come into existence. This generative nature of the knowledge of the market is what Hayek was trying to get his peers to see, and why he even resorted to using the word “marvel” in his description of the price system.
Jon Miltimore exposes “antitrust’s dirty secret.” A slice:
In his 1996 book Antitrust and Monopoly: Anatomy of a Policy Failure, economist Dominick Armentano reviewed dozens of the most infamous monopolies in US history. He concluded that virtually all of them were the result of government protection, not an unfettered marketplace. “The general public,” wrote Armentano, “has been deluded into believing that monopoly is a free-market problem, and that the government, through antitrust enforcement, is on the side of the ‘angels.’ The facts are exactly the opposite.”
Looking at the state of antitrust today, it increasingly appears to be rooted more in a hostility to “bigness” than in a principled concern for consumers. This is folly. Size alone is not evidence of economic harm. In many industries, scale is precisely what allows firms to better serve customers.
Mergers and acquisitions don’t always succeed, but when they do, they generate real economic benefits. They enable companies to achieve economies of scale, cut overhead, integrate new technologies, and streamline supply chains. They also foster entrepreneurship and allow stronger firms to rescue struggling ones.
Allysia Finley (“How America’s Oil and Gas Dominance Has Weakened Iran,” Life Science, March 9) is right to celebrate U.S. energy development but misses an important reason we no longer have 1970s-type energy crises.
The main reasons for the shortages in 1973 and 1979 were U.S. government price and quantity controls on the oil market. Natural-gas prices were also government controlled. While it is true that the Arab embargo of 1973-74 and the Iranian revolution in 1979 did reduce market supply, neither caused the shortages nor the palpable sense of crisis. Had there been no U.S. government controls, the prices of oil and oil products would have risen more and more quickly, but there wouldn’t have been shortages. When controls were lifted in the early 1980s, the age of gas and oil shortages ended.
Ms. Finley includes the first Gulf War alongside the Arab embargo and Iranian revolution. But what happened then proves my point. While prices spiked amid the conflict and Americans feared a return of gas lines, the lines didn’t materialize because prices were no longer controlled. We also didn’t experience supply crises in the 2000s or during the Arab Spring.
Of course, Americans are upset by higher prices, but we’ve lived with high gas and oil prices before and we will again. More worrisome is the report that President Trump wants to do something to lower gas prices. The last time the government “did something” we had oil and gas crises lasting a decade.
My advice: leave the oil market alone.
Peter Van Doren looks at the effects of oil shocks.
Christian Britschgi writes insightfully about the bipartisan, economically clueless assault on build-to-rent housing. Two slices:
Oren Cass, chief economist of American Compass and apparently determined to never be on the right side of an issue, argues that a ban on build-to-rent housing can’t reduce housing supply because such a ban does not vaporize land, workers, and materials that could be employed for new home construction.
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To take the latter point first, it’s true that policy alone does not physically destroy the things that are used to build new homes. Contra Cass, policy can make market actors a lot less likely to finance the construction of new homes.
Which is what a ban on build-to-rent housing would do.
There are hundreds of thousands of families out there that would like to live in a new single-family home but do not want, or cannot qualify for, a mortgage. The build-to-rent market has popped up to service this niche of home-seekers.
Unable to meet the needs of single-family renters, investors will thus move their capital elsewhere. Perhaps some of that capital goes into for-sale housing or apartment development—likely, much of the capital leaves the housing market altogether.
Ditto Hawaii Democrat Brian Schatz. “We have decided, for no particular reason other than what I think is a drafting error, to demonize people who want to build rental housing for folks,” Mr. Schatz said. Mr. Cruz echoed this objection, noting the bill restricts “new rental housing for Americans by requiring build-to-rent homes to be sold within seven years.”
The Senators are referring to a provision that would ban institutional investors from buying homes to rent, with an unworkable exception for those that are built-to-rent. Investors would be required to sell these homes to individual buyers within seven years of acquiring them. But low- and middle-income folks who rent these homes can’t afford to buy them.
That’s the reason home builders are constructing them to rent. Higher mortgage rates and housing prices have locked many people out of the market. But institutional investment enables hundreds of thousands of families to live in homes, rather than cramped apartments.
Build-to-rent homes make up a growing share of home construction, especially in Sun Belt states like Florida and Texas. The American Enterprise Institute’s Ed Pinto and Tobias Peter note that some 153,628 build-to-rent homes are in the construction pipeline. The bill would effectively bar investors from buying these homes and result in less construction.
Joe Salerno remembers Roger Garrison.
César Báez reports on “how Chile’s free market miracle survived a resurgent left.”
… 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?
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.
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.
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.
… 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.
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.
…..
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.
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.
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 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.”
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.
… 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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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