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… is from page xvii of the Definitive Edition (Ronald Hamowy, ed., 2011) of F.A. Hayek’s 1960 volume, The Constitution of Liberty:

The state of opinion which governs a decision on political issues is always the result of a slow evolution, extending over long periods and proceeding at many different levels. New ideas start among a few and gradually spread until they become the possession of a majority who know little of their origin.

DBx: Yes. Ideas have consequences.

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Here’s a letter to F&D Magazine.

Editor:

Gordon Hanson lists four options for dealing with unemployed (and underemployed) workers in locales hit especially hard by job losses (“Righting Globalization’s Wrongs,” June 2026). He dismisses three of these options: protective tariffs, means-tested targeted assistance, and free markets. His preferred option is a set of “policies that promote local economic development.”

He rightly rejects tariffs and targeted assistance. He also rightly recognizes that local economic development is key. But he mistakenly presumes that such development and free markets are alternatives to each other. In fact, not only is local development possible when markets are free, evidence shows that local markets that are relatively free of government intervention have already ‘solved’ the problem that commands Mr. Hanson’s attention. Indeed, the localized harms that Mr. Hanson and his “China Shock” co-authors attribute to free trade were likely caused instead by government intervention in those locales.

Middlebury College economist Gary Winslett reports that over the past 35 years manufacturing and employment have boomed in the market-friendly Sun Belt. He explains: “The Rust Belt’s manufacturing decline isn’t primarily about jobs going to Mexico. It’s about jobs going to Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee…. This migration didn’t happen by accident. It was driven by specific policy choices. States such as Tennessee, Alabama, South Carolina and Texas have aggressively courted manufacturers by promising business-friendly policy environments.”

All governments need to do is get out of the way.

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

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The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board reports on – surprise! – an instance (this one in Michigan) of industrial-policy failure. A slice:

Gov. [Gretchen] Whitmer has authorized nearly $7 billion in business subsidies during her two terms, says the report by James Hohman of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. Mr. Hohman focuses on eight of the biggest projects, which put $2.7 billion of taxpayer money on the line. Some $1.8 billion has been paid out, and “none of these deals have delivered what was originally announced,” he writes.

Of 20,595 jobs promised from these deals, only 602 have been created—a mere 3%, estimates Mr. Hohman. The under-deliveries include $109 million in 2019 for Fiat Chrysler to upgrade plants and create 6,433 jobs in Warren and Detroit. Fiat Chrysler has added some jobs, says Mr. Hohman, but his evaluation of state reports suggests that’s no thanks to the state incentives, which were canceled.

Another dud: $125 million authorized in 2022 for Gotion to build an electric-vehicle battery plant employing 2,350 people that was never built. A $200 million deal in 2023 to upgrade a paper mill in Billerud was canceled. In 2024 the state touted a $250 million deal to bring semiconductor manufacturer Sandisk to Flint and create 7,400 jobs, but the company pulled out. “The result is a big empty field,” says the report.

Two projects are still alive, but they’ve already reduced their job promises. That includes a Ford EV plant in Marshall offered nearly $1 billion in subsidies since 2023. Ford said recently that 500 jobs had been created at the plant.

Jonathan Turley explains what shouldn’t – but, alas, what always does seem to – need explaining: “Madisonian democracy is designed to avoid the concentration of political power, not wealth.” A slice:

Was James Madison the Zohran Mamdani of his time? Gavin Newsom seems to think so. In joining the growing number of Democratic leaders supporting a wealth tax, the California governor claimed that the U.S. Constitution and our Founders were all about wealth distribution: “The system America’s founders built,” he said, “was designed to prevent the concentration of power in a few hands, but we have allowed that concentration to happen anyway, slowly, in plain sight, over decades.”

But Madisonian democracy is designed to avoid the concentration of political power, not the concentration of wealth. The Founders were great believers in capitalism and the free market. This isn’t the 250th anniversary only of the Declaration of Independence but also of the publication of Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations,” which the Founders embraced. Many of the Founders were themselves quite wealthy, including banker Robert Morris Jr., who was known as the “Financier of the Revolution” and would be a billionaire today.

Our revolution was the first true Enlightenment revolution, heavily influenced by writers such as John Locke, who believed in a natural right to property. That right came not from the government but from God, and “excludes the common right of other Men.”

That Lockean principle was manifest in George Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights, which was a basis for the Declaration of Independence. It extolled “the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”

Madison drafted protections from government seizure of property, including the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment, which requires compensation for any property taken by the government. The Constitution was later amended to allow for income taxes rather than wealth taxes. Far from supporting a wealth tax, the constitutional system referenced by Mr. Newsom makes a federal wealth tax unconstitutional.

The Editorial Board of the Washington Post applauds Trump’s nomination of Keith Sonderling to be Secretary of Labor. A slice:

As acting secretary, he has overseen the release of rules that would protect franchise businesses and require greater transparency from the country’s largest unions.

GMU alum Thomas Savidge reviews Kurt Couchman’s Fiscal Democracy in America: How a Balanced Budget Amendment Can Restore Sound Governance.

“Trump’s fertilizer tariff retreat is another admission that tariffs raise prices” – so explains Reason‘s Eric Boehm. Two slices:

With fertilizer prices spiking due to the Iran War and contributing to rising food prices, the White House on Monday quietly dropped tariffs on fertilizer imports from Morocco.

Officially, that maneuver is meant to “ensure in the interim that United States farmers have access to a sufficient and timely supply of phosphate fertilizers during the planting and growing season, to ensure a stable domestic crop supply, and to meet our food production needs.”

In reality, this is yet another admission by the Trump administration that tariffs raise prices—otherwise, how could cutting tariffs bring prices down? It is exactly like when the White House rolled back tariffs on coffee, beef, and other imported food last year. Or when the White House rolled back tariffs on farm equipment earlier this month.

Over and over again, the Trump administration is making fools out of allies who insisted that tariffs would not raise prices.

…..

When you put it all together, Trump’s decision to walk back those tariffs is a damning admission of failure on multiple levels. It exposes how unprepared the administration was for the economic fallout of the war. It reveals, once more, how tariffs have raised prices and harmed crucial American supply chains. It illustrates how Trump’s tariffs have backfired on a specific industry—in this case, farmers — despite their political support for his election. And, thanks to [U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson] Greer’s role in all of this, it shows how lobbyists with protectionist agendas have infiltrated the Trump administration.

Here’s David Bier on Trump v. Barbara.

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… is from page 157 of the original edition of Frank Taussig’s 1915 volume, Some Aspects of the Tariff Question:

The reader who has followed the voluminous economic literature which German scholarship has piled up in recent years meets not infrequently the contention in favor of Schutz der nationalen Arbeit [Protection of National Labor]. Yet often he is left in doubt just how and why national labor is to be shielded by protection, – whether for preventing sudden shifts in the historically rooted industries of a slow-moving people, or for elevating the condition of labor in the whole country. Or, to take another example, it is often set forth, in the same quarters, that the burdens which the great social legislation of Germany imposes on her employers must be offset by duties on the products of competing foreign employers, – a proposition to which the stanch [sic] protectionist would unhesitatingly assent. But, if this be a good ground for compensating duties, why is not a general higher range of wages also a good ground, or any other condition unfavorable to the employer, – e.g., high income or property taxes, or poorer natural advantages? To answer these questions, some severe reasoning is called for: plain commonsense, unsupported by sustained argument from principle, does not suffice.

DBx: As the French purportedly say, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. (My very dear friend from France, Veronique de Rugy, tells me that the French don’t actually say this. Mais….) What was true in Bismarck’s Germany is true in Trump’s America: Protectionists fling against the wall all manner of arguments for protectionism, with much mutual inconsistency, hoping that enough credulous or ideologically benighted people will take no notice of the inconsistencies and the obvious absurdities of many of the arguments and assertions.

As I’ve written before, I have a bit of strange sympathy for protectionists, for they saddle themselves with the task of convincing people, in effect, that ten minus two equals fifteen. That’s a difficult task – or, rather, it would be a difficult task if the world were not populated with a large number of people who are eager to believe that, under the right circumstances, ten minus two does indeed equal fifteen.

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Pictured above is Frank Taussig (1859-1940).

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Americans of my generation, and of earlier ones, will remember – not fondly – the gasoline lines of Fall 1973 and the even worse lines of Summer 1979. The gasoline shortages of the disco decade were the predictable consequence of energy price controls that, although eased somewhat by Carter, weren’t completely removed until Reagan eliminated them in January 1981.

I think it likely that a significant reason why Carter lost the 1980 presidential election was that Americans angrily remembered those gawdawful lines of a year earlier and the accompanying anxiety about being able to fuel their automobiles.

Well now, the current Republican administration is displaying the same economic ignorance that Ronald Reagan successfully campaigned against.

There is no surer sign of economic ignorance – indeed, of corpulent and unalloyed economic stupidity – than having government threaten to prevent private suppliers from charging market-clearing prices.

And yet, the Trump administration is proudly putting this ignorance into practice.

When, oh when, will Trumpians finally realize that their hero is as economically illiterate – and as contemptuous of Americans’ economic liberties and property rights – as are any of the many Democratic Socialists who they are convinced their hero is protecting us from?

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Here’s a letter to Politico.

Editor:

Daniel Desrochers gives good reasons why the U.S. economy would be harmed if Trump withdraws the U.S. from the USMCA trade agreement (“Trump now ‘hates’ his own trade deal. But he’ll have a hard time killing it.” June 30). One of these reasons is the resulting uncertainty that American exporters and importers would suffer – uncertainty that raises these companies’ costs of doing business.

There is, however, another major source of rising costs – one more direct than rising uncertainty – that Mr. Desrochers doesn’t mention, namely, many American producers would pay higher prices for inputs if the demise of the USMCA prompts the U.S. government to raise tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico.

According to Dartmouth trade economist Douglas Irwin, about 60 percent of U.S. imports are inputs into production. In 2025, the U.S imported $917.4 billion of goods from Canada and Mexico – meaning that, in all probability, about $550 billion of those imports are inputs used by producers in the U.S.

Mr. Trump poses as a friend of American business. But what kind of friend recklessly inflicts on businesses not only unnecessary uncertainty and a loss of foreign markets, but also higher production costs?

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

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I sent this letter to the Washington Post nine days ago; it was not published there.

Editor:

You’re correct that Beijing’s move “to lock as much money, technology and talent as possible inside its own borders” signals the weakening of China’s economy as well as will only accelerate that weakening (“China erects a new Great Wall,” June 21). One other effect is worth noting: Less able to invest in America, the Chinese will spend a larger share of their dollar earnings buying American exports. America’s so-called “trade deficit” with China will decrease.

The Trump administration will naively applaud this outcome because of its blindness to two unfortunate results. The first is that, obstructed from taking advantage of attractive opportunities to invest in the U.S. – and, hence, ‘needing’ fewer investment dollars – the Chinese will export less, reducing supplies of intermediate and consumer goods in the U.S. The prices we Americans pay for these goods will rise, hiking costs for American producers and shrinking American households’ purchasing power.

The second negative result for Americans is that the amount of capital in our economy will decline. Real interest rates will rise, choking off some investment. U.S. economic-productivity growth will slow, dragging down the growth in real wages.

And yet the White House will cheer, foolishly supposing that a reduction in the accounting artifact called “the U.S. trade deficit with China” is for us Americans a ‘win.’ In fact, it will be a loss.

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

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GMU Econ alum Julia Cartwright, writing in the Washington Post, explains that

the bill Congress passed to fix the alleged problem — which is currently waiting for President Donald Trump’s signature — says more about Washington’s dysfunction than about what ails the American housing market….

The Road Act, for all its bipartisan support, does not meaningfully address any of these supply constraints. Fixing these issues would require Congress to take on local planning boards that value neighborhood character above affordability, and shorten permitting timelines that can stretch for years. It would also need to reckon with the tariffs on lumber and steel that raise construction costs before a single wall goes up.

These are the forces keeping homes out of reach for Americans, and the Road Act leaves them largely intact. Homeownership will become more attainable when policymakers focus on removing barriers to new construction. Searching for villains won’t fix the problem.

Brian Gross’s letter in today’s Wall Street Journal is excellent:

Scott Bessent’s five principles of economic statecraft in his op-ed “Hamilton Inspires Trump’s Economic Statecraft” (June 24) deserve serious engagement. Yet two of them cannot simultaneously be true.

His first principle holds that economic security requires reducing trade imbalances. His fourth celebrates dollar primacy as a pillar of American power. But the world’s willingness to hold dollars is precisely what allows the U.S. to run persistent trade deficits. Trade imbalances are not evidence of American weakness; they are one consequence of issuing the world’s reserve currency. What Mr. Bessent frames as a vulnerability is the price of an extraordinary privilege. Treating it as a problem to be solved risks undermining one of the principal advantages of American financial leadership.

On Hamilton, the secretary is more selective than the record warrants. Hamilton wasn’t arguing for retreat from global commerce. He was arguing that the U.S. needed to become credible enough to engage in it as an equal. He warned that the want of central regulation meant that “no nation acquainted with the nature of our political association would be unwise enough to enter into stipulations with the United States.” His concern wasn’t exploitation by trading partners. It was American unreliability.

That concern bears directly on Mr. Bessent’s third principle: that America must write the rules of the next economy. That requires convincing partners that the rules will hold. You can’t simultaneously signal that existing commitments are conditional and expect others to bind themselves to new ones. The country that tears up frameworks doesn’t get to author the replacement. It simply loses the pen.

Hamilton was writing for a small agrarian republic struggling to establish its credibility in a world dominated by British industry. The U.S. is now the issuer of the world’s reserve currency, the center of the global financial system, and the principal architect of the international economic order. The challenge isn’t whether America can compete. It is whether it can distinguish real vulnerabilities from the privileges it mistakes for burdens.

As GMU Econ alum Dan Mitchell writes, Trump at least can be credited with prompting more folks on the left to look favorably upon free trade. A slice:

[S]upport for free trade on the left didn’t just increase, it more than doubled.

On the flip side, it’s sad to see that support for free trade on the right declined a bit. Though I hope conservatives go back to being Reaganites once Trump is out of the White House.

I’ll close with a couple of caveats.

First, I’m skeptical that folks on the left now like free trade for the right reason. My concern is that they simply want to disagree with Trump. That’s better than nothing, of course, but I’d like them to understand why it’s a good idea to reduce the burden of government (in all areas, not just trade policy).

Second, I may be getting old, but I can remember what happened when Biden was in the White House. His trade policy was largely a continuation of Trump’s 1st-term protectionism. Though maybe, just maybe, a pro-trade Democrat will emerge as the 2028 race heats up (I won’t be holding my breath).

In response to a Bloomberg report headlined “Trump Pauses Duties on Moroccan Fertilizer to Aid Farm Economy,” Scott Lincicome tweets:

Imports (and free trade) to the rescue, again.

Alexander Kustov rightly criticize Europe’s ‘progressives‘ regressives for their unscientific and inhumane hostility to air-conditioning. Two slices:

As the latest heat wave discomforts Europe, France is arguing about air conditioning. Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally supports issuing €20 billion (about $23 billion) in interest-free loans to buy 30 million to 40 million units and insulation. The French left argues that air conditioning is a selfish indulgence and an ecological menace. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the country’s most prominent left-wing leader, warned that cooling would mean “increasing the damage,” and says he wouldn’t expose his grandchildren to air conditioning because it “destroys your sinuses.”

To an American, this is disorienting. Nearly 90% of U.S. households have air conditioning. But in much of Europe, cooling is a hot issue on which the populist right has the better side of the argument.

That should unsettle American progressives, who assume the far right is consistently irrational while the left is the party of science. On air conditioning, the opposite is closer to the truth. Keeping people cool in a deadly heat wave is humane and politically smart. It is the kind of help ordinary citizens can see for themselves and appreciate.

Summer heat is dangerous. In France, a single heat wave killed nearly 15,000 people in 2003. Across Europe, more than 61,000 people died in record heat in 2022. Air conditioning is the cure. The economist Alan Barreca and his colleagues found that the spread of home cooling explains most of the decline in “hot-day-related fatalities” in the U.S. since 1960.

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When it comes to air conditioning, with people dying in the heat, the populists are simply correct. The left’s most respectable voices are telling grandmothers to draw down the shutters and wait it out. You don’t have to like Ms. Le Pen, or agree with her on immigration, to admit she has this one right. Caring about evidence means being willing to say so out loud, even when the side that has lost the thread is your own.

Also critical of the inhumane ideology that prevents human beings from cleansing the environments in which they actually live and experience closely is Matthew Hennessey. A slice:

European homes aren’t air-conditioned the way American homes are, and the consequences are proving deadly. Houston has roughly the same population as Paris and very few people die there when the temperature spikes. The average summer temperature in Phoenix—a city full of elderly people that is only a little smaller than Paris—is over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Baking to death is a choice.

Roger Pielke Jr. of the American Enterprise Institute gets right to the heart of it: “The larger problem is not technology or cost, but the fact that among many, cooling technologies have taken on a moral framing as a vice.”

Brittany Bernstein is correct: “If the Supreme Court is in the tank for Trump, it sure has a weird way of showing it.” A slice:

But in rejecting Trump’s final avenue to avoid paying millions to Carroll, who successfully argued that Trump sexually abused her in the late 1990s and later defamed her when he denied her allegations when she came forward in 2019, the Court has offered just another piece of evidence that it hardly caters to the president’s every whim.

And in fact, the very same day the Court issued its ruling in the Carroll case, it dealt two more losses to Trump, including a ruling in favor of Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors whom the president had tried to fire. In a 5–4 ruling, the Court determined Cook can remain in her job while the case works its way through the legal system.

The Court also upheld a Mississippi law allowing election officials to count mail-in ballots that are postmarked by Election Day but received up to five days after it.

And yet, progressives are quick to discount these rulings against the president. Every decision in the president’s favor is used as evidence that the Court’s conservative majority serves as a “rubber stamp” for the president.

Barry Brownstein recalls “Thomas Paine’s challenge to a complacent America.”

Richard Salsman hits an important nail squarely on its head:

The publicly schooled are easily fooled. Government ownership & control of the means of PRODUCTION is facilitated by government ownership & control of the means of INSTRUCTION. End the vicious bipartisan DESTRUCTION of human capital. Defund public schools ASAP.

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… is from pages 174-175 of Thomas Sowell’s 1999 book, Barbarians Inside the Gates:

Price controls have been tried on every inhabited continent and for 4,000 years of recorded history. Few policies have been tried among more races or in so many different cultural settings. Yet the results have been remarkably similar.

People went hungry in 18th century France and in 20th century Africa when food prices were controlled by the government. Housing shortages have developed from Hong Kong to Berkeley in wake of rent control. There is indeed much we could learn from studying other peoples and their history, if only we would.

DBx: Yes. But, sadly, too little such learning occurs because too many people – on this matter, especially so-called “progressives” – stubbornly ignore both basic economic theory and history in their attempts to free their aspirations from the reins (and reign) of reality. Unfortunately, reality itself never releases its rein on – and reign over – us.

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Please join me in wishing Thomas Sowell a happy 96th birthday. Here’s hoping that he remains around for many more.