Trump and other protectionists – left, center, and right – should pause to consider that their favored restriction of economic liberty is one that was also favored by Chairman Mao. Here’s a slice from an excellent new essay by the Canadian-American economist Pierre Lemieux:
Unilateral free trade is not a fantasy. In the middle of the 19th century, the British government basically declared it. Another famous example, closer to us in time, is Hong Kong, whose government, led by British administrators, levied no import tariffs after World War II, generating fast growth even as many people in neighbouring China were starving — literally starving — under Mao Zedong. Both China and Hong Kong started from dire poverty but in 1996, the year before the handover of the territory to the Chinese state, per capita income in Hong Kong was 96 per cent of the U.S. level, while China was still at only eight per cent. (The number for China is now about 30 per cent.)
As Mao’s Selected Works confirm, he — and the Chinese Communist Party with him — thought foreign trade was an instrument of subjugation and tariffs were necessary for Chinese development.
Scott Lincicome shares this line from a recent report: “Trump says the US doesn’t need Canada. The economy says otherwise.”
Garland S. Tucker III tells of how John W. Davis helped to thwart Harry Truman’s attempt to seize U.S. steel mills.
GMU Econ alum Adam Michel explains that taxing the rich can’t close the federal deficit.
Patrice Onwuka offers an inspiring warning of the false promises of the socialism now ascendant in the U.S. Two slices:
I never get tired of only-in-America stories. My belief in the promise of the United States is endlessly renewed by the rich experiences of diverse people who moved to this nation for safety, freedom and opportunity. That’s what makes the socialist movement now surging through the Democratic Party so distressing: It challenges the very ethos that drew my family here.
Socialist candidates running on anti-capitalist sentiment are surging in Democratic primary voting this election season. They oppose the very thing that carried so many families to these shores: the idea that a better life is achievable through your own discipline and effort. This truth about America serves as a beacon of hope to the rest of the world, especially in places where cronyism and corruption reign.
But if we are not careful, the Zohran Mamdani-AOC-Bernie Sanders socialist agenda will snuff that light out.
Forty-one years ago, my family stepped off a plane in Washington, D.C. We left behind life on a tiny British colony in the Caribbean to start over in the U.S.
Montserrat, our previous home, is a 40-square-mile island with an active volcano. We settled in Boston, trading lush green hills, tropical fruit trees, black sand beaches and a slow pace of life for the hustle and bustle of a gritty urban city.
Carrying just a few suitcases, my parents brought their two children to America to give us a better future.
We didn’t live in the multimillion-dollar brownstones of Beacon Hill but in the Dorchester hood surrounded by gang violence, drugs and poverty. Yet those things never infected us. My parents taught us to rise above our circumstances and comport ourselves with dignity.
They also modeled faith and a strong work ethic, laboring at menial, entry-level jobs without complaint. Their belief in delayed gratification paid off when they saved enough to buy a fixer-upper in a better neighborhood on the outskirts of the city.
Importantly, my parents rejected government dependency. During the immigration application process, they had to prove their ability to support their family. Even during hard times, they never sought a penny of public support.
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After the joy of America’s 250th anniversary recedes, we must redouble our efforts to educate the populace on the first principles of the capitalist system that make the American Dream possible — property rights, the profit motive, competition and free voluntary exchange — to inoculate our country against the folly of socialism.
Because the government does not — and should not — own your home, your business, your labor, your money or your dreams.
Tosin Akintola is right: “The backlash against data centers is bipartisan, nationwide, and wrong.”
Also right is John Puri: “The notion that data centers are guzzling the nation’s reservoirs is, to put it softly, a fiction.” Two slices:
Based on the most recent figures, data centers consume 17.4 billion gallons of water each year. That sounds like an enormous amount, until you realize the nation consumes tens of trillions of gallons. Even including data centers’ indirect water consumption via the electricity generation needed to power them, they account for less than 1 percent of the country’s total water consumption. Data centers use less water than the nation’s golf courses or California’s almond industry.
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Ignore the water demagoguery. Halting the construction of data centers won’t refill the Colorado River or free up critical supplies for Western towns and cities. The only thing that can is a shift away from economically inefficient irrigation, which is best facilitated by fluid markets.
The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal makes clear – with evidence from Texas – that rich families are not the principal beneficiaries of school choice. A slice:
‘Vouchers are welfare for the wealthy,” Texas Senate candidate James Talarico said last year, as state lawmakers were on the verge of passing their first law for private-school choice. Now that program is launching, and official statistics show Texas vouchers are no such thing.
More than 85,000 students from 895 school districts have confirmed they’ll use a state-funded scholarship toward private school or home-school expenses in the coming year, according to a report this month by Texas Comptroller Don Huffines. Some 68,000, or 80%, are in households making 200% or less of the federal poverty level. That’s $66,000 for a family of four.
Another 17,300 students are in households between 200% and 500% of the poverty threshold, meaning no more than $165,000 for a family of four. More than 20,000 students, or about 25%, also have a disability. This outcome is by design: The law gives priority to children with disabilities and lower incomes, and a $1 billion funding cap means the program won’t reach other tiers of applicants.
George Will remembers and admires the memorable and admirable Dolly Parton. A slice:
“Once Dolly climbed over a fence and came down hard on something poking through the dirt: the sharp cutting blade of a plow. She nearly severed her toes.” Was she taken to a nearby hospital? No, there wasn’t one. “As Dolly’s older brothers and father held her down, her mother poured kerosene into the wound, packed it in cornmeal, and sewed up the wound with a quilting needle.”
Her family knew the old story of a cheerful preacher saying to a hardscrabble farmer, “This is a right nice place you and Lord have here,” and the farmer replying, “You should have seen the som’bitch when the Lord had it hisself.” Young Dolly was steeped in the ethic of self-reliance.
She was a savvy businesswoman even when getting started in Nashville’s music industry, which was not a lagoon of advanced thinking about the emancipation of women. In 1974, she was 28 and starstruck when Elvis Presley expressed interest in meeting her and recording “I Will Always Love You,” which she had written. But when Presley’s management insisted on at least half the rights to the song, she refused, the meeting was off, and she never met — never again wanted to meet — Elvis. But Ackmann reports that Parton said keeping the copyright to that one song made her enough money — perhaps $10 million — she could have bought Graceland, Elvis’s Memphis home.
Also remembering Dolly Parton is Reason‘s Billy Binion, who writes that she was “grounded in a reverence for the responsibility that comes with personal freedom and individuality. “I don’t want to be anybody else. I’m not responsible for anybody else,” she told CBS in 2023. “But I’m responsible for me.”
The next time some academics tell you how important “diversity” is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.
Trade makes new goods available to a country and so, it would appear, changes tastes and expands wants. In fact there is nothing analytically new here. The essential nature of the static gains from trade is that trade widens choice by presenting a country with a consumption-possibility frontier that differs from the closed economy one. The country can still choose the closed economy bundle of goods, but it can now choose from many more bundles than it was able to in the closed economy. If it is argued that the changes in tastes are undesirable, it is implied that the opening or expansion of trade may have adverse effects in terms of some kind of social welfare function that does not accept the primacy of individual choices.
Before the 1800s, most people in Europe lived as they had in Roman times, with simple agrarian methods leaving their lives at the mercy of droughts and floods. The rise of industrial capabilities permitted incomes to double in just a few decades, a startling development never seen in human history.
