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… is from pages 68-69 of Viktor Vanberg’s 2023 paper “Public Choice, Behavioral Symmetry, and the Ethics of Citizenship,” which is chapter 5 of The Legacy of Richard E. Wagner (Peter J. Boettke and Christopher J. Coyne, eds., 2023) [footnotes deleted]:

In a sense, the public-choice outlook at politics was meant to mirror the way welfare economists looked at markets. Just as the latter diagnosed real-world markets to be plagued by “failures” when compared with the ideal of perfectly working markets, public-choice economists insisted that real-world politics likewise “failed” when measured against its ideal image. Yet, unlike welfare economists, who considered such diagnosis of “market failures” a sufficient basis for recommending government intervention, public choice scholars did not draw symmetric conclusions. Rather, the point they sought to make was that measuring either real-world markets or real-world politics against unrealizable ideal standards is of no help whatsoever for answering the question of how problems a society faces ought to be dealt with. The only meaningful way to seek answers to such questions is, from a public choice perspective, to compare and evaluate feasible institutional arrangements, both in markets and in politics.

DBx: Pictured here are Jim Buchanan and Viktor Vanberg.

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Clark Packard’s and Scott Lincicome’s letter in today’s Wall Street Journal – a letter written in response to U.S trade representative Jamieson Greer’s hostility to the World Trade Organization – is superb:

Jamieson Greer’s frustration with the World Trade Organization is understandable, but his op-ed ignores how the U.S. unwisely accelerated the organization’s decline (“Another Fish Story From the WTO,” April 8).

The American middle class has prospered in the era of open trade, and U.S. manufacturing job declines—driven mainly by productivity gains—long predate China’s WTO accession. The U.S. was the WTO’s chief architect and reaped significant economic and geopolitical value from the system. Its retreat, which began before the administration, ignored these realities and instead prioritized U.S. farm subsidies and trade remedies, often resisting the disciplines Washington demanded of others.

Fealty to these and other insular political issues stymied multilateral negotiations and motivated four separate U.S. administrations to neuter the WTO dispute settlement by blocking Appellate Body appointments. Washington’s participation in disputes has also ground to a halt. You can’t complain about the rules of the game after you stop playing and strangle the referee.

Worst of all, the U.S. has been a bad-faith abuser of the rules it helped write, blowing through tariff bindings and invoking narrow WTO exceptions for national security and balance-of-payments crises to maintain President Trump’s global tariff wall.

Mr. Greer is right to decry the WTO’s consensus problem and the abuse of certain rules by other WTO members. The institution does need reform. But members’ continued participation shows the institution isn’t dead. And reform can’t happen if the U.S. keeps pretending it didn’t help cripple the institution it’s now eulogizing.

“The White House ballroom’s imported steel shows how tariffs encourage cronyism” – so reports Reason‘s Eric Boehm.

My Mercatus Center colleague Alden Abbott applauds Shanker Singham’s method of assessing anticompetitive market distortions (ACMDs). A slice:

The domestic-competition pillar asks a basic question: do firms compete on the merits, or do governments tilt the field through favoritism, incumbent protection, or directed allocation of capital and demand?

The international-competition pillar asks whether foreign firms can compete on reasonably equal terms. Localization rules, discriminatory standards, procurement preferences, and similar measures often push them to the sidelines.

The property-rights pillar asks whether firms can rely on secure legal protection for intellectual property, data, contracts, and investment-backed expectations.

This framework helps distinguish ordinary trade frictions from true market-rigging. A tariff can impose costs without reshaping the competitive order. By contrast, rules that channel procurement to politically favored firms, force technology transfer, or grant regulatory privileges to state-owned enterprises operate differently. They decide winners before competition even begins.

George Will explains that the U.S. president’s “’power to grant reprieves and pardons’ has become another source of political brutishness.” Here’s his conclusion:

So, the remedy for tawdry pardoning is not this or that institutional gambit. The only feasible solution is the election of presidents who are not louts. This, however, becomes less likely as voters are made ever more cynical by loutish pardons.

Phil Magness justly criticizes J.D. Vance’s support for Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán. Two slices:

How did the vice president of the United States end up doing campaign work for a Hungarian strongman five days before an election? The answer runs through the most dangerous intellectual movement in American (and world) politics: postliberalism.

In Part 1 of this series, I documented how a visceral disdain for capitalism and economic modernity in general spawned the postliberal movement amid the failed apocalyptic predictions of “Peak Oil Theory” in the mid-2000s. In Part 2, I documented how postliberalism enlists the overtly fascist legal theories of Carl Schmitt to wage an attack on the Madisonian constitutional system of checks and balances and the classical liberal philosophical ideas that animated the American founding.

In this installment, I turn my attention to the postliberal movement’s search for a patron. The fundamental unpopularity of this movement’s ideas has sent them searching — to both the Catholic Church and Viktor Orban’s Hungary — for a top-down authority willing to override public opinion.

…..

Scholars from across the political spectrum have documented how the left-leaning identity politics of elite academia spilled out of the faculty lounge and into mass media, K-12 education, and even the corporate board room. Sociologist Musa al-Gharbi dubbed this the “Great Awokening” and dated it to the early 2010s. In my own work, I’ve documented how faculty political opinions underwent a hard left turn in this same period and flooded mainstream dialogue with previously obscure jargon from the Critical Race Theory academic literature.

Although the leftward cultural shift is real, [Gladden] Pappin’s diagnosis of its causes misses the mark. Rather than investigating its sources in the classroom, he defaulted to the ideological anti-capitalism and disdain for economics that undergirds the postliberal movement.

[Patrick] Deneen made a similar move in his own cultural diagnosis. In a 2023 interview, he attributed wokeness to a hypothesized merger between the 1960s sexual revolution and a “neoliberal capitalist ethos” in which everything is commodified to maximize consumption and material comfort.

Financial Times columnist Harvey Nriapia takes a look at the latest research on minimum-wage legislation. (HT Richard Ebeling) A slice:

The majority of this research shows that a minimum wage rise lowers employment, especially among younger and less-educated workers. While the evidence is not unambiguous, it certainly points in one direction.

The logic is quite straightforward: as the price of low-skilled work rises, employers demand less of it. This is especially true for the young, who might be less productive and more error-prone when starting out.

There are many potential mechanisms explored in the literature. It could be that in response to a minimum wage uplift, companies cut jobs and invest in more labour-saving technologies, such as self-service checkouts. Or perhaps, when thinking about business needs for the next fiscal year, they opt for one older, more experienced hire rather than two young workers. Of course, some unproductive companies also buckle under the weight of the new statutory pay demand, which could leave entire teams without jobs.

[David] Neumark’s research suggests the evidence is often at odds with how the body of research is summarised. “One can always say that a lot of studies are wrong, and some small set are right — and that could lead one to the conclusion that higher minimum wages don’t reduce employment in the US,” he told me. “But simply saying “studies show” that is highly inaccurate and continues to be since this paper.”

As for why the research and the communication about the research differ so markedly, Neumark posits three reasons. First, very few economists tabulate all the literature, so they don’t know what the majority of it says. Second, a few of the prominent studies that show no negative or even positive employment effects get disproportionate press, such as the Card and Krueger 1994 paper, which is a cornerstone of economics undergraduate courses.

The third is more concerning: “I have no doubt that there are some researchers . . . who are advocates for higher minimum wages,” he told me. “I’ve seen this reflected in so many ways. I think they amplify the claim that ‘most minimum wage studies show’ no effects, even though it’s inconsistent with the data.”

Ian Vásquez shares a report – one presented last month at a meeting of economists and policy-makers (that I, too, attended) – on impressive progress in Argentina of reducing economically stifling regulations.

At a meeting I attended last month with a small group of economists, Argentina’s Minister of Deregulation, Federico Sturzenegger, presented the graph above. It shows how satellite internet use exploded once the government lifted its ban, which had, until then, benefited a politically powerful local internet provider.

In a recent paper, Sturzenegger describes how Argentines and businesses that were previously isolated or harmed by the high cost of the internet benefited from the deregulation.

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… is from David Hume’s essay “Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion” (here from page 5 of the 1985 Liberty Fund collection of some of Hume’s essays, edited by the late Eugene Miller, Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary):

The good or ill accidents of life are very little at our disposal; but we are pretty much masters what books we shall read, what diversions we shall partake of, and what company we shall keep.

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Here’s a letter to National Review.

Editor:

Flaws aplenty infect Michael Brendan Dougherty’s criticisms of the many studies that show high and rising living standards for America’s middle class (“How the Upper Middle Class Was Made,” April 10). Distilled to their essence, however, Mr. Dougherty’s criticisms are nothing but revelations of his ignorance of the facts mixed with his distaste for the choices freely made by his fellow Americans.

Although it’s true that, over the past half-century, women’s inflation-adjusted earnings rose faster than those of men – hardly surprising given that women decades ago were generally less skilled than men in the workforce – the fact, as documented by Scott Winship, is that men’s inflation-adjusted earnings have also risen. Contrary to Mr. Dougherty’s presumption, therefore, it’s more affordable today than in the past for a family to have only the male in the workforce. It follows that today’s greater participation of women in the workforce isn’t an economic necessity imposed upon families by the heartless market but, rather, a choice voluntarily made by most families. (See also this important post by Jeremy Horpedahl.)

Mr. Dougherty’s factual errors are too numerous to mention, but two deserve the spotlight. First, it’s untrue, as Marian Tupy points out, that Americans today work more hours than in the past. In the 1950s, each American worker, on average, worked 2,024 hours annually. Since 2000, each American worker, on average, works only 1,808 hours annually – or 11 percent fewer hours than during that alleged golden decade of the 1950s.

Second, manufacturing employment today is more secure than in the past. From 1958 through 1980, the average monthly manufacturing-job layoff rate was 1.6 percent. Today the rate of layoffs and discharges is lower. From December 2000 through February 2026 – years including both the Great Recession and the covid hysteria – that rate is down to 1.1 percent.

No one argues that the economy is perfect, whatever such a standard might mean. But Mr. Dougherty should both better familiarize himself with the facts and quit presuming that his personal preferences are, or ought to be, those of his fellow Americans.

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

GMU Econ alum Caleb Petitt deconstructs ships. A slice:

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

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

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

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

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

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

…..

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mr. B__:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

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

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

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

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

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

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

……

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s impressive, really.

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

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

…..

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This raises some intriguing questions about we.

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

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

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

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

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