The Economist reviews Doug Irwin’s Clashing Over Commerce. A slice:
Mr Irwin also methodically debunks the idea that protectionism made America a great industrial power, a notion believed by some to offer lessons for developing countries today. As its share of global manufacturing powered from 23% in 1870 to 36% in 1913, the admittedly high tariffs of the time came with a cost, estimated at around 0.5% of GDP in the mid-1870s. In some industries, they might have sped up development by a few years. But American growth during its protectionist period was more to do with its abundant resources and openness to people and ideas.
I don’t know if The Niskanen Center’s Jerry Taylor is correct or not to have changed his mind about global warming. But as I explain in my most-recent Pittsburgh Tribune-Review column, I do know that a recent Mother Jones description of his career as a public intellectual is highly misleading, and in a way that is unjust to him..
Harvard undergraduate Laura Nicolae writes wisely and eloquently about the frivolous yet frightening infatuation that many young people today have with communism. (HT Mark Perry) A slice:
Communism cannot be separated from oppression; in fact, it depends upon it. In the communist society, the collective is supreme. Personal autonomy is nonexistent. Human beings are simply cogs in a machine tasked with producing utopia; they have no value of their own.
Speaking of poorly educated college students, here’s Jonathan Haidt.
James Walpole makes the case for principles.
Trade saved the American pilgrims. (HT Bryan Riley)
