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… is from page 316 of my late colleague Gordon Tullock’s Fall 1987 Cato Journal paper, “The Calculus: Postscript After 25 Years“:

Keynes’s remarks about the role of ideas may be exaggerated, but they are not fundamentally wrong. New ideas invented in the quiet studies of scholars sometimes do change the world.

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Clark Packard and Alfredo Carrillo Obregon review the long, sordid history of protectionism for the U.S. steel industry. Three slices:

Over the last 60 years, the federal government has showered the domestic steel industry with every conceivable form of protection from import competition, from tariffs, quotas, and trade remedies to voluntary export restraints, Buy American procurement preferences, and restrictions on trade and foreign investment under the guise of national security. These policies have further entrenched the steel industry as a protected constituency that wields significant influence over trade policy, which in turn has led to more—and increasingly complex—schemes for further shielding the industry from imports.

…..

And yet for all the protection that the government has conferred to the industry and all its costs, the steel industry’s prospects show remarkably little improvement: Major producers are struggling to innovate and compete, output and capacity utilization have stagnated, employment continues its long-term decline, and prices are among the highest in the world. Altogether, the history of steel protectionism in the United States is yet another case study in the failures of protectionism to reinvigorate declining industries and the consequences of pursuing these policies.

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Yet the domestic steel industry continues to struggle. Capacity utilization and production have basically been flat over the last decade, and total capacity has declined despite its recent uptick. Major players have ceased to be innovative, are in bad financial shape, and their business models are less suited for the realities of the modern-day steel industry and US steel consumption.223 Meanwhile, the industry continuously advocates for protectionism. Even if more protectionist measures are added and domestic steel production increases, such increases are unlikely to be decisive or sustainable, and employment in steel manufacturing is unlikely to return in large numbers. The last seven-plus years of national security protectionism, in particular, have shown this. Instead, the industry has become even more dependent on government-sanctioned protectionism for its profitability.

While steel protectionism may be a wise short-term strategy, it is a pyrrhic victory. Today’s unsavory mixture of protectionist steel measures harms the broader economy by artificially inflating manufacturers’ input costs and, ultimately, consumers’. Not only that, protectionism helps deprive domestic steel producers of sufficient foreign competition to foster more innovation. US policymakers intent on promoting more domestic manufacturing should look at ways to lower the price of a key input such as steel by promoting freer trade.

Here’s the abstract of a new paper by James Lake and Ding Liu on steel tariffs: (HT Adam Millsap)

President George W. Bush imposed safeguard tariffs on steel in early 2002. Using US input-output tables and a generalized difference-in-difference methodology, we analyze the local labor market employment effects of these tariffs depending on the local labor market’s reliance on steel as an input and as part of local production. The tariffs did not boost local steel employment but substantially depressed local employment in steel-consuming industries for many years after Bush removed them. The tariffs also led to a persistent exit of steel-intensive manufacturing establishments, suggesting a role for plant-level fixed entry costs in translating the temporary shock into persistent outcomes.

Also weighing in on steel tariffs is my intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy.

Scott Lincicome goes into further detail on why he and his Cato colleagues submitted an amicus brief, on Trump’s tariffs, to the Supreme Court. Two slices:

The administration’s predictions of “catastrophic consequences” for the broader U.S. economy are also silly. As we explain in the brief, the tariffs’ relatively modest fiscal effects explain why several studies of Trump’s spring 2025 tariff announcements found that contemporaneous movements in Treasury markets were driven mainly by economy-wide and tactical factors, not bond investors’ expectations of transformative tariff revenues. The government’s bizarre claim that nixing the tariffs would force Washington to “pay back” foreign investments promised as part of Trump’s trade deals—investments that aren’t assured, haven’t even started, and would create no government obligations when/if they do—is ludicrous on its face. And readers of Capitolism surely know by now that economic analyses and business surveys consistently show that invalidating the tariffs—and eliminating the massive uncertainty unique to the broad and vague IEEPA—would modestly help, not majorly harm, the U.S. economy. For these and other reasons, tariff pauses and adverse court decisions have been immediately followed by stock market gains, while new tariffs are typically accompanied by modest selloffs. (The U.S. economy is huge, of course, so we should never expect massive stock market moves either way.)

…..

Maybe this risk is low, but the stakes here—on the law, the economics, and our system of constitutional governance—are big enough that we didn’t want to take any chances. As we discuss in the brief, for example, Trump’s IEEPA tariffs jettison the long-established system of U.S. tariff-setting—formal cooperation between the executive and Congress that’s been used more than 200 times to create a stable and predictable baseline tariff code (the “Harmonized Tariff System of the United States”)—for a new system in which a single person can declare an “emergency” for any reason and then completely rewrite the entire tariff code, covering thousands of products and hundreds of countries, however and whenever he wants. Presidents do have the power to apply duties on top of these baseline tariffs for certain goods or places, but they’ve never just scrapped the entire base itself (which includes all the trade agreements previous presidents and Congresses have codified into U.S. law). Yet that’s exactly what Trump is doing—repeatedly. And it’s just what he promised he’d do on the campaign trail last year.

Paul Schwennesen has a legitimate beef with protectionism. A slice:

Politicians often say they “love” the rancher, the farmer, the working man. But love, in economics as in life, is best revealed by respectful restraint. Don’t interfere. Don’t pretend to know better. Don’t weaponize one group against another in the name of populist sympathy. Ronald Reagan, the cowboy president, said the nine most terrifying words one could hear was “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” As the cattle industry turns its back on Trump’s meddling, he is about to learn the political perils of a command economy as well. The best thing Washington could do for the beef industry is to stop helping it.

It’s terribly late and too little, but at least some Republican members of the U.S. Senate are now taking seriously their Constitutional duties, as explained here by the Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal. A slice:

Maybe Congress isn’t entirely comatose. The Senate offered a welcome demonstration of independent thought late Tuesday with a 52-48 vote to terminate President Trump’s 50% tariff on goods from Brazil.

Five Republicans—Susan Collins (Maine), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Thom Tillis (North Carolina), Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul (Kentucky)—voted with Democrats. The measure would end the national emergency declaration that Mr. Trump cited to justify his Brazil tariffs under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA).

The President has used that law to impose tariffs willy-nilly, claiming the U.S. trade deficit, fentanyl trafficking, or anything else he can conjure is a “national emergency.” In July Mr. Trump raised his 10% baseline tariff to 50% on Brazil as retaliation for the leftwing government’s prosecution of former center-right president Jair Bolsonaro for allegedly plotting a coup to overturn the 2022 election.

Jeff Luse reports on yet another industry that Trump is socializing.

I just ordered my copy of Bob Lawson’s and Phil Magness’s Neoliberal Abstracts; this book is a compendium that documents the fact that academia is overrun with economically uninformed ‘scholars’ who – contrary to the assertions of some apologists for these ‘scholars’ – use the word “neoliberal” (and its variations) as a term of derision.

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Back in January, Jeff Ferry and I debated free trade and protectionism. Soon afterward I wrote and posted this open letter to him. Jeff recently responded, on his Substack, to my letter. His response – titled “Free Trade: An Obsolete Theory” – is here. (My apologies to Jeff for my apparent misdirection of the email earlier this year in which I sent to him a link to my open letter.)

For this post, I will leave the comments section open (at least for as long as it isn’t overrun with spam). Feel free to chime in with your thoughts, the best of which – from both sides – I will likely share here in a follow-up post.

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… is from page 341 of the Definitive Edition (Ronald Hamowy, ed., 2011) of F.A. Hayek’s 1960 volume, The Constitution of Liberty:

The conflict between the ideal of freedom and the desire to “correct” the distribution of incomes so as to make it more “just” is usually not clearly recognized. But those who pursue distributive justice will in practice find themselves obstructed at every move by the rule of law. They must, from the very nature of their aim, favor discriminatory and discretionary action.

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Here’s a letter to a former undergraduate student of mine.

Curt:

Thanks for your email. It’s good to hear from you.

You counsel that I “maybe should cut Trump some slack cuz he’s using tariffs to get better deals.”

Your argument is a common one. But I believe it to be misguided. Creating leverage in order to bargain for better deals can indeed be a productive move, but only if the cost of the leverage doesn’t exceed the value of the improvement in the deals made possible by the leverage. In the case of Trump’s tariffs, this condition doesn’t hold.

First, Trump & Co. largely ignore the costs of creating this leverage. Yet even without retaliation by other governments, these costs are real. When protective tariffs are in place, Americans suffer economic losses in the form, in some cases, of consumers paying higher prices (and having reduced product selection), in other cases of American importers and retailers suffering lower profits as they eat some of the costs of the tariffs, and in yet other cases of American producers paying higher prices for the inputs that they import.

Second, even if a miracle occurred and the above-mentioned costs disappeared, the successfully concluded deals must be economically productive. Unfortunately, in the case of Trump’s tariffs, the deals themselves are too often destructive. The principal stated purpose of Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs is to ensure that America, from here on in, has no “goods trade deficit” with any individual country.

This goal is economic lunacy. Not only is the administration misguided to ignore trade in services – services are nearly 80 percent of U.S. GDP – the notion of a trade balance with an individual country is meaningless.

The “better deals” that Trump is trying to get would, were he actually to get them, forcibly shift a great deal of American economic activity into the production of goods for which we have no comparative advantage and away from the production of services for which we do have a comparative advantage. Trump & Co. might admire the resulting ‘balance’ in goods trade that the U.S. would have with each and every individual country, but that would be akin to quack physicians who, thinking that a person is healthiest when he’s comatose and bleeding, look with pride on a formerly healthy man lying unconscious after they’ve bludgeoned him with a sledgehammer.

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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Writing in the Washington Post, Scott Lincicome makes clear that “the Supreme Court won’t hurt America by striking down the tariffs.” Two slices:

In both legal filings and in public, President Donald Trump and his team have made fantastical claims about the calamities that would befall the nation should the Supreme Court curtail his authority to implement global tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. They allege, in the government’s opening brief for a case that will be argued before the court in November, that an adverse decision would devastate the U.S. economy, the federal government’s fiscal position, and the president’s ability to effectuate trade and foreign policy. The goal, it appears, is to pressure the court into issuing a favorable opinion for prudential and institutional reasons, even if the law demands otherwise.

Given the legal deficiencies in the Trump administration’s case, this shock-and-awe approach is understandable. Yet it suffers from a serious flaw: The underlying policy claims are ridiculous.

First, a ruling against the tariffs would not “lead to financial ruin,” as the government’s attorneys asserted in a letter to an appeals court. Between May and September, the tariffs were only around 4.5 percent of federal receipts. But even this effect is overstated because it ignores the slower economic growth and smaller tax base that the tariffs create.

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Meanwhile, revenue from the tariff collections under consideration by the court are just $89 billion thus far — a rounding error in a $30.5 trillion economy. The tariffs’ modest fiscal effects mean that invalidating them would have a modest effect on the market for government debt and related securities.

And virtually all professional economic analyses have concluded that unilateral tariffs — and related policy uncertainty — harmed the economy during Trump’s first term. In short, it would be impossible for the “catastrophic consequences” warned of during an earlier appeal to result from invalidating the new tariffs. If anything, we should expect a small but real boost to the economy — a conclusion that rising equity markets confirmed when lower courts found the tariffs to be illegal.

The administration also errs when contending that the tariffs are critical to the conduct of trade and foreign policy. Since the 1977 enactment of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the United States has completed 14 comprehensive free trade agreements with 20 countries, as well as two massive multilateral agreements at the World Trade Organization. (This includes Trump’s own U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership he jettisoned on the first day of his first term.) The United States has officially ratified 538 treaties over the same period. None of these deals involved IEEPA tariffs or the threat of them, nor did the Abraham Accords, which Trump considers a signature foreign policy achievement and framework for broader Middle East peace.

Ontario premier Doug Ford explains, in this letter to the Wall Street Journal, why his government ran the ad featuring Ronald Reagan’s endorsement of free trade:

Your editorial “Reagan vs. Trump on Tariffs” (Oct. 27) begins by pointing out that Ronald Reagan and his legacy still matter to Donald Trump. There’s nothing wrong with that. The 40th president still matters to me too.

I’m not American, but like millions of Canadians I admire Reagan and his commitment to free trade, free markets and closer ties between our two countries. His friendship with another great leader, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, set the stage for decades of cooperation and shared prosperity on both sides of the border.

The numbers don’t lie: Last year cross-border trade between the U.S. and Canada hit nearly $1 trillion. Every day, millions of Americans wake up, go to work and earn a paycheck making something for or providing a service to a company based in Canada. Together we have built the most secure, prosperous and mutually beneficial partnership between any two countries in the history of the world.

I believe that is Reagan’s legacy—built on free trade.

It’s now at risk. Tariffs are threatening millions of American jobs. They’re making life more expensive for American families, raising the cost of everything from homes to gas and groceries. They’re driving a wedge between Canadians and Americans when we need to be united against external threats from such adversaries as Russia and China.

Our government ran an ad featuring the words of President Reagan because we all benefit from being reminded of his wisdom. As the Gipper said, “protectionism” is “destructionism,” and the “way to prosperity for all nations is rejecting protectionist legislation and promoting fair and free competition.”

In 1987, President Reagan celebrated the new Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement by saying that it would “strengthen the bonds between our nations and improve the economic performance and competitiveness of both countries.” The pact, he added, would “provide an enduring legacy of which both nations can be proud.”

Rather than tarnish that legacy, let’s build on it. Mr. Trump called our ad a “hostile act,” but it was meant as an encouragement to embrace what has made our nations great. Together the U.S. and Canada can usher in a new century of shared economic prosperity by dropping tariffs, rejecting protectionism and promoting free and fair trade.

GMU Econ alum Jon Murphy makes the case that Trump’s tariffs punitive taxes on Americans’ purchases of imports would not be approved by Adam Smith.

Here’s my GMU and Mercatus Center colleague Pete Boettke on “what Hayek understood about the unknowable nature of markets.” Two slices:

From President Donald Trump’s aggressive tariffs and acquisition of government stakes in industrial and tech businesses to Zohran Mamdani’s avowedly socialist New York mayoral campaign, politicians in 2025 are not shy about central economic planning. That makes the work of the acclaimed economist F.A. Hayek, including the “knowledge problem” he exposed as a fundamental flaw in such enterprises, as relevant as ever.

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Prices are the conduit through which this vital knowledge is communicated, Hayek argued, making unencumbered markets an almost-miraculous telecommunication system that aids us all in changing circumstances.

Why? Because prices are the result of the relentless push-and-pull among what consumers value, what sellers seek, plus supply chains, technology changes, resource availability, and every other conceivable factor. Setting a true market price—not having one dictated from on high—is done only after these unknowable forces have been incorporated into the marketplace and felt, directly but more often indirectly, by the seller.

The price system works because of private property and freedom of contract, which are the antithesis of central planning.

Property ownership creates high-powered incentives to husband resources efficiently. We don’t waste what we—as opposed to someone else—pays for. Profits, enabled by the freedom to buy and sell our goods or labor to whom we choose at the price the market determines, lure us into attractive ventures. Losses discipline us when conjectures prove to be mistaken.

This system, always adjusting and unfurling, gives us, as economic decision-makers, constant feedback. It allows us to plan—to know whether to rent an apartment for the next year or buy a house that will last us a lifetime, go to trade school or college, hire five employees or 10, to build 100 cars or 200—and have the best possible chance of success.

The key point Hayek was trying to get across to his fellow economists was that the ability to mobilize the ordinary behavior of individuals in society, to make the most of our physical resources, and to utilize the knowledge and talent scattered throughout society requires not more.

The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board is correct about health-care-insurance premiums: “Rising premiums are the result of Affordable Care Act flaws.” A slice:

Democrats keep voting against opening the government or even for GOP bills to pay some federal workers. They assume they can extort the GOP into extending enriched ObamaCare subsidies that were sold as temporary pandemic support. You can understand how Democrats got this idea.

Since the GOP failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 2017, Democrats and the press have shut down GOP debate about healthcare by warning that those with a pre-existing condition will be uninsured and destitute without ever-growing subsidies. Yet this Democratic doom loop isn’t having its usual effect this time, and that’s in part because the party is unintentionally reminding voters of the law’s manifest failures and bad incentives.

Take a recent social-media post from Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota. If Republicans don’t extend the turbocharged subsidies, she warned, “early retirees like Bill & Shelly will see their health insurance premiums increase nearly 300%—from $442 to $1,700.”

Wait. Early retirees? This is a tacit admission that ObamaCare encourages Americans to stop working. The Biden subsidies turbocharged that incentive by making subsidies larger and available even to those with incomes above 400% of the poverty line. The couple in Ms. Klobuchar’s example had north of $130,000 of income in 2024, mostly from pensions, according to the media article.

Arnold Kling offers these sobering thoughts.

Norbert Michel and Jerome Famularo reveal “how federal policy locked homeowners — and the housing market—in place.”

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… is from page 77 of the original edition of IHS-founder F.A. “Baldy” Harper’s 1949 tract, Liberty: A Path to Its Recovery:

Truth, when newly born, is always an ugly stranger amidst the untruth and superstition of its time; it cannot live except as it is allowed the protection of liberty, which serves to protect newly-discovered truth in the same way as a mother protects the new-born child.

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Here’s a letter to a long-time reader of my blog.

Mr. W__:

Thanks for your email.

You ask what you can tell your “pro-tariff Trump supporting friend” who “contends that tariffs in the 80s to protect Harley-Davidson worked.”

You can ask your friend to support his contention by offering evidence. And the evidence that he must offer is not that those tariffs helped Harley-Davidson; no one doubts that particular producers can reap net benefits when government grants those producers some measure of monopoly power by restricting consumers’ options to shop elsewhere. The evidence your friend must offer is that net benefits were reaped by Americans as a whole. As this 1984 study by my GMU Econ colleague Dan Klein suggests, your friend will have difficulty finding and offering such evidence.

Further, even if (contrary to fact) those motorcycle tariffs somehow managed to improve the American economy overall, the economic case for free trade doesn’t require that every instance of protectionism fails to help the economy. Rather, the economic case for free trade rests on the recognition that protectionism as a general rule will damage the economy – and that politicians are neither sufficiently motivated nor informed to identify the rare instances when protectionism might ‘work.’

I’ve always liked this observation by the late economist Harry Johnson: “To the primitive mind, one case of magic’s working (or seeming to work) is sufficiently impressive to confirm faith in magic against a long series of experienced failures.”* Protectionism’s history is a long series of experienced failures.

While I can’t say about your friend, I can say that most protectionists – on matters of trade policy – have primitive minds.

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

* Harry G. Johnson, “Mercantilism: Past, Present, and Future” (1973), as reprinted in Johnson, On Economics and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), page 274.

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Wall Street Journal columnist Gerard Baker decries the moral relativism now busily further corroding U.S. public policy. Two slices:

Moral relativism is enticing. It enables me to establish the moral value of everything I do by reference to the behavior of others. It allows me to avoid censure by judging my intentions, choices and actions not on the basis of whether they are intrinsically right or wrong, but by the lesser standard of whether someone in a similar position might have done something similar.

It is deeply corrosive of personal mores and social trust. Over time it dulls the conscience to any moral hierarchy. It is never a legal defense and shouldn’t be a moral one.

Moral relativism is hardly new in public life. Self-exoneration through false moral equivalence by public figures is as old as time itself. But when it becomes the controlling ethical architecture of public behavior, we are in serious trouble. Its effect is to give leaders permission to do just about anything they want, unconstrained by guilt, shame or political sanction. Moral relativism and the ratchet effect will ensure that there is always some precedent close enough to persuade people to shrug even when confronted with some evidence of genuine turpitude on their own side.

We’ve been descending this spiral for a long time, but as with just about everything to do with the gargantuan figure of Donald Trump, his behavior has accelerated the descent.

His corrosive effect on norms of ethics, language and, for that matter, conservatism, has been amplified by the eager acquiescence of the Republican Party in the process.

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Misdirection is a convenient tool of relativism. Look at the latest mind-numbing assault on sanity of the president’s new tariffs on Canada. The obvious legal, political, moral, diplomatic and economic monstrosity of a president unilaterally imposing a tax on imports because he was upset by something that a Canadian provincial government decided to show on television is literally without precedent. Yet a lot of people on the right have spent the last week explaining how Mr. Trump was essentially right to say Ronald Reagan “loved” tariffs more than those wicked Canadians claimed. (He didn’t, but truth is another casualty of moral relativism.)

GMU Econ alum David Hebert has this great letter in today’s Wall Street Journal:

Shyam Sankar’s recommendation that the U.S. copy China’s industrial policy is compelling but misguided (“Why the China Doves Are Wrong,” op-ed, Oct. 18). State-led industrial policy makes economies weaker, not stronger.

Researchers at Stanford found that receipt of billions of dollars in direct subsidies from Beijing was “linked with lower firm productivity growth and only modest growth in R&D spending in subsequent years.” A recent International Monetary Fund working paper argues that China’s industrial policy has led to reduced aggregate productivity.

To beat Beijing, we ought to allow its products to reach the hands of productive Americans. We have 12.7 million workers employed in manufacturing; China has some 212 million. That they only produce twice as much “manufacturing value” as we do despite having more than 16 times as many workers is evidence enough that we needn’t embrace their policies.

David Hebert
American Inst. for Economic Research

Scott Lincicome explains why Cato Institute trade scholars are writing to the U.S. Supreme Court. A slice:

In particular, President Trump and his administration have made fantastical claims in both legal filings and in public about supposed calamities that would befall the nation’s economy and foreign policy if the Court were to strike down the president’s ability to impose tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). As my Cato colleagues Colin Grabow, Clark Packard, and I explain in our brief, the administration’s claims—including that an adverse decision would bring about another “1929-style” depression, bankrupt the US government, and leave the United States at the mercy of foreign adversaries—are groundless. Yet we worried that their repeated utterance—and a lack of correction from people who know better—risked shifting the Court’s attention away from the legal arguments that should dictate the cases’ outcome, misinforming the Court about the IEEPA tariffs’ effects, and manufacturing public outrage in response to a Court ruling against them.

So, we felt compelled to respond in an official amicus filing.

As we explain in the brief, the government’s policy claims are not only inaccurate but also ridiculous. Our arguments—citing decades of US trade policy and history and reams of economic analysis—show that the president’s ability to impose tariffs under IEEPA is, contrary to the government’s assertions, not essential for 1) negotiating and finalizing trade agreements; 2) imposing so-called “reciprocal” tariffs; 3) conducting US foreign policy; 4) reversing the nation’s fiscal trajectory; 5) preventing a US economic collapse; 6) blocking retaliation by foreign governments against US trade and investment; or 7) restoring American manufacturing and the defense industrial base. We also explain that, again contrary to the government’s claims, 8) IEEPA tariff refunds need not be administratively difficult; 9) the government would not be obligated to repay foreign investment commitments; and 10) the IEEPA tariffs are rewriting US trade law without Congress.

Jack Nicastro reports on a Virginia-based company that says that Trump’s tariffs punitive taxes on Americans’ purchases of imports makes business planning impossible. A slice:

Bill Crutchfield founded his company in 1974 as a car stereo mail-order business operating out of his mother’s basement in Charlottesville, Virginia. Despite nearly filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy the year of its founding, Crutchfield successfully pivoted from a traditional retail business to an audio equipment information company in 1975. Since then, the company has grown to over 600 employees, and last year, the consumer electronics retailer celebrated its semicentennial, but Trump’s International Emergency and Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) tariffs threaten the future of this American success story.

Like many American businesses, “the only available suppliers and vendors” for many of Cruthfield’s products “are overseas,” according to the company’s brief. China alone accounts for 60 percent of Crutchfield’s products, making the 145 percent tariff on Chinese imports threatened in April particularly galling. Although this triple-digit duty was lowered to 55 percent in June, the initial tariff rate and the trade war that has escalated since have impacted Crutchfield, which makes “decisions to cancel or scale back purchase orders from overseas vendors…long before retailers know if their worst fears are realized.”

Crutchfield explains that “tariffs imposed today, and the threat of additional tariffs imposed tomorrow, matter.” If the president has “unprecedented, unilateral, and unreviewable authority to set tariffs…then Crutchfield cannot plan for the short term [or] the long run because it cannot possibly predict what the household electronics it sells will cost.” Compounding the unseen cost of unrealized revenue, Trump’s tariffs could amount to a $200 billion annual tax on small businesses, according to the Chamber of Commerce.

Charles Lane, writing at The Free Press, explains that “the tariff case being heard next week might be the biggest test of the court’s legitimacy in over 200 years. And the Constitution is clearly not on Trump’s side.” Four slices:

Today’s justices should not be swayed by the undeniably huge short-term stakes. Instead, they should take the long view, as did Justice Robert H. Jackson, who described how not to decide such a case in his opinion on another monumental clash between the judiciary and the executive.

“The tendency is strong,” Jackson wrote in a 1952 opinion concurring with a six-justice majority that rejected President Harry S Truman’s wartime seizure of the U.S. steel industry, “to emphasize transient results upon policies. . . and lose sight of enduring consequences upon the balanced power structure of our Republic.”

…..

If the Supreme Court endorses Trump’s theory and IEEPA stays on the books, it would license future presidents—of either party—to declare “emergencies” and use them to levy tariffs with no debate or vote by the people’s elected representatives. One man would have the power to shape and reshape the entire global economy by decree. If the framers intended the Constitution to prevent anything, it was that.

…..

True, courts generally give the president latitude on matters of foreign policy and international negotiations. But the Constitution specifically carved out “duties” and “imposts”—tariffs—as Congress’s purview in the section of the Constitution devoted to the legislative branch. And it did so in part because tariffs are not a purely international matter. In fact, Americans, like the small importers who are suing to block Trump’s levies, pay them.

The Supreme Court should not bend and stretch IEEPA’s words to fit Trump’s actions, as the president and his defenders are urging. They should heed the words of Justice Jackson, whose experience as a former adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt made for a better guide to the contours of presidential power “than the conventional materials of judicial decision which seem unduly to accentuate doctrine and legal fiction,” as Jackson put it in his 1952 opinion.

…..

To preserve the separation of powers, the rationality of economic policymaking, and the Supreme Court’s own legitimacy, the justices should rule crisply and cleanly that IEEPA gave President Trump no authority to impose the tariffs he decreed to deal with the fentanyl crisis or on Liberation Day.

Such a ruling would not “destroy America,” as Trump warned but, in a very real sense, preserve it. The American Revolution was fought—and the Constitution written—to inhibit one-man emergency rule, not to facilitate it.

Corey DeAngelis reveals “the perverse incentives of teachers’ unions.”

Aidan Grogan reviews Dean Spears’s and Michael Geruso’s After the Spike. A slice:

Echoing the economic insight of Julian Simon, the co-authors note that “a good idea does not get used up.” The world is not a fixed pie, and population growth contributes to an increase in “non-rival innovation,” which benefits everyone through greater technological progress. One person’s good idea “gets copied and reapplied, endlessly.” The results of the famous wager between Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich have demonstrated that we aren’t going to run out of resources and starve to death in a Malthusian catastrophe. As Simon correctly predicted in his 1981 book The Ultimate Resource, a rising number of “skilled, spirited, and hopeful” people results in more ingenuity, abundance, and lower prices over time

In the years 1990–2019, global food production surged by 61 percent as the world population increased by 45 percent. In that same period, global extreme poverty fell from over one-third to less than 10 percent, and the prices of commodities became much cheaper, as Simon anticipated. Apart from wars or government mismanagement, famines have virtually disappeared.

Despite these vast improvements in material well-being, many are still gravely worried about climate change and the impact of 8.2 billion people on the earth’s ecosystems. Spears and Geruso take the threat of global warming seriously, but they also showcase how depopulation is not a path to decarbonization. Nor is there a theoretical or historical relationship between population size and particulate air pollution. Whether the population stabilizes or declines, the global temperature is still forecast to rise. “Billions of lives lived would make a small difference to this big problem,” they said.