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… is from page 173 of the 1996 Liberty Fund collection of Frank Meyer’s essays, In Defense of Freedom (William C. Dennis, ed.); specifically, it’s from Meyer’s June 6th, 1956, National Review article titled “Conservatives in Pursuit of Truth”:

There is no more logic in the conclusion that a love of freedom implies a disbelief in, a lack of enthusiasm for, ultimate values than there is in the Liberal canard that a belief in ultimate values makes impossible a belief in freedom. The reverse is the case: the belief in ultimate values and the belief in freedom are dependent one upon the other, integral aspects of the same understanding.

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Nick Gillespie’s recent discussion with Matt Ridley, about science and Science, is excellent.

C. Jarrett Dieterle explains what shouldn’t – but, alas, what nevertheless today does – need explaining: “Seattle’s delivery minimum wage failed drivers and raised costs.”

Progressive Democrats (with their obsession with a “green” economy), like MAGA Republicans (with their obsession with tariffs), apparently believe that Americans are too wealthy. A slice from a new Wall Street Journal essay:

The House on Thursday passed the Standardizing Permitting and Expediting Economic Development (Speed) Act, 221-196. Every Republican except Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania voted for the bill. But the Hakeem Jeffries’ Democrats voted 195-11 against the bill that is co-sponsored by Democrat Jared Golden of Maine. The 11 Democrats other than Mr. Golden who voted aye include four from Texas and represent swing districts where Republicans have at least a chance at winning.

The Speed Act attempts to simplify the morass of federal permitting by limiting environmental reviews to the impact from a proposed project but not from speculative downstream effects. The Act also imposes sensible limits on the lawsuits that are routinely deployed to delay projects for years. Under the bill, lawsuits must be filed within 150 days and can only be filed “by a party that has suffered or imminently will suffer direct harm from the final agency action.”

The Democrats who voted no bowed to the green lobby that refuses to accept any changes to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the 1970 law that has become the main impediment to building roads, bridges, tunnels, pipelines, transmission lines, you name it. Some 26 environmental interest groups opposed the bill, while nearly all business groups supported it.

GMU Econ alum Jon Murphy reflects on the failure of Trump’s tariffs to deliver its promised boost to manufacturing employment.

Megan McArdle writes about the “diversity”-inspired institutionalized bias against young straight, white males. Two slices:

Everyone in media, academia and entertainment knew it was happening. A number of them had qualms. Almost none spoke up. And now that someone has said something, many are pretending they didn’t see it happen with their own eyes. This is incredible, in every sense of the word.

I am talking about how for years, at many institutions, there was a hiring preference for anyone but White, straight men. As Jacob Savage argues convincingly in a recent essay for Compact magazine, this most affected one group: younger White men who hadn’t had time to gain the skills and experience that might have compensated for their melanin deficiency.

…..

Young White males were about a quarter of college graduates in 2022, so we’d have expected them to average about a quarter of new hires for various elite professions. They didn’t drop to 12 percent of junior television writers because of demographics, or because studios stopped discriminating against other groups. They dropped because employers started discriminating against them to make their institutions “look like America.”

If you want to understand the backlash to diversity, equity and inclusion, you need to understand how bad that math was for a certain class of educated millennial men. You also need to recognize that a lot of this math was bad, period.

John Phelan is understandably underwhelmed by the performance of the policies of Britain’s Labour Party.

National Review‘s Editors rightly applaud Ben Shapiro. A slice:

First, at the Heritage Foundation, he [Shapiro] argued that a political movement, like a nation, needs borders. He illustrated the point with reference to the Heritage Foundation mission statement, which supports free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense.

He then compared those principles with the beliefs of Tucker Carlson, with whom Heritage President Kevin Roberts has been in ideological sympathy, up to and including initially defending Carlson’s interview with Nick Fuentes (before backpedaling). Shapiro persuasively argued that by Heritage’s own standards Carlson — who expresses routine contempt for markets, who launders Russian propaganda, who sees the advantages of sharia law, and who gives sympathetic interviews to white nationalists, Churchill-hating World War II revisionists, and proud misogynists accused of rape — is no longer a conservative.

We assume that Roberts won’t be inviting Shapiro back any time soon, but his talk was received warmly by the audience at the Heritage Foundation.

A couple of days later, Shapiro spoke at TPUSA’s AmFest conference. He addressed the rank pandering to audience, widespread conspiracy-theorizing, and cowardly unwillingness to call out lunacy on the right that has infected the right-wing influencer space. Here, Shapiro focused on the absolutely cracked theories promoted by Candace Owens about the Charlie Kirk assassination; these rancid, obsessive musings, which would set off alarms bells for any psychiatrist if spouted by a patient, have significantly shaped the debate on the right about Kirk’s assassination.

True to form, Owens responded to Shapiro’s speech with an anti-Jewish rant.

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… is from page 228 of Thomas Sowell’s Compassion Versus Guilt, a 1987 collection of some of his popular essays; specifically, it’s from Sowell’s December 10th, 1985, column titled “By the Numbers”:

When intellectuals discover that the world does not behave according to their theories, the conclusion they invariably draw is that the world must be changed. It must be awfully hard to change theories.

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Here’s a letter to a relatively new correspondent.

Mr. W__:

Thanks for your follow-up email.

Contrary to your charge, I do not believe that I misled anyone when I earlier described Ronald Reagan as a free trader. Former senator Phil Gramm – whose commitment to free trade is deep and rock-solid – tells me (as he’s said publicly) that he witnessed first hand Ronald Reagan agreeing to protectionist measures reluctantly and only as a means of steering Congress away from imposing even worse protectionism.

This essay from earlier this year by David Hebert and Marcus Witcher further clarifies the reality that Reagan was indeed opposed to protectionism.

As for China, the well-established national-security exception to the case for free trade might well apply in this case. But the desire to strengthen America’s (or the West’s) national security against a Chinese military threat cannot not explain Trump’s tariffs.

If Trump were truly intent on using trade measures to strengthen the U.S. relative to China, he would not have imposed baseline tariffs on imports from nearly all countries, along with additional tariffs on 67 others (not counting China). He would seek to deepen commercial ties with Canada, Mexico, Japan, and other allies rather than antagonize these countries, as he’s done with his indiscriminate tariff-rattling. Not only do tariffs on imports from friendly countries deny to us important inputs from these countries – inputs that bolster our military abilities – by antagonizing our friends Trump makes them less eager to help us and more open to increasing their commercial ties with China.

I’m open to a serious argument in support of thoughtfully crafted trade restrictions narrowly targeted to reduce a military threat from China. But what we’re getting from the Trump administration is anything but such thoughtful policy. What Trump serves up as justification for his tariffs is rank economic ignorance – for example, his insistence that U.S. trade deficits are a problem – splattered about, as are the tariffs themselves, with all the discretion and discipline of a toddler throwing a temper tantrum.

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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Rachel Lu – inspired by a 1964 book written by George Mosse – reviews some of the “second-rate thinkers who paved the way for Nazism.” (HT Arnold Kling) A slice:

From the opening pages of Mosse’s work, one is immediately struck by two defining features of Volkish thought that are in tension with our usual vision of Nazis. It was profoundly anti-modern. And it was deeply rooted in nineteenth-century romanticism, spurning philosophical rationalism and classical economics, and embracing instead an ideology that glorified nature, rootedness, idyllic visions of pre-industrial peasant life, mystical experience, rose-tinted nostalgia for feudalism, and the promise of greater meaning and a revitalized sense of community.

Ben Shapiro is correct: “Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and others make vile accusations through vague insinuations. Beating their distortions requires honesty and clarity.” Two slices:

Why does this matter? Because today, the conservative movement is in serious danger. It is in danger not just from a left that all too frequently excuses everything up to and including murder. The conservative movement is also in danger from charlatans who claim to speak in the name of principle but actually traffic in conspiracism and dishonesty, who offer nothing but bile and despair, who seek to undermine fundamental principles of conservatism by championing enervation and grievance. These people are frauds, and they are grifters. And they are something worse: a danger to the only movement capable of stopping the left from wrecking the country wholesale.

…..

Emotive accusations, conspiracy theories, and “just asking questions” is lazy and stupid and misleading. None of them are a substitute for truth. So when Candace Owens says, “I don’t know know, but I know,” that’s retarded, and we are all more retarded for having heard it. When Steve Bannon, for example, accuses his foreign policy opponents of loyalty to a foreign country, he’s not actually making an argument based in evidence—he’s simply maligning people with whom he disagrees. Which is par for the course from a man who was once a PR agent for Jeffrey Epstein.

Fiona Harrigan reports on how Trump’s mass deportations inflict harm not only on the innocent individuals who are deported (or who now live in terror of being deported), but also on native-born Americans. Two slices:

Entrepreneurship is in Alejandro Flores-Muñoz’s blood.

Back in his birthplace of Guadalajara, Mexico, his mother and other relatives sold whatever they could—hair products, food products—to make ends meet. After Flores-Muñoz’s mom brought him to the U.S. as a child, she got a nine-to-five job but kept her entrepreneurial streak alive. “From me just having to watch her figure out how to make a large batch of cheesecakes and flanes” to observing her develop “her selling points” and participate in pop-up events, Flores-Muñoz says, “that entrepreneurship spirit was instilled in me.”

He was inspired to become an entrepreneur himself in 2012 after receiving Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), a status established by President Barack Obama’s administration that delays deportation for people who were brought to the U.S. without documentation as children. That gave him a way to get a Social Security number and the ability to earn the licenses and certifications he needed to become a full-fledged business owner who employs others. He launched several hustles throughout his 20s before becoming part owner of a food truck in 2018. He now owns a catering company.

…..

Those businesses provide the products and services that Americans enjoy every day, and they also contribute to the national economy in big ways. “Most immigrant entrepreneurs own the types of businesses that populate Main Street,” noted Laura Collins, director of the George W. Bush Institute–Southern Methodist University Economic Growth Initiative, in 2019. They “start more than a quarter of all ‘main street’ businesses—retail, neighborhood services, and accommodation and food service.” Immigrants have also founded some of the country’s biggest companies: Over a fifth of all Fortune 500 companies were started by immigrants, and about a quarter were founded by the children of immigrants. Those companies employ 15.5 million people globally, according to the AIC.

Here’s a new empirical study the results of which, although utterly unsurprising to economists, will be ignored by the likes of Zohran Mamdani, with the cost of this ignorance being paid by lower-income people: rent control reduces the availability of residential rental units. (HT Scott Lincicome)

Norbert Michel and Christian Kruse detail the good and the not-so-good of the INVEST Act, which was just passed by the U.S. House of Representatives.

Steve Chapman appropriately criticizes the selling of one’s soul in exchange for political position. A slice:

[Kevin] Hassett’s time in the White House confirms that there is no principle or insight of economics that he is not willing to discard to please his boss. When Trump spouts nonsense, Hassett is always there to offer a smiling, expert gloss on it. Last summer, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics revised its May and June calculations of job growth—a perfectly normal event—Trump fired the commissioner and claimed the report was “​​RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.” The NEC director promptly went on TV to back him up. Hassett asserted that the revision was the biggest since 1968, which was false, while offering no evidence of deception by the agency. He went on to say, “The president wants his own people there so that when we see the numbers, they’re more transparent and more reliable”—as if Trump had the slightest fondness for valid data.

Hassett is not above lying about the most basic and verifiable facts. Gasoline prices, he said recently, are “below $2 a gallon in a lot of places.” In fact, as AAA documented, there is and was no state where gas prices averaged as low as $2.

What is so remarkable about Hassett, though, is that he was once, in his own words, “an unabashed free-trader.” In 2008, he went so far as to praise Bill Clinton for his “aggressive pursuit of free trade.” In 2003, he wrote that “liberalized trade” is “a key ingredient in the recipe for prosperity.” But you can’t sup at Trump’s table without swallowing your convictions. Hassett had an epiphany that revealed to him the cruel unfairness of our free-trade agreements and the importance of reducing the trade deficit—which he, in a flight of fantasy, holds responsible for “hundreds of thousands of deaths from fentanyl.” Trump’s tariffs, he suggests, are the antidote. Any reputable economist can attest that tariffs will not necessarily reduce the trade deficit, which is merely the other side of our massive capital surplus, the result of foreigners investing in American assets. What could reduce it is the economic slowdown the tariffs threaten to cause, something that a man who was once a free-market economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute understood perfectly well.

Indeed, in his 2021 book, The Drift: Stopping America’s Slide to Socialism, Hassett recounts how he battled Peter Navarro and other trade hawks over tariffs, a contest he lost. But he stayed on nonetheless, and when research indicated that the duties on washing machines created only a few jobs, and at an exorbitant cost, he insists that Trump “watched the evidence closely and adjusted his game accordingly.” Oh? The tariffs stayed in place till the end of his first term—and beyond, because Joe Biden extended them before letting them expire in 2023. And if you believe Trump cared about the evidence, I have a White House East Wing to sell you.

National Review‘s Jeffrey Blehar decries this decry-able reality: “Instead of draining the swamp, Trump starts renaming it after himself.”

Understand that the Kennedy Center was named by statute. It is patently illegal for it to be renamed by a “board of directors,” by presidential diktat, or by anything except legislation. But that doesn’t matter to Donald Trump! What does the law mean to our Dear Executive Leader? Trump has contempt for the very idea that he might restrained by either Congress or the law, as is abundantly clear by the way he has conducted his second term to date.

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… is from page 2 of the manuscript of Edward Tower’s, Thomas Willett’s, and John Gilbert’s paper “Mr. Trump’s Tariff War on the World” – a paper forthcoming in the Journal of International Commerce, Economics and Policy:

Apart from the economic damage that Mr. Trump’s unilateral actions are generating, they have already dealt a major blow to the fabric of international cooperation and the rule of law that had been painstakingly developed over the postwar period. His actions have violated the provisions of international institutions and agreements, and bilateral treaties, as well as U.S. domestic law. They have caused financial turmoil, strained relations with U.S. allies, and have seriously damaged the international reputation of the United States.

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Here’s a letter to Forbes.

Editor:

Ken Roberts writes that U.S. trade deficits represent America’s “ability, willingness and desire to buy more than it produces” (“Trump’s Failing Effort To Tackle Trade Deficit Puts Him In Good Company,” December 20). Not so.

Any entity that consistently buys (spends) more than it produces (earns) must necessarily suffer reduced net worth. But over the course of the now-half-century uninterrupted run of annual U.S. trade deficits, the inflation-adjusted net worth of the average American household has risen spectacularly: The average American household’s real net worth is today (second quarter of 2025), 240 percent higher than was the average American household’s real net worth in 1975, the last year that America did not run an annual trade deficit.*

This net increase in Americans’ real wealth simply could not, and would not, have occurred if trade deficits represent America’s “ability, willingness and desire to buy more than it produces.”

Several examples can be given of how the pernicious accounting artifact “trade deficits” creates false impressions of the sort that misled Mr. Roberts. Here’s one: All purchases by foreigners of American real estate are classified as foreign investments in the U.S. (rather than as foreign purchases of American exports). So suppose that Jack is a home builder in Jacksonville. Jack builds a new house in Jacksonville that he sells for $1M as a vacation home to Juliette, a Jamaican living in Kingston. Although in this case an American profitably produced something purchased for consumption by a non-American, this transaction is not recorded as an American export; instead it’s recorded as incoming foreign investment in the U.S., thus raising the U.S. trade deficit by $1M.

But suppose that Jack had built that very same house, at the very same cost, and then loaded it onto a boat and shipped it to Juliette in Jamaica, where she bought it for $1M. In this case the sale of the house is counted as an American export, and thus doesn’t cause a rise in the U.S. trade deficit.

The economics in the second case are essentially identical to those in the first, yet in the first case the U.S. trade deficit rises while in the second case it doesn’t. Clearly, the accounting artifact called “the trade deficit” must be used with far more understanding and care than most reporters (and pundits and politicians) bring to discussions of trade and trade policy.

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

* To get the latest figures, I updated the data from this March 2025 blog post.

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Here’s the final episode of Juliette Sellgren’s excellent podcast, The Great Antidote. In it, she talks with her mother – my intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy – about the podcast’s history and production.

Billy Binion praises the great Jimmy Lai.

Outgoing NYC mayor Eric Adams does this good deed for Gotham’s residents: He moved to delay incoming socialist mayor Mamdani’s ability to further restrict the availability of rental housing in that city.

Speaking of Metropolis, Jack Nicastro reports on some of the many other ways that that city’s government artificially raises costs. A slice:

Short-term rental sites such as Airbnb—which hosted 38,500 units in the city in 2023—could have provided tourists with an affordable substitute for these asylum seeker–occupied hotel rooms. However, in September 2023, the city passed Local Law 18, which forbids “renting [out] units for less than 30 days.” While the law failed to make housing more affordable, it succeeded in reducing rooms available to tourists: As of September, there were only “about 3,000 short-term rentals operating legally,” per The Wall Street Journal.

Scott Lincicome tweets:

New @GitaGopinath @BrentNeiman paper:
1) The actual US tariff rate is ~1/2 the announced rate bc of exceptions/delays
2) US companies/consumers are so far bearing ~94% of tariffs’ costs (w/ foreigners paying the rest)
3) Bc of 2, US tariffs are a ~1% tax on US manufacturing

And here’s the abstract of the paper, by Gita Gopinath and Brent Neiman, that inspired Scott’s tweet:

In 2025, statutory tariff rates on U.S. imports rose to levels not seen in over one hundred years. What are the implications for prices? On the one hand, shipping lags, exemptions, and enforcement gaps have kept the actual implemented rates at only half of the statutory rates, moderating the tariffs’ impact. On the other hand, tariff pass-through to U.S. import prices is almost 100 percent, so the United States is bearing a large share of the costs. We study the incidence of the 2018-2019 and 2025 U.S. tariffs and discuss implications for U.S. sourcing, domestic manufacturing costs, and the dollar.

David Henderson argues persuasively that “nothing fails like prohibition.”

Andrew McCarthy of National Review makes clear what shouldn’t – but, alas, what nevertheless today does – need to be made clear: “Trump has no authority to categorize fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction.” A slice:

Law school is a three-year grind. But 40 years later, while I couldn’t tell you a thing about, say, the “rule against perpetuities,” I did internalize the most valuable lesson, which came in the first three hours. It wasn’t a precedent or a statute, just a bit of folk wisdom you mightn’t think would need teaching. But it does, now more than ever.

It’s this: If you hang a sign that says “horse” on a cow, that doesn’t make it a horse.

Get it? If you do, then you’ll quickly grasp that a Latin American dope dealer is not an alien enemy combatant. The Defense Department, a creature of statute, does not become “the Department of War” by a presidential decree that sends Pete Hegseth to the front of the Pentagon with a plaque and a screwdriver. A foreign terrorist organization does not, by the abracadabra of “designation,” become an authorization for the use of military force — even if we generously assume that a drug gang is the same thing as a terrorist organization. Lindsey Halligan is not the United States attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. Riots are neither patriotic nor mostly peaceful. The congressionally established John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is not, by dint of wand-waving by a crony committee, the Trump . . . anything.

And fentanyl is not a weapon of mass destruction, even if the “horse” sign in this instance happens to be an executive order.

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… is from pages 132-133 of Norbert Michel’s superb data-filled 2025 book, Crushing Capitalism: How Populist Policies are Threatening the American Dream:

The truth is that industrial policy will lead to a government-planned economy, which – as history has shown repeatedly – is doomed to fail because it seeks to impose the will of a few on everyone else. It rejects the benefits of economic freedom and the free-enterprise system. Industrial policy does not merely redirect the market economy, it takes it over, even if in small steps. Government coercion to achieve the preferred economic outcomes of those in power has demonstrably and repeatedly failed to life the common people’s fortunes. Industrial policy is not a recipe for improving people’s lives; it is a way to impoverish them.