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Rep. Riley Moore (R-WV)
Washington, DC

Mr. Moore:

In a letter to the Wall Street Journal, you assert that, because of free trade, the people of your district spent the past 40 years “watching factories close, jobs disappear and communities hollow out.” And you find in Pres. Trump’s protectionism a means of “bringing honest, blue-collar jobs back to the heartland.”

The economist Jeremy Horpedahl looked at the ten metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) in the U.S. that suffered the largest negative hits during the “China Shock” of a quarter-century ago. No region in your district is among these ten. But each of these ten MSAs is today significantly better off economically than it was before the “China Shock.” It’s a good bet that the same is true for your Congressional district.

While I have no data on your district alone, data for West Virginia at large show that inflation-adjusted average weekly earnings for West Virginians are today (2024) about 14% higher than in 2001. You might protest that this gain is too small, but a gain it nevertheless is and, thus, is inconsistent with your tale of terrible woe.*

A final point: the jobs and wages protected by tariffs aren’t “honest”; they’re dishonest. Those jobs and wages exist only because government denies to other Americans the opportunity to spend their incomes as they judge best. Every job protected by tariffs is matched by a job destroyed by tariffs. Every American business that exists or expands as a consequence of tariffs does so only because other American businesses disappear or shrink as a consequence of those same tariffs. And every cent of higher wages and profits made possible by tariffs is more than offset by reduced wages and profits elsewhere in our economy.

The gains of those who benefit from protectionism are no more “honest” than are the gains of those who benefit from robbery.

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

* I made this calculation using these three sources: here, here, and here.

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GMU Econ alum Caleb Petitt ponders the ruling in Learning Resources v. Trump. A slice:

The IEEPA tariffs were bad because they were unconstitutional, but they were also bad politically and economically. They were incapable of achieving their stated ends, they fostered graft and corruption, created uncertainty, were based on the faulty notion that trade deficits are bad, put a regressive tax on ordinary Americans, drove a wedge between our America and her allies, and slowed economic growth. Removing these tariffs will bring more life, order, and growth to the American economy.

Also exploring the implications of the Learning Resources ruling is John O. McGinnis.

Gary Clyde Hufbauer asks: “How will Trump’s new 15 percent tariff fare in court?” Here’s his conclusion:

Finally, Section 122 reads in part that limited, temporary import restrictions can be employed “to cooperate with other countries in correcting an international balance-of-payments disequilibrium.” There is no such ongoing international cooperation.

My PIIE colleague Alan Wm. Wolff wrote recently about the major limitations of Section 122 and other statutes (Sections 338, 122, 232, and 301) that Trump will likely use as authority for new tariffs. The Supreme Court’s ruling implies that Trump will face serious legal challenges as he invokes these  statutes as instruments to raise substantial revenue through tariffs, rather than as instruments to address specific foreign practices.

Phil Magness shares evidence from the U.S. Senate report on the Trade Act of 1974 that Congress then understood that a trade deficit is not the same thing as a balance-of-payments deficit.

Tarnell Brown reflects on “executive overreach, trade law, and the challenge of accountability over time.”

David Hebert argues that, despite the applause-worthy ruling in Learning Resources, “the damage of tariffs has already been done, and it is continuing to be done.” A slice:

Trade is not just about transactions. It’s about relationships and trust built and earned over time. This establishes that trading partners will play by agreed-upon rules and that market access is not a bargaining chip to be leveraged whenever one side, in this case Washington, needs a political victory.

Adam Smith understood this. He knew that the wealth of nations wasn’t built on clever tariff schedules or trying to hold the rest of the world hostage. It’s built on expanding the division of labor, broadening the extent of the market, and enabling man’s propensity to “truck, barter, and exchange.” All these things are made possible by stable rules and predictable networks of exchange. Smith understood that tariffs altered these incentives, but even he may have underappreciated the role of trust in international trade, how quickly it can be eroded, and what happens when it is.

Rather than breathing a sigh of relief after the Court’s ruling, the rest of the world is getting further confirmation that this administration, and by extension the United States of America, is no longer trustworthy. The first trade deals of 2026 have included deals meant to limit the damage that can be done by the turn away from trade by the United States. Canada and China announced a “trade reset,” with the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, referring to China as “more predictable” than the United States. When China, of all places, is viewed as more predictable than the US, something has gone very, very wrong.

“Trump’s tariffs have not shifted the trade deficit” – so reports Timothy Taylor.

GMU Econ alum Romina Boccia makes clear that “America can’t tariff its way out of this debt crisis.”

And – as explained by Dominik Lett – nor will the U.S. government’s obscenely large budget deficits be eliminated by the ‘war on fraud.’

Jeremy Horpedahl again busts the zombie myth that the real incomes of American families haven’t increased substantially over the past few decades. Here’s his conclusion:

The gains in real median household or family income since the 1970s are not being distorted in any major way. Total hours of work didn’t double in the household — they increased modestly, by about 12 percent at the mean and 39 percent at the median. And this increase stopped after the Boomer generation (roughly in the mid-1990s). Furthermore, we can adjust household income for these increases, whereby we see a rise of 26-38 percent, not a fall of 40-50 percent as Mr. Tucker claims.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Roland Fryer makes a powerful case that, as he puts it, “the social harms of drug use are dwarfed by the social harms of prohibition.” A slice:

In a 2013 study with Paul Heaton, Steven Levitt and Kevin Murphy, I measured what crack cocaine did to black communities in the 1980s and ’90s. With the rise of crack, homicide rates doubled among black males 14 to 17 while fetal deaths among blacks sharply increased. Yet even as crack use persisted at 60% to 75% of its peak level through 2000, the violence almost disappeared. The initial violence was driven not by drug use but by the struggle to establish property rights in illegal markets. Once those rights were established and crack prices fell, the violence subsided. The carnage of the crack epidemic wasn’t an argument for prohibition. It was an indictment of it.

“Do immigrant cultures threaten liberty?”

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… is from pages 101-102 of Thomas Sowell’s Compassion Versus Guilt, a 1987 collection of some of his popular essays; specifically, it’s from Sowell’s July 22nd, 1985, column titled “Lessons from Coca-Cola”:

The greatness of a competitive economy is that it forces constant revision of our estimates and changes in our behavior when we are mistaken. If we were omniscient, there would be no point in free enterprise or a competitive economy. Appointed officials could issue orders from on high to do the right thing, and that would be the end of it.

DBx: Yes.

Note that proponents of industrial policy implicitly believe that human beings who exercise government power are, if not omniscient, at least in possession of super-human intelligence and foresight.

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My emeritus Nobel-laureate colleague, Vernon Smith, sent the following note to me in response to this post of mine on Trump’s misunderstanding of trade. I share this note in full with Vernon’s kind permission.

Don:

Good job of explaining Trump’s ignorance on tariffs and trade. He really does not understand trade and the sharing of gains from trade.

The theorem that markets Limit the extent of specialization, which creates wealth, implies that any interference with markets, such as tariffs, reduces wealth creation.

Vernon

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Here’s a letter to a new correspondent.

Mr. F__:

Thanks for your email.

You ask if my “antagonism to our president’s tariffs may fall if his prediction comes true that the tariffs will replace income taxes.”

Reasonable people debate the merits of different tax regimes. Being a very-small-government guy, I’m favorably inclined to any tax regime that’s as mild and broad-based as possible. For reasons that I’ll not get into here, tariffs don’t fit this bill.

But there are other equally valid reasons for dismissing Trump’s boast that – and I quote him– “as time goes by, I believe the tariffs paid for by foreign countries will, like in the past, substantially replace the modern-day system of income tax.” These words reveal Trump’s cluelessness about history and economics.

First, since the federal income-tax was introduced in 1913, there’s never been a time “in the past” when tariffs replaced, much less “substantially” so, the modern-day system of income taxation. Anyone who’s this unfamiliar with history cannot be taken seriously.

Second, the data are clear that U.S. tariffs are overwhelmingly paid by Americans, not by foreigners. The fact that Trump continues to deny this fact is further reason not to take the man seriously.

Third, regardless of who pays U.S. tariffs, the maximum amount of revenue that these levies can raise wouldn’t come close to replacing the income tax. That Trump doesn’t recognize this reality is alone sufficient to discredit his boasts about his tariffs.

Fourth, if Trump really believes that foreigners pay all of the tariffs, then the fact that he also believes that his tariffs will create more manufacturing on American shores by protecting U.S.-based manufacturers from foreign competition exposes not only deep economic ignorance, but a flaw more fundamental: logical confusion. Foreigners pay U.S. tariffs only insofar as foreigners lower the prices they charge for the goods they export to America or as foreigners export fewer goods to America. If they pay all of these tariffs, foreigners absorb the entire tariff hike in the form of lower prices without reducing their exports. It follows that the prices that Americans pay for ‘protected’ goods don’t rise. And because these prices don’t rise, there’s no ‘protection’ given to American producers.

Trump’s blindness to the incompatibility between his claim, on one hand, that foreigners pay all of the tariffs, and, on the other hand, that the tariffs protect American manufacturing is, like each of the above three points, sufficient reason to dismiss all that he says about trade and tariffs.

Trump’s pronouncements on these issues drain him of all credibility when it comes to trade policy. Every mature person, regardless of politics, should resent the barrage of his intelligence-insulting pronouncements.

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 Wall Street Journal, Phil Magness explains that section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 – the legal authority that Trump is now trying to use as the basis for re-instituting tariffs – is not lawfully available for this purpose. A slice:

The White House’s tariff Plan B looks copied from President Biden’s playbook when the court overruled his student-loan forgiveness scheme in 2023 and Mr. Biden began statute shopping for anything to back it. That strategy hit a roadblock in federal court, as a succession of rulings invalidated his attempt to revive the policy under different laws.

The same may happen to Mr. Trump. His plan relies on a seldom-invoked clause of the Trade Act of 1974, Section 122. It allows the president to impose a general tariff of up to 15% for 150 days to address “fundamental international payments problems” that “require special import measures to restrict imports.”

Under Mr. Trump’s current interpretation, this law allows tariffs in the presence of a common trade deficit, which occurs when a country imports more goods and services than it exports. The U.S. has run trade deficits for most years since the mid-1970s. But Mr. Trump’s reading of Section 122 is erroneous. The relevant statute allows only tariffs that “deal with large and serious United States balance-of-payments deficits,” “prevent an imminent and significant deprecation of the dollar,” or facilitate an international agreement to correct a “balance-of-payments disequilibrium.” To justify his new tariffs, Mr. Trump is relying on the first option and now asserts the U.S. has a large balance-of-payments deficit.

But that’s different from a trade deficit. Turning to the arcane economic terminology of international accounting, the balance of payments is a complete ledger of all economic transactions between the U.S. and the rest of the world. The trade balance, also known as the current account, comprises only a part of this ledger.

Other components appear in the capital and financial accounts, which cover monetary transfers and investment transactions with the rest of the world. While the U.S. current account is in deficit, the capital account runs a large surplus, effectively balancing it out. Under this full accounting, the current U.S. balance-of-payments deficit is close to zero.

Also critical of the Trump administration’s reckless reliance on section 122 is the Editorial Board of the Washington Post. Three slices:

President Donald Trump’s first effort to replace the tariffs struck down by the Supreme Court is based on a misreading of a 1974 law that allows for temporary trade restrictions due to “large and serious United States balance-of-payments deficits.” That is not the same as the balance of trade, which is why courts would ideally enjoin the president’s proclamation.

…..

Trump’s proclamation appears to be modeled on President Richard M. Nixon’s 1971 order to impose a 10 percent blanket tariff to respond to a balance of payments problem. But the economy has changed quite a bit over the past 55 years.

Back then, the global economic system had fixed exchange rates for many currencies, and the dollar was redeemable for gold. In that world, it could make sense to restrict trade to avoid an imbalance of payments due to dwindling gold reserves. That’s why international trading rules had an exception to allow for such restrictions.

…..

Courts are supposed to interpret the words in the laws that Congress passes. The justices have made clear they are no longer expected to defer to the executive branch’s interpretations of them. “Balance of payments” doesn’t mean “balance of trade,” and there’s nothing serious about these accounting statistics for the U.S. economy.

And here’s Clark Packard and Alfredo Carrillo Obregon on the unlawfulness of Trump’s selection of section 122 as the alleged legal basis for his re-instituted tariffs. A slice:

Under the current international monetary regime of floating exchange rates, a country that does not regularly intervene in foreign exchange markets to peg its currency and does not suffer from insufficient capital inflows (such as the US) does not need to use its foreign reserves to finance an imbalance between international payments and receipts. Its currency can freely depreciate and thereby prop up its exports and domestic assets. (Milton Friedman actually proposed a floating exchange rate as a solution to balance-of-payments problems in the 1960s: “a system of floating exchange rates eliminates the balance-of-payments problem […] the [currency] price may fluctuate, but there cannot be a deficit or a surplus threatening an exchange crisis.”)

Ilya Somin, a key player in getting Trump’s IEEPA tariffs declared to be the unconstitutional infringements that they are, writes at The Dispatch about this case. A slice:

Trump’s April 2025 “Liberation Day” executive order invoked IEEPA to impose 10 percent tariffs on almost every nation in the world, plus large additional “reciprocal” tariffs against dozens of other countries. He also used IEEPA to impose 25 percent tariffs against Canada and Mexico, and 10 percent tariffs against China, supposedly justified by the flow of fentanyl into the United States from those countries. Taken together, these tariffs amounted to the highest U.S. tariff rates since the disastrous Smoot-Hawley tariffs of the Great Depression, and would have caused grave damage to the U.S. economy.

The main basis for the court’s ruling is that IEEPA does not even mention the word “tariff,” and has never been used to impose them by any previous president during the statute’s nearly 50-year history. The power to “regulate” importation, which IEEPA does grant in some situations, does not include a power to impose taxes.

But an additional crucial factor was the sheer scope of the authority claimed by Trump. As Chief Justice John Roberts noted in his opinion for the court, the president claimed virtually unlimited power to “impose tariffs on imports from any country, of any product, at any rate, for any amount of time.”

The framers of the Constitution wanted to ensure the president would not be able to repeat the abuses of English kings, who imposed taxes without legislative authorization. Under Trump’s interpretation of the law, the president would have virtually unlimited tariff authority, similar to that of an absolute monarch of the kind King Charles I aspired to be. The court decisively rejected this aspiration to unconstrained presidential power. Roberts’ majority opinion, a concurring opinion by Justice Neil Gorsuch, and one by Justice Elena Kagan (writing for all three liberal justices) all, in different ways, emphasized this aspect of the case. As Gorsuch put it, “Our system of separated powers and checks-and-balances threatens to give way to the continual and permanent accretion of power in the hands of one man. That is no recipe for a republic.”

Tim Carney decries the increasing habit of politicians, left and right, to accuse the U.S. Supreme Court as being illegitimate when it rules in ways these politicians dislike.

Here’s Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley on Trump’s tariffs punitive taxes on Americans’ purchases of imports. Two slices:

The Supreme Court’s decision striking down President Trump’s sweeping taxes on imports was the best thing that could have happened to Republicans in an election year when they will need all the help they can get. How long will it take the GOP to realize that?

The court ruled 6-3 that Mr. Trump overstepped his authority by using emergency powers to bypass Congress and impose tariffs on China, Canada and Mexico to address trade imbalances and stop drug smuggling. Like previous high court decisions that blocked the Biden administration’s student-loan forgiveness and eviction moratorium, the ruling strikes a blow for the constitutional separation of powers. It also provides cover to Republicans who want a course correction on tariff policy between now and November.

…..

The president insists that tariffs ultimately are paid by foreigners and are necessary to “protect our companies,” but a recent study by the New York Federal Reserve concluded what many other studies have shown—that nearly all the economic burden from the Trump tariffs has fallen on U.S. firms and consumers.

That is no surprise to anyone familiar with classical economic writings on trade going back more than two centuries. But even people who have never read a word of Adam Smith, David Ricardo or John Stuart Mill can read an electricity bill or a grocery-store receipt. Mr. Trump is less bothered by higher retail prices because he thinks they are necessary to rebalance a global economy in which the U.S. supposedly has been “ripped off” for “many decades,” even as it somehow became the most prosperous nation in human history.

Voters punished Democrats in 2024 over inflation, but Democrats have since won elections by campaigning on cost-of-living concerns. Mr. Trump wants to double down on tariffs, but that means doubling down on tax increases at a time when consumers are most worried about affordability. The president would have Republicans ignore polls on the economy, stay the course on his trade policies, and hope for the best in the fall as he tries to make mercantilism great again. It’s a fool’s errand.

Reason‘s Jack Nicastro identifies three blatantly false economic statistics that Trump boasted about in his 2026 State of the Union address. A slice:

2. In 12 months, I have secured commitments for more than $18 trillion pouring in from all over the globe.

Trump keeps making outlandish claims about the foreign direct investment supposedly fostered by the “deals” he’s brokered with his illegally imposed tariffs. Reason has debunked these claims here and here. But even the White House isn’t claiming the level of investment that Trump claimed tonight: Its website reports $9.7 trillion in total U.S. and foreign investments.

Here’s a photo taken on April 8, 2025, in Guatemala City. In it are, on the bottom left, Laura Williams; sitting on the bed is Ryan Yonk; on the couch are me and, to my left, Caleb Petitt; to Caleb’s left, standing, is Jack Nicastro; seated in the chair nearest Jack is Phil Magness; seated in the chair on the bottom right is Lenore Ealy. This photograph was taken by Brad DeVos. We were drafting – connected by telephone with David Henderson – the Anti-Tariff Declaration.

Scott Winship, with help from Jeremy Horpedahl, corrects one of the errors committed by Jeffrey Tucker in the latter’s attempt to discount the rise in ordinary Americans’ living standards over the past half-century.

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… is from page 146 of Razeen Sally’s excellent 2005 paper “Free Trade: The Next 50 Years,” which is chapter 10 of the 2005 collection, edited by Philip Booth, Towards a Liberal Utopia?:

The historical record shows that countries that are more open to the world economy grow faster than those that remain closed.

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Recently – but before the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its ruling in Learning Resources v. Trump – the great trade economist Doug Irwin delivered this splendid lecture at Duke University. (HT Bruce Caldwell)

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Ramesh Ponnuru rightly criticizes Marco Rubio and others who continue to assert that, until Trump, the United States dogmatically pursued a policy of “unfettered” free trade. A slice:

The lightly examined nostrums of our day are different. Consider Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s recent, widely (and justly) praised speech in Munich. He claims that “we embraced a dogmatic vision of free and unfettered trade” while other countries took advantage of us.

Really? Here’s Scott Lincicome writing in 2016, during the supposed reign of free-trade dogmatism:

First, although the United States maintains a relatively low average import tariff of around 3 percent, it also applies high tariffs on a wide array of “politically-sensitive” (read: highly lobbied) products: 131.8% on peanuts; 35% on tuna; 20% on various dairy products; 25% on light trucks; 16% on wool sweaters, just to name a few.  (Agriculture is particularly bad in this regard.)  We also maintain a long list of restrictive quotas on products like sugar, cheese, canned tuna, brooms, cotton, and baby formula. . . .

Second, while America’s tariffs and other “formal” trade barriers have indeed been declining for decades, they are only a small part of the overall story.  U.S. non-tariff barriers – export subsidies, discriminatory regulations, “buy local” rules, “fair trade” duties, etc. – have exploded in recent years.  In fact, according to a recent analysis by Credit Suisse, when you add up all forms of trade barriers imposed between 1990 and 2013, the biggest protectionist in the world isn’t China or Mexico but none other than… the United States.

Sounds pretty fettered.

John Puri praises Justice Neil Gorsuch’s concurring opinion in Learning Resources v. Trump.

Also applauding Justice Gorsuch’s concurring opinion in Learning Resources is David Henderson.

The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal makes clear that Trump’s attempt to use the Trade Act of 1974’s ‘section 122’ to reinstate his tariffs punitive taxes on Americans’ purchases of imports is also unlawful, as the United States does not now have (as is required by that section) a balance-of-payments deficit. Two slices:

The smart play after his legal defeat would be to take an off-ramp and forgo or pause new tariffs. Instead the White House this weekend dusted off Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 as a work-around. That provision lets a President impose tariffs of up to 15% across the board for up to 150 days “to deal with large and serious United States balance-of-payments deficits.”

What a relic, which wasn’t intended to manage a trade deficit per se. Instead it’s a holdover from a bygone era of the gold standard, fixed exchange rates and periodic panics about global liquidity.

The balance of payments is much broader than the balance in the trade of goods or services. It encompasses an economy’s total international position, including trade and capital flows. These days the U.S. balance of payments deficit is effectively zero because trade and capital flows exactly offset each other. The balance of payments is such a nonissue that the feds stopped publishing several data series about it in the 1970s.

…..

The larger reality is that Mr. Trump is so bull-headed about tariffs that he’s going to re-impose them any way he can. Along with Section 122, he’ll fire up more Section 201, 301 and 232 (national security) studies and tariffs. But as our friend Don Luskin points out, these are pea shooters compared to the IEEPA tariffs the Court struck down. They are limited in scope and duration.

That isn’t to say they won’t do harm. They’ll create more uncertainty for business, at least for a while. And with the midterm elections coming soon, this timing is fraught for Republicans. Amid an “affordability” panic, Mr. Trump says he is going to impose more border taxes on enough imports to make up for his lost emergency tariffs. Democrats must be thrilled at their dumb luck.

National Review‘s Jim Geraghty decries Trump’s lashing out at Supreme Court Justices whose ruled against him in Learning Resources. A slice:

I would only add that Trump destroyed whatever legitimate argument his administration had by exercising his powers in ludicrously capricious ways, announcing he increased tariffs on Canada because he didn’t like a television commercial and when he increased tariffs on Switzerland because he didn’t like the tone of the country’s former president. We can debate what the Founding Fathers intended about the powers of the presidency, but they surely did not intend that. A lot of leaders might be tempted to exercise powers in arbitrary and capricious ways and some may do it, but Trump is unique in that he feels the need to publicly brag about doing it.

The oral arguments went badly for the administration; no one following the issue should have been that surprised that the Supreme Court ruled the way that it did.

And yet, it triggered a presidential meltdown at the White House, with the whole world watching. Besides the accusation of foreign influence, Trump raged that the Supreme Court majority is “just being fools and lapdogs for the RINOs and the radical left Democrats. And not that this should have anything at all to do with it, they’re very unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution.” Echoing his previous nonsense claims about his former Vice President Mike Pence and the certification of the 2020 presidential election, he fumed, “They don’t want to do the right thing.”

In Trump’s mind, everyone who disagrees with him is always corrupt, driven by sinister motives, and likely part of some shadowy conspiracy. Everyone who agrees is always the best.

It was my pleasure to be a guest yesterday on Duane Lester’s radio program.

Philip Hamburger argues that California’s proposed wealth tax is an unconstitutional taking. Two slices:

California’s proposed billionaire tax is unconstitutional. The ballot initiative calling for one-time retroactive 5% tax on the net worth of the state’s billionaires has prompted much unease, but the legal arguments against it have remained elusive. It’s therefore important to recognize that this tax is an uncompensated taking or at least a deprivation of property without due process, contrary to the Fifth and 14th amendments.
…..
axes can be targeted without being unconstitutional. They can take aim at particular events, goods and materials, and exceptions can excuse particular companies. California’s tax, however, targets a small class of individuals, billionaires, and doesn’t burden anyone else, even for small amounts. This is distinctive and worrisome—particularly when imposing massive payments.

Similarly, retroactivity isn’t uncommon, and taxes don’t have to be recurring. But when added to the targeting, these considerations confirm that the California measure is confiscatory.

The combination of these features sets the billionaire tax apart. A retroactive nonrecurring tax that profoundly targets a small group and no one else is an uncompensated taking or at least a deprivation of property without due process. It should, therefore, be held unconstitutional.

Kristian Niemietz asks if a wealth tax would reduce wealth inequality.

Institute for Free Speech president David Keating’s letter, in today’s Wall Street Journal, in praise of the late Ed Crane is splendid:

Your editorial “Edward H. Crane, Libertarian Builder” (Review & Outlook, Feb. 14) rightly celebrates Ed’s extraordinary contributions to libertarian ideas and institution-building. But another dimension of his legacy is worth noting: his commitment to free speech.

Ed said that the “core of libertarianism is a defense of free speech,” and he often put himself on the front lines of its defense.

As a Libertarian Party official, Ed gave testimony on behalf of the party, one of the plaintiffs in Buckley v. Valeo, the landmark 1976 Supreme Court case that saved free speech in election campaigns.

Ed joined me as a plaintiff in SpeechNow.org v. Federal Election Commission, in which the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled in 2010 that Americans had a First Amendment right to pool resources for independent political speech without contribution limits.

Ed also played a consequential role in shaping the Federal Election Commission. It was through Ed’s encouragement that Bradley A. Smith—then an emerging scholar on free speech—came to the attention of policymakers. That connection eventually led to Brad’s appointment to the FEC as a commissioner, where he became one of the most consequential advocates for free speech in the agency’s history.

After Brad left the FEC in 2005, he founded the Institute for Free Speech, with Ed as an original director. Ed’s invaluable guidance and support through the rest of his life demonstrated his passion for free speech.

Ed Crane leaves behind a remarkable legacy. For those of us defending free speech, it is a legacy we carry forward with gratitude.

From Scott Lincicome: