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… is from page 8 of Johan Norberg’s wonderful 2025 book, Peak Human: What We Can Learn from the Rise and Fall of Golden Ages:

Some cultures are better than others because they provide institutions for positive-sum games instead of zero-sum, and their eras create liberties and opportunities rather than oppression and destruction.

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GMU Econ alum David Hebert does his own excellent version of ‘If protectionism were correct, Santa Claus would be an economic terrorist.’ Two slices:

Worse still, is Santa’s practice of dumping gifts on the American economy. “Dumping,” according to US law, is when a foreign producer sells goods in America below the cost of production. Previous administrations have solved this in the past through the use of antidumping duties, sometimes exceeding 200 percent of the product’s value.

But Santa does not merely sell below cost. He gives his goods away for free. This is dumping at a price of zero, which is completely indefensible under US law. Even China, often referred to as the worst trade offender in the world, has the decency to charge us something for their harmful production.

Using standard methodology to calculate the appropriate response is simple: take the value of the good, divide it by the price the importer is selling, and multiply it by 100 to arrive at the appropriate percentage penalty to apply. Since Santa charges us nothing, the appropriate response is therefore an infinite tariff rate applied to any and all goods imported from the North Pole.

…..

But if we really stop and think about it, foreign producers have a degree of “Santa” in them. While they do not sell us their wares at zero price, they still charge lower prices than our domestic counterparts can match. This means more access to goods and services that allow us to live healthily and wealthily, however we choose to define those terms. Unlike Santa, foreign producers sell their “gifts” to everyone regardless of age or religious affiliation and they do so year round.

So what we should really be after here is consistency: either condemn Santa as the job-destroying, IP-stealing, border-flouting menace he is — or thank foreign producers for enriching our lives with their gifts of specialization. You cannot have it both ways.

The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal – reporting on the Trump-tariff-induced decline in demand for American-made whiskey – concludes that “this is harm inflicted on American workers by their own government.”

With this letter in today’s Wall Street Journal, two GMU Econ alums bust the myth that events have proven economists wrong about tariffs:

Economists never claimed that tariffs immediately or inevitably cause inflation (“Why Everyone Got Trump’s Tariffs Wrong,” Page One, Dec. 16). We’ve long acknowledged that their effect on prices is complicated.

The first reason for that is the substitution effect: When tariffs raise the relative price of imports, consumers often shift their spending toward other goods. Some import prices may even fall, particularly if demand dries up. The net effect, then, is ambiguous.

The second factor is the income effect. Higher import costs give consumers less bang for their buck. If iPhone prices double because of tariffs, for instance, consumers enjoy less real income. Tighter budgets mean consumers have less to spend on other goods.

Moral of the story: If you’re looking solely at the inflation rate to see the effects of tariffs, you likely won’t find it. In a vacuum, the levies cause a one-time jump in an economy’s price level but not a continuous rise in its growth rate. What happens after that depends on how policymakers respond. In any case, tariffs’ most predictable and immediate effects are sputtering growth and declining consumer welfare.

Ask yourself: Doesn’t that resonate with your experience over the past nine months?

Scott Burns
Southeastern Louisiana University
Baton Rouge, La.

Caleb S. Fuller
Grove City College
Grove City, Pa.

The Editorial Board of the Washington Post writes eloquently on this:

It only took the European Union two years to start walking back its plan to ban all new gas and diesel automobiles by 2035. It’s an important reminder that government mandates are destined to disappoint in the fight against climate change.

Autumn Billings reports that the Trump administration obviously believes that the American people would oppose its immigration crackdown if the American people had a clearer understanding of what those crackdowns involve.

George Will bids adieu to 2025. A slice:

In the Republicans’ hotly contested Toadyism Sweepstakes, a House member proposed legislation to mandate carving Donald Trump’s visage on Mount Rushmore. Channeling the etiquette of the Golfer-in-Chief, American spectators at the Ryder Cup shouted vulgarities at the European players. Cannot protectionism fend off the NBA’s overbearing foreigners? In the season that ended in June, the five top players, as identified by two sophisticated metrics, had passports from Canada, Serbia, Greece, France and Slovenia.

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… is from page 401 of The Thomas Sowell Reader (2011):

Egalitarians create the most dangerous inequality of all – inequality of power. Allowing politicians to determine what all other human beings will be allowed to earn is one of the most reckless gambles imaginable.

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Here’s a slightly modified version of a letter that I sent eleven days ago to the Washington Post – a letter not published there.

Editor:

Nearly all that you write about the effect of U.S. tariffs on China is correct and crucial (“Are U.S. tariffs on China working? Look at the evidence.” December 15). But you err when you describe China’s trade surplus as “evidence of its industrial overcapacity.” China might well have industrial overcapacity, but a country’s trade surplus isn’t necessarily evidence of such. A trade surplus could instead reflect the relative attractiveness to a country’s citizens of investing abroad rather than in their own country. The resulting net outflow of capital (which is the mirror image of a trade surplus) reflects, not necessarily industrial overcapacity but, rather, much better investment opportunities abroad.

It’s worth noting that if China does indeed have industrial overcapacity, that’s a problem for China but a boon to the rest of the world. We get a greater abundance of goods for our consumption and inputs for use in our own production facilities – all subsidized by the Chinese people.

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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John Puri, at National Review, eloquently exposes the historical inaccuracies of the concept of “heritage Americans.” Two slices:

American heritage has never been static — a closed system incompatible with newcomers. Rather, it has always been distinguished by openness and dynamism, by the simultaneous assimilation and evolution that new arrivals undergo and bring about.

Conservatives tend to scoff when liberals say that America is a “nation of immigrants,” because progressives often use that sentiment to decry any lawful restriction on migration. But, of course, America is a nation of immigrants and their descendants. Unless you’re Native American, none of your ancestors were here a thousand years ago. At least two of them had to get on a boat or a plane and come over at some point, leaving another place they formerly called home. Accordingly, there exists no American culture that preceded American immigrants.

The first English settlement in America, Jamestown, was founded by what we now call economic migrants, seeking profit in a bountiful new world. The second settlement, Plymouth, was built by refugees — Puritans escaping legal persecution because of their divergent faith. They were distinctly English, yes, but also distinctly their own.

Most Europeans who came to the Thirteen Colonies between 1630 and the Revolution came as indentured servants. They were usually destitute, willing to surrender their freedom for many years for a chance at someday acquiring land. Before the war, Americans complained that England was dumping its wretched refuse on the colonies — shipping over tens of thousands of prisoners, vagrants, and other undesirables. But those miscreants soon became Americans, too. So-called heritage Americans can claim many of them as their ancestors. By the Founding era, just three-fifths of the white population in America was of English descent. The rest were of Scottish, Irish, Dutch, French, German, Swedish, or other origin. Hundreds of thousands more had been brought from Africa. America was then the most ethnically and religiously diverse republic the world had ever seen. It remains so today.

The framers of the Constitution drafted the document to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” They also knew that the American posterity would include many newcomers. The Constitution authorized Congress to “establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization” for future citizens. No one was more concerned with sustaining the nation’s republican character than the patriots in Philadelphia. It is therefore interesting that they specified how immigrants could become the people’s representatives in Congress after a certain number of years as naturalized citizens — less than a decade. An amendment to increase the wait time to 14 years was voted down at the Constitutional Convention.

…..

Large-scale immigration continued from the 19th century into the 20th, interrupted just for a few decades by stringent laws before resuming. Immigrants arrived increasingly from unfamiliar places like Italy, Russia, and Poland. Later, from Asia and Latin America. Today’s nationalists claim to preserve America’s history and institutions. Does Ellis Island not count among them?

America’s nationhood, to self-proclaimed nationalists, is just like that of a European country. Bloodline is everything. But American blood has never not been a mixture, because immigration has never not been a part of the American story. There is nothing here to keep “pure,” besides our defining impurity.

Also writing insightfully about the grotesque concept of “heritage Americans” is the Cato Institute’s Alex Nowrasteh.

Steven Greenhut explains what shouldn’t – but, alas, what today nevertheless does – need explaining: “When Washington crossed the Delaware on Christmas 1776, it wasn’t in the name of Christian nationalism.” A slice:

We’re seeing the re-emergence of an age-old debate. Most people see America as an experiment in classical liberalism, whereby the founders created a system of limited government, religious pluralism and liberty. Religious leaders are free to spread their message through the culture—but not to take control of the levers of power and base lawmaking on their sectarian Bible interpretations. The Constitution protects everyone’s natural rights, with its main purpose limiting the sphere of government—not implementing rules to assure proper religious observance.

There really is no other way to seriously read our Constitution, but many religious people still argue the founders were Christians who envisioned a Christian nation. Some of the founders were indeed devout Christians and these folks cherry-pick Christian quotations from them. The Heritage Foundation, which has recently taken a nationalist detour, argued in 2011 that the most-reasonable read is the founders simply were “influenced by Christian ideas.”

Indeed. I’m a Christian who believes our faith centers on kindness, charity, redemption and free will rather than empowering tribunals to decide who gets publicly stoned or flogged for violating some biblical admonition. Consider the madness that will ensue if religious interpretation becomes the legal standard. Then again, the hilarious fights at city councils between Calvinists and Catholic integralists over the proper manifestation of God’s will might be worth the price of admission.

Christian nationalists often argue that America cannot survive as a multicultural, multi-religious nation. To which I’ll quote a 1788 rebuttal from George Washington: “I had always hoped that this land might become a safe and agreeable asylum to the virtuous and persecuted part of mankind, to whatever nation they might belong.” As we approach the 250th anniversary of our founding, Americans must not let Washington’s brilliant legacy and the nation’s ideals get hijacked by wackadoodles.

Also explaining what shouldn’t – but what today nevertheless does – need explaining is the Editorial Board of the Washington Post, which here makes clear that socialized medicine is very bad for your health. A slice:

A campaign [in Britain] to keep people away from hospitals during the holidays is underway, which includes begging the public to seek out other forms of treatment for “less serious” injuries and ailments. The British press compares the messaging to “Covid-era stay-at-home pleas,” which included asking patients who needed care to avoid medical facilities in order to “protect the NHS.”

That messaging worked — so well, in fact, that the health service has been playing catch-up ever since. There were 6.24 million individual patients waiting to get treatment in England as of October. That’s about 1 in 10 people in the country waiting in the queue.

A stiff upper lip is one thing in wartime — and during a once-a-century viral outbreak. It’s something else when you’ve got a hernia.

This is the dark reality of single-payer and a cautionary tale for the third of Americans who mistakenly believe Medicare-for-all is a good idea. Both funded and run by the taxpayer, the NHS relies on rationing treatment to stay afloat. This results in patients with serious health problems forced to wait for months or years to access treatment, hoping they don’t die before the doctor sees them. Wait times get exacerbated by the politics that inevitably become intertwined when government, rather than consumers, calls the shots.

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy, argues persuasively that the most overlooked holiday miracle is the abundance that we humans create when we’re free and innovative. A slice:

History shows quite clearly that the societies most capable of generosity and liberalism are not those trapped in poverty but those that have escaped it. An abundance of wealth does not corrupt moral life; it enables it. Economic growth is not a rival to our highest values. It’s a precondition to their most vigorous pursuit.

This truth is easy to forget precisely because modern growth has been so successful. We take for granted the material abundance that allows us to debate its spiritual costs. For most of human existence, life was defined by constant vulnerability. Hunger, disease, and early death were ever-present. The idea that ordinary people could expect anything different—let alone genuine comfort or opportunity—would sound fantastical to our preindustrial ancestors.

As economic historians like Deirdre McCloskey have shown, the dramatic acceleration of growth beginning in the 19th century—the “Great Enrichment”—transformed human prospects on a scale unmatched by any previous moral or political revolution. Living standards rose exponentially. Poverty declined. Education spread. And with this abundance came a greater capacity for tolerance, pluralism, and peaceful coexistence.

GMU Econ alum David Hebert puts in perspective the recent report of an annualized 4.3% economic growth rate in the third quarter of 2025. A slice:

So what do I think about the 4.3% growth for Q3? Honestly, I am surprised but also not all that surprised. As it turns out, the American economy is incredibly resilient because the American people are incredibly resilient. It would take a massive amount of government stupidity to overcome the incredible strength of the American worker, which serves as the source of our economy’s resiliency.

Still, growth is slower this year than it was during 2024, at least so far. To get to a growth rate above what we saw in 2024, we would need to see Q4’s annualized growth rate hit over 4% again.

When is the last time we had two consecutive quarters of over 4% annualized growth? Excluding the pandemic years and the insanity for national income accounting statistics during that time (does anyone really believe that we grew at 34.9% during Q2 2020?), the last time this happened was in the 1998.

GMU Econ PhD candidate Brian Mandeville ponders how governments and robbers are, and aren’t, similar to each other.

Matt Yglesias makes a good point: “Fossil fuel executives are not why we have prohibitively high tariffs on Chinese EVs.” (HT Scott Lincicome)

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… is from page 298 of William Easterly’s brilliant 2025 book, Violent Saviors: The West’s Conquest of the Rest [footnote deleted; link added]:

The Friedman’s [Milton and Rose] liked markets because they could make individual self-determination possible for all groups. Markets allowed “the freedom of individuals to pursue their own objective.” Markets made this possible as long as interactions between individuals were consensual rather than coercive. They celebrated Adam Smith’s key insight: If there is a right to choose, then exchange will take place one if both parties believe they will benefit. The Friedman’s continued the long liberal fight to recognize individual choice as a good thing in itself; it was the whole basis of a beneficial market economy.

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… is from page 22 of Thomas Sowell’s Compassion Versus Guilt, a 1987 collection of some of his popular essays; specifically, it’s from Sowell’s March 1st, 1985, column titled “The Wonderful World of ‘Solutions’”:

Trade-offs are not good enough for the morally anointed. There must be solutions.

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Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal.

Editor:

David Hebert masterfully exposes several of the errors that infect Peter Navarro’s attempt to defend Trump’s tariffs (Letters, December 24). But because the number of these errors is so large, several more letters are necessary to complete the job.

Another of Mr. Navarro’s errors is his boast that the tariffs are eaten by foreigners (thus causing no price hikes in America) and will spark an increase in U.S. manufacturing activity. This boast is illogical. Tariffs can spark more manufacturing in the U.S. only by causing the prices of manufacturing imports to rise which, in turn, then enable U.S. manufacturers to profitably raise the prices they charge for their outputs. If, as Mr. Navarro asserts, foreigners are eating the tariffs, these same tariffs are driving the excessively low prices that he alleges are now being charged by foreign manufacturers even lower and, thus, doing nothing to incite more American manufacturing.

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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In this excellent letter in today’s Wall Street Journal, GMU Econ alum Dave Hebert busts some of the many myths that infect Peter Navarro’s lame attempt to defend Trump’s indefensible tariffs punitive taxes on Americans’ purchases of imports:

Peter Navarro begins his op-ed “Tariffs Are a Discipline, Not a Press Release” (Dec. 22) by knocking down a straw man. No serious economist predicted that the levies would “immediately crash the economy” or “ignite runaway inflation.” We said they’d make Americans poorer by forcing them to pay higher prices or accept inferior substitutes—which is exactly what’s happening.

Mr. Navarro claims victory because we haven’t seen a recession. But his colleague, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, promised in March that the economy would be “humming” by now. Instead, manufacturing employment has declined for nine consecutive months, business optimism is depressed and consumer sentiment nears historic lows.

Notice the pattern: When tariffs don’t deliver the promised renaissance, administration officials push back the timeline. First it was weeks, then months. Now, we need “the right timeline” and must not grade policy “on a news cycle.” This isn’t economic analysis—it’s buying time until the economy improves despite tariffs, at which point the administration will claim victory.

Mr. Navarro says that a slogan, “Who pays the tariff?,” is misleading. The data say otherwise. The Harvard Pricing Lab finds that after six months U.S. consumers are eating 20% of the tariffs on average in the form of higher prices. For President Trump’s first-term tariffs, the pass-through rate stayed under 5% for a full year. Mr. Trump 2.0’s tariffs are hitting us harder and faster, and there’s evidence that this pass-through rate will climb.

Tariffs don’t “discipline” foreign producers. They discipline American families, businesses and workers who must now pay more for less. No amount of rhetorical repackaging will change that.

David Hebert
American Inst. for Economic Research

Most people will read this inspired column by the Washington Post‘s – and GMU Econ alum – Dominic Pino as satire. And satire it is. But it’s satire making a serious and important point. If the propositions that Trump and other protectionists regularly offer about trade were true, then everything that Dominic here writes about how Santa Claus is a threat to the U.S. economy would be completely, non-satirically accurate. Two slices:

Millions of American children are looking forward to Santa Claus’s visit and his sleigh full of presents. Timeless tradition? Harmless fun?

Not anymore. The United States has adopted a new philosophy about foreign trade under President Donald Trump, and jolly old St. Nick is desensitizing American kids to the dangers of trade deficits.

Here’s how Claus gains an illicit advantage and creates a trade deficit. Claus is not an American, and he brings his gifts from the North Pole (which is suspiciously close to Canada, a country that threatens U.S. national security). The gifts are produced by elves who don’t have the protections of U.S. labor laws in workshops that aren’t subject to U.S. environmental or safety standards. Claus has stolen jobs from American workers with his industrial policy, which uses Yuletide magic to subsidize the manufacturing and transportation of his exports. This unfair competition allows Claus to flood our country with toys priced lower than anyone else can produce them: $0.

….

Trading relationships are fair only if the exchange of goods is balanced or America has a surplus. Which is to say: Americans must export as much, or more, to foreigners as they export to us. Yet in exchange for all those toys, the only things Americans export to Claus is cookies. The paunchy pillager should at the very least commit to buying a few hundred billion dollars’ worth of American oil and natural gas — or better yet, coal — to take a step toward balanced trade.

That way, every request from a child sitting on his lap at the mall would help create good-paying jobs in the Rust Belt. The white-bearded interloper also uses a foreign-domiciled vessel to make deliveries in the U.S. when he jumps from house to house. Efficient as it may be, Kriss Kringle’s sleigh and reindeer operation denies jobs to the hardworking American truck drivers, train engineers and union dockworkers who would transport the gifts instead.

Higher production and distribution costs might result in fewer toys, but as Trump has said before, girls don’t really need so many dolls anyway. Parents can have a teaching moment when they explain to their kids around the tree that the short-term pain of a less fun Christmas is worth the long-term gain of national sovereignty and a new golden age for manufacturing.

The transition away from the Santa Claus tradition won’t be easy for many families, but the era of outsourcing and trade deficits is over. Young children are too impressionable to risk developing fond sentiments about low-priced goods produced abroad. They might grow up to support free trade.

Marc Oestreich makes clear that the rising price of electricity in the U.S. is the fault of constraints on supply.

Here are the Editors of National Review on the MAGA-fueled ruination of the Heritage Foundation.

Eli Lake justly criticizes J.D. Vance for embracing illiberal provocateurs such as Tucker Carlson. A slice:

Vance has aligned himself with the side that wants to keep the MAGA tent as wide as possible. And that means he is on Team Tucker Carlson. On the other side of the party’s civil war are conservatives like Newsweek senior editor Josh Hammer, Fox News host Mark Levin, and [Ben] Shapiro. Shapiro’s speech denounced those inside the MAGA coalition who were too afraid to call out conspiracy theory hokum, lest they offend their very-online audiences. In short, Shapiro is asking the MAGA coalition to enforce its own borders and keep out the kooks, conspiracy theorists, and antisemites.

Vance’s allegiance to Carlson is understandable. Carlson played a major role in persuading Trump to select him as his running mate in 2024. And Vance made clear on Sunday that he will not turn on Tucker, despite having occasional disagreements with him. Vance is the prohibitive favorite to win the 2028 Republican presidential nomination and he is counting on support from Carlson and his audience for the nomination.

Walter Donway is correct: “Artificial intelligence will not destroy us. But fear-driven regulation might.”