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GMU Econ alums Scott Burns and Caleb Fuller steel-man the argument that Trump’s tariffs are meant to be bargaining chips to make trade freer and U.S. national security stronger. Two slices:

If forced to devise a “strategic trade war plan” to bring about freer trade, our strategy would be grounded on three pillars. We’ll call them the “three T’s” of trade wars.

First, a strategic trade war should be Targeted. In particular, its scope should be squarely focused on “bad actors” nations and “strategically important” industries. For our purposes, “Bad actors” refers to nations that impose significant trade restrictions on American firms and exports; “strategically important” refers to products and industries deemed essential for economic and national security.

Why is it so vital that the trade war be targeted? Since trade promotes peace and prosperity, we want to avoid inflicting any collateral damage on friendly trading partners. Reliable trading partners don’t need to be catching strays in a well-executed trade war. To the extent they do, we’re unnecessarily hurting our relationship with those allies and harming our own economy. We also want to minimize any blowback we might face in the form of retaliatory tariffs. When it comes to using tariffs and other weapons in our strategic trade arsenal, we want to shoot with a sniper rifle, not a shotgun.

Second, it should be Transparent. This means that officials should announce any tariffs or sanctions well in advance. There’s also a case in which they should be phased in rather than going into effect all at once.

Why telegraph your maneuvers? In chess or traditional warfare, the element of surprise is essential. You don’t want your foe to predict your next move or see your attack coming. Trade wars, however, operate under very different rules of engagement. If the goal is to negotiate better (i.e., freer) trade deals, guerrilla warfare and surprise attacks aren’t the best course of action.

Instead, you want your counterpart to know exactly what you plan to do and when you plan to do it. This gives them ample time to negotiate and strike a deal before a mutually destructive conflict begins. Telegraphing your actions is also smart because it gives businesses more time to adjust their supply chains and plan for the future. As any economists worth their salt can attest, uncertainty is a surefire recipe for economic stagnation. If we want to avoid an economic quagmire, transparency is critical.

The key thing to keep in mind is that tariff threats should be a form of deterrence. The goal is to avoid hostilities, not incite them. Remember: trade is, by definition, “win-win.” When people trade, they’re both made richer. This is just as true for trade between people in different nations as for trade within a country. Thus, anything that impedes trade is a “lose-lose”—it makes people in both nations poorer. It’s one thing to talk tough and threaten tariffs. But it’s another to enact them. The moment those talks fall apart and a trade war actually breaks out, both sides have already lost.

Third, trade wars should be Temporary. For tariff threats to be effective, they must be negotiable and, ultimately, reversible if your terms are met. The sooner an armistice is reached, the better.

…..

Contrary to the President’s claims, most of his tariffs weren’t “reciprocal” or “retaliatory”in any meaningful sense of the words. Most of the nations we imposed our steepest tariffs on did not have exorbitant tariffs or non-tariff barriers on us. In fact, America’s track record isn’t exactly above reproach when it comes to free trade. Before April 2, the average tariff rate the U.S. imposed on foreign imports was approximately 2.5%; the average tariff rate that foreign nations imposed on U.S. exports was only about 2%. After “Liberation Day,” our average tariff rate shot north of 25%. Even after the President’s 90-day pause on April 9, our trade-weighted average tariff rate still exceeds 24%, making the U.S. the most protectionist nation in the developed world. Even the alleged “worst offenders”— China, the EU, Mexico, and Japan—charged no more than 4-5% tariffs on U.S. exports, which is well below the President’s 10% baseline tariff rate that’s been in place since April 2.

“Trump’s economists say the darndest things.”

Arizona Supreme Court justice Clint Bolick – who cofounded, with Chip Mellor, the Institute for Justice – is speaking out against the further battering done to the rule of law by the Trump administration. Two slices:

Clint Bolick is worried.

The Arizona Supreme Court justice and rock star of the political right stood before a crowd of lawyers recently and rebuked “deeply disturbing” attacks on the American justice system coming from senior Trump administration officials.

“It’s almost dystopian. And when I think of people wrapping themselves in the Constitution while they are simultaneously doing violence to it … it is really scary stuff,” Bolick told those gathered at the May event hosted by Society for the Rule of Law, a right-of-center legal organization.

Though he didn’t name names, the speech showed an extraordinary level of openness for a Supreme Court justice, as justices typically refrain from commenting on public affairs to avoid perceptions of bias.

…..

Bolick emphasized multiple threats in his speech, including Vice President JD Vance flippantly referring to “due process” on social media, and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller threatening to suspend habeas corpus if judges didn’t “do the right thing.” Habeas corpus protects against unlawful imprisonment.

He also chastised local threats to judicial independence, including a fierce campaign from the political left against his retention election in 2024, which focused on his decision to uphold an 1864 near-total abortion ban in Arizona.

Chandran Kukathas explains what shouldn’t – but, alas, what nevertheless today does – need explaining: The tighter are government controls on immigration, the tighter are government controls on its own citizens. Three slices:

Yet the danger to those American values comes not from immigration itself but from immigration control. You cannot control outsiders (immigrants or would-be immigrants) without controlling insiders (citizens). The more vigorously you try to control immigration, the more you end up limiting the freedom of your citizens and violating equality and the rule of law.

This isn’t hypothetical. As Hiroshi Motomura and others have noted, during the Great Depression and in the years following World War II, an estimated two million people were forced to leave the United States. Astonishingly, more than half were American citizens, mostly people who were (or were suspected of being) Mexican. They were blamed for taking jobs and public resources and were deported or self-deported under intense pressure from authorities after targeted raids on neighborhoods.

…..

Immigration control is not necessarily about restricting entry but about controlling what those who enter do: determining whether they can work, study, reside, buy property, open bank accounts, set up businesses or marry. This is a challenge because many citizens are all too ready to employ outsiders, admit them to schools and universities, sell to them, buy from them or fall in love with them — in short, welcome them.

The only way for a government to prevent this from happening is to control its citizens by limiting their freedom to live as they choose. This means citizens must be controlled with penalties or punishments: fines, imprisonment or violence. They must be inspected, monitored, scolded, threatened and made to be fearful of finding themselves in violation of the law and at risk of being punished.

…..

The more determined governments are to control immigration, the more they will have to abandon due process and act as if the corruption of the rule of law were justified. Or turn a blind eye to the misuse of power by its agents.

We have to consider what these measures do to a society. They affect America’s core values, particularly liberty and equality. Liberty, because Americans see freedom to live as they choose as central to their way of life. Equality, because liberty is the natural endowment of all, not just some. Americans are not alone in thinking this, but they have said it more loudly and clearly than anyone else.

Proponents of such control will have to persuade at least some citizens that this violation of liberty is warranted and even normal. As the use of power by immigration authorities to stop and search citizens becomes routine and the voices of dissent are suppressed, citizens will even come to accept the militarization of society.

But the efforts at control will be divisive among citizens: Some will accept them as necessary, but others will resist them. So as governments try to normalize the violation of liberty, those who buy this story will look at those who object or resist not as fellow countrymen but as enemies. This is what we are seeing now unfolding on the streets across the United States.

Immigration control will transform America. The more vigorously it is pursued, the more it will turn us into people who do not care about the liberty of others. Worse still, it may turn us into people who do not care about our own.

George Will writes insightfully about the Voting Rights Act of 1965. A slice:

This is today’s judicial morass concerning redistricting: Race-consciousness is mandatory; race as “predominant” is forbidden. The path to this conundrum is explained in “Deconstructing the Republic,” the invaluable 2008 book by Anthony A. Peacock of Utah State University.

Emmanuel Rincon updates us on Argentina under Javier Milei.

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… is from page 286 of William Leggett’s December 13th, 1834, Evening Post essay, “A Little Free-Trade Crazy,” as this essay is reprinted and titled in Democratick Editorials, Lawrence H. White, ed.:

They who read the pages of history with thinking eyes, will perceive that to the interference of Government with the private pursuits of individuals; to the granting of exclusive privileges to one body of citizens, and placing burdensome restrictions on others; to the giving a stimulating bounty here, and imposing a prohibitory duty there; to the withholding from whole communities the right to employ their capital or labour in a particular channel of industry, and conferring a monopoly of that privilege on some single one as a token of favour, or selling it to hide as an article of traffic – that to these, and a thousand similar violations of the principles of political economy, is to be ascribed much, very much of the misery with which the groaning nation of king-governed Europe is filled.

DBx: What an important and relevant fact to ponder on this 249th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

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Mr. Howard Lutnick
Secretary, U.S. Department of Commerce
Washington, DC

Mr. Lutnick:

Yesterday you tweeted this:

Our trade deal with Vietnam is a massive win for America’s businesses, manufacturers, and farmers!

For the FIRST TIME EVER, Vietnam will open its market to the United States. They will pay 20% to sell their products here, and 40% on transshipping – meaning if another country sells their content through products exported by Vietnam to us – they’ll get hit with a 40% tariff.

For starters, you’re patently mistaken to assert that Vietnam is opening its market to U.S. exporters “for the FIRST TIME EVER.” As reported by the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, “U.S. goods exports to Vietnam in 2024 were $13.1 billion, up 32.9 percent ($3.2 billion) from 2023.” And this figure doesn’t include U.S. exports of services to Vietnam, that are also in the billions.

Even worse is your false assumption that U.S. tariffs on American imports of goods from Vietnam will be paid exclusively by the Vietnamese. It’s true that, because trade is mutually advantageous, Vietnamese exporters will suffer as a result of the tariffs; they’ll sell fewer goods to Americans. But the very fact that Americans will get fewer goods from Vietnam means that we Americans also will suffer; we’ll pay higher prices because these new U.S. tariffs – which are double what they were prior to Trump’s latest trade war – reduce the abundance of goods available to Americans.

Yet your most egregious error is to presume that we Americans gain when our government charges foreigners for what you suppose is the privilege of offering to sell their goods to us. Foreign sellers already pay “to sell their products here” simply by incurring the costs of producing and shipping their goods to our shores. Every cent that we spend on their goods is a cent spent voluntarily – a cent that reveals that we Americans gain from the opportunity to buy those imported goods.

Suppose I employed thugs to guard the entrances to all restaurants and other retail establishments that you visit, and ordered those brutes to demand from these merchants a 20 percent fee for the ‘privilege’ of offering to serve you. Economically, would you be made better off? Ethically, would my mafia-like action be acceptable? Of course not. And this reality would not in the least be altered by a puerile tweet.

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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Terence Kealey explains that “government funding of academic research does not stimulate growth.” A slice:

The most important fact in science policy is that the United Kingdom led the world through the first industrial revolution in the absence of significant government money for research. By contrast, the French and German governments were then funding their nations’ research capaciously, yet their GDPs per capita failed to converge on the UK’s. Government funding for research is thus neither necessary nor sufficient for economic progress.

The country that did converge on the UK—and in 1890 overtake it—was the U.S., whose government also did not fund research significantly. In those days, the British and U.S. federal governments then funded only “mission research,” which was research that was undertaken by government agencies such as the Library of Congress or the Coast Survey in the service of their missions. In comparison with the vast government labs funded in France and Germany, UK and U.S. mission research was always narrowly focused and modestly funded. All other research was done through private funding.

The two largest U.S. research missions were defense and agriculture, but neither was of substantial economic impact. Defense research in peacetime was always small: The federal government did create research agencies during the Civil War and WWI, but they were defunded on the resumption of peace. Equally, the Office for Scientific Research and Development, which had been established in 1941 and had funded the Manhattan project, MIT’s Rad Lab, and other vast WWII research missions, was shuttered in 1947.

The other significant mission of the day was agriculture, yet agriculture’s problem was over-production, which impoverished the farmers. But trying to raise agricultural productivity would not solve their problem. The federal and state governments’ motives in funding agricultural research were, therefore, essentially political—the farmers were poor, there were many of them, they had votes, so it seemed wise for politicians to be seen to be doing something.

In short, by as late as 1940, the federal and state governments’ investment in research amounted to only 23 percent of U.S. R&D and 10 percent of U.S. basic science, and the nature of that investment could have had little or no impact on rates of American economic or health growth: Defense R&D has almost no economic benefit, while the agricultural R&D was surplus to requirement.

Roger Ream talks with GMU Econ alum – and National Review‘s – Dominic Pino about “the false promise of government-driven growth.”

GMU Econ alum Nikolai Wenzel urges a rediscovery of Bastiat in our age of tariffs. A slice:

Many people are instinctively worried about trade deficits – somehow, it seems problematic that trade partners might sell to us more than they buy from us. But, first, the US is richer than almost every other country in the world, so it makes sense that the US would buy more.  Second, the US has deeper capital markets with greater legal protections than almost any country in the world, so it makes sense that foreigners would invest more in the US than the US invests abroad; this capital account surplus is merely the flip side of a current account deficit.  Third, all of us run trade deficits with the grocery store, the doctor, and the restaurant, who brazenly refuse to buy from us; yet we are all better off.  In his Economic Sophisms, Bastiat debunks the idea that The Balance of Trade is problematic.  Indeed, he playfully shows that the trade deficit could be erased if the ships carrying payments to foreigners were to sink… or be scuttled.

Clifford Asness and Michael Strain debunk several myths, beloved by both MAGAs and progressives, about the American economy. Three slices:

But today, both the progressive left and the MAGA right seem to run on imaginary—or at best, horribly exaggerated—grievance. The uniting theme is that the average American has it terrible these days, and only their chosen end of the horseshoe can fix it. People will go to extremes only when they are convinced things are terrible—and there’s a cottage industry, again both press and politicians, working on selling that story.

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There has never been a better time and place to be alive than in the United States today. We will focus on economics below, as that is our expertise, and easily the single biggest category of populist grievance.

Wages for typical American workers have never been higher. According to our calculations, after adjusting for inflation, the wages of nonsupervisory workers—roughly the bottom 80 percent of workers by pay, including manufacturing workers and service-sector workers who are not managers—have grown by around 60 percent over the past two generations. Over the past three decades, inflation-adjusted wages for typical workers have grown by 44 percent.

Wages are the most important component of the flow of financial resources households can use for consumption and savings. But households receive resources from other sources as well, including government transfer payments, social insurance receipts, and businesses. Overall household income tells the same story as wages: Real household income has never been higher than it is today.

And not just for families at the very top. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), families in the 51st to 90th percentiles of the wealth distribution had an average wealth of $1.3 million in 2022, the most recent year data are available. That’s up from around $500,000 in 1990, after adjusting for inflation.

…..

In the 1960s, the poverty rate was above 20 percent. Using the government’s official poverty measure, poverty has fallen to 11.1 percent as of 2023, the most recent year data are available. This measures poverty on a relative basis. Of course, a relative standard will always find relative poverty. But using an absolute standard finds that income poverty is below 6 percent. On a consumption basis, well over 20 percent of households were in poverty in the 1960s, and 11 percent were in poverty in 1990. Today, the consumption poverty rate is around 1 percent.

Eric Boehm points out that the greatest threat to America’s fiscal health isn’t immigrants; it’s Congress. A slice:

The debate over the OBBBA has revealed (once again) that the uniting principle in Republican politics is not fiscal responsibility. The bill that passed the Senate on Tuesday afternoon, with Vance as the tie-breaking vote, will add nearly $4 trillion to the national debt over the next decade. It is not, under any circumstances, a fiscally responsible piece of legislation.

Instead, the fulcrum for conservative politics is—and for quite some time has been, even before Vance and President Donald Trump rose to prominence—immigration. If you want to keep the GOP coalition together for a tough vote, it makes more sense to pitch the bill as an immigration measure.

Vance understands this. He also understands that the facts don’t really matter when conservatives are talking about immigration within their own tribe.

Indeed, he’s completely wrong about “the thing that will bankrupt this country more than any other policy.”

It’s not immigrants who are doing that. It’s Congress.

Ilya Somin dives into yesterday’s court ruling thwarting Trump’s declaration that almost all migrants who cross the U.S. southern border are ‘invaders’ and, thus, subject to presidential efforts to keep them out.

Jeff Luse decries a fact worthy of being decried, namely, “the ‘Big, Beautiful Bill’ keeps most of Joe Biden’s energy subsidies.”

And Dominik Lett reports more ugliness stirred up on Capitol Hill: “The Senate’s big beautiful blunder could increase the debt by $6 trillion.”

“How much government are you willing to fund?“

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… is from page 5 of Norbert Michel’s excellent 2025 book, Crushing Capitalism: How Populist Policies are Threatening the American Dream (original emphasis):

Industrial policy advocates view the market as a policy device that government officials can manipulate, but in fact, the market is a group of people cooperating to get what they need while offering each other something in exchange. And in the United States, the market is a very large group of people. Even to “redirect” this market would require persuading – or forcing – hundreds of millions of people to so something they would otherwise not do. It’s a core reason that so many experiments with government-directed economies have failed.

DBx Yes.

Note the hubris of those persons who call for industrial policy. Whether, in the U.S., it be Oren Cass on the right or Robert Reich on the left, industrial-policy advocates point to a handful of large, visible features of our vast and intricate economy – an economy dependent upon getting countless unseen details correct – and conclude not only that they, these advocates, know better how these large, visible features should look, but also that their schemes for changing the appearance of these large, visible features will work to improve the welfare of ordinary Americans.

But ask an industrial-policy advocate how he or she came to possess this knowledge. You’ll get lots of criticism (most of it mistaken) of modern economics and of “market fundamentalists.” You’ll be assured (without warrant) that free traders are wedded to a too-narrow and materialistic understanding of humankind. You’ll hear false claims about the current and the past state of the American economy. It’s also likely that you’ll be bazookaed with statistics that are either out of context or simply don’t mean what the pundits who are blasting these statistics at you think they mean.

What you’ll not get is a substantive answer to your question beyond the insistence that this or that sector of the economy is allegedly doing worse than it ‘should’ be doing – with the standard for making this assessment being some (often fabricated or doctored) picture of the past. Yet press on by asking “How can you be sufficiently sure – sufficiently sure, that is, to justify greater government control over the way people spend their incomes – that more manufacturing jobs [or more manufacturing output, or smaller trade deficits, or a smaller financial sector, fill-in-the-blank] will improve the well-being of Americans?” You’ll get no satisfactory answer. You’ll simply be told to put your faith in these divines.

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… is from page 31 of the late Fred McChesney’s 1995 essay “In Search of the Public-Interest Model of Antitrust,” which serves as the Introduction to Part One of the 1995 collection edited by Fred S. McChesney and William F. Shughart II, The Causes and Consequences of Antitrust (footnotes deleted):

In the long run, expected antitrust penalties just become costs of doing business. Prices will eventually increase to the extent that the conditions of demand and supply allow sellers to pass these higher costs on to consumers. The end result is fewer producers selling at higher prices – just the opposite of antitrust’s intended effect.

DBx: I offer this quotation on this, the 135th anniversary of the signing of the Sherman Antitrust Act – an event that, in my view, is unfortunate. Fred McChesney shared my view – or, more accurately, because I learned from him – I share Fred’s view. With his final few words above, Fred was being facetious, for he knew that the real intention behind the Sherman Act and other antitrust statutes is to protect politically powerful producer groups from the competition of producers that are more efficient or more entrepreneurial but less politically powerful.

It is unfortunate that the Trump administration is continuing the Biden administration’s economically harmful revival of active antitrust ‘enforcement.’

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Here’s the next part of my exchange with a new correspondent.

Mr. D__:

Thanks for your reply to my email of yesterday. In your reply you write that “it is majorly unfair that foreign countries subsize exports sold here at below cost prices.”

I agree. But the unfairness isn’t to Americans; it’s to those foreigners who are taxed in order to increase the purchasing power of Americans. Just yesterday at my blog I featured a quotation from Milton Friedman who makes the case more eloquently than I can.

With respect, you seem to hold the implicit protectionist presumption that American producers are ethically entitled to a portion of the incomes earned by their fellow Americans. Putting aside concerns about national security (which you don’t raise), please explain why, say, an automobile producer in Michigan is so entitled to that portion of your income that you spend buying a car that, should you choose to buy a car from a producer in Japan or Germany, the government acts ethically if it punitively taxes your exercise of your freedom to choose. How is it morally acceptable for the government to improve the economic well-being of some Americans (those producing automobiles) by worsening the economic well-being of other Americans (car buyers, as well as those Americans not involved in producing automobiles)? As I see it, such government action is morally outrageous.

You’ll answer that it’s wrong to allow Americans to lose jobs to subsidized foreign goods – to which I respond: Why, exactly? Where is the ethical offense to Americans? I submit that there is none.

Suppose a wealthy foreign philanthropist donates two billion of his own euros to a German university, and, as a result, researchers at that university develop a technique for lowering the production cost of automobiles by 25 percent by dramatically reducing the number of workers required in automobile factories. Would it be wrong to allow Americans to buy foreign cars made with this new technique? Would it be wrong to allow U.S. auto factories to adopt this production technique? In both cases, note, many American autoworkers would lose jobs in exactly the same way they do when automobile production is subsidized by foreign governments. If you answer ‘no’ to these questions, I challenge you to explain why foreigners act unethically toward Americans by offering to sell us subsidized exports.

Why should we refuse to accept what Milton Friedman accurately describes as “reverse foreign aid” – aid that goes directly into the pockets of American producers that import some inputs, and American households who purchase imported consumer goods? How is it ethical for the U.S. government to prevent you from accepting such gifts?

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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Wall Street Journal columnist Matthew Hennessey summons more people to the cause of basic economic enlightenment. A slice:

Yet each generation somehow produces naïfs who are certain that collectivism is the true longing of the human heart. They know they can make it work this time. The young voters who supported Mr. Mamdani were primed by their expensive educations to buy his line that capitalism is rigged in favor of the rich. All they’ve ever been told—by teachers, professors, TV and TikTok—is that markets are inhumane. Capitalism is rapacious and bad for the climate. They may never have heard a single word to the contrary.

This is a failure of education, yes. Basic economics is rarely taught in high school or required in college. But it’s equally a failure of public relations. Who is making a sustained and coherent public case for American-style capitalism? The field is wide open. We need new Milton Friedmans and Thomas Sowells.

The product itself isn’t the problem. Free markets have made life better, healthier and more prosperous in demonstrable ways for billions of people. Anticapitalists on both left and right struggle to make a serious case that things are worse now than they were 100 or 150 years ago. Take a moment to imagine life without washing machines or chemotherapy.

Competitive markets foster innovation and allocate resources with remarkable efficiency. They work. Even when markets come up short or create externalities like pollution, the incredible wealth they generate can be used to fill the gaps. When socialism fails, as it inevitably does, the only option is brutality. This always gets glossed over on MSNBC and CNN. I’d like to hear Mr. Mamdani explain how he plans to keep New Yorkers captive when his experiment goes south.

Markets are more than efficient, which would be argument enough in a head-to-head competition with socialism. They’re also moral. Markets enable willing and mutually beneficial exchange among free people. They abominate coercion. They encourage a belief that tomorrow will be better than today. No one would bother investing absent an expectation that it will pay off. Capitalism is synonymous with confidence in the future.

Arnold Kling shares insights about AI and productivity.

James Pethokoukis explains that “markets are good for a country’s pocketbook and its soul.”

Who’d a-thunk it?: “US manufacturing mired in weakness as tariffs bite.” (HT Scott Lincicome)

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy, is understandably dismayed at the calamity that is the so-called “One Big, Beautiful Bill.” A slice:

Meanwhile, the bad amendments were made worse. For all the complaints and the “green new scam” label, the Senate utterly failed to terminate the Biden administration’s green subsidies. Read Alex Epstein’s summary and weep. And Senator Susan Collins (R., Maine) got all the subsidies she wanted and will pay for them by taxing the rich.

With Republicans like this, who needs Democrats?

For those of you who believe that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act will produce enormous growth, as projected by the Council of Economic Advisers, I have a bridge to sell you. There is only so much that the few good tax provisions in the bill can do.

GMU Econ alum Dominic Pino reports that the Trump administration is working to reduce the transparency of labor unions. A slice:

When President Trump appointed the Teamsters’ preferred nominee for secretary of labor, that meant unions were going to have access in a Republican administration like they haven’t had in decades.

One of the first pieces of evidence for that has surfaced in a proposed rule published Tuesday that would reduce union transparency. The administration wants to reduce the number of unions that have to file the most detailed public disclosure reports by raising the threshold for which such reports are required by law.

Bradley Smith is correct: “Campaign regulations are unconstitutional.” A slice:

But the problem goes deeper than the need to define “corruption” and balance it against the “urgency” of political speech. There is no constitutional basis for government to regulate political speech through campaign-finance laws.

When Congress passed the Federal Election Campaign Act in 1971, it claimed authority under its constitutional power to regulate the “time, place and manner” of elections. The Supreme Court accepted this premise without analysis in Buckley v. Valeo (1976). But political campaigns aren’t “elections,” and campaign-finance laws obviously don’t regulate the time and place of an election. But neither do they regulate the manner of holding an election. Dating may precede marriage, but it isn’t marriage. Similarly, campaigns precede elections, but those campaigns aren’t elections. They are speech: Americans are debating and talking about the candidates.

Elections are the casting and counting of votes. To run an election, the government must choose the date and polling places, manage voter registration, tally ballots and so on. Administering an election is far different from regulating a political campaign—a candidate or party’s conversations with voters. Campaigns consist of speech, publishing and assembly, three fundamental rights enshrined in the First Amendment.

When government regulates campaigns, it is directly and explicitly regulating protected First Amendment activity. Debate about issues and candidates happens every day in America, with or without an election pending. It isn’t possible to cabin off “election” speech from general political discourse, and there is nothing about regulating the manner of an upcoming election that allows the government to interfere in that public discussion. Congress not only lacks the enumerated power to do so but is specifically prohibited from doing so by the First Amendment.

Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle joins with the critics of Zohran Mamdani’s foolish proposal for government-run grocery stores. Two slices:

Even saving New Yorkers that percentage would be a challenge, because it’s really hard just to break even in the grocery business. It takes extensive experience and a relentless focus on implementation to keep the right stock on the shelves, to prevent theft while providing attractive and easily accessible displays, to cultivate workers who provide excellent customer service, and to keep spoilage down to acceptable levels. Order too few perishables, such as meat and produce, and your disgruntled customers will leave empty-handed; order too much and you’ll have to throw it away after it passes its expiration date, eating those narrow margins and plunging the business into the red.

…..

What’s that I hear from the back? They can save on rent by parking stores on city-owned land? My friend, let me introduce you to the economic concept of opportunity costs: A “free” location isn’t actually free if it means forgoing money you could have collected by leasing it, not to mention the tax revenue you’ll lose by substituting a city operation for a successful business.

GMU Econ alum Benjamin Powell makes the case that “Trump’s travel ban will not make Americans safer.”

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… is from page 3 of Richard Baldwin’s new book, The Great Trade Hack: How Trump’s Trade War Fails and the World Moves on:

Trump’s trade war is grievance in action – victimhood weaponised and unleashed as tariffs. It’s not economic strategy; it’s MAGA-fied trade policy, where protectionism becomes a form of emotional retribution without a great deal of thought about the consequences.