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Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal.

Editor:

Rightly decrying Trump’s escalation of what you call his “tariff blitz,” you reveal – but don’t comment on – an internal contradiction in the administration’s excuses for punitively taxing Americans’ purchases of imports (“The Trump Tariffs Keep Coming,” April 24).

To justify these tariffs legally, the president imposes them under Sections 232 and 301, the former to protect U.S. national security and the latter to counter allegedly “unfair” trade practices. Yet Mr. Trump also boasts that his tariffs will raise enormous amounts of revenue. When properly used, however, Sections 232 and 301 keep tariffed imports out of the U.S., resulting in no revenues collected on those excluded imports.

If the purpose of the tariffs really is to enhance U.S. national security and counter “unfair” trade practices, it cannot also be to raise revenue. But if the goal instead is to raise revenue, then imposing these tariffs under Sections 232 and 301 is unlawful.

The administration either doesn’t see this contradiction, or it has such contempt for the intelligence of the American people that it thinks nothing of baldly expressing this contradiction. Either way, we Americans have no reason to trust anything this administration says or does regarding trade.

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 Jason Riley writes sensibly about AI. A slice:

ChatGPT arrived in 2022, and the AI alarmists said white-collar workers were in danger. Yet the Economist reported this year that “since late 2022 America has added roughly 3m white-collar jobs—which include management, professional, sales and office roles,” while blue-collar employment has remained flat. “Some occupations regularly cast as AI’s early victims are on a tear. America has 7% more software developers, 10% more radiologists and 21% more paralegals than three years ago.”

Pay has likewise kept pace, the magazine noted. Since 2022, inflation-adjusted wages “in professional and business services (think salespeople, accountants and the like) have increased by 5%. Office and administrative workers earn 9% more.” American history is full of disruptive innovations that have resulted in higher productivity, with many more jobs being created than destroyed. Government basic-income schemes are a solution in search of a problem. And to the extent that these policies discourage work and wind up subsidizing idleness—and the associated counterproductive behavior—they will exacerbate the problem.

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy, continues her battle against the U.S. government’s fiscal incontinence. A slice:

Start with a recap of the fiscal picture. The federal government runs large deficits so persistently that they’ve become a structural threat to price stability. As Romina Boccia and Dominik Lett argue in the handbook’s second chapter, when debt expands faster than the economy, investors begin pricing in one of three outcomes: higher future taxes, deeper spending cuts, or inflation that quietly erases the real value of what the government owes. When Congress fails to credibly commit to the first two, it chooses door No. 3 by default.

The inflation surge of 2021 was the consequence of an extraordinary flood of deficit-financed spending with no commitment to repaying it. As our money lost purchasing power, the Federal Reserve eventually had to raise interest rates sharply, further reducing purchasing power. Politicians have yet to meaningfully tighten the government’s belt, and we continue to have unnecessarily high interest rates and prices.

The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board rightly criticizes the Trump administration’s bailout of Spirit Airlines. Two slices:

Who could have imagined that the U.S. government would deem a budget airline too big to fail? Yet here we are, as President Trump is flying to the rescue of the beleaguered Spirit Airlines. This is a story of how one misconceived government intervention leads to another.

Spirit last summer declared bankruptcy for the second time in less than two years. A hefty debt load and challenging business model has made a turnaround difficult. The Biden antitrust cops closed one escape hatch by blocking its merger with JetBlue in 2024. Now Spirit is getting slammed by soaring prices for jet fuel because of the war in Iran.

All of this means that the no-frills carrier could have to liquidate and lay off some 14,000 workers. Enter Mr. Trump, who floated a bailout of Spirit in a CNBC interview this week. Press reports say his Administration is negotiating a rescue that would lend the carrier some $500 million in return for warrants to buy as much as 90% of equity in the company. Is this the revival of the Trump Shuttle, circa 1989?

…..

Don’t be surprised if JetBlue seeks a rescue too. Government ownership would also lead to regulatory and political favoritism that harms competition. That’s no doubt why stocks of other airlines fell following reports of the Trump intervention.

Washington could wind up subsidizing Spirit’s money-losing business indefinitely. The Trump Shuttle didn’t succeed, and the U.S. doesn’t need an Amtrak of the airways.

The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board also reproaches the Trump administration for continuing to impose punitive taxes – a.k.a. tariffs – on Americans’ purchases of imports.  Two slices:

The President said Tuesday he plans to more than compensate for the emergency tariffs the Supreme Court struck down by using other trade authorities. “We’ll end up with bigger numbers, actually,” the President told CNBC. His proposed budget forecasts $5.4 trillion in tariff revenue over the next decade—a $600 billion increase from its projection last fall.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said last week that the Administration plans to complete its Section 301 investigations by July, which would let the Administration impose tariffs on countries to counter supposedly unfair trade practices. Earlier this month, the Administration boosted its Section 232 national-security tariffs on steel, aluminum and copper.

…..

Mr. Trump’s tariff escalation comes at a particularly painful time for American companies that consume metals, especially auto makers. An aluminum factory in upstate New York that supplied 40% of the U.S. auto industry caught fire last fall and is under repair. Auto makers have had to scale back production and import more aluminum at much higher cost.

Global aluminum prices have jumped nearly 20% this year owing to the war in Iran. Iranian missile attacks has damaged large smelters in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. The UAE is America’s second biggest source of aluminum imports after Canada. Higher natural gas prices are also raising costs for metal producers in Asia.

By the way, the border taxes undermine U.S. national security. Mr. Trump’s proposed budget includes $450 billion more for defense, but he’s undercutting his buildup by making defense contractors buy steel and aluminum at a substantial markup. That’s because the tariffs let U.S. metal producers raise their prices.

The President also recently imposed new national-security tariffs of up to 100% on pharmaceuticals. Generics, orphan drugs and large pharmaceutical companies that have negotiated “most-favored nation” price and onshoring agreements with the Administration will be exempt. Tariffs will be lower (15%) on the European Union, Japan, South Korea and Switzerland. Our sources say the tariffs will mostly wallop small biotech companies that can’t afford U.S. manufacturing. The result will be higher drug prices and less investment in cures.

Charles Cooke decries the illiberal lizard-brain ideas of Hasan Piker. A slice:

It is not, in fact, acceptable to murder people because you think they are “social murderers.” It is not, in fact, acceptable to steal cars if you can “get away with it.” It is not, in fact, acceptable to shoplift if the store in question is owned by a “big corporation.” And no, blowing up pipelines is not, in fact, a “thing that should be legal that isn’t.”

John Locke contended that all individuals possess a natural right to “life, liberty, and property,” and, as a guiding principle, this has served us pretty well. It has not, of course, ended political debate or forced us into universal accord. But it has established the rule that one does not get to infringe upon those things simply because one has deemed oneself exempt. Hasan Piker seems to believe that his reference to Friedrich Engels’s “social murder” concept is extremely clever. In truth, it represents nothing more than solipsistic special pleading. If permitted to do so, everyone could play this game. Piker’s argument is that, by allocating resources as he did, Brian Thompson “killed” people. But one could offer precisely the same justification against politicians who run the government health-care systems that Piker covets, or against contractors whose budgets do not perfectly inoculate their apartment buildings against arson — or, if one were to fixate upon his refusal to donate his wealth to the world’s poor, against Piker himself. In this country, we do not leave it up to each person to determine to what extent each individual is murderable; we insist upon a blanket rule. To chip away at that dictum, even rhetorically, is to play with ancient fire.

Here’s the abstract of a new paper in Demography by Kevin Corinth and Jeff Larrimore: (HT Tyler Cowen)

Whether each generation of Americans continues to economically surpass the previous one has recently been called into question. We construct a posttax, posttransfer income measure from 1963 to 2023 based on the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement that allows us to consistently compare the economic well-being of five generations of Americans at ages 36–40. We find that Millennials had a real median household income that was 20% higher than that of the previous generation, a slowdown from the growth rate of the Silent Generation (36%) and Baby Boomers (26%), but similar to that of Generation X (16%). The slowdown for younger generations largely resulted from stalled growth in work hours among women. Progress for Millennials younger than 30 has also remained robust, though largely due to greater reliance on their parents. Additionally, lifetime income gains for younger generations far outweigh their higher educational costs.

Marian Tupy details “Earth Day’s bad bet against humanity.” A slice:

The Simon Abundance Index, which Dr. Gale L. Pooley and I publish every year on Earth Day, is named after Julian Simon. It is a deliberate continuation of the quantitative analysis of the relationship between population growth and resource abundance that Simon’s bet with Ehrlich began. Unlike Simon and Ehrlich, who measured the abundance of resources in inflation-adjusted dollars, we look at “time prices.” Money prices are distorted by inflation and disputed deflators. Time prices solve that problem by dividing a good’s money price by hourly income, showing how long a person must work to buy it. They capture both falling prices and rising wages, require no inflation adjustment, and allow comparisons across countries and centuries. Time is universal, cannot be printed, and reflects the real cost people pay: hours of life. Time prices provide a clearer, simpler, and more meaningful measure of resource abundance than money prices for ordinary people.

By this measure, the last 45 years have been a rout for the pessimists. The 2026 report says that the Simon Abundance Index stood at 636.4 in 2025, up from a base of 100 in 1980. That means Earth was 536.4 percent more abundant in 2025 than in 1980. All 50 commodities, including fuels, such as crude oil, coal, and natural gas, food, such as chicken, beef, and lamb, and metals, such as aluminum, copper, and gold (yes, even gold!), in the dataset were more abundant in 2025 than they were in 1980. The global abundance of resources increased at a compound annual rate of 4.2 percent, doubling about every 17 years. In the 42 countries tracked by the report—accounting for 85.9 percent of global gross domestic product and 66.3 percent of the world’s population—none saw lower resource abundance in 2025 than in 1980. That is not what a species trapped in Malthus’ arithmetic is supposed to produce.

The mechanics of that gain matter. Between 1980 and 2025, time prices for the 50 commodities fell by an average of 70.9 percent. What required an hour of work in 1980 required about 18 minutes in 2025. The same hour of work that bought one unit of a typical commodity in 1980 bought 3.44 units in 2025. That is a 244 percent increase in personal resource abundance. At the same time, the world population grew by 85 percent, from 4.44 billion to 8.21 billion. Put those two changes together and you get the index’s central finding: For every 1 percent increase in global population, population-level resource abundance grew by about 6.3 percent.

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… is from page 105 of the late Brian Doherty’s marvelous 2007 book, Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement [footnote deleted]:

Hayek later decided that what really separated him from his friend Keynes was that the latter always believed that certain advanced thinkers (Keynes among them, of course) could skillfully and accurately manipulate the social order to their own ends, without ill effects. Hayek was always too skeptical about the limits of human knowledge and ability to believe that.

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Here’s a letter to a relatively new reader of my blog.

Mr. M__:

Thanks for your email.

You write: “The USA ran trade deficits for 50 years. Those were offset by foreigners’ investments in the USA. Foreigners expect returns on these investments. Doesn’t it mean Americans eventually have to pay those returns to foreigners?”

No.

The only Americans who are obliged to pay anything to foreigners are Americans who borrowed money from foreigners. (This number includes U.S. citizens-taxpayers whose government borrowed money from foreigners.) But no such obligation exists for other investments that foreigners made in the U.S. – those other investments being equity investments in the U.S. (for example, foreigners buying a restaurant in Houston), purchases of real estate in the U.S., and holding U.S. dollars.

If, for example, the foreign-owned restaurant in Houston goes bankrupt, the loss is fully borne by its foreign owners; no American is obliged to pay anything on that account to foreigners.

Of course, foreigners do expect positive returns on all of their U.S. investments, regardless of form. But with the exception of Americans’ repayment of principal and interest on funds that they borrowed from foreigners, no returns that foreigners earn on their investments in America are paid by Americans. If the foreign-owned restaurant in Houston is profitable, those profits are newly created wealth – wealth that’s created by that restaurant’s foreign owners.

In the international commercial accounts, when the restaurant’s foreign owners realize returns on their restaurant – say, by being paid dividends drawn on that restaurant’s profits – it appears that Americans are paying foreigners. This appearance comes from the fact that dollars flow from the U.S. to abroad, and so are recorded as payments from America to a foreign country or countries. But this appearance is misleading. America, as such, doesn’t pay those returns to the restaurant’s foreign owners. Nor do any flesh-and-blood Americans pay those returns. Those returns, again, are new wealth created by the restaurant’s foreign owners; economically, those returns are paid to the restaurant’s foreign owners by the restaurant’s foreign owners.

But the international commercial accounts mask this economic reality. What appears in the commercial accounts as payments by America to foreign countries are no such thing. This accounting mistakes geography for economic reality. Untold confusion is unleashed by supposing that, just because these dollar-denominated returns are created in the U.S. and then sent abroad to foreigners, these dollar-denominated returns are necessarily paid by Americans to foreigners.

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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George Will explains what shouldn’t – but, alas, what nevertheless does – need explaining: “The Constitution doesn’t make an exception for misusing police powers.” Two slices:

In 2022, Amy Hadley, a mother in South Bend, Indiana, returned to find her home surrounded by police. They were neither in hot pursuit of anyone, nor did they believe they confronted a hostage situation. An officer’s mistaken belief was that a fugitive was active on social media from inside Hadley’s house.

According to court papers, after many commands were shouted by bullhorn at the house (Hadley wasn’t home), the officers fired tear gas grenades through the windows, entered wearing gas masks, punched holes in walls, overturned furniture, and ripped off paneling and wall fixtures, from basement to attic. The gas permeated everything porous.

The fugitive, who was never in the house, was arrested four days later. Hadley and her children slept in her car and elsewhere until the home was habitable. The more than $16,000 of damages was only partially covered by insurance. Government paid nothing because some federal appellate courts recognize (and others do not) a police-power exception to the Fifth Amendment’s takings clause.

It says private property shall not be “taken for public use, without just compensation.” Damaging property while trying to apprehend a suspected criminal is a public use, and the takings clause contains no police-power exception to the requirement of compensation.

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For the Institute for Justice, which is representing the plaintiffs in all these five cases, business is depressingly brisk. A 2015 report found that between 1980 and that year, uses of SWAT teams soared from 3,000 per year to 80,000. The militarization of law enforcement has been dramatized by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents operating with too little training and too much testosterone. The Institute for Justice hopes that the Supreme Court’s textualists will eventually acknowledge the absence of a police-power exception in the takings clause’s text.

GMU Econ alum Romina Boccia, writing in the Washington Post, reveals what’s wrong with Pres. Trump’s new proposal for Americans’ retirement savings. A slice:

The proposed accounts also ignore the data on how people save for retirement. Low-income workers who live paycheck to paycheck cannot afford to lock funds away for decades.

Automatically enrolling lower-income workers in a retirement fund can create more problems than it solves. They are more likely to offset default retirement contributions by taking on debt or withdrawing money early and paying tax penalties. According to Vanguard, 6 percent of workers took hardship withdrawals from the 401(k) plans it administered last year. Households at the lowest income level have the highest early withdrawal rates, with penalties accounting for 43 percent of all taxes paid by individuals with adjusted gross incomes below $5,000.

If policymakers want to help those Trump called “often forgotten American workers” when he announced his proposal, they should focus on simplicity and flexibility. Tax-advantaged universal savings accounts, without withdrawal restrictions or government matching, would do much more to help these families. And all without increasing federal spending.

GMU Econ alum Daniel Smith is au courant on a little-known but instructive Greek economic tragedy.

Pat Lynch isn’t misled by the false allure of the “abundanauts.” A slice:

More recent research agendas, such as “nudging,” fit into this same category, as men of system try to correct “errors” in the way people think and act. Relying on recent developments in behavioral economics, Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler have argued that choice should be taken out of the hands of individuals and given to the wise professors and researchers who know better.

Whether one is nudging, moving people around on a chessboard, or trying to “optimize” more efficiently than markets, all of these people are men of system. They wish to impose their own vision on society and the individuals who live in it. Some, like [Ezra] Klein and [Derek] Thompson, openly admit that markets freed from burdensome regulations and limits will produce abundant goods at very low costs, but they cannot simply stop there. Instead, they require large planning boards and programs to abscond with that wealth and redistribute it in ways that reflect their preferences, not the preferences of individuals engaged in voluntary exchanges.

The Abundance Agenda, such as it is, reflects the need of intellectuals to manage the lives of others, not accept the lives that normal people wish to lead. Average people would love abundance, along with the cheaper and more abundant goods and services that would be created. But to allow that and then expand the regulatory power of the state’s fiscal redistribution defeats the entire purpose. Absolutely, let abundance happen. But we already have an agenda for it: it’s called freedom and responsibility.

Eric Boehm decries Commerce secretary Howard Lutnick’s hypocritical hostility to globalization. A slice:

The first year of the second Trump administration has been defined by an economic and foreign policy that treats the movement of people and goods around the globe as not merely suspect but actively harmful to Americans’ well-being.

In January, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick set the bar for demonstrating how bizarre—and wrong—that logic is. While addressing the World Economic Forum’s annual gathering in Davos, Switzerland, Lutnick declared that the decades-long project of economic liberalism had been, in fact, a terrible mistake.

“The Trump administration and I are here to make a very clear point: Globalization has failed the West and the United States of America,” Lutnick said. “It has left America behind.”

Has it? It’s difficult to square that conclusion with Lutnick’s own life. His grandfather ran a dry cleaning business in the Bronx. His father was a history professor. Lutnick became the CEO of a New York–based investment bank, Cantor Fitzgerald, in 1990 and is now a billionaire (and a senior official in the federal government to boot). If that’s a trajectory that suggests failure, we should all hope to be so unlucky.

The idea that globalization has failed America is equally incompatible with the facts. The most blunt way to measure a country’s prosperity is by looking at gross domestic product per capita, which measures economic output per person. In 1990, when Lutnick took over at Cantor Fitzgerald, America’s GDP per capita was about $40,000 (in inflation-adjusted terms). Last year, after three and a half decades largely defined by the globalization that Lutnick now derides, the U.S tallied a per capita GDP of more than $70,000. In real terms, America is far wealthier today.

But workers aren’t paid with increasing GDP stats, as the illiberal right likes to point out. The good news, however, is that wages have also climbed considerably. Average hourly wages have increased from about $20 to over $36 in the past 20 years. The number of households earning over $100,000 annually (adjusted for inflation) has tripled in the past 50 years, while the number of those earning less than $35,000 has declined.

Clark Packard and Chad Smitson report on a new paper that confirms what economic theory predicts: China’s trade surplus is not caused by clever industrial policy that increases that country’s exports as it decreases its imports. A slice:

In light of comments filed by Cato’s Scott Lincicome and Chad Smitson in response to USTR’s Section 301 investigations, the new NBER working paper carries an important message: trade balances do not tell the whole story. The administration is attempting to assess foreign economies using broad, national-level macroeconomic indicators such as trade surpluses and excess capacity. However, as the authors of this paper have explored, these metrics are shaped by structural domestic forces—demographics, financial repression, and weak household demand—that tariffs cannot address.

The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal reports on “Virginia’s race to the Gerrymander bottom.” Two slices:

Trump’s redistricting gambit backfires as Democrats rig districts in states they run.

…..

The nationwide gerrymander upshot is that Republicans are likely to break even on new seats at best and could end up losing on net if the building Democratic wave ends up hitting ballot boxes in November. Democrats now have a six point edge in the “generic” test of which party they want to represent them in Congress.

The main accomplishment of this gerrymander free-for-all will be to further polarize the U.S. House. The number of competitive seats in the general election will shrink. Party primaries will increasingly be the only real competition, and that will drive candidates to court the most partisan voters. The result will be more fools and posers like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Jasmine Crockett in Congress.

Here’s the abstract of a new paper by my old friend Roger Koppl:

Standard economic models assume a common event space shared by all agents and the observing economist. This assumption is present in Aumann’s (1976) agreement theorem and in related work on expected utility, bounded rationality (Simon 1955), ambiguity (Gilboa and Schmeidler 1989), and unawareness (Dekel et al. 1998). It is ubiquitous. This paper argues that event spaces are often subjective, evolving, and incommensurable across agents and that assuming otherwise can obscure important economic phenomena. Recognizing subjective event spaces has concrete implications for economic analysis. It yields a principled case for institutions that sustain viewpoint diversity, illuminates the epistemic risks of monopoly expertise and the mechanisms of expert failure, undermines the confidence of paternalist interventions grounded in behavioral economics, and clarifies the long-standing difficulty of central planning and industrial policy.

Paul Mueller, Lydia Mashburn Newman, and Pete Earle discuss the 2008 financial crisis.

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… is from page 125 of Thomas Sowell’s Compassion Versus Guilt, a 1987 collection of some of his popular essays; specifically, it’s from Sowell’s November 8th, 1985, column titled “A Political Glossary”:

“equal opportunity”: preferential treatment
“non-judgmental”: blaming society
“compassion”: the use of tax money to buy votes
“insensitivity”: objections to the use of tax money to buy votes

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Reason‘s Eric Boehm explores this heap of hypocrisy: “The Trump administration is worried about high fertilizer prices. Its top trade official lobbied for them.” A slice:

With fertilizer prices spiking due to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a majority of American farmers now say they will have a hard time securing their needed supply this year, and President Donald Trump says he is “watching fertilizer prices” closely to prevent price gouging.

But if the president is worried about high fertilizer prices, he might want to have a conversation with his top trade official.

Before joining the Trump administration last year, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer lobbied for policies that limited fertilizer imports and drove up prices for American farmers. Greer represented the J.R. Simplot Company as it successfully persuaded the first Trump administration to impose higher tariffs on fertilizer—despite the opposition from farmers and agricultural interests, who warned that those tariffs would create higher prices and potential shortages.

That part of Greer’s career is not a secret. He testified in front of the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) in favor of those tariffs and later represented Simplot in court as it fended off challenges to them.

Scott Lincicome, Alfredo Carrillo Obregon, and Chad Smitson explain that “IEEPA tariff refunds are far from ideal — and could get farther.”

The Washington Post‘s Editorial Board urges the Trump administration to understand that the wisdom of “trade not aid” applies also to trade that happens to cross political borders. A slice:

Many of the world’s poorest countries threw off colonialism in the mid-20th century only to replace it with variants of socialism. They have high barriers to cross-border trade and capital flows, state-owned enterprises, stifling regulations and corrupting favoritism, all based on the idea that government knows best how to make people rich. In truth, the only people who get rich are the governments and their cronies.

“The most effective economic development assistance is mutually beneficial and profitable trade partnerships between the private sectors of countries,” the declaration of principles says. That’s correct, and the tariff-friendly administration could benefit from listening to its own advice.

The principles the U.S. wants other countries to adopt go both ways. Blaming foreign trade or immigrants for economic problems is shirking America’s responsibility for its own economic development. Taxing imports makes it harder to develop the mutually beneficial relationships that the U.S. says it wants.

Poverty doesn’t go away by transferring money from the people who have it to the people who don’t. That’s true between countries, and it’s true within countries. “Trade over aid” is a message the U.S. government should feel confident expounding to domestic audiences as well as international ones.

Phil Magness calls postliberalism “the most dangerous intellectual movement in American (and world) politics.” A slice:

The postliberals argue that—whatever public opinion says—the worldly authority of government is inherently subordinate to the spiritual authority of the Church, seeking to return us to the time when medieval popes asserted their authority over kings (indeed, some prominent postliberals have even fantasized about a bizarre scenario where the Pope appoints Melania Trump as a Queen of America). There wasn’t any polling from that time, but I’d expect attitudes were different toward this sort of thing.

But beyond public opinion, what’s damning for the postliberal Integralist theorists is that the Catholic Church wants nothing to do with them!

Cardinal Christophe Pierre, the Pope’s Nuncio to the United States, recently published a scathing assessment of postliberal political doctrine, characterizing it as a far-right counterpart to the “wokeism” of the far-left.

Steve Patterson’s letter in today’s Wall Street Journal is superb:

Mark L. Clifford and L. Gordon Crovitz put it perfectly in their op-ed about the confiscation of Jimmy Lai’s assets (“Now China Is Taking Jimmy Lai’s Property,” April 17): “Businesses know better than to invest in a place where private assets are seized on the whims of the Chinese Communist Party.”

They’re right that “Hong Kong’s seizure of Mr. Lai’s assets is a warning to other companies.” First China arrested him and took his freedom. Now it’s his assets. Mr. Lai risked much and made much.

And how is it less of a pointed message to businesses and entrepreneurs when U.S. states do the same thing and call it a wealth tax?

California and New York, are you listening?

Although I believe that Deirdre McCloskey pushes her case against the importance of institutions a bit too far, there nevertheless remains much important truth in her insistence – such as is expressed in this new essay of hers – that the dominant social force is ideas (and the way people talk and write about ideas). One flaw of most neo-institutionalists is indeed, as Deirdre notes, to give excessive credit to consciously designed legislation imposed by a central authority.

My colleague Bryan Caplan is betting that AI will not doom humanity to extinction.

Let’s hope that the courts overturn Virginia’s obnoxious new gerrymandered map.

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… is from page 388 of my GMU Econ and Mercatus Center colleague Peter Boettke’s 2012 volume, Living Economics:

Truth in economics, as in all scientific endeavors, ultimately matters much more than popularity and power. And the task of teaching that truth in economics to generations of students is a worthy and honorable vocation. In fact, it is a calling that demands our most careful attention and dedication to the craft of scholarship and teaching. The best economists read widely and deeply, think hard, speak directly, and write clearly.

DBx: Yes. Pictured here is one of history’s greatest examples of such an excellent economist.

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I thank John Stossel and his team, including Kristin Tokarev, for inviting me to talk with him about Phil Gramm’s and my book, The Triumph of Economic Freedom.