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… is from page 22 of Pierre Lemieux’s excellent 2018 book, What’s Wrong With Protectionism? [original emphasis; footnote deleted; link added]:

The mercantilists of the 16th and 17th centuries thought that a country should export as much as possible and import as little as possible. This is an economic error. Just as individuals sell goods or labor in order to buy something, countries export in order to import. As James Mill wrote nearly 200 years ago, “The benefit which is derived from exchanging one commodity for another, arises, in all cases, from the commodity received, not from the commodity given.”

DBx: Pictured here is James Mill (1773-1836).

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Here’s another note to a regular correspondent who, in his words, knows “for sure President Donald Trump is right about trade.”

Mr. McKinney:

Thanks for passing along U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer’s recent Congressional testimony – testimony from which, you claim, I “may finally learn the truth how President Trump is rescuing the US from foreigners taking advantage of us for decades.”

Sigh.

I could go through Greer’s piece and identify each of its many errors, not the least of these being his main point that U.S. trade deficits are a problem that must be solved. In reality, these “deficits” reflect net capital inflows into the U.S. – capital inflows drawn overwhelmingly by the U.S. economy’s strength. These deficits are not, contrary to what Greer and Trump repeatedly insist, caused by foreigners having “rigged the global economy” to abuse Americans. According to UNCTAD’s hot-off-the-press “World Investment Report 2026,” the U.S. continues to lead the world as a recipient of inbound foreign direct investment, receiving in 2025 83 percent more such investment than was received by second-place Singapore (and 164 percent more than fourth-place China).

Also contributing to U.S. trade deficits is the dollar’s continued role as the global reserve currency. This role is one that Trump – inconsistently with his obsession with eliminating U.S. trade deficits – wants the dollar to continue to play.

I could, as I say, pick apart Greer’s testimony flaw by flaw, misunderstanding by misunderstanding, half-truth by half-truth. But instead, I’ll share with you this new music video by Jason Stills showing World Cup visitors to America being gobsmacked by the prosperity enjoyed by ordinary Americans.

If Trump, Greer, and the MAGA choir were correct that we Americans have been abused for decades by trade with foreigners, these visitors to America would have found us to be a relatively poor people – a people worthy more of pity rather than of our visitors’ astonishment at the wealth that for us is mundane yet for our visitors is jaw-droppingly enormous.

Sincerely,
Don

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GMU Econ alum David Hebert, writing in today’s Wall Street Journal, explains that uncertainty over the USMCA – uncertainty stirred up by that supposedly crack businessman Donald Trump – is bad for business. Two slices:

The U.S. won’t renew the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement in its current form, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said on July 1. The decision leaves North America’s trading rules uncertain. Canada and Mexico wanted a 16-year extension of the pact. Instead, the agreement now enters a cycle of annual reviews, with a hard expiration date of 2036 if the three countries never reach a resolution.

The main value of a trade agreement isn’t that it lowers tariffs but that it eliminates doubt. USMCA’s greatest achievement was never a slate of tariff rates, exceptions and rules. It was the confidence that the rules would stay stable long enough for companies to make plans and act on them. A parts supplier in Michigan could sign a 10-year lease and order supplies because the terms governing what crossed the border were set.

Consider a manufacturer trying to determine whether to build a plant. The investment takes 15 years to pay off. The rules that determine whether it is profitable are now up for renegotiation every 12 months. The rational move is to wait, to build smaller or to build elsewhere. The cost of that uncertainty won’t make headlines. It will show up as factories never constructed, expansions delayed and workers never hired.

Annual reviews destroy confidence in business. Canadian and Mexican officials as well as members of Congress saw this coming, warning during the original hearings that a mandatory review clause would create the uncertainty that discourages investment.

The administration argues that recurring reviews will strengthen America’s bargaining position and create leverage to reduce trade deficits. But trade deficits have never been a score card. Your persistent trade deficit with the grocery store doesn’t mean you are losing.

…..

Investment requires confidence, and confidence requires stability. That stability is what the administration chose not to renew.

Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen warns against buying “the snake oil of the ‘blood and soil’ right.” A slice:

Is America just another country?

That may seem like an odd question to ask as we celebrate the 250^thanniversary of our Declaration of Independence, the greatest testament to individual liberty and popular sovereignty the world has ever known. But, amazingly, some on the right are making just that claim. America, they tell us, isn’t an idea; it is a nation built by a distinct people based on shared ancestry, shared soil, shared history and shared culture — and that these, not the lofty ideals of our Declaration, are what make us great.

This is dead wrong. We are the first nation in human history built not on blood and soil but on an idea: the idea of human freedom. What unites us as a people is not a common bloodline, but our common creed.

“There is at present no American ethnicity,” historian Gordon Wood explained earlier this year at the American Enterprise Institute, and “there was no such distinctive ethnicity even in 1776.” In 1790, Wood said, only 60 percent of the White population was English. The citizenry was what John Adams called a “Hotch potch of people such an omnium gatherum of English, Irish, German, Dutch, Sweedes, French, &c. that it is difficult to give a name to the Country, characteristic of the people.”

What gave us that defining characteristic was our creed. Most European states, Wood said, “were created out of a prior sense of a common ethnicity or language.” But in the United States “the process was reversed.” We were united as one people by a shared belief in a set of ideas — that “all men are created equal” and are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights” and that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” This unique patrimony is the reason Americans can make the audacious claim that we are an “exceptional” nation.

Whether they realize it or not, the blood-and-soil nationalists reject the very idea of American exceptionalism. If what makes us a country is shared land, language and culture, well, that is true of every country. They appear to agree with President Barack Obama, who infamously declared, “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”

In other words, he did not believe in American exceptionalism. And neither do these conservatives. Indeed, by seeking to graft European-style “blood and soil” nationalism on the American body politic, they are inadvertently making common cause with the far left, which also rejects American exceptionalism through its insistence that America’s founding ideals were always a lie told in the service of slavery and oppression.

Eric Boehm points out this: “If President Donald Trump had his way, the breakout star of the United States’ World Cup” – Folarin Balogun – “run would not be an American citizen.”

GMU Econ alum Jeremy Horpedahl corrects an egregious error, committed by Fox Business, about immigration’s effect on U.S. housing prices. (HT Scott Lincicome)

Francois Melese’s letter in today’s Wall Street Journal is excellent:

Newly elected Democratic socialists on their way to Washington would do well to read Phil Gramm and Michael Solon’s excellent op-ed debunking the myth that Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts heavily favored the rich (“The Surprising Truth About Reagan’s Tax Cut,” June 20).

The familiar refrain that the rich should “pay their fair share” overlooks a basic fact: They already do. The authors note that in 2022 the top 20% of taxpayers paid 88% of all federal income taxes. But it’s important to add that they earned little more than half of total income that year. In other words, their share of taxes far exceeded their share of income.

The bottom quintile, by contrast, had an average effective income tax rate of minus 10%. Thanks to refundable tax credits like the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit, they got more back from Washington than they paid in income taxes. The U.S. federal income tax code that Democratic socialists attack and demonize is already the most progressive in the developed world.

Matt Ridley writes that “for me the most momentous happening in 1776 was the inauguration of James Watt’s first practical steam engine” – an event that occurred literally within days of the publication of Adam Smith’s Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Two slices from Ridley’s essay:

We have the industrial revolution backwards. We tend to think that clever people in powdered wigs came up with ideas – democracy, free enterprise, stock markets, science, intellectual property – that enabled men with dirty fingernails to set about changing the world. But I think it was more that the fingernail fellows made the wig wearers possible. Smith’s division of labour and Jefferson’s democracy were all very well. But Thomas Newcomen and Watt mattered more. Thermodynamics – the science of heat and work – was invented to explain steam engines, not vice versa.

…..

If hydrocarbon energy was vital to Britain’s pioneering rise in living standards through industrialisation, the war on hydrocarbons is the chief cause of Britain’s pioneering stagnation through de-industrialisation. The first country into the industrial revolution is now the first deliberately to drop out of it.

Our deceleration is accelerating. Britons are now consuming just 61 per cent as much energy per capita as they did in 2001 – almost halving the practical work we can do. China is consuming twice as much as us per head, or 350 per cent as much as it did in 2001. One by one, we have closed most of our productive industries: oil and gas, aluminium, steel, heavy engineering, mining, cement, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, fertiliser, ceramics. Now even artificial intelligence is leaving or shunning our shores.

The worst part of this is that we have done it deliberately. We set out to pretend we are reducing emissions of carbon dioxide when all we are doing is exporting them. We ban shale gas – but import shale gas from America at much higher cost and much higher carbon footprint. We ban North Sea oil exploration – but import North Sea oil from Norway. We subsidise wood burning at Drax power station – but don’t count the emissions because the wood comes from North Carolina. We load emissions trading taxes on to oil refineries, then wonder why two out of six closed last year and we must import most of our jet fuel, diesel, ethylene and fertiliser.

Alex Tabarrok warns that the U.S. is increasingly showing signs of practicing the dark arts mastered by the British at impoverishing its citizens. Here’s his conclusion:

It is discomforting to watch the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, individual rights, and free speech—the nation that once built the railways, the steam engines, the factories that remade the world—lose the capacity to build much of anything, or even to tolerate people speaking their minds. In parallel, instead of dealing with our real problems—almost all of our creation—the right gets literally hysterical over symbolic culture-war questions like birthright citizenship, while the left nominates candidates with Marxist-Leninist sympathies. The abundance and progress movements are some of the few shining lights. It’s not too late. But Great Britain is a warning.

My Mercatus Center colleague Jack Salmon busts Mamdanian myths about grocery stores. A slice:

The most common argument for government grocery stores is that they’ll be cheaper because they won’t have to satisfy shareholders. The logic sounds plausible until you look at how razor thin grocery store profit margins actually are.

Grocery stores, on average, operate on net profit margins of about 1–2% after taxes. During the pandemic, when supply chains were a mess and demand was unusual, margins briefly hit 3%. These are not the fat profits of a cartel; they are the thin margins of an intensely competitive industry. Of those profits, roughly 35–40% is returned to shareholders in the form of dividends. The rest is reinvested into operations, capital expenditures, expansion, and debt reduction.

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… is from page 79 of the great Columbia University trade economist Jagdish Bhagwati’s 2002 book, Free Trade Today:

The trade sanctions approach, as I have indicated, is likely to be counterproductive (e.g. by pushing children into worse occupations) and therefore, while inspired by good intentions, could well be wicked in its effects.

DBx: So true.

Trade sanctions are nearly always justified by an alleged need for “us” to help right a wrong committed abroad. Sometimes, as Bhagwati notes, such justifications are issued by people with good intentions but with poor economic understanding. Other times, such justifications are issued by rent-seekers with bad intentions but with correct economic understanding. In both cases, the alleged foreign wrongs are not righted.

…..

Beware of economically uninformed good intentions … and of economically informed bad intentions.

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Wall Street Journal columnist Andy Kessler rightly criticizes politicians of all stripes now peddling and pursuing pretty much the same set of ignorant ideas. A slice:

Comedian Adam Carolla has a routine about how the very wealthy and very poor do the same things. Some printable examples: never eat at an Outback steakhouse, take outdoor showers, have lunch with Bono, drive a make of car that no longer exists.

Annoyingly, it’s the same for politicians. They all end up doing the same things—the horseshoe theory has become reality. The left and right, progressives and MAGA, bend around and almost touch. To me, it’s more like a teething ring, going round and round in a politician’s mouth with government power constantly biting down and inflicting pain on all of us. Or an M.C. Escher drawing with everything confusingly connected. I don’t like it one bit.

Who said this? “Today I’m announcing new tariffs in key sectors of the economy that are going to ensure that our workers are not held back by unfair trade practices. They include a . . . 25% tariff on Chinese steel and aluminum products . . . a 100% tariff on electric vehicles made in China . . . a 25% tariff on electric vehicle batteries from China and a 25% tariff on the critical minerals that make those batteries.”

Donald Trump? Nope, Joe Biden in May 2024. Eleven months later, “Tariff Man” Trump declared, “Effective at midnight, we will impose a 25% tariff on all foreign-made automobiles.” Clang goes the horseshoe.

Or this: In 2024, Mr. Biden complained of “too many corporations in America ripping people off. Price gouging, junk fees, greedflation, shrinkflation.” Mr. Trump recently wrote that “Customers are being ‘gouged’ ” and that “gasoline prices better start going down a lot faster than what I’m seeing!” Same, same. A recent Journal headline nailed it: “Trump, Like Biden, Takes Aim at Big Oil.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders wants government to own 50% of artificial-intelligence companies. Get in line, Bernie. In June, Vice President JD Vance said, “The president is supportive of the United States owning these big AI companies.” OpenAI is considering giving up 5% to Washington. This on top of equity ownership in U.S. Steel, Intel, MP Materials and that piece of Nvidia’s processor sales to China. Make it stop.

Phil Magness busts the Trumpian myth that America was founded by “tariff men.” A slice:

This is essentially the tale told by Oren Cass, whom [J.D.] Vance has dubbed “one of the smartest thinkers about political economy in the country.” In Cass’ account, “the American tradition from the founding was one of aggressive protectionism and support for domestic industry.” Free trade, by contrast, “emanat[ed] from Britain as self-serving ideology” to prop up its empire at the expense of the world. After almost 175 years of economic independence, the United States finally succumbed to free trade propaganda in the wake of World War II.

If this account sounds familiar, it’s basically a Trumpian adaptation of an older protectionist mythology that has percolated for decades. In the 1990s, Pat Buchanan similarly characterized free trade as “a betrayal of the country as it was structured by Washington and Hamilton and Madison,” and traced an identical “lost” lineage from Hamilton to Clay to Lincoln and McKinley. So did the cult leader Lyndon LaRouche, who penned a paranoid tract accusing economist Milton Friedman of seducing America with free trade dogmas and thereby subverting its protectionist founding. (The LaRouche book’s co-author, David Goldman, is currently a senior adviser to Trump’s State Department and a recurring presence in the “national conservative” movement.)

A conspicuous omission complicates these and other attempts to enlist the American Founding in the cause of Trump’s tariff agenda. Amid their many historical appeals, the text of the Declaration of Independence is nowhere to be found. Specifically, they never discuss the Declaration’s indictments of the British Crown for “cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world” and “imposing Taxes on us without our Consent”—actions that bear more than a passing resemblance to Trump’s attempts to rewrite the entire U.S. tariff schedule by executive order.

As those passages hint, the White House has a key part of its history backward. Far from intending to create a Hamiltonian tariff republic, the American colonies explicitly rebelled against British restrictions on their ability to trade with the rest of the world.

The Editorial Board of the Washington Post explains that the quality of democratic decision-making processes isn’t necessarily improved by reductions in income inequality – or worsened by increases in such inequality. A slice:

Despite this decades-long reduction in inequality, it’s hard to find anyone who would say British democracy is healthier today than it was in 2000.

The country has cycled through seven prime ministers in the last ten years. In the 2024 general election, the Labour Party won 64 percent of the seats in the House of Commons with just 34 percent of the vote as the party system broke down. Seventy-nine percent of Britons say their country is on the wrong track, one of the highest rates for any country.

The year when average annual real wages in the U.K. and the U.S. were the closest was 2007. That year, the average American worker took home 12 percent more than the average British worker. In 2024, the average American worker took home 30 percent more.

The average American worker made over $12,000 more in 2024 than in 2007. The average British worker made just $875 more. That’s in 2024 dollars at purchasing power parity.

GMU Econ alum Paul Mueller talks with historian Brad Birzer about the Declaration of Independence’s most radical and consequential idea.

Guy Denton points out that America – her people, her openness, her vibrancy, her diversity – deserves celebration. A slice:

American life today is noisy. Smartphones perpetually consume our attention, bombarding us with horrifying headlines and drawing us into vitriolic social-media arguments. But in the real world, America’s civil society is enviably vibrant, and its culture is defined by friendliness and generosity. When I step outside and talk to ordinary Americans — be it in suburban Virginia, or in New York City, or in South Florida — I seldom encounter cynicism or resentment. Instead, I am continually amazed by their warmth, humor, and kindness. In the “real America,” I don’t see a nation on the verge of collapse. I see a uniquely open and prosperous country, rich with greater opportunity than anywhere else can offer, that remains the world’s great beacon of liberty and abundance.

What’s more, I see a country that offers staggering diversity. America is a land of sprawling deserts, towering mountains, verdant forests, and majestic cities. It’s a place where the opera is as easily attended as a wrestling match. Its food, weather, music, and literature are spectacular. Its culture is innovative, dynamic, and endlessly surprising. Its Constitution is the most perceptive political document ever composed, and its institutions of government endure despite new attacks.

Fleeting difficulties may threaten the American promise, but they should not deter us from championing everything that makes this country extraordinary. The wisdom of the Declaration of Independence is as true today as ever, and it has brought us to a time of extraordinary human flourishing. July 4, 2026, is a moment to reflect on all that America has provided, and all that is still to come.

Let’s celebrate.

[DBx: Yes. A country is much more than its government. And the freer the country, the greater is the difference between it and its state.]

Wall Street Journal columnist Mary Anastasia O’Grady describes the U.S. partnership with Venezuela’s “morally bankrupt government” as “an American embarrassment.” A slice:

Even before Ms. Rodríguez agreed to work with the U.S., Mr. Trump was crowing like Jed Clampett about Venezuela’s vast oil reserves. The country also has rich mineral deposits, including gold, and fabulous beaches. It’s a place where, under the right authoritarian regime, one could make a lot of money by getting in on the ground floor. Like, say, in Kazakhstan.

But Venezuelans want an election. Popular opposition leader María Corina Machado, who is in exile, wants to run. The regime has threatened her with arrest if she returns to her native land. She has hoped that the U.S. would support her desire to go back. The Trump administration has told her to wait. Stabilization and recovery, it says, must come before a transition to democracy.

Mr. Trump has lifted sanctions, cheered Chevron for pumping oil for the dictatorship, and cleared the way for Caracas to get market prices for its petroleum exports. This has Venezuelans “dancing in the streets,” according to the U.S. president.

Yet most Venezuelans are unhappy. Nearly 400 political prisoners remain behind bars. Inflation for the 12 months ending in May was over 500%. Mr. Cabello still runs the secret police, the paramilitary and a good part of the military, and he uses his power to keep a lid on dissent.

David Hart shares H.L. Mencken’s translation of the Declaration of Independence into American. A slice from Mencken’s translation:

When things get so balled up that the people of a country have to cut loose from some other country, and go it on their own hook, without asking no permission from nobody, excepting maybe God Almighty, then they ought to let everybody know why they done it, so that everybody can see they are on the level, and not trying to put nothing over on nobody.

All we got to say on this proposition is this: first, you and me is as good as anybody else, and maybe a damn sight better; second, nobody ain’t got no right to take away none of our rights; third, every man has got a right to live, to come and go as he pleases, and to have a good time however he likes, so long as he don’t interfere with nobody else. That any government that don’t give a man these rights ain’t worth a damn; also, people ought to choose the kind of goverment they want themselves, and nobody else ought to have no say in the matter. That whenever any goverment don’t do this, then the people have got a right to can it and put in one that will take care of their interests.

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… is from page 170 of my GMU Econ and Mercatus Center colleague Tyler Cowen’s 2019 book, Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero:

Trump in some key regards likes to favor crony businesses, but it is hard to avoid the suspicion that he does not really know business works, in spite of having spent his whole life in this vocation.

DBx: Case in point: Trump’s obsession with protective tariffs – tariffs that in the U.S. fall on imports well over half of which are inputs used by American businesses to produce. Indeed, a strong case can be made that nearly all imports are inputs into production processes in the U.S.

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We Americans are not as free as we should be. Not even close. But our economy is freer than most, and it still largely embraces entrepreneurship. And the results prove to the world that ordinary people love material prosperity (even if they too frequently do not understand its causes). Enjoy this new song by Jason Stills.

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George Will looks at America in 1876 looking at America through the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. Two slices:

The exhibition foretold the mechanization of agriculture, which produced urbanization and industrialization. Hitherto, a farmer’s scythe could harvest only an acre a day. Machines would make the vast Great Plains bountiful, and send farm labor to higher-productivity factory jobs.

…..

In 2026? Today, Americans’ low pain threshold is the result of unimagined reductions in life’s discomforts. Improvements in material, legal and moral conditions have been accompanied by national hypochondria and irrational anxieties.

Unlike in 1876, there is gloominess about new technologies. Pessimists exhort Americans to fear a jobs famine caused by artificial intelligence. Yet as the Economist notes, “never in modern history has technological progress hurt the overall demand for human labour.”

Optimists, equally speculative, say AI will so dramatically boost economic growth, hence government revenue, that we can continue forever our comfortable infantilism. Last week, the government announced that in just the first eight months of fiscal 2026, its spending exceeded revenue by $1.2 trillion.

Fear of AI might be symptomatic that Americans, bored by a surfeit of improvements, have a thirst for the excitement of future dangers from disruptive developments. They should remember this:

In terms of social and political upheaval, no subsequent technology has equaled Johannes Gutenberg’s 15th-century invention of movable type. In time, it democratized literacy, leading to democracy and freedom’s unending turmoil that we should not want to end.

John Hillen celebrates the space and embrace that Americans give to entrepreneurship. A slice:

The most revealing measure of U.S. competitive power isn’t found in military operations against Iran or a looming $1.5 trillion defense budget. It’s in our private economy.

SpaceX closed with a market cap larger than the gross domestic product of most nations on June 12, its first day of public trading. In the prior two weeks, Anthropic and OpenAI filed to go public, both chasing $1 trillion valuations.

These aren’t the closed deals of an insider class. SpaceX set aside nearly a third of its offering for retail buyers, and millions of Americans now own a sliver of it through index funds and 401(k)s. The spoils of the most dynamic companies on earth are spread among schoolteachers and retirees.

Nothing like this is happening in Europe or China. The U.S. drew about 64% of all venture capital worldwide in 2025, up from roughly 47% a few years earlier, and captured about 85% of global funding for AI.

Almost 80 countries run space programs, yet a single U.S. company, SpaceX, flies more than 10,000 satellites, about two-thirds of everything active in orbit. AI commands the ambition of governments on every continent, but the firms setting its pace are almost all American. In both arenas, the breakthroughs come not from a state ministry but from the inventiveness of private enterprise.

The gap between the U.S. and others is widening, not closing. In the 2024 European Union report on European competitiveness from Mario Draghi, the former central banker noted that not a single European company worth more than 100 billion euros had been built from scratch in the past 50 years. Of America’s dozen or so trillion-dollar companies, half were built during that exact span.

In the past 250 years, a nation once so fragile that it might have been strangled in its cradle has risen above all its major competitors and established itself as the world’s pre-eminent power. How a republic not built around martial genius or government planning did that is the central question of American strategy. The answer is the spirit of enterprise: free markets and free people.

Clare McHugh talks with Tom Holland – the historian, not the actor – about history, including the American Revolution. Two slices:

“It’s very unfashionable, I think, to attribute the success of the revolution to the remarkable qualities of the Founding Fathers,” Holland says, then pausing a beat. “So what? Their quality was recognized at the time, even by their enemies. And it’s rare for people who have been defeated to acknowledge the stature of those who have defeated them.”

Holland notes how stupefied King George III was to learn that Washington had given up the presidency and, like Cincinnatus, returned to his plow. But America’s founders consciously emulated the Romans, he explains, because as members of the transatlantic British elite they were steeped in classical history. “There are multiple lessons that can be applied from classical history — that’s the joy of it,” Holland says. “If you are in rebellion against a king, you can look back at the palmy days when the Romans expelled a monarch and established a republic.” They knew how that project ended, of course, “so there’s an immense emphasis in the early decades of the American republic on the virtues of the early Romans as they are properly understood.”

…..

Asked to name his favorite Founding Father, Holland fulsomely praises Franklin for lining up the French on the colonists’ side — “the great diplomatic achievement in the whole of American history” — before admitting that no colonial leader surpasses Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence. “The genius of the Declaration is that it draws on what are clearly Christian ideas of the inherent dignity of mankind — life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” he says. “But there is no overt Christian framing of it, which is brilliant, because it allows all kinds of people to buy in.”

What of the current antipathy for Jefferson, owner of 600 slaves, a man who sired children with his late wife’s enslaved half sister, Sally Hemings? Holland responds passionately: “Jefferson knew in his marrow that slavery was a moral abomination. He knew this because he had read the New Testament, because he was steeped in the liberalism of the English Enlightenment, because for him the ideal of liberty was the most vivid ideal he had.”

And yet the historian admits “it’s such a mystery” that Jefferson lived in conflict with his own values. “My solution is he basically wants to be Cicero; he wants to retire to enjoy otium cum dignitate, as the Romans call it, leisure with dignity, but he needs the slaves for that. All the Virginian aristocracy is going bust at that time. If he frees his slaves, he will lose Monticello, and Monticello is the great love of his life.”

Reason‘s Christian Britschgi applauds George Washington. A slice:

In the final days of the American Revolution, Continental Army soldiers gathered in Newburgh, New York, to demand that Congress fund their back pay and promised pensions. Anonymous letters circulating among the troops suggested that they might refuse to disband, and might even overthrow Congress, if their benefits weren’t forthcoming.

Some of the generals and politicians egging the soldiers on hoped that George Washington would take up his men’s cause and in doing so replace a weak Congress with a powerful new federal government. Instead, Washington ended the mutiny with a few words and some brilliant political showmanship.

In the middle of an address to the restive soldiers in which he urged them to respect Congress, the aged general conspicuously reached into his pocket for his glasses.

“Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in the service of my country,” he said to the assembled soldiers. There wasn’t a dry eye left in the house after that.

The so-called Newburgh conspiracy collapsed instantly. American history did not begin with a military coup; instead, Washington gave the new nation a powerful image of republican self-restraint and a tradition of military submission to civilian authority.

That’s a lot to accomplish just by putting on one’s glasses.

Libertarians can certainly find much to criticize in George Washington. At the beginning of the War of Independence, some wanted to use voluntary militias to fight the redcoats. Washington demanded instead that we stand up a European-style army, which in turn necessitated European-style martial discipline, taxes, and inflation. After the war, he agitated for replacing the decentralized government established by the Articles of Confederation with a stronger federal government with its own robust powers to tax. As the first president under the new Constitution, Washington was hardly a small-government man. He supported a permanent standing army and put down a tax revolt at the point of a sword.

Despite all that, the highlights of Washington’s military and political career show him time and again walking away from power when he had every opportunity to seize or retain it. The Newburgh conspiracy is a prime example.

George Leef looks at two reports on the decline of American higher education.

The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal warns that “the Faster Labor Contracts Act is a progressive trap for Republican supporters.” A slice:

The Trump Administration is campaigning against racial preferences in hiring, but watch out or they could arrive through the back door—with the help of Republicans. The vehicle is the Faster Labor Contracts Act (FLCA), which would aid Big Labor in imposing its progressive agenda on American business.

The House recently passed the FLCA with the support of 20 Republicans, and Josh Hawley of Missouri is promoting it in the Senate with Bernie Moreno (R., Ohio) and Roger Marshall (R., Kan.) as co-sponsors. Teamsters President Sean O’Brien has called Mr. Hawley “labor’s biggest ally in the Senate Republican caucus.”

These Republicans are promoting much more than the FLCA’s mandated arbitration after 120 days of collective bargaining. The bill gives the whip hand to unions in negotiating labor contracts, and along with that comes the left-wing cultural agenda that unions like the Teamsters and the SEIU have adopted.

Take DEI—diversity, equity and inclusion—which unions have made part of their social-justice mission and collective-bargaining agreements. The General Teamsters Local Union No. 174 made DEI a feature of its negotiation with the Port of Seattle. The Writers Guild of America, East, included DEI targets for the hiring process and a formal diversity committee in its bargaining with Vox Media.

The Screen Actors Guild and American Federation of Television and Radio Artists 2025 National Board resolution calls DEI a “moral imperative” and says that “systemic barriers to full and fair inclusion, equal employment opportunity, and accessibility persist, requiring continued vigilance and advocacy.”

Or how about anti-Israel policies? In June, the United Auto Workers in Michigan voted to divest from Israel. The resolution cites the “billionaire class” and Israel’s contribution to “undermine global worker unity by furthering settler colonialism, apartheid, dispossession, and genocide.” Who knew the UAW had a Gaza policy?

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… is from page 186 of Thomas Sowell’s 1994 book, Race and Culture: A World View:

Slavery was “peculiar” in the United States only because human bondage was inconsistent with the principles on which this nation was founded. Historically, however, it was those principles which were peculiar, not slavery.

DBx: Thomas Jefferson, George Mason, George Washington, and other slave-holding American founders are and ought by right to be criticized for engaging in the heinous practice of human bondage, as well as for their hypocrisy. Yet for their many words and actions in support of the principles of liberty, they deserve also much praise. Regardless of the judgment that you personally choose to pass on each such founder, the indisputable fact is that the liberal ideology that they espoused and risked their lives to further was the acid that finally dissolved the unquestioned acceptance that most human beings for the previous 10,000 years had for slavery.

As we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, let that celebration be for the institutional triumph, however imperfect, of the liberal creed – a creed that eventually destroyed slavery.