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… is from page 59 of Jacob Viner’s indispensable 1937 volume, Studies in the Theory of International Trade:

Freedom for themselves, restrictions for others, such was the essence of the usual program of legislation of the mercantilist tracts of mercantilist authorship.

DBx: Pictured here is the great economist Jacob Viner (1892-1970).

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GMU Econ alum Caleb Petitt, writing at Fortune, exposes the weakness of the Trump administration’s justification for its new tariffs on imports from Canada punitive taxes on Americans’ purchases of imports from Canada. Two slices:

In its Proclamation announcing the new tariffs, the administration claimed that Canada’s 25% tariff on U.S. autos and auto parts—enacted days after Trump’s April 2, 2025 “Liberation Day” Executive Order announcing new U.S. tariffs on Canada and virtually every other country in the world—unfairly discriminates against the American auto industry, thus “disadvantaging the commerce of the United States compared to the commerce of other countries.”

In support of this view, the administration claims that Canadian imports of U.S. autos “fell precipitously” by more than $5 billion, or “approximately 22%,” while Canada’s imports from Mexico, Japan, Korea, and Germany increased by nearly $3 billion.

A closer look at actual trade flows tells a different story, however. As the chart below shows, Canadian imports of U.S. autos historically have far exceeded those from the other listed countries. Since April 2025, Canada’s auto imports from the other countries have increased slightly or stayed the same, while Canada’s imports of U.S. autos have bounced around, falling sharply late last year, rebounding sharply during the first quarter of this year, then trending downward again—ending up, most recently, around the level they were in April ’25.

Moreover, it’s not clear that the tariffs are the cause of the modest decline in American auto exports to Canada. A more likely explanation is that Canadians, like Americans, are holding on to their existing cars longer, resulting in fewer new car purchases overall, which would affect both U.S. and foreign imports.

…..

Canada’s tariffs may harm the Canadian economy, but they’re not harming America’s—at least not the auto sector, which is the focus of the administration’s Section 338 retaliatory action.
The announced new U.S. tariffs on Canada are responding to a problem that American tariffs started. Trying to get back at Canada with new tariffs because Canada is trying to get back at America for the tariffs we unilaterally imposed is a fool’s errand. A tariff war with Canada is another potential U.S. war with no winner and no end. But there are likely losers: U.S. and Canadian consumers and the U.S. and Canadian economies.

Fareed Zakaria decries the Trump administration’s disrespect for the law in raising tariffs punitive taxes on Americans’ purchases of imports. A slice:

For eight decades, the U.S. led the world toward open markets and open trade. In barely two years, Trump has transformed it into effectively the most protectionist major advanced economy. The result has not been a manufacturing renaissance. It has been higher prices, weaker investment, fewer manufacturing jobs — and a government increasingly willing to make falsehood official policy in order to defend a failed economic creed.

John Steele Gordon eloquently explains the difference between zero-sum wealth acquisition and positive-sum wealth creation. The modern world, led by the United States, is the result of entrepreneurial innovation that creates wealth. Two slices:

The grandeur of the Roman Empire was built on the aggregation of wealth. Using its superior military organization, Rome conquered its neighbors, took their gold and silver and sold their populations into slavery. When the empire ran out of neighbors, the Roman economy began to falter.

Today America is in the midst of the greatest epoch of wealth creation the world has ever known. Our history is one of innovation, and we are all richer because of it.

…..

Billionaires don’t keep their wealth locked in Scrooge McDuck-style money bins. They invest it in ever more wealth-creating enterprises.

Capital and labor are the two fundamental inputs into an economy. Many on the left, unable to distinguish between wealth aggregation and wealth creation, want to tax wealth heavily, which would reduce the available capital needed to make the economy grow. If there was ever a prime example of ideology blinding people to reality, this is it.

[DBx: Gordon should have instead written: “Entrepreneurial innovation is the fundamental input into an economy.” This revised claim is more consistent than is his own claim with his essay. Yes, entrepreneurs require capital and labor to put their ideas into action, just as they require gravity and oxygen and temperate climates. Yes, also, capital and labor contribute at the margin to wealth creation, which is why capital and labor earn returns. But all societies, even hunter-gatherer ones, used capital and labor. Today’s enormous productivity of capital and labor is due to entrepreneurial innovation. See the work of Deirdre McCloskey and of Julian Simon.]

Wall Street Journal columnist Allysia Finley isn’t favorably impressed by the socialism that is today oh so chic among many Democrats. A slice:

A friend recently observed that many young, relatively affluent people in his New York City neighborhood—which voted heavily for Zohran Mamdani—dress like hobos and sport Carhartt workwear. Call it socialist chic. The sartorial style is also an apt metaphor for patrician progressives who feign solidarity with the proletariat.

Consider Abdul El-Sayed, the left-wing front-runner in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary this Tuesday. Mr. El-Sayed has surged to the lead against Rep. Haley Stevens by presenting himself as a man of the people. He has called for free child care, “Medicare for all” and an 8% wealth tax on billionaires.

“I don’t think that our system should be in the business of creating billionaires,” he said during a March debate. “I think our system should be in the business of empowering everyday folks to be able to live a life with access to the basic dignities that they need and deserve, good housing, good healthcare, affordable food.”

Nobody can disagree with the latter goals. But Mr. El-Sayed’s prescriptions to achieve them would expand government control of healthcare and the private economy and exacerbate the socioeconomic inequalities he inveighs against.

David Bahnsen writes wisely about the recent spate of writing and talking about “the common good.” A slice:

The issue is not whether or not absolute standards of right and wrong exist (they do), and the issue is not whether or not the state has a role (it does). Any belief that the state ought to punish criminals and defend national security is a claim on the state’s promotion and defense of what some would call the common good. The issue is on where the lines are to be drawn and what the limiting principles are. Conservatives who loathe post-liberalism (like yours truly) recognize Kuyperian sphere sovereignty — where the primary institutional responsibility for civil society lies with the family, with church, and with robust communities. Asking the federal government to take on the role of common-good morality, manners, and virtues is a grotesque violation of jurisdiction and suitable silo. Using common-good language to rationalize some state intervention in the marketplace must contain a limiting principle, or it is better referred to by its other name: rank statism.

Also writing wisely about the common good is National Review‘s Dan McLaughlin. Two slices:

One of the problems with the common good as a standard is its vagueness. Does it mean that laws should have a moral basis? If so, that just restates reality: virtually all law is grounded in moral judgments about what is right, wrong, fair, unfair, just, unjust, etc. Does it mean that laws should aim to improve the morals of the people? That’s a very different question, and one that raises serious questions about the limits of the competence of government: government can do a lot to degrade the morals of the governed but has only limited power to improve them. That’s to say nothing of the difficulty of defining what kinds of morality are supported by a sufficient consensus to justify backing them with governmental force.

…..

The Founding Fathers understood the difficulty of defining this sort of thing. That’s why they used general terms like “establish Justice” and “promote the general Welfare” when describing the goals of government in the Constitution’s preamble, but avoided those terms when actually defining the powers of government.

We all want something that looks or sounds like the common good. But, like common sense, it’s easier to invoke as an aspiration than to define as a standard. Which means that instead of helping us sharpen our thinking, it often conceals more than it elucidates.

Paul Vaughn makes clear that many progressives are eager to weaponize government power to enforce their ideology. Two slices:

On a quiet October morning in 2022, my life changed forever. Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation pounded on my front door and arrested me at gunpoint in front of my wife and children. Last week, my life changed again.

After years of legal battles to clear my name, my family has reached a settlement with the government concerning the weaponization of power against us and the harm it inflicted. This settlement comes on the heels of a landmark Justice Department report that confirms what my attorneys at the Thomas More Society argued from the beginning: What happened to me wasn’t an accident or an overzealous mistake but a coordinated campaign against pro-life advocates like me.

…..

A Christian should be able to stand on a public sidewalk or in a building open to the public, pray quietly, peacefully share the pro-life message, and go home to his family without fear that a federal task force is building a file on him and taking cues from an abortion industry lobby.

That isn’t a radical request. I pray this marks a turning point—for pro-life Christians and for every American who believes that justice must be blind and speaking the truth isn’t a crime.

Matthew Continetti praises the late, great Milton Friedman. A slice:

Critiquing Friedman is a bipartisan trend. Recently, Vice President JD Vance told the Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles that, “American economic policy on the right is now much more Alexander Hamilton than it is Milton Friedman. I think that’s obviously a good thing.”

Obviously?

Leave aside the fact that current economic policy is neither Hamilton’s nor Friedman’s—it’s President Trump’s. Concentrate instead on the policy’s ambiguous results. Inflation remains above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target. Real wage growth has been lackluster. Overall manufacturing employment is down since January 2025. Furthermore, Mr. Trump’s economic agenda is unpopular. The public rejects tariffs.

It gives Mr. Trump poor marks on the economy and inflation. If this is the alternative to Friedman, it isn’t working.

Mr. Vance also told Mr. Knowles that, “Milton Friedman’s ideas made more sense in the 1980s because they were being advocated in a country that still had a very rich and powerful institutional Christianity.” Yet Friedman’s ideas—that government should secure rights and allow free people to trade with minimal interference—make sense regardless of social or historical context. They’re based on empirical data and the law of supply and demand. A rich and powerful institutional Christianity wasn’t behind Hong Kong’s or India’s prosperity, for instance. Their growth was the result of falling barriers to savings, investment and trade.

True, Friedman had little to say about culture. For him, people and nongovernmental associations such as families, churches and communities were the best transmitters of moral values. But his lack of interest in social questions doesn’t undermine his insights into economics. And no one is asking policymakers to become die-hard libertarians. Just a little Friedman would go a long way.

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… is from pages 146-147 of the December 1828 Edinburgh Review article “The American Tariff,” as reprinted in volume 1 of Battles Over Free Trade (Mark Duckenfield, editor, 2008); this article is in response to U.S. enactment of the “Tariff of Abominations“:

But strange as it may seem, the best established scientific conclusions, the experience of all ages and nations, and their own progress, failed to convince the legislators of America of the expediency of pursuing that liberal line of policy, from the adoption of which they had already reaped so many advantages. Not satisfied with the progress they had already made, with the enjoyment of free and liberal institutions, and a boundless extent of fertile and unoccupied land, they resolved to call custom-house regulations to their aid! Mistaking the effusions of a few miserable pamphleteers, and the speeches of the Newcastles and Kenyons of the day, for the wisdom of the British nation, they persuaded themselves that those very restrictions which had clogged and impeded our progress, had been the main causes of our advancement. Instead of dwelling on the advantages of free competition, their statesmen deemed it productive only of poverty and ruin…. Selfishness, patriotism, and ignorance, each lent its aid to the introduction of what has been pompously designated by its more ardent supporters, as the ‘American System.’

DBx: Protectionism, then as now, is the dogma that 10-2=15.

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Here’s a note to a Facebook friend.

Mr. Kartik Chandrasekhar

Kartik:

Thanks for noting, on my Facebook page, that someone put the following challenge to you: “What would be great is if you would actually take the time to study what Trump himself has to say about Tariffs, and how he uses them, rather than immediately defaulting to criticizing him, and doing so publicly.”

I get this same challenge routinely. I respond by saying that it’s precisely because I’ve actually studied what Trump himself says about tariffs that I’m confident that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Although Trump offers several different, often inconsistent, rationales for tariffs, by far the rationale he offers most frequently is that tariffs are a tool to eliminate U.S. trade deficits with individual countries. Importantly, this rationale is the one that was given for the “Liberation Day” tariffs. As reported by the New York Times, a senior administration official said that those tariffs are “based on the concept that the trade deficit that we have with any given country is the sum of all the unfair trade practices and ‘cheating’ that country has done.” This NYT summary is fully consistent with Trump’s long-standing assertions about trade and trade deficits.

No more about Trump’s trade policy needs to be discovered in order to conclude that it’s a Niagara of economic nonsense.

First, the only “US. trade deficit” that has any economic meaning at all is the U.S. trade deficit with the rest of the world. A U.S. trade deficit with an individual country or region – for example, the U.S. trade deficit with Canada or with Europe – has no more economic significance than does Donald Trump’s trade deficit with his dentist. In a world of more than two economic entities – two people, two countries, two regions, two planets, two whatever – there is absolutely no reason to suppose that any pair of entities will have trade with each other that’s ‘balanced.’

Second, U.S. trade deficits with the rest of the world are not – again contrary to Trump’s uninformed belief – a sign of U.S. decline or of foreign ‘cheating.’ These deficits are instead evidence of the continued unusual attractiveness of the U.S. economy as a destination for global investment – investment that further strengthens America’s economy. Rather than join with Trump in bemoaning U.S. trade deficits, we Americans should be proud of these ‘deficits.’

The fact that Trump finds meaning in bilateral trade deficits, along with the related fact that he’s blind to the cause of U.S. trade deficits with the rest of the world, is sufficient reason to criticize – fervently – Trumpian protectionism. To continue to suppose that some subtle yet ingenious design lies at the heart of Trump’s trade policies is akin to supposing that some subtle yet ingenious design lies at the heart of the advice of a financial counsellor whose chief recommendation for securing your retirement savings is to feed those savings into a Vegas slot-machine.

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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This monologue by Bill Maher is spot-on, funny, and brilliant. It’s a must-watch. (HT David Henderson)

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J.D. Tuccille reports that Trump’s protectionism “has constituted the largest tax increase since 1993.” A slice:

“In 2025, the Trump tariffs amounted to an average tax increase of $1,000 per US household,” write Erica York and Alex Durante of the Tax Foundation. “We estimate that the tariffs both announced and imposed, including the Section 122 tariff, Section 232 tariffs, Section 301 tariffs, and Section 338 tariff on Canada, will increase taxes per US household by $900 in 2026.”

The somewhat lower additional cost of trade protectionism on Americans projected for 2026 relative to last year comes courtesy of the changing legal landscape, not because of any loss of resolve on the part of the Trump administration. The sweeping tariffs imposed last year under the alleged authority of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) were voided in February when the Supreme Court flatly ruled that “IEEPA does not authorize the President to impose tariffs.” Since then, the president and his partisans have scrambled to exploit any possible means to burden imports with high duties and to punish foreign sellers for daring to export goods to the U.S. at competitive prices.

The laws that the administration has invoked for new tariffs are limited in scope or can only be invoked under specific circumstances. Section 122 tariffs, for example, may only be put in place for 150 days. Imposed after the IEEPA ruling, they expired on July 24 and were themselves overruled in May by the U.S. Court of International Trade since there was no balance of payments deficit as required by the law.

Bryan Riley tweets: (HT Scott Lincicome)

Weird, uneducated protectionists often talk about trade as if it’s only about helping globalist billionaires. But trade has always been about lifting people out of poverty and strengthening U.S security.

George Leef explores what happens when academics deny reality (as they too often do). Two slices:

You’ve no doubt heard the expression, “That’s an idea so ridiculous only an academic could believe it.” It kept coming to mind as I read Professor John Staddon’s new book Inevitable Differences: An Inquiry into Human Variation. That individuals vary enormously in their talents and desires is an obvious fact, and yet many academics have become famous by declaring that individuals and especially groups must be treated as though they were equal.

Staddon, an emeritus professor of biology at Duke University, takes a critical look at the obsession among “progressives” for engineering equality, particularly with regard to race. Why, he wonders, are academic writings about race and “diversity” so filled with factual errors, logical fallacies, and animosity? The reason, he maintains, is that few scholars are willing to subject the work of leftists to rigorous analysis—especially black writers who claim that America’s past racism calls for a national transformation. Toxic ideas that ought to have withered on the vine have therefore spread widely and influenced policy.

…..

[Ibram X.] Kendi declares that racism and capitalism are “conjoined twins.” Leftists are apt to nod in agreement with that, but Staddon replies that his position is “crypto-Marxist nonsense.” Rejecting capitalism would have the same disastrous results as did the rejection of traditional farming in the Soviet Union in favor of Trofim Lysenko’s crackpot beliefs rooted in Marxist theory. Again, thinking through the consequences of their demands is not part of the mental toolkit of academics like Kendi, nor is it expected of them by the educational establishment.

Nearly all Americans have been raised in the belief that individuals should be treated fairly and judged on the basis of their actions, not their race. Nevertheless, large numbers of them still harbor racist thoughts. That, at least, is the contention of numerous academics who declare that whites suffer from “color-blind racism.” They may think of themselves as good people who “don’t see color,” but they’re mistaken. How do we know? Because of a test devised at Harvard that supposedly reveals their “implicit bias.” Based on the dubious results of this strange “test,” the notion that many Americans harbor racial bias took hold. Staddon points out that although this test has been debunked, scholars persist in repeating that America is still awash in racism and that we need lots of education and training programs to combat it.

One of the hallmarks of the “thinking” of the academics Staddon surveys is that they refuse to consider non-racist explanations for social phenomena. A good example is the newly invented sub-field of economics called “Stratification Economics.” That’s the brain-child of Duke professor William Darity, who says that it studies why different racial groups have unequal incomes. Astoundingly, he forthrightly declares that he explicitly excludes any factors relating to the abilities of individuals. Ruling out a class of explanations is flagrantly unscientific, but Darity’s unintellectual approach is meant to support the “progressive” agenda of economic transformation and thus gets a pass.

George Will recommends David S. Reynolds’s new book, Two Ships. A slice:

Reynolds, a City University of New York historian, uses his subtitle — “Jamestown 1619, Plymouth 1620, and the Struggle for the Soul of America” — to assert this: The White Lion, the ship that first brought slaves to Virginia, and the Mayflower, which brought to New England Puritans in flight from monarchical absolutism and Anglican bossiness, incubated two ultimately incompatible American futures. Reynolds’s powerful demonstration is that his story — the symbolism of the two ships — is not his. It was ubiquitous in American political rhetoric until, happily, it no longer was, as the nation transcended old categories.

Here’s the abstract of Dora Costa’s and Matthew Kahn’s review of John Cassidy’s Capitalism and Its Critics: (I’ve not yet read the full review, but the abstract promises a solid analysis.)

John Cassidy’s Capitalism and Its Critics surveys 250 years of capitalism’s history through the eyes of roughly thirty critics, from the Luddites, early utopians and Marx to modern communitarians, antigrowth proponents, free trade opponents, and scholars of inequality. The result is a vivid, sympathetic reconstruction of left-of-center dissent. We argue, however, that the book reproduces two analytical weaknesses shared by the critics it profiles. First, it commits Harold Demsetz’s Nirvana Fallacy, evaluating imperfect real-world markets against idealized regulatory alternatives rather than against equally imperfect real-world governments. Second, it underestimates capitalism’s most distinctive self-correcting mechanisms: endogenous technological change and entrepreneurial creative destruction, all coordinated by the price system. The result is a catalogue of capitalism’s failures unaccompanied by any comparable accounting of the alternatives.

Inez Feltscher Stepman is understandably not optimistic about the future of Comrade Mamdani’s grocery stores.

A realistic short-term prediction is that the stores will become havens for half-criminal resale markets, outright thievery, the homeless, and the mentally ill — that is, generally the same basket of issues that plague so many urban spaces where “discounted and/or free” stuff is on offer. Rather than relieve the very real affordability burden on the law-abiding working class, eliminating minimal barriers to entry, like normal prices and competition, that keep out the most antisocial elements of the city instead will force those workers to share space with the drug-addled, criminal, and dangerous. As surely as blood in the water attracts sharks, handouts of free or deeply discounted goods, in the melee of a populous city like New York, attract the worst kinds of crowds.

The importance of these small barriers, and correspondingly, the results of giveaways, can be affirmed all over New York and America’s other urban cores. For example, a “free” public pool in Central Park that opened in 2025 quickly became a hotbed for fights, disorder, and homeless “bathing.” The city has quietly stopped crowing about its success. “Free” gift stunts by companies or livestreamers in the city frequently result in unsafe mob scenes that further degenerate into violence.

Also writing about the splendors of government-run grocery stores is César Báez, a native of one of socialism’s many shining triumphs, Venezuela. A slice:

The [New York] city’s plan rests on the assumption that it can control who buys subsidized goods. Yet Venezuela’s experience with government-run grocery stores suggests that assumption deserves scrutiny.

When Venezuela’s socialist president, Hugo Chávez, created a nationwide network of government-run grocery stores called “Mercal” in 2003, he faced the same conundrum of how to control excess demand when prices are set artificially low.

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… is from page 78 of Thomas Sowell’s 1999 book, Barbarians Inside the Gates:

Trade-offs are not just something thought up by conservative meanies. As long as what we want exceed what we have – and it’s been that way for thousands of years now – we are going to have to make trade-offs. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a carpenter or a CEO, whether you are down in a submarine or up in the dizzying heights of an editorial office in Times Square.

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Jeffrey Anderson makes the case that the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History is indeed now controlled by leftists with an ideological agenda. Two slices:

The Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History has been in the news for disparaging our nation’s history and engaging in partisan activism. Addressing such charges, the museum’s director, Anthea Hartig, testified at two congressional hearings. The most interesting thing about her prepared testimony is that she chose not to address a single exhibit that has opened under her seven-year watch.

Responding to a 160-page report from the White House Domestic Policy Council that details how the museum has strayed from its intended mission, Ms. Hartig’s response was to invoke the flag—specifically, the Star-Spangled Banner. In her prepared testimony, she referenced it multiple times. That flag, which so inspired Francis Scott Key, has been displayed at the National Museum of American History since 1964 and housed in its current gallery for 18 years. That exhibit is excellent and patriotic, but the newer parts of the museum are heavy-handed, dumbed-down and anti-American—the opposite of what a national museum should be.

I sat directly beside Ms. Hartig as a witness in her second hearing. I testified that the National Museum of American History increasingly is a museum not about American history, but about activists’ attempts to shape the future. The museum’s newer exhibits offer no coherent sense of a shared national identity, and they divide Americans into oppressors and the oppressed.

…..

What little the museum does provide on the founding and pre-founding eras is largely critical. In one exhibit, 1492-1776 is referred to as the period of “Unsettling the Continent.” Visitors are told, “Our world today grows out of that unsettling history.” Elsewhere, they’re told that our founding can either be viewed as a “complete, perfect, sacred event led by a great patriot who, as American children would learn, never told a lie” or else as “part of a wider, unfinished movement” that was “deeply imperfect.” Viewing our founding as one of the greatest events in world history, warts and all, apparently isn’t an option.

Americans deserve a National Museum of American History that expresses a love of that history and views it as the wondrous story of a nation conceived in liberty. They don’t deserve a museum that alternates between ignoring and condemning our extraordinary heritage.

National Review‘s John Puri wisely warns against using government to engineer “the common good” (which, of course – and contrary to the presumption of so many people across the ideological spectrum – is no objection to the common good). A slice:

Promoting education as a track to the middle class was another common-good policy. Government paved it with subsidies to attend college — guaranteed student loans and direct assistance — making a four-year degree the badge of advancement. Today, not only have these programs inflated the price of a college education, but they have also degraded its value. Half of college graduates naturally feel cheated when they end up working jobs that don’t require their degrees, which they just spent four years and many thousands of dollars to attain. Yet college has been made the norm, so not attending may be even worse.

Privileging unions was a common-good policy toward stable jobs. But unions could only maintain such jobs by protecting incumbents, thereby excluding younger workers from quality vocations. Tying health insurance to employment was a common-good policy to simplify family benefits. Until it obscured the true cost of health care, requiring ever more labyrinthine subsidies to afford.

Neighborhood schools with enrollment tied strictly to residence were a common-good policy to foster community. Now, they make attractive neighborhoods into closed enclaves. Property-tax breaks for seniors were a common-good policy to keep grandparents in their family homes. Now, the same incentive prevents younger families from moving in.

The story throughout is that interventions to fortify a certain way of life eventually sealed it off. Protections became barriers to entry; subsidies became effective taxes and transfers. The common good was made less accessible because it was defined and supported by state action.

Therein lies the basic conceit of the common-good form of politics. In an endlessly complex world, the competence of government to fabricate social outcomes, especially at scale, is profoundly limited. Tradeoffs are ubiquitous and unavoidable. One generation’s insulated good life may be another’s desperation. In that case, what is a benevolent government to do?

The conservative answer is for government to do what it can: Remove artificial barriers and distortions, and otherwise leave space for citizens to pursue the good life for themselves, comporting with the preferences of others as best they can manage. A society of spontaneous order will doubtless leave many people out in the cold. Yet fewer, perhaps, than a government so hubristic that it tries to entrench the common good.

Alfredo Carrillo Obregon reports on “how “Liberation Day” cost America its tourists.” A slice:

While survey and government data already pointed to declines in foreign visits to the United States (see figures 1 and 2), a recent working paper finds that the “Liberation Day” tariff announcements in April 2025 led to a significant decline in tourism to the United States, costing the sector over $1 billion in lost revenue per month.

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy, defends the correct version of the doux commerce thesis.

Steve Hanke and Roger Koppl note that Anthony Fauci was a “big player.” A slice:

As we recently wrote in Fortune, Big Players are big because their words and deeds move a whole system. They are insensitive to any disciplinary mechanism in the system, be it profit and loss in a market or peer review in science. In addition, they are discretionary because they are not bound to any simple, understandable rule. They act on judgment, even mood or whim in some cases. Big Players make their words and deeds matter more than underlying fundamentals such as consumer preferences or scientific truth. Fauci’s diary provides no less than a confessional by a Big Player who is reveling in his unchecked powers and celebrity status.

The Editorial Board of the Washington Post explains what shouldn’t – but, alas, what always does – need explaining: “Democracy doesn’t require truth police. It needs a free marketplace of ideas.” A slice:

The hysteria around “misinformation” assumes democracy runs on unvarnished truth. It doesn’t. It runs on persuasion, with rival camps making their best case to loud and stubborn voters, under procedures everyone can accept.

Political scientists established long ago that people have always leaned toward voting in line with their identities and loyalties. The era of machine politics did not destroy the republic, nor will social media. Those hell-bent on defeating “misinformation” are trying to re-create a system that never really existed.

The challenge today is that social media supercharges the factionalism that has always plagued the body politic. Rather than serving as a conduit for information, it becomes an echo chamber. Users choose whom they interact with, which typically means gravitating toward like-minded people. This is why anti-vaccine activists thrived on platforms like Facebook.

Newspapers play an essential role in reporting facts and publishing opinions, but the mainstream media’s gatekeeping power has diminished in recent decades amid declining trust across institutions.
Combating this problem, however, was never going to be as simple as taking down inaccurate content. The trouble with fighting “misinformation” is that someone must be a final arbiter of truth, and the fight over who gets to play that role ends up politicizing everything.
That’s why the best response to false speech, however odious, will always be more speech. The American system depends on vigorous debates forging public sentiment. Stifling unpopular ideas usually backfires.

Phil Gramm and I are honored that Arnold Kling is reading our book.

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… is from page 174 of an April 12th, 1913, article – “The New American Tariff” – in The Economist, as reprinted in volume 3 of Battles Over Free Trade (Mark Duckenfield, editor):

It must be remembered that since the McKinley Tariff [of 1890] the working classes and the lower middle classes of the United States have hardly known such luxuries as underclothing, or garments, or blankets, made of wool. Cotton and shoddy have been the principal raw materials of the so-called ‘Woollen Companies.’ The wealthy who travel have been in the habit of buying suits and dresses in England, and carrying them home duty free for personal use in their trunks. Consequently, if this new tariff passes there will not only be a general fall in prices, but also an introduction of many goods which for some time have been practically unknown to the shops of the United States.

DBx: The bill to which The Economist refers is the Underwood-Simmons Tariff Act, which did indeed pass and took effect in October 1913. It significantly lowered average tariff rates.