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The Editorial Board of the Washington Post sees right through the Trump administration’s latest cynical effort to escape the legal limitations on its ability to punitively tariff – that is, to punitively tax – Americans’ purchases of imports. A slice:

The Trump administration keeps pursuing creative ways to impose tariffs after setbacks in the courts and amid a lack of support on Capitol Hill. The latest gambit came late Tuesday when the U.S. trade representative announced plans to raise tariffs between 10 percent to 12.5 percent on 60 countries for not being aggressive enough about combating the use of forced labor in their supply chains.

This is clearly a pretext for protectionism. If it weren’t, China wouldn’t be subject to the same new import taxes as Japan, South Korea and Switzerland.

Also quite skeptical of the Trump administration’s latest gambit to impose tariffs unlawfully is GMU Scalia Law’s Ilya Somin. Two slices:

I am extremely skeptical of the claim that all of these sixty countries – including numerous affluent liberal democracies – are actually more lax about importing goods produced by forced labor than the US is. And if forced labor were really the concern, there would be no reason to impose massive tariffs on virtually all imports from those nations, even though the vast majority of those goods have little or no connection to forced labor. It sure looks like the forced labor issue is just a pretext for large-scale protectionism of the same kind courts blocked earlier. This looks like yet another presidential power grab seeking to usurp Congress’ authority over tariffs, granted by Article I of the Constitution.

…..

Ultimately, the new Section 301 tariffs appear to be yet another attempt to give the president a blank check to impose tariffs at will. The same is true of the administration’s plans to use Section 301 to target “structural excess capacity,” which rely on the absurd premise that it is somehow an unfair trade practice for countries to be able to produce more goods than they can use themselves.

About the Trump administration’s foot-dragging on its obligation to refund the taxes that it illegally collected from Americans, Douglas Holtz-Eakin tweets:

This is just outrageous.

Gale Pooley tells of how the Gillette company “built an abundance revolution.” Three slices:

Simple ideas often appear obvious in retrospect, but simplicity is usually the far edge of genius.

Men’s facial fashions were shifting rapidly in the late 1800s: the beard was out, the clean-shaven chin was in, and the mustache had to be perfect. To maintain this look, men either visited the barber two or three times a week, or shaved themselves, a risky alternative. The “cutthroat” straight razors demanded constant sharpening, and punished even small mistakes — especially for beginners or anyone pressed for time.

[K.C.] Gillette’s insight was simple: don’t sharpen the blade — replace it with something safe, affordable, and convenient.

…..

Under Gillette, shaving ceased to be a tedious chore performed with a dangerous blade. It became part of the modern masculine ideal. The right razor promised confidence, precision, cleanliness, and success — the same virtues embodied by the athletes and heroes in his advertisements.

Later, using an elaborate formula, Gillette figured that the monetary value of the time men saved each year using his razor was equal to the entire capital of US Steel, valued at around $1.5 billion at the time.

…..

What began as a dull blade before a mirror in Boston became a revelation: knowledge can redeem time. Gillette became a global engine for transforming human ingenuity into billions of dollars of value and billions of liberated hours.

In 1903, Gillette sold 51 razors. A century later, Procter & Gamble purchased the company for $57 billion. Steel did not become more valuable. Steel is abundant and nearly worthless without the mind. The value resided in the invisible architecture of human creativity — metallurgy, machinery, chemistry, branding, logistics, engineering, and trust — accumulated across generations and poured into a single morning ritual. Accumulated manufacturing knowledge compressed time prices downward, making what was once a luxury nearly universal.

“Do you trust the government to control AI?”

Tosin Akintola is correct: “Bernie Sanders’ AI wealth fund bill shows that he doesn’t understand AI or wealth.” A slice:

And while Sanders frames “tech oligarchs” as modern-day robber barons, he proposes an idea commonly used by real oligarchs and authoritarians across the world to prop up illiberal regimes, illegally funnel money, and wield unchecked power over their citizens.

In Russia, President Vladimir Putin is draining the country’s National Wealth Fund for his war in Ukraine, against the advice of the nation’s financial monitors. Iran uses its National Development Fund to finance terrorist groups such as Hezbollah, Hamas, and its shadow police force, while Saudi Arabia’s wealth fund is regularly used to facilitate human rights abuses, according to a 2024 report from Human Rights Watch. While it’s unlikely that an American wealth fund would be used this nefariously, recent cases of fraud show it’s not unreasonable to assume that an unappropriated pot of hundreds of billions of dollars could tempt officials.

George Will applauds Lamar Alexander’s new memoir. A slice:

Edmund Burke, the fountainhead of modern conservatism, warned against purely performative politicians, of which America today has a surfeit. They “make themselves bidders at an auction of popularity,” and become “flatterers instead of legislators.” By them, “moderation will be stigmatized as the virtue of cowards, and compromise as the prudence of traitors.”

Arnold Kling writes of the books that he has re-read.

Ryan Streeter remembers the late Economic Nobel laureate Edmund Phelps. A slice:

His 2013 book, Mass Flourishing, makes the case that “relatively modern-capitalist economies are more rewarding in nonmaterial terms than the relatively corporatist or socialist economies.” Societies that encourage and reward indigenous innovation by freely allowing investment and competition to select the winners and losers, rather than state actors and rent-seekers, always come out ahead. But, again, this is not merely a statement about policies and institutional arrangements. “[A]s important as institutions and policies may be, we must recognize that every economy is a culture or mix of cultures, not just policies, laws, and institutions,” Phelps writes.

The economic culture of a nation consists of prevailing attitudes, norms, and assumptions about business, work, and other aspects of the economy. These cultural forces may affect the generation of nonmaterial rewards indirectly through their influence on the evolution of institutions and policies, but also very directly through their impact on participants motives and expectations.

Put another way, he writes that an “economy may owe its vibrancy – its readiness to apply newly discovered technologies and adopt newly proven products – to one or more components of its economic culture; an economy may owe its dynamism – its success at using the creativity of people to achieve indigenous innovation – to some other components in its cultural repertoire.”

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… is from page 140 of Deirdre McCloskey’s superb forthcoming book, Equality of Permission:

What mattered to the economy was a mad commitment to trying, venturing, experimenting, now suddenly under primary liberalism permitted without let or hindrance – nay, encouraged – in which a proletarian like Edison or Franklin or Faraday could participate.

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Among the speakers at this National Review event are David Bahnsen, Phil Gramm, Sam Gregg, Jeb Hensarling, and Bob Lawson.

The Washington Post‘s Editorial Board decries the Trump administration’s maneuvers to evade the government’s legal obligation to reimburse Americans who were unlawfully ‘taxed’ by its illegal tariffs. A slice:

The administration launched a portal in April for companies that paid unlawful tariffs to submit their claims, and in May the money began to flow. Just over $20 billion has been returned.

But the administration said in the Friday court filing that it would appeal a judge’s order that it recalculate hundreds of thousands of importers’ tariff bills in light of the Supreme Court’s decision. It argued that it should only have to do so for companies that have filed a lawsuit contesting the tariffs.
The Justice Department told the U.S. Court of International Trade that the order to pay back all the illegal tariffs exceeds the court’s authority.

The administration seems to be suggesting that any company that wants to be reimbursed for unlawful border taxes might need to sue on its own accord. Forcing more companies to hire lawyers to get the refunds they’re owed will only raise those companies’ costs and therefore consumer prices.

But some companies might decide this isn’t worth it if the legal costs are great and the tariffs they paid are relatively small. Others might not want to sue to get their money back for fear of regulatory or other reprisals by the Trump administration.

Jim Dorn reflects on Blackstone’s Commentaries. A slice:

Both Jefferson and [George] Mason and other Founding Fathers were familiar with William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, published in four volumes between 1765 and 1769. Of particular interest is Blackstone’s discussion of “the absolute rights of individuals” in the first chapter of Book 1, where he argues that “the principal aim of society is to protect individuals in the enjoyment of those absolute rights, which were vested in them by the immutable laws of nature”—namely, “the right of personal security, the right of personal liberty, and the right of private property.”

Drawing on the Magna Carta (“the great charter of liberties”), Sir Edward Coke (1552–1634), and Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke (1632–1704), Blackstone examines the higher-law foundation of common law and holds that “the principal view of human laws is, or ought always to be, to explain, protect, and enforce such rights as are absolute, which in themselves are few and simple.” Moreover,

“The absolute rights of man, considered as a free agent, endowed with discernment to know good from evil, and with power of choosing those measures which appear to him to be most desirable, are usually summed up in one general appellation, and denominated the natural liberty of mankind. This natural liberty consists properly in a power of acting as one thinks fit, without any restraint or control, unless by the law of nature: being a right inherent in us by birth.”

Charles Calomiris writes insightfully about stablecoins. A slice:

Congress also poked stablecoin issuers in the eye with the Genius Act’s requirement that they must redeem stablecoins on demand, which created liquidity risk for issuers akin to risks banks face from uninsured demand deposit outflows. There is no need to require redemption and doing so makes stablecoins less efficient.

The great Richard Epstein harshly criticizes the Trump administration’s proposed “anti-weaponization fund.” A slice:

There is no doubt that the IRS was negligent. In their initial lawsuit, the Trumps cited a case brought by billionaire Kenneth Griffin after his documents were released to ProPublica in the same data breach — a case that settled, with the IRS formally acknowledging its misdeed. But in that settlement, the IRS offered no financial incentive or inducement to settle. While the documents of many other individuals were released by Littlejohn, none of them received any cash relief at all, let alone a Trumpian jackpot. The key question is how the Trumps aggregated their claims to obtain this $1.776 billion settlement.

For openers, the Trump plaintiffs never established anything approaching proof of any actual losses, measured in terms of prospective business losses. The complaintcontains the standard boilerplate language of “significant and irreparable harm to Plaintiffs, their reputations, and their substantial financial interests.” But there is not a single instance of any event that traces the ensuing harm from those releases, let alone the severe business and financial sanctions that were imposed on the Trump family by the bloodthirsty activities of New York State Attorney General Letitia James, or Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, which ironically might have propelled Trump to victory everywhere outside of New York State. Absent actual damages from this release (which did not result in any further action against the Trump plaintiffs), Trump should only receive nominal damages at a level that could not support the sweetheart settlement the President has reached with Acting AG Blanche, who had been his own personal lawyer, creating an inexcusable conflict of interest that was never explained away.

David Henderson reminded me that several years ago he reviewed a book co-authored by Glenn Hubbard and Peter Navarro. A slice:

Second, an undervalued currency, while it causes Chinese consumers to pay too much for imports and earn too little on exports, is a clear-cut boon to the U.S. economy. I feel for the hapless Chinese who have to pay for this, but if a government offers us lower prices, we shouldn’t kid ourselves that these lower prices make us worse off.

Bjorn Lomborg reveals some of the sloppy ‘science’ used by the World Health Organization as it continues to peddle climate hysteria:

The World Health Organization is at it again. A top commission—stacked with a former European Union climate commissioner, a former prime minister of Iceland, other former ministers and environmental campaigners—has recommended that the health body declare climate change a global health emergency. The commission’s headline evidence is a Lancet study showing heat deaths in Europe are rapidly rising, reaching 63,000 a year. This study shows that European heat-death risk has risen 82% since 1990.

But the study and the commission report both ignore a crucial factor: Heat mortality risk rises sharply with age, and Europe has aged dramatically. Since 1990, the share of Europeans over 70 has increased by 78%. Aging alone explains virtually all the observed increase in heat deaths.

Any honest analysis of mortality in a rapidly aging society uses age-standardized death rates, which are comparable over time because they control for demographic change. The Global Burden of Disease, the world’s leading mortality database, finds that Europe’s standardized heat-death risk has changed only marginally since 1990. At current population, the increase amounts to fewer than 850 additional heat deaths. The WHO commission’s unstandardized figures exaggerate the problem more than 50-fold.

This isn’t a technical quibble. It is the difference between a genuine health crisis and a demographic inevitability being rebranded as a climate emergency.

The World Health Organization is at it again. A top commission—stacked with a former European Union climate commissioner, a former prime minister of Iceland, other former ministers and environmental campaigners—has recommended that the health body declare climate change a global health emergency. The commission’s headline evidence is a Lancet study showing heat deaths in Europe are rapidly rising, reaching 63,000 a year. This study shows that European heat-death risk has risen 82% since 1990.

But the study and the commission report both ignore a crucial factor: Heat mortality risk rises sharply with age, and Europe has aged dramatically. Since 1990, the share of Europeans over 70 has increased by 78%. Aging alone explains virtually all the observed increase in heat deaths.

Any honest analysis of mortality in a rapidly aging society uses age-standardized death rates, which are comparable over time because they control for demographic change. The Global Burden of Disease, the world’s leading mortality database, finds that Europe’s standardized heat-death risk has changed only marginally since 1990. At current population, the increase amounts to fewer than 850 additional heat deaths. The WHO commission’s unstandardized figures exaggerate the problem more than 50-fold.

This isn’t a technical quibble. It is the difference between a genuine health crisis and a demographic inevitability being rebranded as a climate emergency.

Scott Lincicome tweets:

Bernie copying Trump, who copied Bernie, who copied Lenin.

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… is from page 9 of Jagdish Bhagwati’s 1989 lecture “Is Free Trade Passé After All?” as reprinted in Political Economy and International Economics, a 1991 collection, edited by Doug Irwin, of some of Bhagwati’s writings [footnote deleted; link added]:

Thus [Alfred] Marshall, after observing the American experience with protection which reinforced his skepticism of rational tariff intervention, felt that “in becoming intricate it (i.e., protection) became corrupt, and tended to corrupt general politics.”

DBx: It has become fashionable among certain protectionists to attempt to strengthen the weak intellectual credentials of protectionism by conscripting into protectionist ranks famous economists, including Alfred Marshall (1842-1924), pictured here. But these attempts reflect nothing more than a failure, by the protectionists, to read the works of their would-be conscripts carefully.

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Here’s a letter to the Nevada Globe.

Editor:

Spurred by the White House’s recent announcement about tariffs on steel, aluminum, and copper, you applaud Pres. Trump’s protectionism because allegedly it is “rebuilding American industry” and strengthening U.S. national security (“Trump Tightens Tariffs on Steel, Aluminum, and Copper as America First Manufacturing Push Accelerates,” June 2). I have some questions.

– Are you aware that in April 2025, the month Mr. Trump imposed his “Liberation Day” tariffs, U.S. industrial capacity was at an all-time high, being then 11% larger than when China joined the World Trade Organization and 64% larger than when NAFTA took effect?

– Because nearly all imported steel, aluminum, and copper are inputs used in American factories to produce outputs – including military materiel – how, exactly, does restricting these factories’ access to inputs help to ‘rebuild’ American industry?

– The U.S.’s largest foreign supplier of steel and of aluminum is Canada, and Canada is also the U.S.’s second-largest supplier, after Chile, of copper.* How does tariffing imports of these metals from one of our closest allies promote U.S. national security? And as high U.S. tariffs prompt Canada (and Chile, Mexico, and Brazil – other major, friendly suppliers of metals to the U.S.) to build buyer networks away from the U.S., won’t we Americans regret having alienated allies as well as obstructed our access to their metals?

Unlike Mr. Trump’s second term, when tariffs were raised almost immediately, in Mr. Trump’s first term there were no tariff increases, or even announcements of such, until late January 2018, just over a year after Mr. Trump was first sworn into office. Might the following facts prompt you to reassess your position? Industrial production during the first year of Mr. Trump’s second term rose by 1.4%, but during the first, no-tariff-hikes year of Mr. Trump’s first term, this production rose at nearly twice that rate, by 2.7%. Real private-sector nonresidential fixed investment rose, in the first, tariff-filled year of Trump 2.0 by 5.8%, after having risen in the first, no-tariff-hikes year of Trump 1.0 by 7.5%.

Other economic measures that performed better during the first year of Trump 1.0 than during the first year of Trump 2.0 include, but are not limited to, all three major U.S. stock indices, real per-capita GDP, real median household income, real hourly earnings of all private-sector employees, and – important chiefly because the administration puts huge stock in this measure – manufacturing employment.**

If you were to investigate the facts rather than swallow and regurgitate conventional wisdom, you’d be much less gullible than you are about the alleged ‘need’ for – and wonders worked by – Mr. Trump’s punitive and mad taxation of Americans’ purchases of imports.

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

* According to Claude (whose answers here are consistent with what I’ve learned over the past few years).

** See my forthcoming column at AIER.

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Charley Hooper and David Henderson, writing in the Wall Street Journal, make a powerful case for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to leave considerations of medications’ efficacy to doctors and their patients. Two slices:

With distressing frequency, the Food and Drug Administration rejects safe drugs it says haven’t demonstrated enough efficacy. These pages documented the FDA’s recent rejection of Replimune’s melanoma drug RP1, a case in which the agency seemed confused about key facts and failed to apply good judgment.

Here’s a solution: Remove efficacy from the FDA’s approval process and focus on safety alone. That would improve doctors’ ability to match patients with the best drugs and help Americans live longer, healthier lives.

Medicine is a matchmaking exercise in which potentially beneficial drugs are tested patient by patient, using trial and error. Clinical trials, while useful, don’t tell us which patient will respond to which medication. Consider anticoagulants, which reduce blood clots. Some patients respond to Pradaxa but not Xarelto, and vice versa.

No drug works for everyone. Only antibiotics, vaccines, insulin, anesthetics and direct-acting antivirals for hepatitis C come close. The top-selling drug in the world, Merck’s Keytruda, helps little more than a third of melanoma patients.

That’s where trial and error comes in—but only if the FDA approves the drug. If a new drug helps 10% of patients, that drops to zero if the FDA rejects it. If the FDA were to focus on safety, the question of efficacy would be left entirely to the medical community to answer.

Safety and efficacy are fundamentally different. Lack of safety kills. Lack of efficacy requires trying a different drug.

…..

Drug approvals became much slower and more expensive. Why? Roughly one-fourth of drug development costs are to demonstrate safety while three-quarters are for efficacy. The cost of the FDA’s efficacy requirement is tremendous, and the value is close to zero. If the FDA went back to its pre-1962 rules, Americans would live longer and healthier lives.

Alfredo Carrillo Obregon decries the Trump administration’s inexcusable efforts to obstruct the ability of Americans to be reimbursed for taxes that they were unlawfully compelled to pay.

Tosin Akintola reports on yet additional evidence that Trump’s tariffs punitive taxes on Americans’ purchases of imports are failing – and that Trump is looting taxpayers to mute the political consequences of this failure.

Bob Graboyes shows why “the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is dangerous for America and perhaps even more so for its Democratic fan base.”

Jason Riley, writing at City Journal, busts currently popular, sophomoric myths about America and slavery. Two slices:

Slavery was neither central to America’s founding nor the primary source of the country’s subsequent prosperity. Yet both ideas have gained currency in recent years, making it likely that the nation’s slaveholding past will figure prominently in commemorations of the 250th anniversary of American independence.

Scholarly studies offering a more accurate and balanced history of slavery in the United States are not impossible to find, but they are far outnumbered by ideologically driven treatments that downplay the institution’s ubiquity across the world and throughout history. Often the aim is less to illuminate a complex subject than to emphasize the sins of the West. As a result, what should be understood as a global evil is reduced to a single narrative: Europeans and their descendants enslaving Africans—in the Western Hemisphere generally, and in the southern United States especially. End of story.

The reality is that slavery has existed since time immemorial. It has taken many forms—field hand, domestic servant, soldier, artisan, concubine—and has been practiced on every continent. “There is no region on earth that has not at some time harbored the institution,” Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson writes in the preface to Slavery and Social Death, his landmark study. “Probably, there is no group of people whose ancestors were not at one time slaves or slaveholders.” Ancient Greece and Rome were slaveholding societies, as were medieval Europe, Africa, China, Southeast Asia, the Islamic kingdoms, the Caribbean islands, and pre-Columbian America.

Nor were the magnitude and savagery of slavery in the New World unprecedented, despite recent efforts to slant the historical narrative in that direction.

…..

The economist Deirdre McCloskey also challenged the authors’ claim that capitalism in the West is an outgrowth of slavery. Yes, raw cotton produced by slave labor was an important commodity in the South, but the “enrichment of the modern world did not depend on cotton textiles,” McCloskey wrote. “Cotton mills, true, were pioneers in some industrial techniques, techniques applied to wool and linen as well. And many other techniques, in iron making and engineering and mining and farming had nothing to do with cotton. Britain in 1790 and the U.S. in 1860 were not nation-sized cotton mills.” Plantation slavery “made a few Southerners rich; a few Northerners, too. But it was ingenuity and innovation that enriched Americans generally.” And, contra Marx, slave labor wasn’t essential to cotton production, noted McCloskey. “By 1870, freedmen and whites produced as much cotton as the South produced in the slave time of 1860.”

A review of the Baptist, Beckert, and Johnson books by two economic historians, Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhode, took no issue with the authors’ broad claims about slavery’s legacy of social inequality and frayed race relations. “However, to agree that slavery was important and evil does not mean that it was economically essential for the Industrial Revolution, for American prosperity, or even to produce cotton in the United States.” They add that the three authors’ “new history of capitalism” makes “spectacular but unsupported claims, relies on faulty reasoning, and introduces many factual inaccuracies.”

Logan Tantibanchachai wisely refuses to swallow the tales told by Hasan Piker and his ilk.

Here’s my GMU Econ colleague Bryan Caplan’s opening statement in his UATX debate on immigration with another GMU Econ colleague, Garett Jones.

David Bier is thankful that, as he puts it, “the Supreme Court is unlikely to scrap birthright citizenship, because that would open the door to mass ethnic cleansing.”

Wall Street Journal columnist Gerard Baker urges his fellow Americans to take pride in the U.S. – a country which, despite its many warts, is indeed one worth celebrating. Here’s his conclusion:

I can’t do much about this cold civil war. But as an immigrant, perhaps I’m better placed than others to make the case that America’s greatness far outweighs its faults. The U.S. economy remains the envy of the world; its capitalist system is pushing out the frontiers of technology in ways that will transform lives and enhance our already world-beating prosperity. It remains a beacon of opportunity for almost the entire world. Most remarkable isn’t that our liberal values are again under attack, but how long and how firmly they have endured. Americans embarked on a wild experiment to preserve and advance liberty 250 years ago. How many other countries’ institutions that were around in 1776 are recognizably the same today?

This isn’t a call to complacency: We are all familiar enough with the mistakes America has made and continues to make to know that supremacy isn’t guaranteed. But you would have to be incredibly ignorant to believe that the accumulated genius of America won’t survive a flawed president or three, or a bout of cultural self-loathing,

If none of this persuades you of the intrinsic greatness of this country, my fellow Americans, then at least use this historic moment to take a holiday from the bad stuff. If the British in the 1970s, a byword for national decline and institutional collapse, could find a way to celebrate what their country stood for, perhaps by focusing briefly on America’s virtues more than its vices, you’ll get a better appreciation for what it is.

Take pride in your country, America. Despite 250 years of trying, no one has been able to come up with a better one.

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… is from page 233 of the 2003 edition of Benjamin Constant’s brilliant 1815 work, Principles of Politics Applicable to All Government (Dennis O’Keefe, trans., Etienne Hoffman, ed.) [emphasis added]:

Is it an advantage, however, for a nation to set up manufactures on its own territory which, in order to furnish it with a certain money income and quantity of production, absorb more funds than the purchase of these products would have required? We can reply in the affirmative only in supposing that if these funds were not thus employed, they would not be employed at all. Now, this supposition is clearly absurd. If these funds were not employed in this way, they would be employed in some other way and more advantageously. This is to say that with a portion of these resources one would buy products which the whole lot of them is now used in producing, while the remainder would be redirected to some other branch of production which it would vitalize. Governments, in forcing their subjects to manufacture themselves things they would not voluntarily have manufactured, force them to employ their resources inefficiently. They diminish the output of their capital and their labor. They therefore diminish their wealth and thereby the national wealth.

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Ryan Owens decries “the new politics of resentment.” Two slices:

A new wave of class-baiters and grievance politicians have shown how deeply economic liberty is under attack in parts of America. We should be alarmed because economic liberty is not merely about economics; it is about human flourishing.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani recently filmed a “tax the rich” video outside the Manhattan residence of Ken Griffin, founder of Citadel. His message was clear — that wealth creators are villains. Griffin rightly called the stunt “creepy weird.” He could have added “dangerous” and “economically destructive.”

On the other side of the country, Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson mocked concerns that wealthy residents and businesses will flee Washington’s new “millionaire tax” and take their jobs with them, stating: “I think the claims that millionaires are going to leave our state are, like, super overblown. And if — the ones that leave, like, bye.”

These attitudes from leaders of some of the nation’s largest cities are not merely juvenile; they are immoral, self-defeating, and profoundly economically illiterate.

America rests on the idea that citizens are and ought to be free to rise through hard work and risk-taking. That’s what “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” is all about. If you’re confused as to why, go ask a former Soviet, Cuban, or Venezuelan.

Frederick Douglass understood all this. The former slave explained the liberation he felt when, at last, he earned wages for his work: “To understand the emotion which swelled my heart as I clasped this money, realizing that I had no master who could take it from me — that it was mine — that my hands were my own” affected him in ways few Americans today can comprehend.

Every dollar the government spends comes out of your pocket. Every “free” item provided by the state comes courtesy of a taxpayer who has a job and a family to support. When government treats private success as public property, it tears the fabric of liberty.

…..

Resentment politics and populism also make for bad economic policy.

People respond to incentives. When individuals are free to innovate and to keep a meaningful share of what they earn, prosperity grows. Individuals generally allocate resources more efficiently than centralized government planners. Families know their needs better than bureaucracies do.

Anyone who remains unconvinced that protectionism breeds cronyism should read this editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal. A slice:

President Trump is hammering away at “affordability” to help Republicans win an uphill battle to keep Congress in November. He can’t undo the damage his tariffs have done to household budgets to date, but he can keep things from getting worse.

One opportunity concerns “quartz surface products” used in some 36% of kitchen counter-tops in American homes last year. Quartz is also a popular choice for bathroom vanities, shower walls and backsplash. A handful of domestic quartz slab producers want to use Section 201 of the Trade Act of 1974 to hurt the competition: American quartz fabricators who use imported slab. If they prevail, expect costlier new homes and thousands of lost jobs in the U.S. quartz fabricating industry.

Mr. Trump can stop them, but he’ll have to disappoint the six companies that petitioned the International Trade Commission (ITC) under the banner of the Quartz Manufacturing Alliance of America. They’re led by Minnesota-based Cambria and CEO Marty Davis, a big Trump donor.

The ITC ruled 2-1 in April in favor of a “global safeguard” petition alleging that quartz imports are causing “substantial” harm to domestic producers. The lone Republican on the commission voted against the petition.

“Exxon says goodbye to New Jersey.” A slice:

Politicians like to blame companies for acting in their self-interest, but that’s the easy way out. If New Jersey and Delaware want to retain companies, let alone attract them, they need to take a hard look at what they’re doing to drive so many away.

The Wall Street Journal‘s Kimberley Strassel is right: “A federal registration fee [for automobiles] is one of the worst Republican ideas to come along in a while.” A slice:

Policywise, this idea is as short-sighted as they come. The GOP will bleat that its new Frankenstein targets only EV and hybrid owners. True, until it doesn’t. What Republicans build, Democrats will supersize. As Americans for Tax Reform’s Grover Norquist warned: “As soon as the Democrats get into power, they’ll say, ‘Oh my goodness, there’s the gas-car loophole. We must have the car tax on all cars.’ . . . It won’t take them two weeks to do it.”

And don’t think it will stop there, not after every local DMV has become a branch of the Internal Revenue Service. With that plumbing in place, Democrats can expand (or exempt) the “fee”—and plenty of new climate-related taxes—with infinite creativity. Greater and varying annual amounts for gas-guzzlers, luxury rides, vehicles that choke metro centers. Lower fees based on income, profession or government-favored safety features. Hedge-fund owner car tax: $2,000. Union teacher car tax: $11. What could possibly go wrong?

Politically, it’s even more foolish. Millions of Americans have bought electric and hybrid vehicles in recent years, and Congress paid them mass subsidies to do so. Republicans—who say they want to run on “affordability”—want to penalize these households with a brand new bill on Oct. 1. (Yes, these geniuses would impose this tax one month before the election.) Does the GOP fail to realize this pool contains any number of would-be (but won’t be) GOP voters?

Andrew Stuttaford reveals how China meets – “meets” – its green goals:

And thus the FT’s Edward White can only note that it “appears” that China [in its reports on carbon emissions] is now “excluding non-energy uses of fossil fuels. “

Convenient!

Ben Zycher continues to write wisely about energy. A slice:

There is a view, seemingly popular among many, that what is good for the oil industry must be bad for America—that is, the rest of us—and vice versa. That this is a view utterly childish should be obvious: What is good for America is good for America, and whether that condition is good for the oil industry is neither here nor there as a matter of general concern. But it is obvious as well that years of policies designed to substitute unconventional energy in place of fossil fuels have yielded a sharp increase in costs and a decline in political support for such policies. The reason too is obvious: A sharp increase in the cost of energy makes most people worse off. Baseless litigation against the fossil energy producers would have the same effect: It is an attack on national wealth and the well-being of ordinary people. It is a pure money grab.

My GMU Econ colleague Vincent Geloso explores the relationship between monetary policy and birth rates.

Matt Yglesias tweets: (HT Scott Lincicome)

I am completely against involving “planners” in any of this. All I think is that a landowner should be allowed to build whatever he thinks there is a market for on the land that he owns, subject to bona fide safety concerns.

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… is from page 234 of William Shughart’s paper, “Robert Tollison: Underappreciated Economist,” which is a chapter in the hot-off-the-press book Unsung Heroes of the Market: The 24 Underrated Economists You Need to Know – a volume edited by Robert Whaples, Christopher Coyne, Gregory Robson, and Diana Thomas:

Tollison saw few differences between antitrust law enforcement and the perhaps more familiar industry-specific regulation of prices and entry conditions (e.g., public utilities). Both are vulnerable to influence by well-organized, politically powerful special interests having stakes in policy processes and, in catering to such lobbying pressure, undermine rather than promote competition.

DBx: Pictured here is Bob Tollison (1942-2016). He was a senior colleague of mine at GMU Econ in the late 1980s.