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Phil Gramm and Jeb Hensarling report that “ESG may be eating away at your investments.” A slice:

President Trump recently signed an executive order that aims to end a 20-year experiment in backdoor socialism usurping private wealth to serve special interests. It affirms fiduciary responsibility and extends it to proxy advisers “that prioritize radical political agendas over investor returns.” Fiduciary responsibility requires investment managers and advisers to act in “the best interest of the investor,” and it applies even when the investor is seeking nonfinancial outcomes such as environmental, social, faith-based or humanitarian gains.

Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Paul Atkins’s recent announcement that the commission is reviewing Biden-era rules governing so-called environmental, social and governance funds affirms this point. Fiduciary duty requires investment managers and advisers to exercise loyalty and care to ensure that investment objectives, whether financial or nonfinancial, are fulfilled.

Pursuing ESG objectives without the investor’s expressed consent has been part of a thinly veiled attempt by progressives to coerce investment managers and private corporations to advance their political goals and not the investors’ interest. This process began in 2006 when United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan announced the Principles for Responsible Investment initiative. Loud activists with anticarbon and pro-DEI agendas have colluded with asset managers to push through hundreds of corporate stockholder resolutions contrary to the financial interests of general investors.

As investors have noticed that ESG constraints produce lower returns while delivering few environmental or social benefits, opposition to ESG has grown. While the Biden administration used the same government agencies charged with protecting fiduciary responsibility to promote ESG, investor support for ESG stockholder resolutions fell from 33% in 2021 to 13% in 2025. The number of ESG proposals voted on in the last proxy year dropped 33% from the previous year. Support for ESG resolutions by asset managers, voting the shares of their investors, has dropped from 46% in 2021 to 18% in 2025.

Say! GMU alum Thomas Savidge draws an economic lesson from one of Richard Scarry’s books for children.

The Editorial Board of the Washington Post is correct about Paul Ehrlich: “The scholar lived long enough to see his once-influential ideas thoroughly discredited.” A slice:

Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich made his name as the author of “The Population Bomb,” a 1968 book that shaped the way many in his generation thought about demographics. He died on Friday at age 93, having lived long enough to see the world’s population quadruple.

He wrote that “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death” during the 1970s. The actual number of people who died in famines that decade: Under 4 million. It was under 2 million in the 1980s, and under 1 million in the 2000s, as the world’s population continued to climb.

In fact, famines today occur because of state failure or war, not natural causes or excess population. That’s because farming has become much more efficient. The world’s average farmer can now grow roughly twice as much rice and soybeans, or two-and-a-half times as much wheat or maize, on the same amount of land as he could in 1968.

Also writing about the late Paul Ehrlich is Ron Bailey. A slice:

Ehrlich seemingly never encountered a prediction of doom that he failed to embrace. For example, he was all-in on the projections of imminent economic collapse from nonrenewable resource depletion as argued in the Club of Rome’s 1972 book The Limits to Growth. In fact, Ehrlich was so confident that he bet University of Maryland cornucopian economist Julian Simon that a $1,000 basket of five commodity metals (copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten) selected by Ehrlich would increase in real prices between 1980 and 1990. If the combined inflation-adjusted prices rose above $1,000, Simon would pay the difference. If they fell below $1,000, Ehrlich would pay Simon the difference. In October 1990, Ehrlich mailed Simon a check for $576.07. The price of the basket of metals chosen by Ehrlich and his cohorts had fallen by more than 50 percent.

Here’s more wisdom from Arnold Kling:

There is no way for you to believe that the ratio of your net worth to that of Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos corresponds to your worth as a human being relative to theirs. But as far as the economy goes, chances are that they have created far more wealth than what they obtained for themselves. So strictly from that measure, one can argue that they are much more valuable to society.

Once again, the question becomes whether we live in luck village or effort village. If you think that the economy is a board game with a space that makes you a billionaire if you happen to land on it, then you resent the rich person’s luck. If you think that without Bezos there would be no powerful logistics system supporting online retail or that cloud computing would be nothing but an exotic niche, then you respect Amazon’s achievements.

David Inserra and Brent Skorup decry the Trump administration’s continuing authoritarian threats to silence broadcasters that displease it.

Stephen Slivinski and Ryan Bourne review the recent Executive Order on housing.

Nick Gillespie remembers the late Brian Doherty.

Tyler Cowen remembers studying with Ludwig Lachmann.

The Washington Post‘s Editorial Board explains that “hiking the minimum wage puts robots over people.” A slice:

Companies are already moving toward more automation, and this will speed up the process. An academic paper published last month shows how increases in minimum wages raise the likelihood of robot adoption in manufacturing. From 1992 to 2021, a 10 percent increase in the minimum wage increased robot adoption by roughly 8 percent.

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… is from page 1 of the late Brian Doherty’s great 2007 book, Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement:

The policymakers behind Social Security took it upon themselves to manage the future and savings of all Americans intelligently and rationally. But what they set in place was a system that would eventually bind the coming generations to promises they could not reasonably afford. It was, in other words, the foundational political program of the twentieth century – well meaning, choice eliminating, and ignoring obvious secondary effects.

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Wall Street Journal columnist Andy Kessler details the high cost of policies promising “affordability.” Two slices:

Economist Mark J. Perry’s famous Chart of the Century shows that since 2000 prices for things that government touches—hospital services, college tuition, textbooks, housing and food—have risen faster than overall inflation. Meanwhile, free-market items like computers, software, televisions and cellphone services (thanks Silicon Valley) as well as clothing, furniture, toys and even new cars (thanks globalization) have dropped in price or rose less than inflation after taking into account the increased value of technology, like 75-inch smart TVs. Try streaming March Madness on your 1980s 50-pound 19-inch Sony Trinitron.

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What scares me is that government can mandate affordability anytime it wants. Simply announce price controls. When you fix prices, you get shortages: Soviet supermarkets with empty shelves. Or available apartments in rent-controlled New York. Can’t get home insurance? Many state price caps sent insurers scurrying away, especially in coastal and flood prone areas. Drug shortages are next. And consumer credit if we cap credit-card interest rates.

In sectors with affordability problems, Adam Smith’s invisible hand got smashed by a giant regulatory gavel. Competition and freedom from constraints lower prices.

The Bernies and AOCs of the world complain about capitalism. Naive, but on brand. By invoking affordability, what they’re really protesting, with zero self-awareness, is the socialism-inspired heavy hand of the U.S. government: feds, meds and eds.

Those who yell the loudest about affordability are actually making the case for smaller government. Who wants to tell them?

Brian Albrecht makes clear that “Europe’s rigid labor markets are an economic death sentence.” A slice:

Why has Europe slowed down relative to the US?

I have my hobby horse about tech regulation and horrible antitrust laws, but I don’t think those are THE biggest reason. Instead, I agree with a recent piece by Pieter Garicano that points to labor market regulations. The timing and the magnitude fit much better than for other theories. See also their podcast discussion of it.

Edward Pinto explains that “the ROAD Act overlooks the role institutional investors play in providing critical housing opportunities to low-income families.”

Also rightly critical of the ROAD Act is GMU Econ alum Jace White. A slice:

The “large institutional investors” targeted by the proposed housing legislation make convenient villains, but in reality, they collectively own less than 1 percent of the single-family homes across the country. At their peak, large investors purchased just 2.5 percent of homes sold, and their purchasing activity has since fallen sharply. The vast majority of single family homes are owned by individual families and small, “mom and pop” landlords.

That’s part of the reason why, when politicians first began to advocate a ban on “Wall Street buying up homes,” the reaction was mostly one of annoyance from those that hold to the free-market principle that the government shouldn’t be in the business of dictating whom people can sell their property to. After all, there aren’t many political points to score by standing up for a principle that could be caricatured as sticking up for Wall Street over would-be homebuyers . Plenty of pundits criticized the proposed bans, but with more of a groan than an uproar. The problem is that incomplete and misleading views of the world, when left unrefuted, can lead to truly damaging policies.

That’s exactly what happened to the ROAD to Housing Act. The version of the bill that sailed through the Senate includes not just the expected ban on institutional homebuying (which was bad enough), but also a prohibition on investors building single-family homes and renting them out for more than seven years.

Today, roughly 47,000 single-family homes and duplexes per year are constructed by companies that will rent them out to individual families, just as they would rent out apartments or condos. Homeownership is a great thing for many, but families are not being duped or exploited if they choose to rent. Those without a credit history or extensive savings may not be able to buy, and even well-off families may find the math favors renting if they don’t plan on staying in one spot long enough for the benefits of ownership to overcome the high upfront costs of inspections, realtors’ fees, and mortgage down payments.

Stuart Benjamin, reflecting on FCC chairman Brendan Carr’s recent threat to deny licenses to broadcasters that report in ways that Carr doesn’t like, highlights the dangers of government ownership of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Scott Lincicome tweets this passage from a piece in The Guardian:

“The majority of all voters (72%) believe Trump’s tariffs have had a negative rather than a positive impact and 67% said tariffs aren’t the right solution for improving the economy.”

George Leef shares Rich Vedder’s realistic assessment of conservatives’ attempts to improve U.S. higher education from within.

Paul Ehrlich, who famously lost a bet to Julian Simon – and who, for all of his brilliance in biology, repeatedly hawked economic fallacies – has died.

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… is from page 128 of the 2021 Liberty Fund collection of some of Josiah Tucker‘s writings – a collection titled Josiah Tucker: A Selection from His Economic and Political Writings:

[I]t hath been the Observation of many Ages, that Bigotry and Industry, Manufactures and Persecution, cannot possibly subsist together, or cohabit in the same Country.

DBx: Yes. The more free and open is an economy, the more do the people in that economy flourish.

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Terrible news: Reason‘s Brian Doherty has died at the age of 57.

GMU Econ alum Caleb Petitt, writing at National Review, masterfully maps out the folly of the Trump administration’s “Maritime Action Plan.” A slice:

The White House recently released America’s Maritime Action Plan (MAP) to revitalize America’s maritime industry. It proposes a variety of regulatory modifications, subsidies, government financing options, and fees to encourage domestic shipbuilding. Although it includes a wide variety of proposals, two of them, when taken together, show the Trump administration’s hostility to free trade, as well as a general naïveté about the plan.

The first is the proposed “universal fee” on foreign-built ships; the second is the proposed regulatory change to the definition of a “U.S.-built” ship.

The universal fee is laughable in its imprecision. The MAP suggests a fee of anywhere from one to 25 cents per kilogram of imports brought on foreign-built ships. The MAP authors expect the fee to generate anywhere from $66 billion to $1.5 trillion over the next decade.

Essentially, this would be a tax by weight on all foreign commerce, as less than 2 percent of imports are carried on U.S.-flagged vessels, and even those vessels are foreign-built. The Jones Act restricts shipping between ports to U.S.-built, U.S.-owned, U.S.-flagged, and U.S.-crewed ships. On the high end of the proposed range, the fee would be a considerable barrier to trade. The tariffs put in place under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) are projected to generate $1.4 trillion to $2 trillion over the next decade, so the upper estimate of the universal fee ($1.5 trillion) could come close to those tariffs in terms of both trade barriers and revenue.

My GMU Econ colleague Bryan Caplan reports on his epiphany about Trump’s ‘theory’ of trade. A slice:

While I agree that Trump is terribly wrong about international trade, there’s a big difference between being wrong and being confused. While I doubt I’m ready to pass an Ideological Turing Test for Trumpian trade theory, I recently had a weird epiphany on the topic. After said epiphany, I feel capable of articulating roughly what Trump is thinking.

1. Above all, Trump wants the rest of the world to buy as much stuff from the U.S. as possible. He wants the world to buy our current output — and he wants them to buy our assets, too! His dream is piles of dollars flowing into the U.S. from all directions.
2. If piles of dollars flow into the U.S. from all directions, he thinks this will boost U.S. sales and employment.
3. Trump doesn’t know and doesn’t care about the “trade deficit” as economists define it. When he hears “trade deficit,” Trump imagines that U.S. dollars leaving the U.S. exceed U.S. dollars entering the U.S. Foreign investment means U.S. dollars entering the U.S., so on his implicit definition, foreign investment reducestrade deficits.

Why would anyone find this story plausible? Simple: It’s unadorned, old-fashioned Keynesianism. Trump wants to boost aggregate demand. The more money foreigners spend here, the more American business will sell, and the more American workers they’ll hire.

Judge Glock explains that “private credit is still safer than banks are.” A slice:

Private credit rose to prominence following the Great Recession, when new regulations made it harder for normal banks to lend money. The amount of money in private credit has grown by about 300 percent over the past decade. Today, private credit funds control more than $1 trillion in assets. They’ve attracted investors by providing high returns: over 8 percent a year in recent years, a far higher rate than a basket of typical corporate bonds yields.

These funds fill a vital economic need. Commercial and industrial loans constitute only a bit over 10 percent of all bank assets. By contrast, private credit is almost entirely devoted to lending to working companies that need money to grow. Though still a small part of the financial world, private credit now constitutes over 15 percent of all private company debt.

In an increasingly intangible world, private credit is also showing willingness to take on tech and other new-economy companies. According to a survey by a team of academic economists, the most important reason companies could not get bank credit and had to use private credit instead was that the companies lacked physical capital to put up as collateral. According to an estimate from the International Monetary Fund, about 40 percent of private credit was going to technology companies as of 2024.

Most private credit funds are semi-liquid, meaning that investors can withdraw their investments—much like withdrawing a deposit from a bank. But unlike a bank, these funds have withdrawal caps, usually set at about 5 percent of all assets in a fund per quarter. After that amount is hit, the fund can “close the gate,” as funds like those at BlackRock have recently done.

The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal rightly criticizes the FDA’s refusal to approve a new drug that, in clinical trials, passes even the FDA’s own absurdly high ‘standards.’ A slice:

Sydnexis has spent a decade developing atropine eye drops that slow the progression of pediatric myopia, a growing problem. Myopia typically develops in early childhood and progresses until a child stops growing. Genetics plays a role, and screen-time increases the risk. Rates have soared with smartphone use.

The company’s three-year randomized controlled trial succeeded on the key benchmarks the FDA set years earlier, reducing progression by about a third among children under 12 and more among the fastest progressors at the start. Yet the FDA rejected Sydnexis’s drug last October because benefits weren’t “clinically meaningful” in its view.

Why not? Because some children would still need glasses since the eye drops don’t completely stop or reverse nearsightedness. Maybe, but children wouldn’t have go to the eye doctor as often to get prescriptions for new lenses. Severe myopia increases the risk of cataracts, glaucoma and retinal detachment later in life. Reducing nearsightedness can prevent these eye diseases.

In any case, the FDA’s job is to review drugs for safety and efficacy. Let doctors and patients decide whether the benefit is meaningful. The FDA’s rationale echoes the paternalistic mindset of Dr. [Vinay] Prasad. He has scuttled rare disease drugs because, in his view, they aren’t worth the cost since they don’t cure all patients, even if they slow progression and reduce symptoms.

[DBx: Hey, but at least the arrogant, overbearing FDA under Trump isn’t woke, so it must be doing its part to rescue Americans from arrogant, overbearing progressives!]

Zohran Mamdani doesn’t want to soak only the rich; he also wants to soak middle-class New Yorkers. (HT S. Kaufman) [DBx: New Yorkers of a certain age will recall the Crazy Eddie’s television commercials, which I paraphrase here: “Mayor Mamdani! His taxes are INSANE!!!”]

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… is from page 48 of Jerry Z. Muller’s 1993 book, Adam Smith In His Time and Ours [original emphasis):

As a moral philosopher, Smith was concerned about the nature of moral excellence. But like many other Enlightenment intellectuals, he tried to begin by describing man as he really is. His conception of man was not as an intrinsically good creature corrupted by society, nor as an irredeemably evil creature except for the grace of God. His project was to take man as he is and to make him more like what he is capable of becoming, not by exerting government power and not primarily by preaching, but by discovering the institutions that make men tolerably decent and may make them more so.

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George Will is correct: “America needs immigrants as much as they need liberty’s blessings.” Three slices:

Two dissimilar government agencies have inadvertently combined to clarify the immigration debate. Stomach-turning excesses by Immigration and Customs Enforcement have turned many Americans’ abstract political preference into something uncomfortably concrete. And the Census Bureau has demonstrated that the nation needs immigrants as much as they need the blessings of American liberty.

Given a clear binary choice — for or against deporting immigrants who are here illegally — most Americans favor deportation. However:

One Sunday, a moderately pro-deportation American goes, as usual, for brunch at the neighborhood diner. Jose, who has put waffles in front of this American for 20 years, and who regularly exchanges pleasantries with him about their families, is gone. He has been deported for America’s improvement. Suddenly, the immigration issue has a face, and complexity.

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A recent Cato Institute report (“Immigrants’ Recent Effects on Government Budgets: 1994-2023”) says: Immigrants “generated more in taxes than they received in benefits from all levels of government.” They “created a cumulative fiscal surplus of $14.5 trillion in real 2024 US dollars,” including $3.9 trillion in savings on interest that did not need to be paid on debt that was not added.

Immigrants were, on average, more than 12 percent more likely to be employed than the U.S.-born population. Cato: “In 1994, the immigrant share of government expenditures was 18 percent below their share of the population; in 2023, it was 25 percent below.”

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As Cato notes, many illegal immigrants who are employed under borrowed or stolen identities have taxes withheld by employers but are ineligible for many government benefits. And they are less likely than others to file returns in order to claim refunds. This is another reason why Cato says:

“Immigrants have created an enormous fiscal surplus for the US government … The $14.5 trillion in savings from immigrants is the equivalent of 33 percent of the total inflation-adjusted combined deficits from 1994 to 2023 without immigrants.”

That fellow having brunch at the diner will still get his waffles. But he will miss Jose, and millions like him, in more ways than he can easily imagine.

My GMU and Mercatus Center colleague Pete Boettke and his co-author Gabriel Giguère explain that AI will not be able to replace the free market. A slice:

Economic coordination does not begin with a giant spreadsheet of given facts. The knowledge that matters is dispersed across millions of individuals. It is local, contextual, and often tacit. A shop owner knows her neighbourhood customers. A machinist senses subtle changes in production. An entrepreneur imagines a product that has never existed before. Much of this knowledge cannot be fully articulated, let alone uploaded into a database.

Most importantly, prices—the signals that guide decisions—are not raw facts about the world waiting to be harvested by an algorithm. Prices emerge from real exchanges based on private property and freedom of contract. When the price of lithium rises, it is because buyers and sellers are competing over scarce resources. The price increase communicates something about relative scarcity, but it also gives people an incentive to adjust in order to conserve, to innovate, to search for substitutes.

Prices are not inputs to the system, but outputs of a dynamic discovery process (see Figure 1). Without the process of exchange and production, without the haggling and bargaining in the market, the knowledge embedded in a price simply doesn’t come into existence. This generative nature of the knowledge of the market is what Hayek was trying to get his peers to see, and why he even resorted to using the word “marvel” in his description of the price system.

Jon Miltimore exposes “antitrust’s dirty secret.” A slice:

In his 1996 book Antitrust and Monopoly: Anatomy of a Policy Failure, economist Dominick Armentano reviewed dozens of the most infamous monopolies in US history. He concluded that virtually all of them were the result of government protection, not an unfettered marketplace. “The general public,” wrote Armentano, “has been deluded into believing that monopoly is a free-market problem, and that the government, through antitrust enforcement, is on the side of the ‘angels.’ The facts are exactly the opposite.”

Looking at the state of antitrust today, it increasingly appears to be rooted more in a hostility to “bigness” than in a principled concern for consumers. This is folly. Size alone is not evidence of economic harm. In many industries, scale is precisely what allows firms to better serve customers.

Mergers and acquisitions don’t always succeed, but when they do, they generate real economic benefits. They enable companies to achieve economies of scale, cut overhead, integrate new technologies, and streamline supply chains. They also foster entrepreneurship and allow stronger firms to rescue struggling ones.

Butler University emeritus professor Peter Grossman’s letter in today’s Wall Street Journal is excellent:

Allysia Finley (“How America’s Oil and Gas Dominance Has Weakened Iran,” Life Science, March 9) is right to celebrate U.S. energy development but misses an important reason we no longer have 1970s-type energy crises.

The main reasons for the shortages in 1973 and 1979 were U.S. government price and quantity controls on the oil market. Natural-gas prices were also government controlled. While it is true that the Arab embargo of 1973-74 and the Iranian revolution in 1979 did reduce market supply, neither caused the shortages nor the palpable sense of crisis. Had there been no U.S. government controls, the prices of oil and oil products would have risen more and more quickly, but there wouldn’t have been shortages. When controls were lifted in the early 1980s, the age of gas and oil shortages ended.

Ms. Finley includes the first Gulf War alongside the Arab embargo and Iranian revolution. But what happened then proves my point. While prices spiked amid the conflict and Americans feared a return of gas lines, the lines didn’t materialize because prices were no longer controlled. We also didn’t experience supply crises in the 2000s or during the Arab Spring.

Of course, Americans are upset by higher prices, but we’ve lived with high gas and oil prices before and we will again. More worrisome is the report that President Trump wants to do something to lower gas prices. The last time the government “did something” we had oil and gas crises lasting a decade.

My advice: leave the oil market alone.

Peter Van Doren looks at the effects of oil shocks.

Christian Britschgi writes insightfully about the bipartisan, economically clueless assault on build-to-rent housing. Two slices:

Oren Cass, chief economist of American Compass and apparently determined to never be on the right side of an issue, argues that a ban on build-to-rent housing can’t reduce housing supply because such a ban does not vaporize land, workers, and materials that could be employed for new home construction.

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To take the latter point first, it’s true that policy alone does not physically destroy the things that are used to build new homes. Contra Cass, policy can make market actors a lot less likely to finance the construction of new homes.

Which is what a ban on build-to-rent housing would do.

There are hundreds of thousands of families out there that would like to live in a new single-family home but do not want, or cannot qualify for, a mortgage. The build-to-rent market has popped up to service this niche of home-seekers.

Unable to meet the needs of single-family renters, investors will thus move their capital elsewhere. Perhaps some of that capital goes into for-sale housing or apartment development—likely, much of the capital leaves the housing market altogether.

The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal applauds the U.S. senators who voted against the Trump-backed bill that would further intrude government into the housing market. A slice:

Ditto Hawaii Democrat Brian Schatz. “We have decided, for no particular reason other than what I think is a drafting error, to demonize people who want to build rental housing for folks,” Mr. Schatz said. Mr. Cruz echoed this objection, noting the bill restricts “new rental housing for Americans by requiring build-to-rent homes to be sold within seven years.”

The Senators are referring to a provision that would ban institutional investors from buying homes to rent, with an unworkable exception for those that are built-to-rent. Investors would be required to sell these homes to individual buyers within seven years of acquiring them. But low- and middle-income folks who rent these homes can’t afford to buy them.

That’s the reason home builders are constructing them to rent. Higher mortgage rates and housing prices have locked many people out of the market. But institutional investment enables hundreds of thousands of families to live in homes, rather than cramped apartments.

Build-to-rent homes make up a growing share of home construction, especially in Sun Belt states like Florida and Texas. The American Enterprise Institute’s Ed Pinto and Tobias Peter note that some 153,628 build-to-rent homes are in the construction pipeline. The bill would effectively bar investors from buying these homes and result in less construction.

Joe Salerno remembers Roger Garrison.

César Báez reports on “how Chile’s free market miracle survived a resurgent left.”

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… is from page 127 of my late, great colleague Walter Williams’s 1982 book America: A Minority Viewpoint [original emphasis]:

Under natural law, individuals own themselves. From this it follows that an individual has the right to any material goods he produces and to dispose of these goods as he sees fit. But this right is violated when government “redistributes” income. Politicians say that all Americans have a right to food, shelter, and decent medical care. But what they are really saying is that some people have the right to take my money, through government coercion, and give it to others. I would like to know: Under what interpretation of “human rights” do some people have the right to take what another man has produced?

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The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal wisely calls for completely abolishing the Jones Act. Two slices:

The Trump Administration is looking for ways to mitigate rising U.S. gasoline prices caused by the war. That includes suspending the 1920 Jones Act, and ponder that irony: Because of a war, the President may suspend a law that was intended to protect national security.

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America’s shale fracking bounty means the U.S. isn’t hurt as much by oil supply disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz as are Asia and Europe, which depend on the Middle East. Nonetheless, the Northeast and California import much of their oil. California imports about 15% of its refined fuel and 60% of its crude. About 30% of the latter comes from the Middle East.

The Jones Act is a major reason, in addition to California’s anti-fossil fuel policies that have reduced in-state oil production and shuttered refineries. As we recently reported, some shippers are circumventing the Jones Act by routing gasoline from the Gulf Coast to California through a pit-stop in the Bahamas. That’s not fuel or cost efficient.

Waiving the Jones Act could reduce oil shipping costs and fuel prices at the margin in the Northeast and on the West Coast. If President Trump wants to improve affordability, how about calling on Congress to repeal the law, which increases prices during peacetime too?

Also calling for the abolition of the cronyist Jones Act is Anastasia Boden. A slice:

Formally known as the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, the statute requires any ship moving cargo between two U.S. ports to be built, owned, registered and crewed by Americans. What sounds patriotic on paper has proved a disaster in practice. The World Economic Forum has labeled it the most restrictive cabotage law in the world. Worse: It doesn’t work. The Jones Act has shrunk the American shipping industry. Without foreign competition, U.S. shipbuilders have had no incentive to keep costs down. The Congressional Research Service has found that American-built ships can now cost six to eight times as much as equivalent vessels built in foreign yards.

The economics are simple: When vessels are that expensive, American shippers buy fewer of them. The Transportation Department counted 92 oceangoing Jones Act-compliant vessels as of 2024 — a 52 percent decline since 2000. Meanwhile, more than 60,000 commercial ships operate globally.

Trumpian protectionism gets ever-more illogical, as reported here by Eric Boehm.

“But what about China?” – GMU Econ alum David Hebert has solid answers.

David Henderson reflects wisely on Adam Smith’s Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. A slice:

While it seems fairly obvious that trade works within a country, many people at the time Smith was writing were skeptical about trade across borders. Sadly, many people today share that skepticism.

One of Smith’s motives in writing The Wealth of Nations was to slay mercantilism. Mercantilists believed that national governments should set policy to maximize the amount of specie—gold and silver—in a country. To achieve that goal, they advocated increasing a country’s exports and limiting its imports.

What’s wrong with mercantilism? Smith said it well:

To attempt to increase the wealth of any country, either by introducing or by detaining in it an unnecessary quantity of gold and silver, is as absurd as it would be to attempt to increase the good cheer of private families by obliging them to keep an unnecessary number of kitchen utensils.

Smith’s insight is relevant to current issues. On April 2, 2025, which President Trump called “Liberation Day,” Trump introduced his high tariffs on imports from various countries and seemingly based his proposed tariff rates on whether there was a balance of trade with each country. If the US trade deficit with another country was large, Trump wanted a high tariff rate against that country’s imports. What if the United States had a large trade surplus with another country, as it does with the United Kingdom and the Netherlands? Trump did not want to offset this “imbalance” by subsidizing imports from those countries. Logical consistency was never Trump’s strong suit.

What would Smith have said about Trump’s goal of a trade balance? Actually, he addressed the issue succinctly, writing, “Nothing, however, can be more absurd than this whole doctrine of the balance of trade.”

GMU Econ alum Paul Mueller talks about Adam Smith with Dan Klein.

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy, explains what shouldn’t – but, alas, what always does – need explaining: soaking the rich is bad economic policy. A slice:

The problem is not that the government collects too little. It’s that the government spends too much.

In 1950, [Adam] Michel documents, total government spending constituted roughly one-fifth of the U.S. economy. That figure has now risen to more than one-third. Real spending per person quadrupled over that same period. Jack Salmon of the Mercatus Center traced this phenomenon back to determine exactly where the long-term structural deficit comes from, and found that 98 percent is due to spending decisions. About two-thirds of this deficit reflects the compounding cost of interest on debt we’ve already accumulated. The remainder is mandatory program growth, above all with Medicare, which is on a trajectory to nearly triple as a share of gross domestic product (GDP) by mid-century compared with its historical average.

No plausible tax increase can close a gap like that. There’s a hard empirical ceiling on how much revenue the government can actually extract, regardless of what tax rates it sets.

Federal tax revenues have averaged around 17 percent of GDP since World War II despite the top federal tax rate ranging from 28 percent to 91 percent in that time. The revenue share hasn’t moved much, reaching 19.8 percent in 2000 thanks to economic growth, and promptly declining after that.

It’s simple: When tax rates rise, taxpayers work less, shelter their money, and invest differently, compressing the tax base until the yield reverts to its historical equilibrium. Politicians also respond to high taxes by hollowing out the base. Tax carveouts currently reduce federal revenues by about 8 percent of GDP.

Jack Nicastro is keeping track of the assault on Virginians’ gun rights.

I’m always honored to be a guest on Dan Proft’s radio show; yesterday we discussed ESG ‘investing’ and ECON 101.