… is from page 337 of the “Random Thoughts” section of Thomas Sowell’s 2010 book, Dismantling America:
What is especially disturbing about the political left is that they seem to have no sense of the tragedy of the human condition. Instead, they tend to see the problems of the world as due to other people not being as wise or as noble as themselves.
Proponents say the Equal Time Rule fosters media coverage of politics and affords political candidates greater public access. Critics say it has outlived its usefulness, as today’s media landscape offers a cornucopia of platforms unknown in 1920s America. The critics are right, except for one thing: The rule has never been useful and has always functioned mostly to suppress coverage for challengers.
As University of Texas law professor Lucas A. Powe Jr. wrote in his 1987 book, “American Broadcasting and the First Amendment,” the Federal Communications Commission and courts “have virtually always . . . interpreted the statute, despite its precision, to assist those who hold power. Moreover, when it has come time to legislate, the Congress has blatantly used section 315”—the Equal Time statute — “to bolster the position of those already holding political office.”
In February, a CBS attorney alerted Stephen Colbert that interviewing U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico, a Texas Democrat, on his TV show could invite equal-time demands from other candidates. Doling out free “equal time” or risking a fine for noncompliance is expensive.
Mr. Colbert went ahead and interviewed Mr. Talarico but their conversation ran not on TV but on (unregulated) YouTube. It received about 85 million views across social media, compared with Mr. Colbert’s roughly 2.5 million household audience on CBS.
New media has been a godsend for free speech. But there is no good reason to cling to bad ideas from the Coolidge era for traditional programming. “Equal time” requirements tax free speech and turn debates into media circuses. The networks won’t broadcast them, and major-party candidates boycott them.
The FCC wants to set caps on the number of calls that happen with people abroad while giving customers the choice to speak with someone in the United States. The bureaucracy would also like to force cable, internet and phone firms to disclose the location of whoever is taking your call and require language proficiency requirements.
A classic move by socialists looking to expand the reach of the state is to find experiences that people find frustrating and promise that bigger government can help. It’s a tactic more common among figures like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) than a Republican-controlled FCC, but this isn’t the first time Chairman Brendan Carr has embraced a bigger role for government.
His most aggressive tactics include threatening the licenses of networks like ABC and CBS through “news distortion” investigations, notably pressuring Disney to temporarily suspend comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s show, which had the predictable effect of making the comedian more popular.
Managing how private firms handle call centers will backfire too. More agents moved overseas because it made economic sense, and companies could find enough human capital to provide a needed level of service. (Millions of Indians and Filipinos would no doubt ace an English proficiency test.) If consumers valued native-English speakers enough, they would value companies who raise prices to provide a better call experience with more expensive agents.
Vance Ginn rightly pleads for antitrust to be made boring again. Two slices:
The Federal Trade Commission’s recent appeal in its antitrust case against Meta and the government’s new appeal in the Google search case are not just legal headlines. They are signals to capital markets about how political the federal government wants antitrust policy to be.
If we keep pushing antitrust toward populist storytelling instead of consumer harm, we will get less investment, slower innovation, and weaker competition. Antitrust works best when it is boring. Not toothless, but disciplined.
…..
In the past few years, however, antitrust laws have been turned into a political Swiss Army knife. Under the Biden administration, Lina Khan’s FTC pushed a structural, populist approach that often treated “big” companies as inherently suspicious, even when consumer harm was difficult to prove. Now, some voices on the right — in and out of the Trump administration — are tempted to copy the same playbook for different reasons, using antitrust laws to punish perceived “bias” or to settle cultural grievances.
The Biden and Trump administrations may have different slogans, but they are making the same economic error.
Phil Magness writes about Carl Schmitt, “the Nazi philosopher behind the postliberal right.” Two slices:
In Part I of this series, we examined postliberalism’s war on economics — how its proponents blame free markets for every social ill while demonstrating little grasp of the discipline they attack. But postliberalism’s ambitions are ultimately Constitutional; its deeper project is dismantling the Madisonian order (the separation of powers and checks and balances within the federal government created to prevent anyone from accumulating too much power).
The entire intellectual apparatus for this anti-constitutional attack is built on borrowed Nazi jurisprudence and historical fabrication. To understand this history, we need to follow a single intellectual thread: from Carl Schmitt to 9/11 to the White House.
The fading political memories of the George W. Bush administration have become something of a stand-in for postliberalism’s broader assault against pre-Trump conservative politics. The “neoconservative” blunders during the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars are a recurring postliberal complaint — a symbol of the wing of the Republican Party that it aims to bury once and for all under Trump and Vance, their favored successor in 2028.
Yet for all its posturing as a conservative sea change, postliberal theory has more in common with Bush-era foreign policy than it cares to admit (as we are now seeing in Iran).
The main intellectual link comes in the person of Carl Schmitt, an eccentric German legal theorist from the early 20th century. Once a leading conservative academic figure in the Weimar Republic, Schmitt fell into disrepute after 1933 when he joined the Nazi Party and wrote the legal justifications for Hitler’s seizure of power. Schmitt’s involvement with Nazism rightfully wrecked his postwar academic career, yet he managed to retain a stream of academic interlocutors who saw flashes of brilliance, or at least provocative insight, in his writings on constitutional theory.
…..
Postliberals have spent years denouncing the 1619 Project as a radical assault on American identity — so have I. They were right that it was radical; the 1619 Project declared America’s founding irreparably tainted by slavery.
Patrick Deneen, the subject of the first installment of this series, makes an identical move. He just has a different original sin: not slavery, but individual liberty itself.
Both are refounding projects. Both treat 1776 as a problem. Both have serious historical errors. And both reject political liberalism.
At this point, Vermeule, Deneen, and other postliberals run into a practical branding problem for their ideology. Tearing down the Madisonian constitutional order and recasting it as a relic of past errors smacks of Critical Race Theory, or the 1619 Project, “Cultural Marxism,” or any number of similar political bugbears to the American right. Founder-bashing has never had a particularly receptive audience among conservatives.
J.D. Tuccille reflects on Adam Smith’s Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. A slice:
Environmental fetishes are recent justifications for interfering in market transactions, but old fears that international trade is somehow unfair also, once again, underlie political interference in commerce. Last April, the protectionist Trump administration published a trade report promising that the president’s policies would “reduce our destructive trade imbalance…by putting America First” with tariffs and other restrictions on trade.
Adam Smith was familiar with such arguments and dismissed them as nonsense.
“To lay extraordinary restraints upon the importation of goods of almost all kinds, from those particular countries with which the balance of trade is supposed to be disadvantageous, is the second expedient by which the commercial system proposes to increase the quantity of gold and silver,” he wrote. “Nothing, however, can be more absurd than this whole doctrine of the balance of trade, upon which, not only these restraints, but almost all the other regulations of commerce, are founded….Trade which, without force or constraint, is naturally and regularly carried on between any two places, is always advantageous, though not always equally so, to both.”
Whether for novel environmental reasons or in the name of old-fashioned nationalism, government interference in economic activities is often justified on the grounds that people are “selfish.” By that, of course, politicians mean that people act for their own reasons and not to advance the priorities of those in office. But to Smith, that was part of the productive glory of a free society.
Mark Skousen, too, marks the 250th anniversary of the publications of Smith’s marvelous 1776 study.
Bjorn Lomborg makes clear “how reality destroyed Europe’s green energy dreams.” A slice:
Stagnant or sluggish economic growth persists as a chronic problem, exacerbated by high energy costs, regulatory burdens, and demographic pressures, limiting prosperity and the ability to fund public services or innovation. Pensions and aging populations pose a looming fiscal crisis, with pay-as-you-go systems strained by longer life spans, lower birth rates, and insufficient reforms, threatening unsustainable debt burdens on future generations. Lack of constraints on immigration and integration failures have fueled social tensions, security concerns, and political polarization, ranking high in recent surveys alongside irregular migration flows as a top worry for many citizens.
These overlapping crises and concerns explain why the EU’s once near-obsessive focus on climate has receded so precipitously—Europeans now demand balanced attention to a full spectrum of threats that directly impact security, prosperity, and their daily life—the world is becoming scarier, while more costs are coming into focus.
David Bier tweets: (HT Scott Lincicome)
Ask: “Should Americans be allowed to accept free stuff from foreigners?”
Then ask: “Should Americans be allowed to accept almost free stuff from foreigners?”
… is from page 456 of the Book IV, Chapter ii, of the 1981 Liberty Fund edition of Adam Smith’s 1776 masterpiece, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, which was first published 250 years ago today. Today’s “Quotation of the Day” is a rare repeat, but the occasion justifies it. The 947 pages of Smith’s 1776 book is stuffed with brilliant passages; choosing one as a favorite is quite difficult. But if forced to pick my single favorite passage from this work, the one below is it :
What is the species of domestic industry which his capital can employ, and of which the produce is likely to be of the greatest value, every individual, it is evident, can, in his local situation, judge much better than any statesman or lawgiver can do for him. The statesman who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals would not only load himself with a most unnecessary attention, but assume an authority which could safely be trusted, not only to no single person, but to no council or senate whatever, and which would nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it.
Megan McCardle explains well the powerful economic case against taxing wealth. Two slices:
If you want to give people real goods and services, look at the supply of those goods and services, not paper wealth. Wealth is a claim on future resources, such as corporate profits, or the right to occupy a certain house. Those claims are valuable, and people are willing to sacrifice some current consumption to acquire them — as you do when you divert your salary into a 401(k). But while you can turn your 401(k) into consumption in an emergency (or in retirement), that’s only possible because you sell the stock to someone else who is willing to reduce their consumption to buy the stock.
…..
People see Musk’s $670 billion fortune and imagine turning that into $670 billion worth of services — say, the health care and education mentioned in the wealth tax bill. But Musk is not sitting on hundreds of billions worth of dentists and primary school classrooms. He has a bunch of stock certificates, which are not useful in health care or education. They do not make good bandages or scratch paper.
That doesn’t mean we can’t transfer consumption from billionaires to other people. But their paper wealth is irrelevant to that conversation. What matters is how much they currently consume: about a third of their annual income, according to one paper published by the University of Michigan Law School last year, or about 3 percent of their total wealth. Notice that that’s less than 5 percent.
John Puri writes insightfully about Friday’s disappointing jobs report. A slice:
The statistical hits keep coming: Blame can’t be pinned on federal layoffs anymore, because, of the 92,000 net jobs lost in January, 86,000 were in the private economy. Downward revisions to December and January numbers lowered the U.S. jobs total by another 69,000. Manufacturing continues to bleed jobs, despite (or, partly because of) Trump’s tariffs that were supposed to spark an industrial resurgence.
This fiasco didn’t happen naturally. It was built by the tax code—specifically, the exclusion of employer-sponsored health insurance from taxable income. As Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute has documented, the exclusion is roughly as old as the income tax itself, rooted in early Treasury rulings that predated modern health insurance.
In the early 1940s, wartime wage controls gave the concept practical force. Employers who couldn’t compete to hire workers with wages started using health benefits, which were exempt from the controls, as a workaround. But employer-purchased health insurance did not see robust growth until after wage ceilings were lifted in 1953. Congress then codified the exclusion in 1954, cementing employer-based insurance as the dominant model, a consequence few anticipated at the time.
The tax break is projected to reduce income- and payroll-tax revenue by $487 billion this year. The consequences have been a calamity. [Michael] Cannon has convinced me that this single provision is the most damaging in the entire tax code. And it’s not just because of the fiscal cost—it is three times larger than the next tax break in the code—but because of the behavior it has shaped over eight decades.
The provision has chained workers to their employers. It has practically eliminated consumer price sensitivity. It’s suppressed wages that could have been paid in cash instead of in the form of health insurance. Altogether, it’s systematically crowded out the direct, consumer-driven health care spending that creates genuine market pressure to limit costs.
In response to a discussion among market skeptics of the alleged failure over the past few decades of capitalism in America – as one of these skeptics put it, “American capitalism is failing most Americans” – Scott Winship tweets this: (HT Scott Lincicome)
File this under academics torching their credibility. Capitalism failing most Americans? C’mon, man. Median hourly wages (for men and women), annual earnings (for men and women), and family and household incomes are at all-time highs!
Paul Mueller talks with Sam Gregg and Dave Hebert about the tariff ruling in Learning Resources.
… is from page 103 of Historical Impromptus, a 2020 collection of some of Deirdre McCloskey’s work on economic history; this quotation, specifically, is from McCloskey’s 2000 review, in the Minnesota Journal of Global Trade, of Thomas Friedman’s The Lexus and the Olive Tree and John Gray’s False Dawn [original emphasis]:
Globalization encourages the capitalist engine of growth. If people understood how generous that engine has been they would have less enthusiasm for protectionism or socialism or environmentalist or economic nationalism in any of their varied forms. Most educated people believe that the gains to income from capitalism’s triumph have been modest, that the poor have been left behind, that the Third World (should we start calling it the Second?) has been immiserized in aid of the First, that population growth must be controlled, that diminishing returns on the whole has been the main force in world economic history since 1800. All these notions are factually erroneous. But you’ll find all of them in the mind of the average professor of political philosophy.
Smith then inquired into wealth’s causes. He didn’t inquire into the causes of poverty. Smith understood that that poverty is humanity’s default mode. Nearly all people before Smith’s time — and still most people during his time — were mired in poverty. Poverty is simply the condition we suffer when wealth isn’t created. Wealth, not poverty, demands explanation because wealth, not poverty, has causes.
For Smith, the principal cause of wealth is the division of labor — specialization. The more each worker and firm specializes, the more productive they are. The jack of all trades, mastering none, produces relatively little of each output. But let each of those trades become the task of specialized workers or firms, and the resulting mastery raises the output of all the trades. The economic pie grows, with more output available per person.
In his review of “Red Dawn Over China,” (“A Maoist Myth Debunked,” Books, Feb. 14), Tunku Varadarajan asserts that China’s admission to the World Trade Organization in 2001 had “devastating consequences for every economy except China’s own. (Thank you, Bill Clinton.)” The facts say otherwise.
It’s true that the U.S. economy shed a net five million manufacturing jobs in the years that followed, but even the “China shock” analysis attributes only one million of those to expanding trade with China. Most of the rest were lost due to automation and productivity gains. Meanwhile, tens of millions of U.S. households gained from lower prices for shoes, clothing and other household necessities. The painful recessions of 2001-02 and 2008-09 were homegrown.
If Congress had rejected the accession protocol negotiated by the Clinton administration in 2000, China would likely have joined the WTO anyway, but U.S. companies would have lost out on the increased market access it required. From 2001 to 2017, before the Trump trade wars began, the average duty China applied to goods imported from the U.S. dropped from 25% to 7%. U.S. exports to China during that time grew eight-fold and sales by U.S. majority-owned affiliates in China soared more than 10-fold—totaling more than $500 billion annually.
Trade with China has been tough on certain U.S. companies, but for most Americans—including farmers, high-tech exporters and consumers—the consequences have been positive.
Phil Magness tells the tale of how a tariff fight gave rise to the U.S. federal income tax.
Intel selected New Albany for a large semiconductor facility that was supposed to begin making chips by 2025. But Ohio One, as the project is known, has faced repeated delays. Completion now isn’t expected until the early 2030s. “I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was a little disappointed,” Mayor Sloan Spalding said.
Local officials remain confident the project will come to fruition, but its struggles show that public-private partnerships, however welcome, can’t be insulated from market forces and politics.
State actors from economic-development groups to Gov. Mike DeWine worked to secure Ohio One. The state gave $2 billion in “public incentives,” according to U.S. Sen. Bernie Moreno, who in September 2025 released a letter demanding Intel prove this “investment” wasn’t a “charade” or even “potential fraud.”
States compete to land such projects in what Greg Lawson, a senior research fellow at the free-market Buckeye Institute, has called an “arms race.” Gov. DeWine speaks in similar terms, saying, “I can’t unilaterally disarm, and I’m damn well not gonna do it.”
No one disputes chips are essential. They’re in everything from consumer products to military hardware. For backers of Ohio One, they are too important for our supply ever to be in doubt. “There are a lot of things that we don’t make in America that we need to make in America. Chips are part of that,” says U.S. Sen. Jon Husted. As lieutenant governor, Mr. Husted played a role in securing the Ohio One deal.
Ohio leaders backed Intel, but the market has favored Nvidia and other chip makers, who took the lead as Intel’s stock fluctuated and its leadership changed.
Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) and a dozen of his most liberal members introduced a bill on Thursday aimed at forcing meatpackers to process only one type of meat. In other words, a company that sells chicken can’t also sell beef. That arbitrary rule would force big firms like Cargill and Tyson Foods to shrink as they sell or spin off different divisions.
Four companies, including two Brazilian-controlled firms, currently process about 80 percent of America’s beef. The Democrats want to give power to the Federal Trade Commission to compel foreign-owned meat companies to divest U.S. assets, and President Donald Trump has made noises about investigating the industry.
Ground beef prices went up 17 percent last year, and Democrats see political upside where Trump senses danger. Yet it’s not market consolidation or dastardly foreigners keeping prices high. Big companies, on average, sell at more competitive price points than a shopper could get directly from a farm.
It’s already a notoriously difficult business. Tyson’s net profit margin last fiscal year was just 0.9 percent. Cargill’s estimated profit margin was just over 2 percent in 2023.
After breaking up the existing industry leaders, the Democratic bill envisions a host of government subsidies — including financial assistance and loan guarantees — to help small businesses acquire and operate meatpacking plants. Yet the real solution is expanding supply, not fragmenting the industry.
Jack Nicastro reports that “California billionaire wealth tax would cost the state $25 billion.” A slice:
In November, Californians will consider a ballot measure to implement a 5 percent wealth tax on billionaires, which proponents say will generate $100 billion in revenue. It turns out the tax would probably cost the Golden State nearly $25 billion.
That’s the result from a new study out of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, which was published earlier this week. In this study, researchers analyzed the reported and unreported departure of billionaires from the state, as well as flaws in the tax proponents’ modeling, to find that the law would reduce revenue to the state’s coffers.
“Over 100,000 simulations with varying discount rates, wealth tax revenues, and lost income tax revenues associated with departures, we find that 71% of scenarios in which the Act is instituted yields a negative [net present value], signaling the Act would generate a net cost to the state of California,” the researchers wrote in a Thursday Substack post. The “average across these draws,” they say, “is –$24.7 billion.”
“‘Customs does have automated systems to process refunds,’ said David Cohen, a partner at Sandler, Travis and Rosenberg. ‘Yes, the magnitude is unprecedented, but the tariff refund process takes place routinely.'”
They just don’t want to do it.
… is from page 177 of my GMU Econ colleague Mark Koyama’s, and his co-author Jared Rubin’s, superb 2022 book, How the World Became Rich :
People living in wealthy countries who are at the bottom of today’s income distribution are better off on most fronts than almost everyone who ever lived prior to 300 years ago.
Trump’s declarations routinely begin as sweeping assertions of personal control that immediately cause one to ask, “Can he do that?” That fundamental question then spawns a stream of additional questions as his subordinates maneuver to piece together something that resembles the president’s dream. If the DFC can’t be turned into a universal war insurer, the administration will hunt for a substitute that sounds close enough—probably something more narrow, conditional, and bureaucratic than what the president initially claimed.
That’s how you end up with government by improvisation, where the public is supposed to treat the revised and less fantastical version as proof that Trump’s original pronouncement was true—and where the legal and accountability questions keep accumulating because the governing style relies on answering them after the fact.
George Will makes a case that the U.S. president has, and should have, the authority to make war as Trump is now doing in Iran. [DBx: Conversations over the past few days with colleagues and friends who I respect have caused me to question that which I long did not – namely, Congress must pre-approve the use of military force. Will’s column contributes positively to this pondering.] Two slices:
Surprise is a substantial military asset. If the Trump administration had briefed legislators in advance, could it have achieved the targeted killings crucial to its regime decapitation objective — an objective intended to economize violence?
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For decades, this column has been a tireless — to some readers, a tiresome — critic of the swollen, often lawless, modern presidency. Now more than ever it is urgent to regard executive power as, in Daniel Webster’s words, “a lion which must be caged.” But conditions, threats, and capabilities change, so moral and political imperatives do, too. Changes in modern circumstances, including technologies, often strengthen, if not the argument for, then the opportunity for, executive unilateralism.
Last week, for example, conservative legal analyst Andrew McCarthy wrote in National Review that Trump’s Section 122 tariffs are illegal because they do not meet the preconditions outlined in the law.
As McCarthy and others have noted, Section 122 allows presidents to impose tariffs of up to 15 percent for up to 150 days to “deal with large and serious United States balance-of-payments deficits.” The United States does not currently have a balance-of-payments deficit with the rest of the world, and the Trump administration’s attempt to invoke this law in response to trade deficits ignores the law’s plain language.
Indeed, Trump’s attorneys even admitted as much during the legal battles over the IEEPA tariffs. When that case was before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, the administration’s lawyers pointedly noted that balance-of-payments deficits are “conceptually distinct” from the trade deficits and admitted that Section 122 would not apply.
In the lawsuit filed Thursday, the states’ attorneys note the federal government’s response in the previous lawsuit. When it comes to Section 122, they argue, Trump has not identified “any actual justification permitted” by the law.
“The President cannot meet the statutory requirements of Section 122, and his effort to impose tariffs under this statute is unlawful,” the states argue.
Also writing about the legal challenges to Trump’s latest round of tariffs is Ilya Somin.
Various trade-in programs to subsidize household upgrades of everything from appliances to mobile phones haven’t triggered a durable shift toward greater domestic consumption. And now Beijing has cut the budget on those subsidies in the latest fiscal plan.
China’s economy can still grow despite these policy failures. And its relatively closed financial system allows it to avoid financial panics or crashes if its plans don’t work. Foreigners will continue to visit China and be impressed by corners of the economy that are working—some of which, such as AI, pose serious strategic challenges to the West.
But the Chinese economy isn’t the juggernaut of Communist myth that America should emulate. Its top-down model of political control is leading to slower growth and fewer gains for the working class.
This letter in today’s Wall Street Journal by Jeffery Wyant makes an excellent point. A slice:
The Northeast’s cost of LNG could be reduced by as much as half if the Jones Act were rescinded (“U.S. LNG Exports to the Rescue,” Review & Outlook. March 3). This 1920 law requires all cargo from one U.S. port to another U.S. port to be shipped on U.S.-built, U.S.-flagged and U.S.-owned vessels—crewed by Americans. Since no U.S.-built ships are large enough to ship LNG to the Northeast efficiently, LNG must be imported from terminals overseas.
To save nonexistent U.S. shipbuilding and crewing jobs, millions of households in the Northeast pay much higher electricity bills than if LNG were shipped directly to the Northeast from the LNG export terminals in Louisiana and Texas.
Arnold Kling ventures some guesses about what AI will bring in 2026.
… is from page 103 of Historical Impromptus, a 2020 collection of some of Deirdre McCloskey’s work on economic history; this quotation, specifically, is from McCloskey’s 2000 review, in the Minnesota Journal of Global Trade, of Thomas Friedman’s The Lexus and the Olive Tree and John Gray’s False Dawn:
The capitalist deal is: Let me make profits and I’ll make you rich.
DBx: Yep. And despite endless bleating and spilt oceans of ink to the contrary, it’s a darn good deal. If you doubt it, walk into a Kroger or Walmart, or visit Amazon.com, or observe the HVAC unit in your home or workplace. Ponder these apparently mundane realities and ask yourself: Where does all this stuff come from?
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