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Matt Ridley is right: An eternal battle is between those people who understand the reality of spontaneous order and those people who have difficulty believing that order can arise and be maintained without being consciously engineered. Two slices:

Spontaneous order describes many of the things that work best in the world: ecosystems, brains, bodies, cells, and genomes are built that way, self-assembling with no management. So are economies, markets, and languages. Nobody is in charge of the rules of the English language (thank goodness), even though it is man-made: everybody is. As the eighteenth-century Edinburgh philosopher Adam Ferguson said, “nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design”.

“On coming to Paris for a visit, I said to myself: Here are a million human beings who would all die in a few days if supplies of all sorts did not flow into this great metropolis,” wrote the nineteenth-century economist Frédéric Bastiat. Nobody is in charge of deciding how Paris gets fed every day, and it would be a mess if somebody was (see Union, Soviet or European). The lesson is that we are far too ready to reach for command and control rather than, as far as possible, setting the rules so that people can negotiate complex solutions among themselves through the magic of supply and demand.

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Conversely, we know that the Chinese economic miracle had a bottom-up cause, not a top-down one. It was not some brilliant piece of planning by the government. It was the accidental realisation by Deng Xiaoping that a bunch of farmers disobeying their collective farm rules and growing their own produce were getting results, followed by a decision to loosen the restrictions on other sectors too.

This is true of all economic miracles. When Bill Clinton asked Congress to allow e-commerce, he did not try to dictate what would happen: the Framework for Global Electronic Commerce he put forward in 1997 was one of the most libertarian documents in history. The rapid rise in living standards in countries like India, Vietnam, and Poland is not the result of good five-year plans but of government getting out of the way of entrepreneurs.

Jane Shaw Stroup puts the economic ‘problems’ of Gen-Z Americans into perspective. A slice:

So what can Generation Z do? Take all this lamentation with a grain of salt. Maybe a tablespoon of it. We older folks have seen this before.

In 1982, Fran Schumer wrote “Downward Mobility,” a classic New York magazine cover story. She interviewed 20- and 30-somethings about their financial woes, classifying them as the nouveau pauvre, or, as a well-known economist put it, “well-dressed paupers.”

Ms. Schumer spoke to a married couple in New York whose $70,000 joint income (about $240,000 today) placed them “squarely in the comfortable middle class” but didn’t “allow them even to own their own home.” The husband complained that “so many of the amenities that seemed almost a birthright when he was growing up now appear to be out of reach.”

“The economic realities of adult life have come as a rude surprise to Mark and Alison Kramer”—not their real names—“and many others whose childhoods coincided with the great boom time of the fifties,” Ms. Schumer wrote. “A house, a car, staples of middle-class life, now seem like luxuries. The mention of a large suburban backyard is likely to evoke the same nostalgia from people in Manhattan as madeleines did for Proust in Remembrance of Things Past.”

Ryan Stowers’s letter in today’s Wall Street Journal is excellent:

Many employers are learning that artificial intelligence creates the most value when it strengthens talent rather than replaces it (“Hiring Defies Forecast of AI Wipeout,” Page One, July 27). Rather than disproving AI’s potential, this hiring rebound suggests many employers misunderstood where AI creates value. Organizations that viewed AI primarily as a substitute for talent are now playing catch-up. That means investing in people, not just technology. It is almost always cheaper to retain and reskill employees than to fire and later rehire them. Employers should ask how AI can help individuals take on higher-value work. Companies that use AI only to cut costs will capture just a fraction of its value. Companies that treat AI as an investment in human potential rather than a substitute for it will be best positioned to compete.

My Mercatus Center colleague Alden Abbott describes a morass in U.S. antitrust.

Robert Bork, Jr., makes clear that “the FTC should have shucked the Biden antitrust playbook. It kept it instead.” Two slices:

The second Trump administration’s continuation of Biden-era progressive antitrust enforcement has been an unwelcome surprise.

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The administration’s rhetoric is not much better. Vice President JD Vance recently called for a shift from Milton Friedman’s defense of free-market capitalism to a Hamiltonian focus on big-government projects, adding that the aim of government policy should be to make the economy “a tool to service the dignity of the human person.” Trump’s FTC chair, Andrew Ferguson, said government intervention is necessary “to restrict the exercise of liberty when that exercise of liberty meaningfully diminishes other people’s flourishing.”

References to “flourishing” over freedom are scattered throughout the speeches of Ferguson and his colleague, FTC member Mark Meador. Now Trump regulators are picking up yet another progressive trope: blaming businesses for inflation.

That approach echoes President Joe Biden’s 2021 announcement of 72 antitrust initiatives, which attributed stagnant wages and inflation to capitalist greed rather than excessive government regulation or debt levels exceeding those at the end of World War II.

Vance Ginn argues that “Fauci’s silence cannot erase the COVID-policy catastrophe.”

Also writing about Fauci’s recent silent appearance before Congress is the Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal. Two slices:

It would be good to hear Dr. Fauci respond. We know from previous disclosures that Drs. Fauci and Collins tried to demean the authors of the 2020 Great Barrington Declaration that favored “focused protection” on the old and sick rather than wholesale lockdowns. The duo favored media censorship of those and other dissenting views.

Dr. Fauci might not be facing this tough scrutiny now if he and the press hadn’t worked so hard to stifle Covid debate at the time. The doctor’s recently released diaries reveal how much the media abandoned its skepticism and curiosity to elevate Dr. Fauci as the oracle who couldn’t be doubted on Covid.

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Journalists need sources, and friendships aren’t uncommon. But the conformist media idolatry of Dr. Fauci was a way of shutting off debate over Covid policy. It also became a way for the press to attack President Trump in an election year. Locking down debate over Covid was as damaging as the lockdowns.

Also on Fauci is National Review‘s Noah Rothman. A slice:

There’s a reason why, more than any other public health official under Trump at the outset of the pandemic, Fauci so quickly became a dashboard saint to the American left. No other figure in public life had the demonstrable power to convince the public to subordinate their financial self-interest to the state, severing the bonds of community and family that mediate the personal and the political.

Even as public officials with more propriety assured Americans throughout the Covid years that a return to “normalcy” was the goal — “or as normalized as you can be, post-Covid,” in former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s formulation — a segment of the American left convinced itself that returning to normal would be worse than the perpetuation of the pandemic.

Vox’s Sigal Samuel called it the kind of anxiety that “might be worth cultivating.” Theirs was a fear of returning to a world in which mental health was incompatible with “the rigidity of the modern workday,” a world of wealth disparities and racial inequity, a world defined by “harmful systems” and no collective will to alter them. “We shouldn’t go back to ‘normal,’” he admitted. “Normal wasn’t good enough.” That outlook was hardly exclusive to the far-left fringe. “There is no getting ‘back to normal,’ experts say,” CNN’s headline read. “The sooner we accept that, the better.”

This outlook was overrepresented in the Biden administration. His White House fast lost sight of its initial modest objective — putting “the nation back on a path to get closer to normal.” By the fall of 2021, Fauci told reporters in the first weeks of Biden’s presidency, he hoped only that America would “start approaching some degree of normality.” After all, “our lives are not going to be the same,” Barack Obama’s CDC director, Thomas Frieden, contended. If these were only prudent expressions of uncertainty, they wouldn’t have erred only in one direction — and there would not have been consequences for administration figures who diverged from that depressing pattern. And as 2021 drew to a close, Fauci abandoned normalcy as a goal in favor of advocating the pandemic’s anti-social practices indefinitely.

Ramesh Ponnuru reminds us that Fauci’s enabler during the covidian hysteria was President Trump.

“Why Capitalism Is the Most Moral Economic System.”

Tad DeHaven reveals evidence that relying on politicians to supply national defense has its downsides.

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… is from Samuel Gregg’s brilliant July 2024 paper, “A Free, Prosperous and Secure America”:

A dynamic, competitive, and open economy is more likely to spark ongoing bottom-up entrepreneurship and innovation in every economic sector — including the defense industry — and thus produce genuine technological breakthroughs with potential military uses. In such conditions, military officials would be able to survey new, emerging technologies and assess which may give it an edge over its likely international opponents. Two welcome side-effects would be to diminish the cronyism problem and limit the understandable but also inhibiting preference on the part of military leaders and defense procurement specialists for what they already know.

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Wall Street Journal columnist William McGurn reveals a dismaying similarity of some of the attitudes of Comrade Mamdani with those of Chairman Mao. A slice:

Pity the landlord. In communist China in the 1940s and ’50s, landlords became “class enemies” and were publicly denounced in “speak bitterness” campaigns. An estimated one million to two million of them were murdered.

Today Chairman Mao has morphed into the friendlier face of Mayor Mamdani. Government isn’t murdering landlords, but even as Zohran Mamdani denies that the democratic socialism he champions is communism, he has embraced the same vilification and targeting of landlords.

In mid-July, the New York mayor released a report with 23 policy actions on everything from building inspections to combating mold. The report’s title gives away the game: the “Rental Ripoff Hearing Report.” Reading it, you would think there isn’t a single landlord in the city who treats his tenants decently and keeps his buildings in good repair.

There’s a method to Mr. Mamdani’s madness. Even the barest acquaintance with the record of rent control and other government efforts to keep housing costs down by subsidizing rents or artificially capping them shows they usually end in failure. The mayor will need to deal with the coming failure or distract attention from it.

Enter Saul Alinsky, the community activist in Chicago who wrote “Rules for Radicals.” For Mayor Mamdani, rule 13 offers a path forward: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”

Reason‘s Jacob Sullum explains that “Trump keeps pushing legally dubious tariffs.” A slice:

According to a lawsuit that the Liberty Justice Center (LJC) filed last Friday on behalf of the U.S. businesses that will have to pay the Section 301 tariffs, the findings underlying Greer’s list are woefully inadequate. By and large, they fail to specify exactly how each of these countries has fallen short, how their supposed failures burden U.S. commerce, or why the new tariffs, which make no distinction between forced-labor products and other imports, can be expected to ameliorate the problem that the administration claims to be addressing.

National Review‘s Jim Geraghty warns that Trump’s obsession with imposing tariffs punitive taxes on Americans’ purchases of imports – more than half of which, by the way, are raw materials or intermediate products used by producers in the U.S. – is inflicting such damage on the economy that the GOP will suffer in the 2028 elections. A slice:

Incumbent Republicans, you could have been running for reelection in a roaring economy, but a president addicted to tariffs wouldn’t let you.

Early voting starts in Minnesota, South Dakota, and Virginia on Friday, September 18, just 52 days from now. The cement is hardening in Americans’ perception of the economy, and that perception is negative. In fact, forget Democrats and independents for a moment; the most recent Pew Research survey found “the share of Republicans who say Trump’s policies have worsened conditions has risen from 18 percent to 28 percent, while the share saying they have improved conditions has fallen from 57 percent to 42 percent.” Overall, 60 percent of U.S. adults say Trump’s policies have made the economy worse, while just 20 percent say Trump’s policies have made the economy better.

Jessica Riedl tweets: (HT Scott Lincicome)

Notable that those churning out the “everyone was so much richer in the 1950s-1970s” oppression narrative overwhelmingly: 1) are too young to have experienced that era, and 2) have no serious economic or statistical qualifications to analyze that era. It’s empty rage bait.

The Editorial Board of the Washington Post rightly applauds this move by the U.S. Department of Education:

The department rescinded guidance last week that treated statistical disparities between racial groups as sufficient evidence to trigger civil rights enforcement, even if there was no evidence that any particular person was intentionally mistreated.

The approach has made schools across America less safe by deterring administrators and teachers from disciplining certain disruptive and violent students out of fear that they would be accused of racial discrimination.

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy, talks with Thomas Howes and James Patterson about their new book, Why Postliberalism Failed.

Rachel Lu reviews Howe’s and Patterson’s Why Postliberalism Failed.

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… is from page 11 of Craig Fehrman’s excellent 2026 book, The Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis & Clark:

Congress, of course, held the power of the purse, and Jefferson drafted a secret message asking them to fund an expedition. Lewis listened as the president talked through his motives. Exploring the Missouri-Columbia link was a big one, but there were others, including a motive the House and Senate would like: trade.

DBx: Meriwether Lewis’s and William Clark’s famous expedition (1804-1806) was not exploration only for the sake of exploration and science. It had political purposes (for example, to help prevent European powers from colonizing the American west) and also economic purposes – chiefly, the expansion of trade. Indeed, among Thomas Jefferson’s hopes was that Lewis and Clark would find a waterway clear through to the Pacific ocean in order to facilitate Americans’ trade with Asia.

This reality – reflecting Americans’ commercial culture – debunks the notion that the United States was from the start a protectionist nation. And it puts into further, unflatering context the express sentiment of Donald Trump that “Trade is bad.”

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Economists and historians who challenged this myth include Dominick Armentano, Rob Bradley, Tom DiLorenzo, Burt Folsom, and John McGee.

Editor, The Economist

Editor:

Thanks for explaining that most of today’s billionaires achieved their riches, not at the expense of their fellow human beings, but rather by improving humanity’s standard of living (“The rise of the deserving rich,” July 23).

Your argument, though, is marred by your calling Standard Oil’s John D. Rockefeller, Sr., “sketchy” and lumping him in with post-Soviet Russian oligarchs. Rockefeller earned every cent that he received.

What has come down in history as Rockefeller’s insistence on “predatory pricing” – what you likely mean when you say that Rockefeller “took advantage of weak competition laws” – was nothing of the sort. Standard Oil’s price cuts reflected Rockefeller’s ability to cut costs better than his competitors, who then falsely accused him of being predatory.

Powerful evidence that these price cuts were no monopolizing scheme is found in the falling price of Standard’s principal output, kerosene. As Phil Gramm and I explain in our book, The Triumph of Economic Freedom,

Between 1870, the year of Standard’s founding, and 1885, the nominal price of Standard’s main output, kerosene, dropped by 69 percent, from twenty- six cents per gallon to eight cents. The real price of kerosene over this fifteen-year span fell 60 percent faster than the general level of prices. Five years later, kerosene’s real price had fallen by another 8 percent. Even Sen. George Edmunds (R-VT) – the principal coauthor of the Sherman Antitrust Act – admitted in 1890 that “the oil trust certainly has reduced the price of oil immensely.”*

Monopolists raise prices. Standard Oil cut prices. Ironically, it was Rockefeller’s successful determination to cut costs and prices that led economically uninformed historians to cast him as a villain. He did indeed make life difficult for his competitors, but in the process he also made life better for millions of consumers worldwide.

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

* Phil Gramm and Donald J. Boudreaux, The Triumph of Economic Freedom (Rowman & Littlefield, 2025), page 30.

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Michael Chapman explains what shouldn’t – but, alas, what today nevertheless does – need explaining: Mao Zedong was a mass-murdering monster.

Matt Weidinger reports on the success of the 1996 welfare-reform legislation in the U.S.

Although it gets some history wrong, The Economist busts the myth that today’s billionaires do not earn their wealth. A slice:

More and more billionaires derive their wealth not from accidents of birth or from gaming the system, but by providing useful goods and services and by employing thousands of people.

Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch discuss the rising popularity of socialism.

Kyle Handley argues that the bond market is not counting on revenues from Trump’s tariffs punitive taxation of Americans’ purchases of imports. A slice:

Bond investors are not attached to customs duties as a line item revenue source. They care about the government’s overall fiscal position and about how policy affects economic growth, inflation, interest rates, and the cost of servicing the debt. Once those broader effects are considered, the market’s behavior over the past 18 months looks less like an addiction to tariffs than a response to the ever-changing size of the tariffs themselves.

Collecting tariffs from the pockets of US consumers and businesses has real, negative economic effects. It does raise some money, but relative to the government’s underlying fiscal outlook, tariff revenue is a side hustle. And the Trump administration has already promised to dole out the funds through schemes like tariff dividend rebates, farm subsidies, and pay-fors on tax cuts or other spending. The new tariff money, in other words, has already been spent several times over, not put towards deficit reduction.

Reem Ibrahim makes clear that the “‘AI Kill Switch Act’ won’t stop rogue AI, but it will slow down innovation.”

Unlike adults, children think no further than the anticipated immediate consequences of their actions. This reality is the major reason why society denies to children nearly all of the decision-making authority that it leaves available to adults. Anyone who calls for the Senate to abolish the filibuster in order to enact one particular piece of legislation reveals himself or herself to be, mentally and emotionally, a child. (This conclusion stands regardless of the merits or demerits of the particular piece of legislation at issue.) Thank goodness that mature voices, such as the Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal, warn the Senate not to heed this juvenile demand. Two slices:

Bad ideas are everywhere in Washington, but here’s one that belongs in a hall of fame: President Trump is again pressing Republicans to nuke the Senate’s 60-vote filibuster rule to pass the SAVE America Act. Or in other words, hand progressives the tools to pack the Supreme Court and create new states, in exchange for a voting bill that isn’t a clear political winner for the GOP.

“John Thune should not allow the United States Senate to ‘leave town’ until it passes The Save America Act or, far better still, TERMINATES THE FILIBUSTER, where Republicans can then quickly pass everything they ever dreamed of,” Mr. Trump wrote Monday online.

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One now daring to step up is Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman. He campaigned on killing the filibuster in 2022, but subsequent events have “vindicated” Ms. Sinema and Mr. Manchin, he wrote Monday in the Washington Post. Mr. Fetterman praised the filibuster for forcing compromise and urged voters who dislike Mr. Trump’s agenda to imagine a world without the 60-vote rule: “Republicans could fundamentally change the entire government and country with a simple majority vote.”

The same mental exercise, in the other direction, could benefit frustrated Republicans. If the filibuster went away, Democrats with a mere 50 votes, plus a Vice Presidential tie breaker, could wreck the Supreme Court, add new states, pass Medicare for All, prohibit right-to-work laws, codify Roe v. Wade, create a national gun registry, raise the minimum wage to $25 an hour, and so much more.

The GOP might hope to undo such policies while passing a wish list of its own when it next controls Congress and the White House. Yet the effect would be highly destabilizing, and progressives would have the clear advantage. If Democrats packed the Supreme Court with four new Justices who have life tenure, would Republicans unpack it later? Doubtful.

After Democrats passed new entitlements, year after year, would Republicans marshal the votes for repeal? They can’t even repeal the taxes in ObamaCare. Think how hard it was for Republicans to pass even modest Medicaid reform last year.

The filibuster benefits the country by ensuring stability, so national policy isn’t constantly flipping between polar extremes. This also happens to help the conservative party, because it makes radical change hard to enact. Breaking the filibuster would remove a structural check on the ability of temporary majorities to fundamentally reshape American society, which is what progressives want to do. Even if Republicans moved first, as Mr. Trump wants, the result in the long run would be a ratchet clicking steadily to the left.

Also writing wisely about the filibuster is U.S. Senator John Fetterman (D-PA). A slice:

It’s not often you hear someone in D.C. admit they were wrong, let alone horribly wrong — and the entire Democratic Party was, including me.

When Democrats had the presidency and a majority in both chambers, they were frustrated with the 60-vote threshold needed to advance legislation. Senate Democrats attempted to end the filibuster to push through President Joe Biden’s agenda — an effort I fully supported during my 2022 campaign.

Halfway through my first term, I now recognize how important the filibuster is and the state our country would be in without it.

I thought ending the filibuster was necessary to deliver results for working families. I thought it was unlikely for Republicans in the minority to find common ground on legislation Democrats were proposing. I thought Democrats were not being ruthless the way Republicans were, and we needed to be on that level if we were going to relieve the anger that voters were feeling.

Upon reflection, the pursuit of those short-term wins clouded the bigger picture and lasting impact of a Senate without the filibuster — a Senate that ignored the voices of the minority and everyday people.

The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board reflects on Anthony Fauci’s diaries. A slice:

Anthony Fauci made himself the public face of pandemic lockdowns in 2020, and now we have a glimpse of what was going on behind his eyes. Newly released diaries paint an unflattering portrait of a self-obsessed and not entirely honest bureaucrat, in contrast to the image of the careful scientist he cultivated in public.

The documents were released by Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who for years has dug into the Covid story to understand why the government response to the health crisis was so destructive. The excerpts Sen. Paul has published, which run to more than 1,100 pages, cover December 2019 just before the first reports of an outbreak in Wuhan, China, through Dr. Fauci’s retirement from government in December 2022.

The diary reads as if it was intended to be an aide-mémoire for an autobiography Dr. Fauci might write one day, so it pays to read with care. He might have shaded the truth with an eye (or two) on history. Yet that possibility makes what’s in it all the more remarkable.

One conclusion is that on important points Dr. Fauci was both wrong and dishonest. For instance, he and allies in the government-science industrial complex still cling to the theory that Covid-19 evolved naturally in animal populations before spreading to humans.

Yet on Feb. 1, 2020, his diary records a meeting with a dozen prominent virologists in which only two credited this “natural origins” theory. The rest suspected the virus might have been created artificially, not least because a leading scientist in Wuhan, Shi Zhengli, was known to engage in the sort of gain-of-function research that could produce such a result.

The diary suggests that by Jan. 26, 2020, Dr. Fauci believed the virus hadn’t originated in the Wuhan wet market, often identified as the source by natural-origin advocates. This didn’t stop him and allies from painting skeptics of the natural-origin theory as politicized cranks and conspiracy theorists. Previously released documents shed light on how Dr. Fauci orchestrated publication of a scientific paper to suppress the theory that Covid leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The diary also brags on Dr. Fauci’s influence persuading the likes of California Gov. Gavin Newsom and then-New York Mayor Bill de Blasio to shut schools and lock down large parts of the economy. Yet he later claimed in public that he never argued for locking anything down.

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… is from pages 141-142 of Thomas Sowell’s 2008 volume, Economic Facts and Fallacies [original emphasis]:

One of the most popular – and most fallacious – explanations of the very high salaries of corporate executives is “greed.” But when your salary depends on what other people are willing to pay you, you can be the greediest person on earth and that will not raise your salary by one dime. Any serious explanation of corporate executives’ salaries must be based on the reasons for those salaries being offered, not the reasons why the recipients desire them. Anybody can desire anything but that will not cause others to meet those desires.

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GMU Econ alum Dave Hebert is correct: One insufficiently understood calamity of Trumpian protectionism is its destruction of America’s reputation in the eyes of the world. Trump, with all the insight of a 15-year-old schoolyard bully, thinks his maneuvers engender respect for the U.S.; in fact, his maneuvers understandably engender contempt for, and distrust of, the U.S.. Three slices:

But there’s a far worse outcome from this that cannot be undone by courts, elections, or policy reversals. These new tariffs and their justifications have only served to further destroy the relationships with allies and trading partners that we had previously taken as given. The costs of this will outlast every tariff schedule, court ruling, and this administration. They won’t show up on BLS reports, BEA analyses, or Fed surveys. But they will be felt by every single American for years to come.

As a result of these tariffs, Japan, South Korea, and Australia now face 12.5 percent tariffs for their alleged complicity in using forced labor. China is in the same boat. Three of our closest allies are now accused of being just as negligent about slave labor as China.

Canada, the European Union, the United Kingdom, and Mexico now face 10 percent tariffs for their alleged forced labor practices. Canada and Mexico are, of course, also parties to the USMCA, a trade agreement that this very president negotiated, signed, and called “a colossal victory” only to then walk away from. That same week, the President hit Canada with an additional 50 percent tariff on goods ranging from “wine to hockey sticks to cement” regardless of whether or not those goods qualify under the USMCA.

So in the span of a week, the White House effectively told Canada, our closest trading partner and ally, that America’s word means nothing and then told them that they are complicit in forced labor.

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Foreign officials must now contend with an even clearer reality: not only is an agreement with the United States not worth the paper it’s printed on, but we will accuse you of horrendous practices if it means that an administration can re-impose tariffs. Our trading partners saw that the findings of investigations will be written to fit the desires of an administration instead of the facts on the ground. They learned that not only is America protectionist but that they will publish a serious moral accusation against a friend when doing so is politically convenient.

This changes how other countries will deal with us going forward.

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The trust that America enjoys took generations to build and is being spent at a record pace. In the meantime, the world is moving on and increasingly without us. Unfortunately, courts cannot restore what was actually lost this week. Judges can void tariffs and force refunds, but they cannot unsay an accusation.

The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal decries the Trump administration’s UAW-inspired move to further restrict Americans’ access to foreign-made automobiles. A slice:

Are Mercedes-Benz cars Chinese sleeper-cell spies? A bipartisan Senate bill treats the German luxury vehicles as such and would ban them from the U.S. market. This is political rent-seeking in the guise of national security.

The Senate Commerce Committee last week advanced a bill that would codify and expand Commerce Department restrictions on Chinese “connected” software in cars. This is a national-security concern, but self-serving union and corporate interests have hijacked the bill.

Most new cars are equipped with software that connects to the internet and scoops up data. This can include location data as well as audio and video recorded inside a car. Manufacturers and their software partners use these internet-connected systems to help drivers—say, by warning about road hazards ahead.

It’s not paranoid to worry that adversaries could exploit these systems. The Associated Press reported in 2018 that China had required electric-vehicle makers operating in that country, including foreign-owned companies like Tesla, to transmit real-time data on drivers for government monitoring.

Such concerns spurred the Biden Administration to ban the sale of “connected vehicles” if their manufacturers or software are controlled by Chinese entities. The regulation provides a process for manufacturers to appeal a ban and mitigate security concerns.

The Trump team last month barred new cars from EV maker Polestar (majority-owned by the Chinese Zhejiang Geely Holding Group and its founder) from the U.S. market. Volvo, which has the same majority owner, won an exemption for unspecified reasons. While political favoritism could bias national-security reviews, the Senate bill is more problematic.

It would ban manufacturers from selling cars in the U.S. if Chinese investors own more than 15% of shares unless they get a waiver from regulators. It would also prohibit “connected” software and hardware such as battery packs if they are supplied by Chinese companies or Chinese entities hold more than a 25% equity stake in their developers.

The first threshold targets Mercedes, which has two passive Chinese shareholders that together own 19.7% of shares. Commerce Committee Chair Ted Cruz says General Motors pushed for this threshold to hamstring a competitor for its Cadillac model. The United Auto Workers also wants to punish Mercedes for opposing the union at its plant in Alabama.

Mercedes employs some 7,500 workers in Alabama and South Carolina. This spring, it announced a $4 billion investment at its Alabama plant. The Senate bill would kill these jobs and investment. Yet it has drawn 32 co-sponsors, including 25 Republicans. As Mr. Cruz mused during the hearing, why do Republicans want to harm GOP-led states?

Wall Street Journal columnist Allysia Finley wonders why GOP members of Congress continue to support budgets that compel American taxpayers to fund left-wing ‘nonprofits.’ Two slices:

House Republicans left for summer recess on Thursday after passing a budget bill with as much substance as a beach novel. The tenuous GOP majority looks to have given up on serious spending and tax reforms this year.

Many Republicans seem content serving as tax collectors for Democrats’ welfare state and the bureaucrats whose jobs depend on it. They might consider that the rise of the socialist left coincided with an eruption in federal spending that began during the pandemic, with gobs of money flowing to state and local governments and left-wing nonprofits.

California is the biggest beneficiary of the lava of largess. Since 2020, federal Medicaid payments to the state have doubled to $134.5 billion, more than the general fund of any other state. The state also received hundreds of billions of federal Covid dollars in government aid, rental assistance, public transportation and more.
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The GOP’s main “achievement” this year is a housing bill shepherded by Sen. Elizabeth Warren that creates a panoply of grant programs to funnel ever more taxpayer money to local governments and nonprofits. That means more power and employment for progressives like Ms. Raman and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s housing czar, Cea Weaver (master’s in urban planning, New York University).

Republicans’ complaints about socialism will ring hollow as long as they persist in subsidizing them.

Kenneth Pringle writes that “Adam Smith’s ‘Wealth of Nations’ helped create the world’s wealthiest nation.” (HT Steven Kaufman). A slice:

Jefferson’s assault was political, arguing that a free people had the right to reject a tyrannical king. Smith’s was economic, asserting the right of all men to “truck, barter, and exchange”—that is, do business regardless of royal prerogatives.

To Smith (1723-1790), Wealth of Nations was a “very violent attack…upon the whole commercial system of Great Britain.” The market forces Smith unleashed would disrupt and shatter the mercantilist system practiced by Britain and the other European powers, a crown-directed strategy for hoarding gold. Free enterprise changed the equation.

My emeritus GMU Econ colleague Larry White talks with Radu Şimandan and Cristian Valeriu Păun about the social-justice agenda in central-bank research.

The Wall Street Journal reports this: “After a year of holding back on new hires, companies from tech and transportation to defense now say they need more people to work alongside AI.”

The Editorial Board of the Washington Post makes the case that Comrade Mamdani’s rent-control policy violates the takings clause of the Fifth Amendment.

A group of landlords has filed suit, arguing that the mayor’s office improperly interfered in what should be an independent regulatory decision. The board is also required to conduct an independent economic analysis before a vote, but the plaintiffs say the board had already made up its mind.

After her resignation in protest ahead of the vote, the board’s former landlord representative, Christina Smyth, said the members crossed a “legal line” because their vote wasn’t based on evidence.

A court overturning the rent freeze would be an economic gift for the democratic socialist, even if he doesn’t realize it.

New York’s rent-stabilized housing market is near its breaking point. Before the new policy, landlords were only allowed to raise rents 3 percent per year, which often did not cover maintenance costs. Nearly 60,000 rent-stabilized apartments in the city were vacant last year. That’s an increase of 8,000 from the year before.

Expect more vacancies when the freeze goes into effect in October. When San Francisco implemented rent controls in the 1990s, housing supply dropped by 15 percent.

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… is from page 318 of my late, great colleague Walter Williams’s 2015 book, American Contempt for Liberty, which is a collection of many of Walter’s columns and essays; this quotation specifically is from Walter’s April 27th, 2011, syndicated column, “Smugglers as Heroes“:

[K]eeping in mind that not everything illegal is immoral and not everything legal is moral … smugglers are heroes of sorts. The essence of what a smuggler offers is: “Government tyrants want to either prevent or interfere with peaceable voluntary exchange among individuals. I can reduce the impact of that interference.”