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Peter Harrell warns that in a bill proposed by Lindsey Graham there is a provision that dangerously delegates more tariff-making power to the U.S. president. Two slices:

The day before Sen. Lindsey Graham died, he and a bipartisan group of colleagues announced that they had reached agreement with the Trump administration on a bill to impose new U.S. sanctions on Russia. Graham’s colleagues now want to pass that bill as a memorial to him. Congress should change it first. The bill as written would give President Trump a new legal tool to continue his destructive trade wars.

Congress is right to increase pressure on Russia, whose economy is under stress from earlier rounds of U.S. and European sanctions as well as Ukraine’s intensifying drone strikes against Russian oil refineries, military factories and other economic infrastructure. President Volodymyr Zelensky has called those attacks “long-range sanctions.” But the centerpiece of Graham’s bill would hand Mr. Trump a new tool to impose sweeping U.S. tariffs on countries that buy oil or gas from Russia. He would almost certainly use that tool as a legal pretext to threaten tariffs on American friends, allies and adversaries alike.

Since his second inauguration, Mr. Trump has overseen a historic increase in U.S. tariffs, which are at the highest levels since the 1930s. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, however, authorizes Congress—not the president—to impose tariffs. Mr. Trump has therefore had to rely on statutes in which Congress delegated slices of that power to the executive, and the courts have pushed back.

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The Senate’s Russia sanctions bill would give Mr. Trump a new legal tool to increase tariffs up to 100% on the countries that buy the largest quantities of Russian oil and natural gas. Bill supporters see this as a tool to target China and India, the two largest importers of Russian oil. But many U.S. allies also continue to import smaller quantities of Russian energy, often because of legacy energy infrastructure built years ago that can’t readily obtain supplies elsewhere. Jurisdictions importing Russian oil and natural gas this year include the European Union, Japan, Turkey, Brazil and South Korea.

Vague language in the bill authorizing the president to impose the same crippling tariffs on countries facilitating “oil sanctions evasion” could give Mr. Trump an even more flexible tool to threaten tariffs on countries that do a small amount of business with Russia’s energy sector. He could use these residual energy imports as the legal basis for sweeping tariffs on goods that the U.S. imports from these countries, even if his actual reason for imposing the tariffs has nothing to do with Russian energy and everything to do with his latest international feuds.

We have already seen Mr. Trump attempt this. Last year, before the justices ruled that IEEPA doesn’t include a tariff power, Mr. Trump used that law to impose 25% tariffs on India, purportedly over its imports of Russian energy. He never imposed energy-related tariffs on China, a much larger importer. The difference? Mr. Trump was seeking a détente in his trade war with China and was at odds with India over trade.

Consider how this might work today. Mr. Trump could use the new law to impose 25% tariffs on the EU, purportedly over its natural gas purchases but in reality because he is irate over European leaders’ reluctance to back his war against Iran, or because of a tiff with some European head of state. Meantime, he could impose a 1% tariff on China as he continues to seek a trade peace. Irrespective of Mr. Trump’s actual reason for imposing tariffs, courts would likely uphold them so long as he can show that the targeted country or jurisdiction did in fact import Russian energy, or had some nexus to “evasion.”

Megan McArdle reports on the sorry state of many academic ‘disciplines.‘ A slice:

Academics need to sell the public on the value of their project. They must convince people that the radical pronouncements of the Great Awokening were a terrible mistake, now corrected, and that they are pursuing truth, not political agendas. Many people in academia do understand this, including the administrators who commissioned that report.

But many others are still clueless. Even if they grasp, dimly, that something is seriously amiss, they do not understand what it will take to fix the problem. Their idea of a solution is to imperiously inform Americans they are wrong: wrong that academia has let politics infect its work, wrong that reform is needed, and wrong that there are two sexes, male and female.

They can get away with this in the classroom. They can play those lines for applause at disciplinary conferences. But in the world outside, “experts say” no longer works. Academics spent years lending their institutional credibility to various political projects. Now they are reputationally bankrupt. If they don’t repair the damage, and convince people to keep writing the checks, many institutions will eventually be financially bankrupt as well.

Here’s the first of David Henderson’s ten lectures, for the Peterson Academy, on economics.

Medicare-for-all does indeed mean higher taxes for all. A slice:

A recent poll by Echelon Insights found that 74 percent of voters who support the idea championed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) and other progressive lawmakers think raising taxes only on billionaires would cover all of Medicare’s costs.

Just 40 percent knew the truth: Medicare-for-all would require raising taxes on most taxpayers, including the middle class.

Even that is true only if Medicare-for-all means creating a government-run health care system along the lines of what exists in some other country. The version advanced by Abdul El-Sayed, a Democratic candidate for Senate in Michigan, does not resemble another country’s system or Medicare. The legislation that Sanders and Jayapal have introduced is so light on details that it’s not possible for the Congressional Budget Office to assess how much it would cost.

Logan Tantibanchachai writes about this reality:

Visa holders founded half of today’s Fortune 500 companies and a majority of billion-dollar startups. Current restrictions damage that competitive advantage and choke off future growth.

Ryan Bourne is not favorably impressed by J.D. Vance’s grasp of economics. A slice:

In the same chapter, Vance complains that economics has occupied the moral space vacated by declining religion. The deeper irony is that many political economists stood alongside Britain’s evangelical abolitionists in fighting slavery. The evangelicals saw humanity as brothers and sisters before God. The classical economists began from the secular premise that black people possessed the same agency, rationality, and right to choose as anyone else.

Economics earned the “dismal” epithet that Vance now repeats, in other words, not by calculating away human freedom but by taking it seriously.

Kyle Pomerleau busts myths about a proposed “windfall-profits” tax on oil and gas suppliers.

Timothy Taylor shares some thoughts on Joel Mokyr’s Nobel lecture.

James Pethokoukis decries “America’s stagnationist activist groups.” Here’s his conclusion:

Clearly the anti-data center movement is gaining ground, and that was true even before the New York permitting pause. As the bank JPMorgan explained in a note last month, “Data center buildout is shifting from an engineering-and-real-estate problem to a political-economy problem: who gets power, who pays for upgrades, and who tolerates the local impacts.”

Despite all the talk about the escalating power needs of AI infrastructure, it’s now obvious that AI optimists have been underpricing the social license issue. Specifically, how hard those aforementioned Down Wing forces will fight to keep their dominant position by exaggerating issues of electricity prices and water usage as their vectors. For these activists, the real issue is their dislike of techno-capitalism, as much as it is disdain for nuclear-powered AI data centers. Even if these data centers are all powered by small modular nuclear reactors and recycle all their water, the activist opposition will continue—perhaps even into orbit.

Roger Pielke, Jr., documents the continued decline of climate calamitism.

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… is from this July 16th, 2026, Wall Street Journal report on the AI company “Thinking Machines”:

“Central planning fails not because of insufficient intelligence, but because of the nature of productive knowledge: tacit, local, fleeting, and held privately by those who acquired it through their work,” the company wrote, citing Friedrich Hayek. “Attempting to aggregate knowledge for the use of a centralized intelligence faces the same challenge.”

DBx: Markets can no more be replaced by AI than they can be replaced by an abacus.

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The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board understandably is pessimistic about the coming consequences of the U.K.’s new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham. A slice:

Alas, here Mr. Burnham appears to have the wrong instincts. He supports greater state control over utilities, wants the government to take the lead on housing construction, and is on the prowl for other taxes to raise. It’s hard to tell where he stands on the economy-suffocating net-zero climate policies Labour has championed. He emphatically rebuffed a plea by former Prime Minister Tony Blair to revisit the more market-friendly version of Labour that worked in the late 1990s.

All that plays well with Labour’s noisy progressive flank and assuages members who are nervous about growing support for the Green Party to Labour’s left. But it won’t deliver the economic results voters demand. Mr. Burnham has a limited chance after he takes office to pivot, especially on matters such as welfare reform. It’s a good sign that he seems not to want to appoint Ed Miliband, a popular left-winger and net-zero true believer, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, in charge of economic policy.

Also critical of the apparent ignorance of Andy Burnham is Allister Heath. (HT Andy Morriss) A slice:

Even given the low bar set by recent prime ministers, this was a shockingly poor speech from our Prime Minister-designate, a farrago of nonsense, historical revisionism, blatant contradictions, economic illiteracy and character assassination.

Given Burnham’s demonisation of the 1980s – and thus of its principal architect, Margaret Thatcher, one of the just two truly great British PMs of the past 85 years – the Kumbaya politics was especially hypocritical, as was the nonsensical claim that he will be “pro-business” while renationalising all that moves.

Burnham claims to believe that he will end factional politics, a delusion born of his ludicrous appointment by acclamation. Following a colour-by-numbers approach to speech-giving, the new Labour Party leader believes his arrival will usher in “a new politics”, that he will govern on behalf of “forgotten places everywhere”, that he “will be a leader for all places”.

If that sounds like drivel, that’s because it is. Does Burnham really believe that a jaded, disillusioned public that has heard all of this before will be swayed by his remix of all of the old tunes? Or is his Messiah complex so pronounced that he believes that simply willing a revolution will automatically see it enacted?

If so, we are truly in trouble as a nation, though not as much as Burnham himself when he realises that there are no levers to be pulled to fix any of Britain’s pathologies.

He is the seventh PM in a decade and evidently has no clue what to do. We are living beyond our means, an ever larger welfare state sucking the lifeblood from a quasi-stagnant private sector economy that is now too small, too constrained by red tape and taxes and command-and-control policies to fund our ruling class’s socialistic ambitions.

“California’s billionaire tax is backfiring before it begins,” as reported by by Mohamed Moutii.

David Inserra explains what shouldn’t – but, alas, what today even in the U.S. nevertheless does – need explaining: “Broadcasters should not lose their licenses because they don’t broadcast a president’s speech.”

Juan Londoño argues that “the White House’s approach to frontier AI might be worse than an ‘FDA for AI’.” A slice:

The White House’s executive order on frontier AI supposedly set up a voluntary evaluation process for frontier AI models that, according to the text, should not be interpreted as a pre-release vetting or licensing regime. However, once Anthropic decided to expand access to its Fable and Mythos models, the White House responded by invoking export control powers that would prevent foreign nationals from accessing these models, even if they resided in the US. As Anthropic itself admitted, enforcing this mandate was so complex that there was no choice but to shut down the models. Before this incident, there was no indication that these export controls could be invoked, and Anthropic and the AI industry at large were caught off guard.

This episode clearly draws out the issues with the current evaluation regime: It is seemingly arbitrary; the industry has no clear and public standard over what would make a model “safe” or “dangerous”; and there is no clarity over what the executive can and cannot do to models it deems to be too dangerous to release. This uncertainty, as seen in recent examples, can disrupt not only AI companies but also businesses worldwide that rely on these products.

Timothy Taylor shares a research paper that finds a positive payoff to U.S. federal-government funding of R&D. A slice:

Let’s put all this in some perspective. The US GDP is about $30 trillion in 2026 (actually a little higher, but round numbers are useful here). Thus, the thought experiment of spending $30 billion more per year involves a spending increase of about 0.1% of GDP per year–and sure enough, after about 10 years, it raises per capita GDP by about 0.1% using either approach. This may look like a wash. But notice that the estimates here are based on increasing R&D for only a 10-year period, while the benefits are projected out over 30 years. To put this another way, the current costs of an overall boost in R&D spending–like long-term investments in physical infrastructure–are more than repaid over an extended period of time. But to get the long-run payoff, you need to pay the short-term costs.

[DBx: This finding runs counter to my priors, but a quick perusal of the paper reveals that the research appears to be solid. Question for advanced econ students: When public-choice realities are taken into account, what does this paper’s finding – assuming it to be sound – imply about additional federally funded R&D? The answer isn’t obvious (at least not now to me). Public-choice realities suggest, on one hand, that, because the positive payoff is long-run while the costs are paid in the short-run, too little of this funding is now occurring and, hence, additional funding would yield positive results. On the other hand, public-choice realities warn against trusting government officials to extend such funding in economically justified ways.]

Back in April, Chelsea Follett made clear that “calls for wealth redistribution rest on a faulty premise about inequality.” A slice:

Recent work on multidimensional inequality suggests that the world has not been drifting toward ever greater gaps, but that the rich and the poor have been converging in material comfort. Calls for global wealth taxes or massive new aid programs often rest on the assumption that international trade and economic freedom have failed to deliver broadly shared gains. Yet the long-term evidence suggests the opposite.

J.K. Lundblad tweets: (HT Scott Lincicome)

There is a misconception that protectionism will make the supply chain more robust by reshoring it.

Often, historical evidence suggests the opposite: protecting domestic production leads to more fragility by restricting the supply chains ability to adapt.

I also discussed this in my big tariff/trade essay:

“In 2022, for example, the US faced an extreme shortage of baby formula. The immediate cause was a suspected bacterial contamination at a major producer, which forced a temporary plant closure. The true cause, however, was a protected supply chain; imported baby formula faced high tariffs and red tape, which allowed the US formula market to be controlled by just three suppliers. When panic buying set in, the domestic supply chain couldn’t adapt, and store shelves emptied. The shortages were only resolved by importing formula en masse from Europe aboard military cargo jets.

To witness firsthand the effects of protectionism, we could look at the state of two industries that are perhaps the most protected under the guise of “national security” in the US: steel and shipbuilding. For decades, the government peppered these sectors with protective tariffs, subsidies, “buy American” requirements, etc. As a consequence, however, their inefficiency has become so severe that the United States now fears that it cannot produce the wares it needs in the event of a war. So, it is looking to outsource shipbuilding and steel-making to Korean and Japanese companies instead. In other words, efforts to ensure supply-chain independence have bred a desperate dependence on allies instead.

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… is the opening lines of William Graham Sumner’s brilliant January 1881 Princeton Review essay, “The Argument against Protective Taxes”

The most absurd assertion which can be put into language is that a thing (e.g., free trade) is true in theory but is false in practice. For, if free trade is not true in practice, something else, viz., restricted trade, is alleged to be true and beneficial in practice. It will therefore be a matter of scientific investigation to find out how restriction acts, what forces it brings into action, what are the laws of those forces, what are the conditions of successful restriction, etc. etc.-in short, to find out the theory and philosophy of restriction. The theory thus found will be “true” because deduced from observation and ratified by experience. But it was conceded, at the outset, that free trade is true in theory. Hence it would follow, if free trade is true in theory but not in practice, that two opposite and contradictory propositions about the same subject-matter could both be true at the same time. This is the height of absurdity. Any one, therefore, who makes this assertion is either guilty of very loose thinking, or else he seeks an escape, at all hazards, from rational conclusions against which he can no longer contend.

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The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board decries the juvenile reactions of prominent Americans, on the left and right, to the Canadian wildfires. A slice:

Allow us to clear the air: Canada has reported about 3,500 wildfires so far this year, which is in line with recent historical averages. It’s true that many decades of poor land management have resulted in overgrown forests in Canada, but the same goes for the U.S. The Trump Administration might tend to the federal government’s ill-managed forests before throwing stones at Canada.

As for the effects of climate change, a paper in the journal Nature Communications last year reported that fires in recent decades in North America are running far below historical levels (between 1600 and 1880). Even years “with particularly widespread fire during the 1984–2022 period,” the study said, “were not unprecedented in comparison with the active fire regimes of the historical period across most of the study region.”

All of this is too nuanced to fit into social media sound-bites. But maybe America’s political leaders could try to lower the temperature for a change rather than feed public furies.

George Will wants some hard questions about Social Security posed to political candidates. Two slices:

“Saving” Social Security by huge additional borrowing would intensify upward pressure on interest rates, hence downward pressure on economic growth. This could further worsen Social Security’s financing problems.

Recourse to general revenues also would transform the system that was sold to the country in 1935 as a self-financing contributory program. Few will notice, fewer will care. The change will mean another huge amount of borrowing, added to existing debt, which occasioned little and evanescent anxiety when, this year, its size passed that of U.S. gross domestic product.

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America’s kakistocracy has produced gerontocracy. Government’s biggest, most beloved program is wealth redistribution masquerading as retirement program. Social Security transfers wealth regressively, upward from today’s labor force to the elderly, who have had a lifetime of accumulation, and have paid off mortgages on homes that have risen in value.

Scott Yenor ponders the fate of sociology.

“Cato Institute research fellow Chelsea Follett joins James Hohmann to discuss Europe’s cultural and regulatory resistance to air conditioning.”

Jeffrey Miron summarizes the findings of a new study of the effects of protective tariffs.

Brian Arner asks “Which statute grants the president authority to tariff due to smoke?” – to which Scott Lincicome replies “The Soot-Hawley Act, obvs.”

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… is from Reason magazine’s February 1974 interview of Milton Friedman:

A high rate of monetary expansion would not be desirable but a free society can live with any rate of monetary expansion, provided there isn’t an attempt to eliminate its effects by price and wage controls. What a free society cannot live with is an attempt to repress inflation.

DBx: I suspect that even Friedman would agree that he here overstated the case that “a free society can live with any rate of monetary expansion”; at some point, such expansion becomes destructive in and of itself. But Friedman’s larger point is correct and important: As undesirable as inflation is, matters are made much worse if governments attempt to suppress increases in nominal prices, wages, and interest rates.

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Marian Tupy disabuses American socialists of their economically ignorant belief that successful entrepreneurs steal their wealth from workers and consumers. Two slices:

Early economists, such as James Mill and David Ricardo, theorized that the physical labor exerted to create a good is the real measure of its value. Karl Marx took the concept to its extreme: If labor creates all value, then profit must require unpaid labor, making every employer an expropriator and every fortune a crime.

Then, beginning in 1871, economists countered the labor theory of value. Carl Menger, William Stanley Jevons and Léon Walras demonstrated independently that value resides not in hours of toil but in the judgments of consumers. Writing a 500-page novel takes the same amount of physical labor as typing out 500 pages of the word “banana” repeatedly. Only the novel commands a price. Value is created whenever someone rearranges the world into a shape that others want. It is measured by the buyer, not the worker.

Entrepreneurs are the arrangers. Economist Israel Kirzner argued that entrepreneurship is alertness — noticing an opportunity that nobody else has found. The entrepreneur sees that resources combined in a certain way and priced at a certain level can be recombined into something consumers will value even more. The gap between the two is profit. Nothing is taken from workers, who are paid the wage they agree to, or from customers, who buy the product only when the purchase leaves them better off.

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A movement that believes wealth is stolen will tax it, cap it and make everyone poorer. Ideas drive growth, and ideas come from people who can profit from them. A world that cherishes entrepreneurs will enjoy advanced chips and revolutionary cures. A world that punishes its innovators will at least enjoy plenty of slogans.

“America has a huge trade surplus with Brazil. Trump just put 25 percent tariffs on Brazilian goods anyway.” Here’s a slice from another excellent piece by Reason‘s Eric Boehm:

Trump administration officials have offered a variety of overlapping and competing justifications for the new tariffs in comments to The New York Times, including “inadequate policing of deforestation” and the fact that Brazilian courts had tried to order “U.S. social media companies to take down certain political content.”

Those might be real problems, but how will tariffs address them? Forcing American businesses and consumers to pay higher prices on imports from Brazil seems like an odd way to combat deforestation or stand up for free speech.

“These tariffs are a blunt tool with a weak connection between the practices at issue and the American companies that will bear the costs,” Dan Anthony, executive director of We Pay the Tariffs, a nonprofit coalition representing more than 1,200 American small businesses, said in a statement. “Businesses buying everyday products from Brazil will now pay new tariffs because of disputes over digital payment rules and other policies they have nothing to do with.”

For all the talk about trade deficits, the new tariffs once again reveal that there are no principles underpinning the Trump administration’s trade policies. The president will use any and every justification to slap new tariffs on foreign imports and leave Americans with the bill.

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy, rightfully criticizes Congress for its indifference to the coming Social Security fiscal reckoning. A slice:

When politicians do raise the issue, they make the fix sound easy. Sens. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) want you to believe that eliminating the cap on payroll taxes would fix the problem. That solution fails on its own terms.

Using data from the Social Security Administration’s own actuaries, my colleague Jack Salmon demonstrates that scrapping the taxable maximum closes only 58% of the gap. National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru noted last month that it would push the federal marginal rate on top wages to an untenable 49.4%, and overall rates would climb past 60% in high-tax states like California and New York.

The senators aren’t alone in wanting to tax our way out of this problem. In one recent survey, 89% percent of Americans aged 65 and older favored protecting current retirees’ benefits even if doing so requires higher taxes on younger workers.

That position is popular only because it rests on the image of retirees living off nothing but Social Security. That image, partly an artifact of bad data, fails to capture the situation.

In a March 2025 government survey, 24% of seniors reported that Social Security supplies 90% or more of their income. But when Census Bureau researchers matched responses with IRS filings and benefits records, they found that retirees frequently omitted their 401(k) and IRA withdrawals, making the real figure only about 14%. Meanwhile, 58% of retirees draw less than half their income from the program.

The remaining 42% are the retirees that Social Security reform of any kind should protect. They already receive a raw deal under the current formula, which does a much better job of protecting wealthier seniors.

As the Cato Institute’s Romina Boccia and Ivane Nachkebia documented last month, seniors aged 65 to 74 had a median net worth of $410,000 in 2022, compared with only $135,600 for those aged 35 to 44 (who pay a significant share of the taxes). Roughly 34% of Social Security dollars go to filers with adjusted gross incomes above $100,000. Too often, Social Security is less a need-based program than a transfer of wealth from the young and unpropertied to the old and comfortable.

“Beijing wants to lock down AI. Washington should open it up” – so argues Mark Jamison. A slice:

America has repeatedly become the world’s technological leader not by keeping its innovations at home, but by making them indispensable abroad. American operating systems, cloud computing, software platforms, financial services, entertainment, and internet companies became global standards because businesses and consumers everywhere wanted to use them. This meant enormous profits for U.S. companies—and expanded influence for the U.S. It also ensured that America remained the top destination for global talent, and set the stage for future innovation that would further U.S. dominance.

We have the opportunity to do this again with AI. The United States leads the world in AI innovation and investment. Our frontier models have always been best-in-class. But the gap is narrowing.

Speaking of AI…. (HT Brian Mannix)

On Friday, Thinking Machines released its first manifesto, outlining its vision for a future in which AI was decentralized and built on local knowledge. The company, whose CEO, [Mira] Murati, witnessed the collapse of communism in her native Albania as a child, compared the current dominant AI paradigm of close-source frontier labs to “central planning”—great for bounded tasks like chess and math, but not for the real work humans do every day.

Stu Smith takes us “inside the rise of the anti–data center movement.” A slice:

Across the country, DSA chapters are taking up the data center cause. In Seattle, that has meant calls for a statewide moratorium on AI development, targeted at Microsoft and Amazon facilities in particular. In the Washington, D.C., region, Metro DC DSA has focused on blaming facilities in Maryland and Virginia for rising utility costs while advocating for community control of electrical infrastructure. A similar effort is underway in Arizona, where DSA activists are pushing to take over Tucson Electric Power, which has shown a willingness to work with data-center developers.

In New York State, these campaigns have found tangible political backing and influenced policy discussions and outcomes. At the DSA Ecosocialism event, State Senator Kristen Gonzales noted that the legislature had approved a bill establishing a one-year moratorium on data-center construction, allegedly to shift power away from Big Tech. In Ithaca, the local DSA is actively opposing a TeraWulf data center project—an opposition effort that has won the backing of New York State Representative Anna Kelles. Now that DSA has gained representation on Ithaca’s city council, members have said they intend to “electorally punish” those who supported and enabled the project, while continuing to push for a moratorium and pursuing legal action against TeraWulf.

Charlie Trumbull makes the case that “Trump’s boat strikes are crimes against humanity.”

Phil Magness, writing at his Facebook page, is less than favorably impressed with the intellectual abilities of scholars on the “new right”:

It’s genuinely amusing how all of the leading “intellectuals” of the new right – Deneen, Pappin, Hazony, Pecknold, Pinkoski – are complete lightweights.

Their “research” invariably shows signs of being way out of their depth and lacking even minimal competence in what they purport to describe. It could not pass peer review at even a 3rd tier journal specialized in the same subject areas. So they create their own publication ecosystem of blogs, vanity journals, and “popular” outlets that insulate them from basic scrutiny. And when they put something into print, it repeats basic errors that betray its shallowness.

So you get Deneen making sweeping claims about the American founding that contradict the founders themselves, or Pappin mistaking LaRouchie conspiracy theories for economics, or Pecknold claiming Catholic theological sanction for positions that senior Vatican officials have explicitly denounced, or Pinkoski peddling white nationalist dystopian novels as serious policy analysis, or Hazony trying to repackage incoherent right-Hegelian babble as if it was a derivative of Burkean political writings that he does not understand and has probably never even read beyond a superficial glance.

A functional scholarly ecosystem would have flushed these buffoons out a while ago. Then again, a functional scholarly ecosystem would have also flushed out Nancy MacLean etc.

Virginia Postrel tweets: (HT Scott Lincicome)

People getting sick from cyclospora or avoiding fresh produce to avoid sickness are all casualties of the superstition against irradiating food.

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… is from page 77 of Jerry Z. Muller’s 1993 book, Adam Smith In His Time and Ours [original emphasis]:

Smith did not believe that there was a natural harmony of interests in society. He believed that the public interest would be best served if every man channeled his self-interest through the market. But he realized that from the point of view of the individual producer or group of producers it was most beneficial to circumvent the competitive market with its attendant risks, and use all available means to prevent competition, in order to obtain the highest possible price for their wares.

DBx: Yep. And as Smith understood, no scheme to circumvent market competition in order to enable the few to profit at the larger expense of the many is more pernicious than protectionism.

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Smith died on this date – July 17th – in 1790.

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Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal.

Editor:

Brandon Farris’s defense of steel tariffs is defective (Letters, July 16). He cites a 2023 U.S. International Trade Commission study, but that study analyzed the 25% tariff then in effect, not the 50% rate imposed since then. It cannot vouch for today’s tariffs

The study also undercuts, rather than supports, Mr. Farris’s argument. Prices of final goods did rise only modestly. But the report found near-complete pass-through: foreign exporters barely cut their prices. American importers and the manufacturers and consumers downstream of them — not foreigners, as the administration claims — bore almost the entire cost.

The Commission found that “for downstream industries, the effects are largely negative…. The average annual decrease in production values for these industries was $3.4 billion during 2018–21.” Even so, the report calls its own findings incomplete, as it “focuses on short-term effects during 2018–21 and does not address long-term effects,” omitting consequences such as the drag on U.S. exporters from foreign retaliation, which it notes occurred but are not measured. Significantly, yet ignored by Mr. Farris, the report adds that it “is not an assessment of the complete, economy-wide impacts of the tariffs.”

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