Tweet

Wall Street Journal columnist Barton Swaim decries the hubris-swollen belief that government should be given vast powers to determine our economic destiny and, more specifically today, to regulate AI. A slice:

Leave that debate aside and examine the premise of the complaint that we don’t do all-encompassing collective efforts anymore. Maybe we don’t do them because they generate more ruin and folly than good.

The one great exception to that rule—the abolition of racial discrimination in 1964-65—involved the dismantling of state power more than its imposition. The War on Poverty, launched at the same time, succeeded in boosting the unearned income of the poor, but at the cost of making welfare dependency and its ill effects permanent features of American life. Six decades later, taxpayers spend well over $1 trillion a year to prosecute this metaphorical war. As John Early, Robert Ekelund and Phil Gramm showed peremptorily in “The Myth of [American] Inequality” (2022), average real income in the bottom fifth of earners grew by 681% from 1967 to 2017 when you include government benefits. Yet nobody claims the War on Poverty succeeded or that the poor have escaped immiseration. A well-meaning attempt to mitigate suffering by collective effort instead perpetuated it.

More recent salvific efforts also flopped. The 2009 “stimulus” bill—“the most sweeping economic package in U.S. history,” as President Obama called it—sent $825 billion sluicing through the economy in an effort to stave off recession and bring down jobless claims. The country moved out of recession, technically defined, and into a long era of anemic growth and stubbornly high unemployment. Later attempts to vindicate the 2009 stimulus almost always involve the conveniently unfalsifiable claim that the economy would have deteriorated further without it.

As for the most recent catastrophe, the 2020-21 pandemic, you have to search hard for robust defenses of lockdowns, school closures and blowout spending.

“Trump’s light AI touch keeps getting heavier” – so explains James Pethokoukis.

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy, exposes the serious foundational flaw in Thomas Piketty & Co.’s latest scheme to attempt to create the hell that they believe would be heaven on earth. A slice:

As such, the most important question for poor countries is not who gains most from growth. It is whether growth happens at all. The countries that are home to most of the world’s remaining extreme poor — places like Madagascar, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mozambique, Malawi and Burundi — have not grown for decades. Our World in Data’s Max Rosen points out that Madagascar’s GDP per capita today is roughly the same as it was in 1950.

The reason isn’t a lack of development aid. These are among the world’s most aid-dependent economies. The DRC has received tens of billions of dollars in foreign aid over decades and $1.3 billion in 2024 from the U.S. alone. In past years, Mozambique received as much as half of its government budget from foreign aid. These countries have been the focus of development programs, nongovernmental organization activity, World Bank projects, bilateral donor attention and charitable intervention for generations.

Countries don’t get stuck in extreme poverty because the world has ignored them. They get stuck because they do not produce. And they do not produce because the institutional conditions that make production possible — secure property rights, the rule of law, open markets, protection from predatory government — are largely absent. Countries ranking at or near the bottom of economic freedom indexes are also the poorest. Those that liberalize experience across-the-board income increases.

Economist Vincent Geloso’s research finds that economic freedom is one of the strongest predictors of who escapes persistent poverty and who stays trapped. Colin Doran and Thomas Stratmann have found much the same. The mechanism is straightforward: Property rights give people an incentive to produce. Lower regulatory barriers let businesses form and labor move toward opportunity. Freedom from predatory government encourages long-term investment. Remove these conditions and countries stagnate, no matter how much aid they get.

Scott Winship understandably continues to be skeptical of the empirical claims of Piketty-Saez-Zucman. (HT Scott Lincicome)

David Henderson argues that “Matt Zwolinski makes Emmanuel Saez’s error.”

David Clement explains what shouldn’t – but, alas, what today nevertheless does – need explaining: Tariffs raise the prices paid by buyers of tariffed goods. Two slices:

At the auto dealership, Anderson Economic Group estimated that for a domestically assembled vehicle, the combined effect of steel and aluminum input tariffs and the 25-percent tariff on imported parts adds $2,500 to $4,500 to the sticker price of a new vehicle.

For a fully imported car, S&P Global Mobility put the figure as high as $12,000. The National Automobile Dealers Association estimated an average increase of $3,000 to $4,000 across the new-car market. This is the inevitable result of taxing the steel used for every brake rotor, exhaust system, and engine block assembled in the United States.

A transmission set at $2,000 wholesale faces $500 in new tariff costs. An engine block at $5,000 will have $1,250 tacked on top.

…..

Tariffs also reach the grocery aisle. Steel and aluminum tariffs are estimated to increase the cost of canned food by 15 to 20 percent, and the same trend hits the beer fridge. The Beer Institute has documented that aluminum is the single largest input cost in American brewing. The US beverage industry paid more than $1.7 billion in excess costs through 2023 from Section 232 tariffs alone — and that was before the 2025 escalation.

The Cato Institute’s Tad DeHaven reports on the latest effort by Republicans to have the U.S. government take equity stakes in private companies – that is, the latest effort by Republicans to move the U.S. economy closer to being socialized. A slice:

The Senate Armed Services Committee appears ready to do what the Republican-controlled Congress should have put a stop to: write the Trump administration’s equity stake power grab into law.

Buried in the Senate-reported version of the latest National Defense Authorization Act is a new subtitle on “Equity Investments and Related Matters.” Its central provision, Section 1051, would give the Department of Defense’s Office of Strategic Capital (OSC) explicit authority to make equity investments in private companies. The bill would establish a new “Department of Defense Equity Investment Account” in the Treasury and authorize OSC’s director to use that account to make equity investments.

Democrats, of course, continue to be fond of wasting other people’s money.

Arnold Kling explains why systems get gamed. A slice:

Systems decay as people learn to game those systems.

I think that one could extend this into a general theory of institutional decay. Every business, religion, political system, or set of social norms is subject to being gamed. People will figure out how to use the rules and practices of the institution to gain personal advantage, at the expense of the overall health of the institution. If the institution manages to adapt and renew itself so that its incentives deter the worst sorts of gaming, it will survive. Otherwise, it will rot.

Ron Bailey shares news of this unfortunate reality: “Over 100,000 kids have died due to Greenpeace blocking genetically enhanced rice, new calculation shows.”

Tweet

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

Protectionism … gradually dulls our awareness of our comparative advantages as well as opportunities to pursue them. Tariffs and import quotas seek to offset foreign competition’s impact on a given domestic industry. For a time, they may even succeed. But such measures also discourage that industry from adapting and becoming more efficient. The more you protect an industry, the more inflexible and inefficient it will become. If protectionist measures are thus systematically applied to more industries across a state’s economy, the same inefficiencies and inflexibility will emerge everywhere, thereby weakening that economy and therefore a state’s ability to resource its national security needs.

Tweet

Eric Boehm breaks down the meaning of the Trump administration’s proposed use of tariffs to combat what it calls “structural excess capacity.” A slice:

Every year, there are many more airplanes manufactured in the United States than the country’s domestic airlines can use.

This is a rather straightforward fact, but it has some important ramifications for the Trump administration’s trade policies, so bear with me for a moment. During 2025, for example, Boeing churned out 600 commercial airliners from its assembly facilities in Washington state and South Carolina. Many of those planes were sold to foreign airlines and exported.

Last year was no outlier: The U.S. routinely exports billions of dollars worth of commercial aircraft and airplane equipment. We make more than we can consume, and we sell the rest to businesses in other countries. This excess manufacturing is not a problem. On the contrary, this is tremendous news for the workers at Boeing and for the company’s shareholders. It’s also great for those foreign buyers—airlines can purchase Boeing planes without first needing to develop a local airliner-production industry.

On the other hand, if America were limited to producing only as many airplanes as it could consume domestically, Boeing’s workers would have less to do, make fewer sales, and probably earn lower pay. Boeing’s shareholders and those foreign airlines would be worse off too. Everyone involved would be poorer.

But the same excess manufacturing capacity that makes Boeing a global leader in airplane production is now becoming a boogeyman for the Trump administration—at least when it is businesses in other countries that are doing it.

George Will praises an effort by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) to rein in the abuse of executive power. Two slice:

Their proposed legislation would inhibit government “jawboning,” defined (by Merriam-Webster) as “the use of public appeals (as by a president) to influence the actions especially of business and labor leaders.” The adjective “public” is underinclusive. One of the senators’ objectives is transparency about hitherto secret pressure.

During the pandemic, executive branch officials in the Biden White House, FBI and elsewhere frequently hectored social media platforms (YouTube, Facebook, Twitter) to adopt particular policies of “content moderation.” In plain language, censorship was the officials’ goal and, often, their achievement. (During the 2020 presidential election, the platforms also, absent government pressure, censored speech about Hunter Biden’s laptop.)

The Biden administration thought that content on the platforms was promoting “vaccine hesitancy” and doubts about “social distancing” and shutdowns generally. The officials wanted to suppress theories about covid-19’s origin (the lab-leak theory, now widely considered plausible). Two states and five individual social media users sued dozens of executive branch officials and agencies, seeking an injunction against them for pressuring the platforms to violate their speech rights by removing, obscuring or otherwise discriminating against their posts.

…..

The Cruz-Wyden bill is a response to executive misbehavior, and to judicial judiciousness, that requires Congress to legislate. Their bill affirms the principle that the government may not do indirectly (e.g., censor speech) what it is forbidden to do directly. The bill:

Would require government to make public certain kinds of communications with social media companies, artificial intelligence companies and broadcasters. And would establish that plaintiffs must prove only that government attempted censorship, not that its pressure by itself succeeded. And would provide for money damages, instead of mere injunctions, for plaintiffs when an offending official left office while a case wended its way through courts.

So, crude and sneaky overreaching by the executive was followed by the Supreme Court’s austere (and reasonable) refusal to overreach by ignoring principles of standing. This has prompted two lawmakers to respond. If Congress makes that response a law, there will have been a minuet of actions and reactions driven by each branch’s prerogatives, responsibilities and incentives. The separation of powers will have functioned as intended.

Also writing on the Cruz-Wyden effort to rein in executive-branch “jawboning” is Reason‘s J.D. Tuccilli.

My GMU Econ colleague Vincent Geloso reports evidence that shows that economic freedom doesn’t harm the environment. A slice:

For many, economic growth and environmental protection exist in direct tension. People with this belief generate policy proposals to permit growth while protecting the environment. For others, the tension is irremediable — they believe growth necessarily destroys. For these zealots, degrowth is the only way. For both groups, liberalizing the economy — allowing for more economic growth — carries at least a risk of environmental degradation.

In recent work with Justin Callais and Alicia Plemmons, published in Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, we show that there is no reason to worry. We used 49 cases of sustained economic liberalization since 1970 and measured their effects on outcomes such as death rates from air pollution, total greenhouse gas emissions, as well as emissions per capita and per dollar of economic output. In this context, liberalization refers to the adoption of policies that promote international trade, secure property rights, and lessen fiscal and regulatory burdens.

Comparing with similar countries that did not liberalize, we found that while GDP per capita increased 16 percent within ten years for liberalizers, environmental outcomes did not deteriorate. In fact, we found that death rates from air pollution declined modestly, while there were no effects of liberalization on total greenhouse emissions. Moreover, post-2000 liberalizers actually showed signs of lower emissions per dollar of economic activity and capita.

Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins decries the several factions within today’s U.S. government trying to effectively tax AI into unprofitability. Two slices:

What if the U.S. government decided it could award itself half your house without compensation? Nobody would ever invest in a house again. That’s the Bernie Sanders plan for AI, seizing half the industry’s investment without paying a cent.

…..

Anthropic founder Dario Amodei warns incessantly about a Chinese AI threat even as his company attracts a trillion-dollar valuation that makes sense only if it will be free to commercialize its innovations rather than see them absorbed into an all-embracing military-cyber-industrial complex.

Geitner Simmons tweets: (HT Scott Lincicome)

It’s extraordinary to see the federal government, with congressional acquiescence, leap into long-term ownership of private industry. I realize the administration is obsessive about maximizing its ability to exert “leverage” on every front it can (hence these equity stakes not only in the defense sector), but this calculated erosion of the government/private spheres is harmful economically, especially for the long term.

Tweet

… is from page 418 of Frank W. Fetter’s September 1933 American Economic Review paper on the Smoot-Hawley tariff – a paper titled “Congressional Tariff Theory“:

With nearly every member of both Houses professing belief in the principle of protection, the question as to what sort of protection is proper and what is not proper was frequently raised. The tests that were advanced to separate the just from the unjust were many, and often conflicting. Despite a pretense in the debates that there was some objective test of national welfare, the record of voting on individual items furnishes much evidence in support of the cynical proposition that sound protection was that which raised the prices of things produced by one’s constituents, and unsound protection that which raised the prices of things made by someone’s else constituents.

DBx: The justly infamous Smoot-Hawley tariff was signed into ‘law’ on this date – June 17th – in 1930 by President Herbert Hoover.

Tweet

… is from page 70 of Douglas Irwin’s vital 2017 history of U.S. trade policy, Clashing Over Commerce; Doug here is writing of the United States very soon after the Constitution was ratified:

Most Americans embraced the view that commerce was naturally beneficial and required no central direction, in part because they did not want to create an overly powerful national government that might play favorites with certain producers.

Tweet

Tyler Cowen warns that “if the U.S. blocks AI companies from exporting their models, some countries may delay AI adoption, while others will lean toward China.” Two slices:

A new line has been crossed: The U.S. government has finally declared an AI model too dangerous for unrestricted use. It’s the kind of move that could cripple AI progress in the U.S. and around the world.

I had the chance to work with Anthropic’s recently released, high-powered Fable 5 model, a version of Claude Mythos (I am a member of Anthropic’s Economic Advisory Board). But now the plug has been yanked. A federal dispute with Anthropic led the government on Friday to order an export control that requires Anthropic to withhold the model from any non-U.S. citizens. The only practical way to comply with that order was to take down the model altogether.

…..

Another result is that some countries may opt for an alliance with China and Chinese AI models, rather than the U.S. At least some of these countries are fence-sitters anyway, when it comes to choosing sides, and so lesser American reliability could tilt a few over the edge. In East Africa, for instance, current commercial connections with China are strong, and China has a reputation for not interfering in internal affairs. In this scenario, America would lose some of its global reach and influence.

Finally, many countries and companies will opt for open-source AI systems, where there is no kill switch. That will also empower Chinese AI over American AI, since the best open-source models come from China. That might sound okay, but it is still a big geopolitical loss for America, and possibly for the nations buying Chinese AI as well, if Beijing decides to exploit their dependence. Even in the absence of a kill switch, when it comes to servicing, installation, applications, and upgrades, those countries would look to China rather than to the U.S. Furthermore, the open-source models typically are worse than the best American-made proprietary models.

In sum, the inability of the U.S. government to reach an agreement with Anthropic translates into a big geopolitical loss for the U.S. It also means slower and inferior AI adoption for companies, schools, and countries around the world.

The Editorial Board of the Washington Post also sounds the alarm: “The government’s export ban on Anthropic’s models is exactly the wrong approach.” A slice:

It’s difficult to overstate how counterproductive that was. Cybersecurity has always been a race without a finish line. Attackers are constantly probing to find vulnerabilities to exploit in software, and defenders are always rushing to patch them before it’s too late. AI speeds the race up considerably. But, crucially, it’s also both the tool that finds the flaw and the tool for fixing it.

The problem is that while Anthropic’s models are widely considered to be among the best available at this moment, its competitors are not far behind. OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 is nearly on par with Anthropic’s flagship in unearthing software vulnerabilities, according to the London-based AI Security Institute.

Much cheaper Chinese models, though still not on the frontier, just keep getting better. By whacking Anthropic, the government hasn’t pushed back the cyberthreat. It just took an important tool out of the hands of defenders.

Worse, the mistake was predictable. Only 10 days earlier, the Trump administration signed an executive order about AI guardrails. The administration created a voluntary review process for frontier models, with an explicit promise that nothing in it would create a licensing or preclearance regime.

The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal decries the GOP’s ever-tighter embrace of the ‘progressive’ agenda of labor unions. A slice:

The U.S. House is still run by Republicans, though it’s hard to tell based on recent results. The latest left turn came last week when the House passed the Faster Labor Contracts Act (FLCA), which forces binding arbitration on companies if they don’t reach a new collective-bargaining agreement quickly when new labor unions are certified.

The bill received a House vote after seven Republicans signed a discharge petition to override the Speaker’s control over the floor. It passed, 230 to 193, with 20 Republicans and all Democrats in favor.

The bill shifts the balance of power to labor unions in collective bargaining since they know an arbitrator will step in and dictate a settlement if the parties reach an impasse after 120 days. Arbitrators tend to use industry standards in their judgments, which may not be appropriate for an individual firm. That means less incentive for union chiefs to compromise, and less power for individual workers who will have no say in arbitration.

Scott Lincicome explains why “Whirlpool is a poster child for tariffs — and not in a good way.” A slice:

It would be difficult to construct a clearer cautionary tale of how US protectionism can harm not only American consumers but even its intended beneficiaries.

Whirlpool has been one of the nation’s most vocal proponents of US protectionism since at least 2011. That year, the company requested antidumping and countervailing duties (AD/CVDs) on imported refrigerator-freezers and washing machines from South Korea and Mexico, resulting in significant new duties on the latter products. When foreign production of washing machines moved to avoid the duties, Whirlpool asked Uncle Sam to target imports from those countries too, eventually winning from the Trump administration “safeguards” on washers from every country except Canada.

In the years that followed, Whirlpool was involved in essentially every available legal channel for import protection – more than a dozen interventions under six different laws – and was often successful. Its Ohio facilities also have been the backdrop for two separate Trump administration events touting the President’s “America First” trade policies.

Beneath the surface, however, lie the mounting costs of Whirlpool’s advocacy. For starters, research shows that that the washing machine tariffs increased prices for both those units andcomplementary dryers, costing American consumers more than $800,000 per job created in domestic industry. Moreover, according to a 2023 US International Trade Commission report, the industry’s gains came from LG Electronics and Samsung Electronics’ new US facilities, while Whirlpool’s fortunes continued to decline.

“Leftists use Google Form to organize Stanford commencement walk-out against Google CEO.”

John Puri is correct: “Economic illiteracy is not unusual for progressives.”

Michael Strain makes clear that “sooner or later, America is going to have to reckon with the debt” – and he believes that such a reckoning won’t require a fiscal crisis. A slice:

The US hit a milestone this year. The size of the national debt eclipsed annual economic output. The ratio of debt to GDP is over 100 per cent for the first time since 1946, when the US had been borrowing to finance military spending during the second world war.

Today, debt service is the third-largest category of federal spending, behind only social security and Medicare — and, remarkably, ahead of national defence.

In Washington, analysts and politicians alike seem increasingly resigned to the idea that the only way the government will engage in fiscal consolidation is in the aftermath of a bond market crisis. But I am more optimistic that the normal democratic process could yet lead to deficit reduction.

A visitor – “Freddy” – from Germany to the U.S. is awestruck by America. Two slices:

Freddy found “the holy land” on his third day in America: a Taco Bell near Atlanta. When the German soccer fan landed in New York on June 5 to begin a six-week road trip with a couple of friends for the World Cup, he had about 11,000 followers on X. As he has traveled the country on a tight budget, posting about the wonders small and large he encounters along the way, his audience has grown to more than 600,000.

The camera-shy traveler posts as FreddyLA7, no last name given. As an enthusiastic, even awestruck, visitor, he has performed a public service by opening many Americans’ eyes, just weeks before the nation’s 250th birthday, to see clearly how much there is to savor and celebrate in America.

…..

“I love Americans,” he posted after arriving. “We were about to walk an hour to the stadium in the rain to save on an Uber, and the receptionist at the hotel we were parked in front of decided to drive us there.” From inside Auburn University’s 88,000-seat stadium, he posted, “This is the most ‘The European mind can’t comprehend this’ moment of my life.” Part of the spectacle: “There’s an eagle flying around the stadium.”

The night ended, naturally, with a run to a Buc-ee’s, where Freddy struggled to comprehend the world-within-a-rest-stop Buc-ee’s aesthetic, with gas pumps as far as the eye can see and slow-smoked Texas barbecue inside. Or as Freddy put it, with photos and three crying-face emojis, “DUDE LMAO THIS IS A GAS STATION.”

Quotidian American life has suddenly been made fresh when seen through a visitor’s eyes.

GMU Econ alum Paul Mueller is a careful student  of Adam Smith. A slice:

The institutional failures Smith excoriated — supply restrictions, state-sponsored overproduction, and laws penalizing poor workers — remain rampant today. Modern government intervention sabotages efficiency through the exact same three channels.

In the United States, protectionist state power insulates incumbent industries from new competitors. Certificate-of-need laws permit existing hospitals to block the entry of new medical competitors. Exclusionary municipal zoning laws choke housing construction. Restrictive occupational licensing rules shackle professions ranging from hair stylists and plumbers to medical doctors.

As Smith observed, the state triggers massive inequalities by “restraining the competition in some employments to a smaller number than might otherwise be disposed to enter into them.”

Arnold Kling reviews Batya Ungar-Sargon’s new book, The Jews and the Left. A slice from Arnold’s review:

The labor movement had its moderates who wanted to work within the capitalist system, and its socialists who wanted to overthrow it. Jews could be found in both camps. In either case, they were on the left. Ungar-Sargon fails to mention that in this era, the Democratic Party appealed to urban ethnic groups, perhaps with patronage more than policy.

Franklin Roosevelt’s corporatist New Deal appealed to the moderate wing of the labor movement, including many Jews. In my opinion, support for the New Deal is where Jews began to go wrong. The statist impulse of the left is unfortunate. In Brian Doherty’s Radicals for Capitalism, the most prominent libertarians are Hayek, Mises, Friedman, Rand, and Rothbard. All but Hayek were of Jewish extraction. Too bad that their view of markets did not prevail among Jews at large. Ungar-Sargon takes the more standard view of New Deal good, libertarian economics bad.

Perhaps what clinched Jewish support for Roosevelt was the antisemitism of many on the right. My father always justified his enthusiasm for FDR by referring to Father Coughlin, a radio broadcaster who was vitriolic against FDR and against Jews. Father Coughlin occupied the space in Jewish heads that Tucker Carlson occupies today.

Tweet

… is from pages 477 of the 1971 Augustus M. Kelley reprint of the 1880 Sixth American edition of Jean-Baptiste Say‘s 1803 A Treatise on Political Economy (Traité d’économie politique):

There is this grand distinction between an individual borrower and a borrowing government, that, in general, the former borrows capital for the purpose of beneficial employment, the latter for the purpose of barren consumption and expenditure. A nation borrows, either to satisfy an unlooked-for demand, or to meet an extraordinary emergency; to which ends, the loan may prove effectual or ineffectual: but, in either case, the whole sum borrowed is so much value consumed and lost, and the public revenue remains burthened with the interest upon it.

DBx: As an empirical matter, yes.

Of course it’s possible in theory for government to borrow and then use the funds productively. And, no doubt, some such use by government of borrowed funds has in fact occurred and might still occur. But the general thrust of Say’s point is correct and relevant: government borrowing is overwhelmingly used to fund wasteful current consumption. Resort to deficit financing of government expenditures allows today’s citizens-taxpayers to spend the money of tomorrow’s citizens-taxpayers, many of whom aren’t yet born. And when any group of people gets to spend other people’s money, that money is seldom spent wisely.

Tweet

Ilya Somin – a colleague over in GMU’s Scalia School of Law – shares Georgetown University Law School’s Peter Harrell’s argument that “the courts should rein in Trump’s proposed Section 301 tariffs as well.” Two slices:

Legal problems with USTR’s proposed tariffs start with the statute itself.

Section 301 authorizes USTR to investigate foreign trade practices and to impose tariffs if a foreign government violates the terms of a U.S. trade deal or engages in an “unjustifiable” or “unreasonable or discriminatory” trade practice that adversely impacts the U.S. economy. Specifically, Section 301(b), the provision USTR is relying on for the new tariffs, provides that if USTR conducts an investigation and finds that “an act, policy, or practice of a foreign country is unreasonable or discriminatory and burdens or restricts United States commerce,” USTR “shall take all appropriate and feasible action authorized under subsection (c)…and all other appropriate and feasible action within the power of the…to obtain the elimination of that act, policy, or practice.” (19 U.S.C. § 2411(b)). Subsection (c) then authorizes USTR to impose “duties or other import restrictions on the goods of…such foreign country for such time as the Trade Representative determines appropriate.”

Although the Supreme Court has never weighed in on Section 301, lower courts have, and held that USTR actions pursuant to Section 301 are subject to judicial review pursuant to the Administrative Procedure Act (APA). Simply put, USTR’s new proposed tariffs do not comport with the requirements of 301.

…..

Trump campaigned on tariffs and his win in 2024 gives him the moral and political authority to raise tariffs within the bounds of the law. A single electoral win, however, does not empower a President to upend the Constitution’s separation of powers or usurp Congress’s authority over trade. Potential challengers to Trump’s new Section 301 tariffs have strong arguments on their side, and the courts should continue to insist that Trump follow the law when he imposes tariffs, rather than rewrite them without Congress’s approval.

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy, calls for more attention to be paid to the work of economist Lant Pritchett and less attention paid to the work of socialist data-slicer-and-dicer Thomas Piketty. A slice:

Lant Pritchett of the London School of Economics and Addison Lewis of Brigham Young University have released a paper with a deceptively simple title: “Economic Growth Is Enough and Only Economic Growth Is Enough.“

Their target is a claim that has become fashionable in development economics: that growth is not sufficient to improve human wellbeing, that targeted programs and redistribution are “equally important,” and that poor countries should worry as much about the distribution of income as its growth. To this effect, Pritchett and Lewis cite a bunch of examples. The executive director of J-PAL, one of the most influential development research organizations in the world, put it baldly in a 2021 op-ed: “growth is not enough.” Yale’s Rohini Pande, director of the Economic Growth Center, wrote that growth “will not be sufficient to eradicate extreme poverty.”

This phenomenon, taken to its extreme, is what Piketty and his friends express when they argue against growth.

In that paper, Pritchett and Lewis set the record straight. They aim to prove something stronger about growth than a mere correlation: namely, that every general, plausible, cross-national measure of the basics of human material wellbeing has a strong, non-linear, statistically robust relationship with GDP per capita.

“Basics” here means what you’d expect: things like child mortality, nutrition, access to clean water and sanitation, shelter, primary and secondary schooling, and life expectancy. The floor of what a decent human life requires.

They construct multiple measures of the basics using entirely different methods, then compare them to GDP per capita. They also run three deliberate “data undermining” exercises to search specifically for indicators and weights that minimize their relationship to GDP per capita, to find the weakest possible result.

What they find is that regardless of how you measure the basics of human wellbeing (the Legatum Prosperity Index, the Social Progress Imperative’s Basic Human Needs index, the Oxford Multidimensional Poverty Index, or headcount poverty rates), the relationship with GDP per capita has four features that hold across every specification.

Ernie Tedeschi tweets: (HT Scott Lincicome)

Rising real net worth for people over their lifetime is par for the course. The typical Baby Boomer is indeed doing better than prior generations at the same age.

But, so too is the typical Millennial and Gen-Xer.

Neil Chilson and Adam Thierer explain why they are no fans of Kevin Hassett’s scheme of creating an “FDA for AI.” Two slices:

When National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett called for an “FDA for AI” that would formally license frontier AI models, we warned against such an approach. The Trump administration subsequently walked back those comments. Yet, the U.S. may be on the road to something far worse.

…..

This latest USG action signals a change. It significantly escalates the centralization of control over advanced computation in our country. Like a recent Executive Order, the new export control demonstrates the rise of national security interests in regulating AI. Increasingly, the administration is treating AI like a weapon.

Various experts have questioned how the new “arbitrary, post-hoc system” of model-specific export controls blocking foreign nationals would even work. Anthropic chose the seeming only route to compliance by shutting down everyone’s access – and that may have been the government’s goal. Others have highlighted the important First Amendment concerns raised by these export controls, characterizing them as “a prior restraint on expression justified by speculative risk.”

It’s easy to be cynical about this story. No firm has done more to whip up a panic about frontier model capabilities than Anthropic. As former White House AI czar David Sacks has interpreted it, “Anthropic is running a sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fear-mongering. It is principally responsible for the state regulatory frenzy that is damaging the startup ecosystem.” In fact, just days before all this went down, Anthropic posted a new call for governments “to block or deter the deployment of models that pose a significant risk of catastrophic harm.”

Also warning of the dangers of the Trump administration’s latest move on AI is Kevin Frazier.

Jason Willick documents the late historian Gordon Wood’s influence on the U.S. Supreme Court. A slice:

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.’s most significant opinion citing the historian is Moore v. Harper (2023) about how much leeway state legislatures have to set the rules of their elections. Progressives and the press feared the justices would unleash (presumably Republican) state legislatures to make partisan mischief, but Roberts wrote for a 6-3 majority that state courts could check the elected representatives.

After all, state courts after the American Revolution had to “impose restraints on what the legislatures were enacting as law,” as the chief justice quoted Wood. “Creation” shows how the founding generation blanched first at British royal authority in the 1770s, and then at the runaway state legislatures that came after American independence in the 1780s. That helps explain why Wood’s work might appeal to judges: The historian cast the Constitution as a bulwark against executive and legislative tyranny, and the courts at their best can restrain both.

Wall Street Journal columnist James Freeman reports that Thomas Jefferson had some help – including from George Mason – in writing his magnificent Declaration of Independence. A slice:

In Philadelphia 250 years ago, Thomas Jefferson was commencing work on a writing assignment in the upstairs of a house at what is now Market and South 7th streets. A couple of hundred miles to the south, on this day in 1776 Jefferson’s patriotic pals approved a helpful first draft: the Virginia Declaration of Rights. There was one pal in particular, George Mason, who served as the lead author.

Speaking of Jefferson and the Declaration, here’s Michael Gibson:

Even before Jefferson drafted the Declaration, abolitionist action was under way. In 1775, American Quakers formed the first antislavery society in the Western world. Rhode Island and Connecticut freed any slave imported into their territory. Pennsylvania taxed the slave trade out of existence and abolished slavery in 1780; Vermont did so in 1777. The First Continental Congress banned the slave trade in 1774, though the issue later reverted to the states. In the 1780s, enslaved people in Massachusetts won their freedom by arguing before the state’s highest court that slavery violated their rights as free and equal men.

True, nationwide emancipation would not come for nearly another century, and only at immense cost and tragedy. The setbacks were many and horrific. Yet it must also be acknowledged that slavery’s eventual dismantling began only because the philosophy of the American Revolution contained the seeds of its destruction. The Declaration was foundational.

Megan McArdle – reflecting on the primary victories of the execrable Ken Paxton in Texas and the execrable Graham Platner in Maine – writes wisely about politics and principles. Here’s her conclusion:

What’s that, you say? Politics ain’t beanbag?

Republicans have been saying so for 10 years and it’s gotten them only grief. Many have kept their jobs, but at great cost. They’ve been left with a badly weakened party that will either struggle to win elections or need to rebuild itself as something other than a cult of personality. Their jobs now mostly consist of explaining the inexplicable and defending the indefensible.

It’s a pity to sell your soul for power. It’s an embarrassment to sell it for nothing.

Reason‘s Billy Binion ponders Trump’s UFC spectacle.

Tweet

… is from page 88 of Art Carden’s and Ilia Murtazasvili’s paper “W.H. Hutt: An Economist for the Twenty-First Century,” which is a chapter in the 2026 book Unsung Heroes of the Market: The 24 Underrated Economists You Need to Know – a volume edited by Robert Whaples, Christopher Coyne, Gregory Robson, and Diana Thomas [original emphasis; footnote deleted]:

His [Hutt’s] criticisms of strike-threats were grounded in his conviction that it was impossible to transfer wealth and income from capitalists as a class to workers as a class for several reasons. First, workers who saved and invested were themselves capitalists. Second, any gains workers enjoyed from the strike-threat system came at the expense of other workers who were shut out of the market and consumers who were paying higher prices. Throughout [Hutt’s 1973 book] The Strike-Threat System, he argued that the system’s apologists failed to answer the important ethical question about why one class (investors) should be expropriated for the benefit of another class (workers), noting further that “the easy assumption that investors are rich and workers poor is rather dubious today.” With so many Americans owning the means of production through pension funds and retirement accounts, it is even less clear in the twenty-first century.

DBx: Indeed so.

W.H. Hutt (1899-1988) was one of the finest economists – and most consistent advocates of liberalism – of the past 100 years. His work, unfortunately, is not well known. Also unfortunately, over the past few years Hutt has become the target of libelous accusations issued by pseudo-scholars who are hell-bent on falsely portraying Hutt as an illiberal racist in order to have a straw man to destroy in their dogmatic war against the liberal market order.