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Marcus Witcher is a fan – understandably so – of George Selgin’s remarkable 2025 book, False Dawn. Two slices:

Overturning the FDR as Keynesian narrative is just one of George Selgin’s contributions in False Dawn: The New Deal and the Promise of Recovery, 1933-1947. Selgin’s main argument is that Roosevelt’s New Deal did not result in economic recovery. He is critical of the New Deal as a recovery program, but is careful to note that he is not evaluating its effectiveness when it came to relief and reform, which along with recovery were the stated goals of the Roosevelt administration. Throughout, Selgin analyzes “particular New Deal policies to see how each influenced the course of production and employment,” and he concludes that most of them were not successful.

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In what is the most comprehensive, thorough, and balanced book on the subject, Selgin does more than just overturn the narrative that FDR was a Keynesian. He delves into each of the historiographical debates from 1933 to 1947 in a level of detail that intimidated my undergraduate students when I assigned this book to my American Economic History class last semester. But as my students worked through the book, at a pace much slower than they wanted, they learned to appreciate Selgin’s fair description of scholars who disagreed with him.

The result is the closest authoritative single volume on the New Deal and recovery. I plan to continue using it in class, and I recommend that anyone interested in a detailed account of the New Deal and recovery purchase a copy of False Dawn. You will not be disappointed.

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy, writes that Thomas Piketty is a real-world example of an Ayn Rand villain. A slice:

Writer and philosopher Ayn Rand was often accused of inventing cartoonish villains. Rogues like Ellsworth Toohey in The Fountainhead would scheme to seize the global economy’s commanding heights in pursuit of a distorted sense of justice. But the people who hold such ideas don’t just appear in cartoons or in Rand’s novels.

Enter Thomas Piketty and company.

In early June, Piketty—the French economist whose work on inequality has made him something of a rock star even while being serially challenged for methodological errors, data imputations, and cherry-picked baselines—and his large team unveiled what can only be described as a villainous plan. It’s a comprehensive program for global managed decline dressed up in the language of climate justice and equality.

The plan is far too ambitious for most nations to accept. But given the influence of Piketty and his circle of economists on U.S. wealth taxes and prominent global policy proposals, we should take its underlying ideas seriously.

Piketty’s plan would cap gross domestic product (GDP) per capita in wealthy countries at roughly $69,000, far less than America’s current $94,430. The plan would also limit annual global economic growth to between 0 percent and 0.5 percent. Monsieur Piketty would allot only 0.115 percent annual growth to the U.S, whose GDP has expanded by more than 3 percent on average since 1930. This would hurt not just the billionaires but every American.

The plan would mandate an international three-day work week and reduce construction activity by 70 percent, manufacturing by 87 percent, and even leisure-sector activity by 58 percent. There would be massive and punishing trade actions against noncompliant countries.

It envisions a “Global Justice Fund” financed not by taxing carbon but by global wealth and income taxes. This fund would be 20 times the size of current development aid and would be administered by a new international bureaucracy answerable to heaven knows who.

Don’t be fooled by Piketty’s training as an economist. This is not economic thinking. Consider the utter inconsistency of relying on a vast stock of wealth (mostly from the U.S.) for redistribution while suffocating long-term growth to near zero. Much of the value of the assets needed to finance this scheme would be destroyed. It is also disqualifying to claim that sub-Saharan Africa will grow at 4 percent if we crush the economies that provide the capital for its investments and buy its exports.

Thomas Piketty, sadly, isn’t the only famous flesh-and-blood economist who behaves as if he or she was dreamed up as a villain by Ayn Rand – as Noah Rothman explains. Two slices:

It was an exhibition in moral blackmail masquerading as an argument. It made no attempt at persuasion. Rather, it was a fundraising pitch aimed at the already converted.

That explains why the article published Wednesday in The Guardian by Thomas Piketty, Joseph Stiglitz, and their four other left-wing economist co-authors made such a splash.

The very first sentence of the article, which contends in its headline that “growth” (bracketed with scare-quotes) is “a doomed strategy,” fatally undermines its premise: “We live in an age of manufactured scarcity.”

No, we don’t.

Globally, households consume roughly $40 trillion more today in goods and services than they did at the turn of the century, and not because those goods and services have become more expensive.

In that same period, the average price of consumer electronics collapsed. The cost of important but nevertheless discretionary goods like clothing, furnishings, and new cars is essentially flat. It’s in markets where there is substantial state intervention — food and housing, childcare and medical care, and education — that consumer costs have ballooned over the last quarter century.

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“What is different today is that the majority of the world’s poorest people are stuck in economies that have been stagnating for a long time,” wrote Our World in Data’s Max Roser.

Countries like Madagascar cannot redistribute their way to wealth because there is little to distribute. Mozambique and the Democratic Republic of Congo have stagnated for decades as they cling to policies that discourage foreign investment and domestic enterprise. The Central African Republic cannot attract wealth because it is beset by the corruption and caprice that flourishes in state-managed economies that are more vertically than horizontally structured.

The Guardian’s cavalcade of progressive economists accurately note that sticky poverty is a product of “policy choices.” After all, “If governments can manufacture poverty, they can also dismantle it.” They’re right, as the post–Cold War era has amply proven. But they’re not talking about the governments who maladminister their countries and deprive their people of the opportunity to flourish. They’re talking about the Western world, which they assume (there is no effort to prove the claim) owes its largess to the exploitation of the developing world.

At this point, the article devolves into a dog’s breakfast of Marxian tropes and appeals to global proletarian camaraderie.

Here’s Scott Lincicome on Adam Smith. Three slices:

The Wealth of Nations is also a deeply, savagely political book, with practical insights into how commercial policy really gets made—insights that found a home in modern public choice theory and are evident across generations of U.S. trade politics.

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In the early days of the republic (back when government was really small), tariffs were the primary means of both raising revenue and doling out “rents” to businesses that organized and lobbied for them. The wonderfully named Tariff of Abominations (1828) was heavily influenced by Northern textile and iron producers. The post-Civil War decades were a golden age of tariff rent-seeking, with the U.S. iron, steel, wool, and sugar industries essentially writing U.S. tariff schedules. As I’ve documented at Cato and as Dartmouth economic historian Douglas Irwin thoroughly chronicles in his great book, Clashing Over Commerce, 19^th-century tariff lobbying was in many respects an incubator for the entire U.S. lobbying and interest-group machine that exists today. And it began because American trade policy was openly auctioned off to the highest bidder.

The pinnacle of 20^th-century congressional tariff cronyism is the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930. As economic historian Phillip Magness has documented, tariff-loving congressional Republicans gave industry lobbyists an opportunity for even more price-hiking import protection, and the latter descended on Congress en masse: “Special interests flooded committee rooms, exchanging cash under the table for favorable rates to insulate themselves from foreign competitors amid the unfolding [economic] downturn.” Almost everyone got his own tariff line item, and average tariff rates on dutiable imports hit almost 50 percent, triggering a retaliatory spiral that deepened the Great Depression.

The Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act of 1934 (RTAA) was Congress’ institutional attempt to restrain itself by delegating trade negotiations and tariff authority to the executive, and it was a move Adam Smith would likely have applauded. The idea was to reduce corporate rent-seeking in Congress by taking tariff rate-setting out of legislators’ hands and by getting U.S. exporters to balance protectionist interest groups by conditioning new market access abroad on continued openness to imports.

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Contrary to the common characterization of Adam Smith as a naïve ideologue, we see here that he understood well the deep structural obstacles to free trade from both the public and, more importantly, from organized industry. The latter’s resistance is classic public choice: Protectionism’s concentrated benefits and diffuse costs mean that protected industries will fight like hell for trade protection—and against reforms. Companies and workers, as well as their communities, suppliers, and political representatives, also capitalize gains from tariffs as higher asset values, wages, and political capital—meaning that these groups all stand to lose real money if protection is removed (the so-called “transitional gains trap”).

Meanwhile, the benefits of trade liberalization—lower prices, more efficient resource allocation, dynamic gains, economic growth, etc.—are surely real and, in fact, much larger in the aggregate than those won by the protectionist groups. But these improvements are smaller per person, invisible, and unorganized. So, we don’t lift a finger.

This dynamic means that it’s extraordinarily hard to repeal protectionist policies, even ones that are universally acknowledged as costly and failed. And the U.S. record again bears this out. We still impose tariffs of almost 50 percent on cheap shoes even though the policy clearly harms American consumers (especially poor and large households) and the U.S. has essentially no cheap shoe industry. Big Steel has won a century of protective measures yet remains a global laggard while downstream manufacturers shrivel due to artificially high input costs. The Jones Act has presided over the long and slow degradation of U.S. commercial shipbuilding and the merchant marine, but even emergency waivers are hard to come by because of a notorious Big Ship blockade (get it?). Heck, even after it was clear that U.S. tariff and nontariff barriers helped cause the 2022 baby formula crisis, those barriers snapped right back into place once most people stopped paying attention—thanks in large part to the efforts of Big Dairy.

Wall Street Journal columnist Joseph Sternberg is correct in this: “Few deceptions in American politics are quite so pernicious as the notion that the Social Security trust fund exists.” A slice:

Technically, there is a line item in the ledger of the Social Security Administration marked “trust fund.” Two, actually—one for the old-age retirement benefit and one for the working-age disability program. Superficially, reports of the trust funds’ declining fortunes are alarming. The old-age fund will have run dry by late 2032, several months sooner than previously estimated, the Social Security Trustees warned in an annual report this week. Combined, the two trust funds will be empty by 2034.

But this is all fictional, or notional if you want to be polite. The programs for several decades received more income via payroll-tax revenue than they paid out in benefits. Congress directed the surplus into the trust funds, on the theory that the pot of money would be available later if tax revenues fell below benefit payouts. But rather than invest those surpluses into the private sector as a large defined-benefit pension manager would, Congress directed that Social Security “invest” only in special-issue U.S. Treasury bonds.

The trust funds therefore represent borrowing by one hand of government from another. This transferred the cash to Congress to spend in the flush years, while putting the Treasury on the hook to redeem the bonds out of general revenue or borrowing once Social Security payouts began to exceed payroll-tax revenue. The Treasury already has been funding a portion of Social Security benefits since 2010, the year in which benefit payouts exceeded payroll-tax collections for the first time. The cost in 2025 was $160 billion and will hit $300 billion a year by 2030.

So when you get word that the trust funds will “run out of money” soon, that’s a political rather than a fiscal warning. The previous political-economy equilibrium regarding Social Security is expiring, and a new one will have to be found.

William Watkins urges us Americans to “celebrate the Fourth of July. But don’t forget the Twelfth of June.” Two slices:

Naturally, the main event of America’s 250th anniversary celebrations will be the Fourth of July, in honor of the Declaration of Independence. But a little tailgate party would be appropriate for the Twelfth of June. For it was on that date, 250 years ago, that Virginia’s Declaration of Rights was adopted.

Written primarily by George Mason, Virginia’s declaration inspired Thomas Jefferson in writing the nation’s founding document. It set forth in plain language America’s first principles and provided guideposts for the establishment of a republican government.

It’s no accident that this seminal declaration originated in Virginia. Jamestown, founded in 1607, put many of those principles and structures into action well before 1776. As Lyon Gardiner Tyler — son of President John Tyler and himself president of William & Mary from 1888 to 1919 — observed, “jury trial, courts for the administration of justice, popular elections in which all the ‘inhabitants’ took part, and a representative Assembly” were created in the Old Dominion “before any other English settlement was made on this continent.”

In the first section of the Declaration of Rights, Enlightenment thought and Christian principles intersect to affirm the equality of all men and their possession of rights such as “the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.” If this language sounds familiar, it’s because another Virginian — Jefferson — borrowed from it when composing the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence.

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So, yes, on July Fourth, by all means heartily cheer the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. But to understand the principles behind the American Revolution and republican government, dust off George Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights and study its plain language. It is essential to discerning the pillars of America’s government and the purpose of the nation’s independence.

GMU Econ alum Bryan Cutsinger argues that May’s increased rate of inflation in the U.S. is “more than an energy story.” A slice:

Taken together, the May data point to something more than a passing energy shock. Above-target inflation that keeps drifting higher, alongside a labor market near full employment, is hard to square with the view that oil alone is to blame. Supply shocks change relative prices; they do not, by themselves, push the overall price level up year after year. That requires excess nominal spending, which grew 5.9 percent over the year through the first quarter — well above the roughly 4 percent pace that prevailed before the pandemic. By that standard, the recent run of inflation looks less like a temporary disruption and more like a monetary phenomenon.

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… is from pages 479 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):

National loans of every kind are attended with the universal disadvantage of withdrawing capital from productive employment, and diverting it into the channel of barren consumption.

DBx: Say might be fairly accused here of overstatement – but just barely. It is, of course, possible for funds borrowed by governments to be used productively, and history surely offers some examples of such productive borrowing. But because (as Say understood) government borrowing today is paid for by citizens-taxpayers tomorrow, today’s citizens-taxpayers who can easily resort, through government, to borrowing are especially likely to overspend. No one spends other people’s money with great care, and when many of the people whose money is being spent today aren’t yet born, the spending today of borrowed funds is especially likely to be extravagant and wasteful.

None of what’s said here implies that government spending that’s funded with current tax revenues is invariably wise, prudent, and productive. Of course it isn’t. But at least some subset of today’s citizens-taxpayers feel somewhat the burden of the higher taxes that they pay to fund such spending. But with deficit financing of government spending, today’s citizens-taxpayers do not at all feel the burden of the taxes that must eventually be collected somehow in order to pay for this spending.

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The Wall Street Journal just released this new video – featuring the heroic voices of, among others, Scott Atlas and Jay Bhattacharya – on the authoritarianism and terror that were imposed on much of humanity earlier this decade by covidians.

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Reem Ibrahim reports on the U.S. House of Representatives just passing “a ‘pro-worker’ bill that takes power away from workers.” Two slices:

On Tuesday evening, the House of Representatives passed the Faster Labor Contracts Act (FLCA) in a 230–193 vote, with 20 Republicans crossing party lines to vote in support of the Democratic-led legislation. The bill, which aims to speed up first contract talks after workers unionize, now moves to the Senate.

The bill has been celebrated by a growing consortium of populists that has taken over the Republican Party.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.), who has sponsored the Senate version of the bill, said he was “glad to see the House has done the right thing for working-class Americans.” He added, “We need real labor reform that puts workers first.” Rep. Pete Stauber (R–Minn.), who cosponsored the bill in the House, said he was “proud to partner” on the bill to “hold employers accountable and ensure workers have a real voice at the negotiating table,” adding that “when our workers succeed, our entire nation succeeds.” The bill has also been heralded by Oren Cass, founder of American Compass, who described it as the “best opportunity yet for conservatives to show they support strong labor laws and the rights of workers.”

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The FLCA would mandate a federally supervised arbitration panel to impose contract terms on the entire workplace, meaning that many workers would lose the ability to negotiate for themselves. Their wages, hours, benefits, and working conditions could be settled by union officials they did not support, and government bureaucrats they did not vote for.

Rep. Tim Walberg (R–Mich.) made this very point on the House floor. He argued the bill actually “erodes workers’ rights” and that a “government-appointed arbitration panel” would impose a contract if the parties do not reach an agreement within the bill’s timeline.

“Supporters of this bill assure businesses and workers that it is about worker empowerment and efficiency,” Walberg said. “I may be misremembering the definition of empowerment, but I can guarantee it does not mean taking away a worker’s right to vote on his or her own contract and giving that power to a Washington bureaucrat with no stake in the outcome.

The Editorial Board of the Washington Post reports on Donald Trump’s new love: inflation. A slice:

Fiscal policy isn’t helping. So long as Congress runs a deficit of $1.8 trillion a year, the economy will stay overheated, pushing prices higher. Reports from the Treasury Department this week confirmed that the federal government has already borrowed $1.2 trillion in the first eight months of this fiscal year and is projected to borrow at least $2 trillion by the end of September.

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy, talks with Noah Rothman about left-wing violence.

Jennifer Huddleston and Tad DeHaven explain what shouldn’t – but, alas, what today nevertheless does – need explaining: “Government ownership isn’t the answer to AI anxiety.” Two slices:

Artificial Intelligence (AI) policy shouldn’t begin with the presumption that an emerging technology requires new forms of government control. In fact, the history of American technology policy shows that a light-touch approach allows consumers and innovators to find the best uses for technology. The light-touch approach enables companies to respond to the problems and demands of their consumers rather than those of the government, helping American companies become industry leaders.

Yet concerningly, a new bad policy idea intended to support American leadership in AI is emerging on both the Left and the Right. President Trump has floated a possible federal “partnership” with major AI companies, in which the public could receive “pieces” of those companies and benefit from their success. The details are unclear, but all signs point to the administration seeking to acquire equity stakes, which it has done with over 20 companies starting last year.

On the Left, Senator Bernie Sanders has been more explicit. His proposed American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act would impose a one-time 50 percent tax on the largest AI companies, paid in stock. The government would then use voting shares and board representation to block decisions it deemed harmful and push decisions it deemed beneficial.

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If the government also becomes a shareholder, it would have financial and political incentives tied to the success of some firms over others, possibly making it harder for smaller or newer companies to challenge government-backed incumbents and weakening the market’s competitiveness.

A regulator may hesitate to enforce rules that could reduce a government-backed company’s valuation. A procurement office may favor a company in which the government has a direct interest. Or a president may pressure companies to serve political goals while presenting that pressure as stewardship of the public’s investment.

Want to know why the price of water is rising? GMU Econ alum Julia Cartwright has some answers.

Julian Simon would have loved – although not been surprised by – this development.

My GMU Econ colleague Bryan Caplan debates Simon Hankinson on ICE deportations.

Brad Thompson remembers his dissertation director, Gordon Wood.

Also remembering Gordon Wood is the historian Alan Guelzo. A slice:

Wood’s trademarks were his strict attention to written sources, and his relative indifference to social, cultural, and ethnic history. But he balanced that indifference by his exquisite attention to the most minute changes in voice by pamphleteers and newspapers, even in the use of political vocabulary. When Creation was published in 1969, Wood was considered avant-garde because his revolutionaries seemed to pay no attention to the restrained and lofty political models of Greece and Rome. But he would remain just as resistant to the import of more recent ideological fashions into history writing, and especially the attempt to convert historical process into broad binary categories of oppressed/oppressor or settler/indigenous. In 2019, he broke with a large community of historians when he expressed his skepticism toward the 1619 Project’s proposal that slavery was the dominant fact of American life and that the Revolution was a device for protecting it. In Wood’s eyes, this was absurd. The 1619 Project might be pardoned as an example of over-wrought journalism, but it should not be mistaken for sober-sided history-writing, and it was important for the life a nation for historians to say so. “We all want justice,” he wrote, “but not at the expense of truth.”

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… is from page xxvii of Michael Boskin’s Foreword to the 1986 volume, edited by Dwight Lee, Taxation and the Deficit Economy:

The short-run horizon of our political process is particularly pernicious in dealing with policies that transfer resources across lifetimes and between generations. Our most important policies in this regard are our public debt, Social Security, and capital income taxation. The lack of a vote by unborn generations aggravates the political and ethical dimensions of these policies immensely.

DBx: Yes. Although written 40 years ago, Boskin’s words are today as true and relevant as they were when the ink used to print them was still wet.

Even if – contrary to fact – accumulated government debt poses no fiscal problem for the government, such debt represents today’s citizens-taxpayers living at the expense of tomorrow’s citizens-taxpayers. The ability to live at the expense of other people who do not consent to be hosts to parasites is not only a recipe for economic waste (if not necessarily to fiscal crises), it is also unethical. Financing government spending with borrowed funds is no less wasteful and no less unethical than would be financing, say, your household’s spending with funds that you drain, without permission, from your neighbors’ bank accounts.

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Here’s a letter to a Facebook friend.

Keith:

Thanks for sending along Oren Cass’s and Daniel Kishi’s attempt to rationalize Trump’s punitive taxes – a.k.a. tariffs – on Americans’ purchases of imports. As you realize, their essay is filled with several fallacies, both factual and theoretical.

Let me address here the fallacy that you explicitly highlight, which is revealed in these two passages meant to justify Trump’s new rationale for raising tariffs on imports from countries that allegedly do too little to combat “forced labor”:

Capital moves not to where labor is most productive but to where it is most easily exploited. Cheap labor paid in proportion to its output is just unproductive labor; what the capitalists want is productive workers they can still pay poorly….

The new forced-labor tariffs are the leading edge of a larger ambition: a trade policy that makes capital compete on how productively it employs workers, not on how easily it can exploit them, and that restores a level playing field for Americans.

In other words, the Trump administration’s new tariffs, we are to believe, are an attempt not merely to reverse the pattern of global capital going to countries where worker productivity is high but worker pay is low, but also to ensure that more of that capital moves to the U.S. where it will employ American workers.

Overlook the fact that increasing the amount of foreign capital invested in the U.S. would increase U.S. trade deficits – the same deficits that both Oren and the president often bemoan. That Oren and Mr. Kishi seemingly are unaware of this contradiction is reason enough to dismiss their brief for the tariffs.

Instead, note that their tale is contradicted by facts.

In all but one of the ten years 2015 through 2024, the country that received the largest amount of foreign-direct-investment capital is the United States. (The U.S. ranked second in the pandemic year of 2020, receiving slightly less FDI than China.) Over that ten-year period, the U.S. received a total of $2.95 trillion in FDI, which is twice the amount receive by second-place China, and 20% of all FDI.

Further, as examination of the top-ten recipients of FDI reveals (see attached), nearly all of these countries – places such as Canada, the U.K., France, Germany, and the Netherlands – are wealthy, high-wage countries.

The U.S.’s #1 position isn’t unique to those ten years. Over the 50-year period since the U.S. began running annual trade deficits (in the mid-1970s), the country that received the most FDI is the U.S. By far. Its 20% to 25% percent of all FDI over this half-century is at least double the amount of FDI received during those years by the country that received the second largest amount of FDI, the U.K.*

These data are neither esoteric nor difficult to access. And they refute, as surely as economic data can refute any claim, Oren’s and Mr. Kishi’s assertion that global capital has been avoiding the U.S. and other high-wage countries in order to take advantage of low-wage “forced labor.”

Sincerely,
Don

* Data gathered, with Claude’s help, from various issues of UNCTAD’s World Investment Report.

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The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal decries Trump’s latest round of tariffs punitive taxes on Americans’ purchases of imports. Two slices:

Courts keep knocking down President Trump’s border taxes, but he keeps imposing them, no matter the economic or (soon) the political harm. His tariff fixation is as unmovable as Bernie Sanders’s loathing for the rich.

The U.S. Trade Representative last week teed up new tariffs of 10% to 12.5% on some 60 countries. After the Supreme Court struck down the President’s emergency tariffs in February, the Administration invoked Section 122 to impose a 10% across the board tariff. A federal court last month ruled those tariffs unlawful, and they are also time-limited to 150 days.

So Mr. Trump is dusting off Section 301, which lets him impose tariffs in response to “unfair foreign acts, policies, or practices affecting U.S. commerce.” The first Trump Administration used the law to slap tariffs on China as punishment for its mercantilist policies, including intellectual property theft and forced technology transfers.

But rather than perform detailed investigations for each country, the trade office simply declares that they all engage in unfair trade practices by failing to “impose and effectively enforce a forced labor import prohibition.”

“This creates a dynamic where American workers are forced to compete globally on an unlevel playing field,” says U.S. Trade Rep. Jamieson Greer. Sorry, forced labor isn’t why companies manufacture products outside the U.S. Other countries have comparative advantages, but we know there’s no point informing the President about David Ricardo.

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Mr. Trump’s tariff obsession is a self-defeating act. There’s been no surge in domestic manufacturing, and they are contributing to rising prices. They are also unpopular, especially in the farm belt. That’s presumably why he reduced the Section 232 tariff rate on farm equipment recently to 15% from 25%.

Tariffs are a major reason voters aren’t happy with Mr. Trump and Republicans on the economy and inflation. A recent Fox News poll showed that 71% of voters disapprove of his handling of the economy, including 42% of those who voted for the President and 67% of whites without college degrees. Good luck in November, Republicans.

Also decrying Trump’s latest, throw spaghetti-on-the-wall-and-hope-that-some-of-it-sticks tariffs is the National Taxpayer Union’s Bryan Riley. Two slices:

Either way, Section 301 tariffs are intended to secure the removal of foreign barriers, not to impose long-term tariff increases on Americans. President Trump and former US Trade Representative (USTR) Robert Lighthizer imposed the biggest Section 301 tariffs in history to encourage China to modify its investment and intellectual property policies during President Trump’s first term. Unfortunately, those tariffs failed to achieve their stated goals. The tariffs were supposed to expire after four years, but the Biden Administration took the unprecedented action of extending them, and the Trump Administration is now considering whether to extend them again.

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According to Greer, “The failure of our most important trading partners to address the importation of goods made with forced labor is unacceptable. This creates a dynamic where American workers are forced to compete globally on an unlevel playing field.”

His statement may appear to be relatively innocuous. In reality, it represents a massive power grab designed to give USTR unlimited control over imports.

If allowed to stand, the new template for future tariffs will be:

1. Announce: “The failure of our most important trading partners to ______ is unacceptable. This creates an unlevel playing field.”
2. Fill in the blank with anything that can be dreamed up.
3. Assert the stated foreign action is unreasonable and burdens US commerce.

Section 301 then gives USTR blanket authority to impose duties, limitations, or even import prohibitions, unless the courts or Congress intervene. Future USTRs, regardless of political party, may inherit essentially unlimited tariff power

A reasonable response would be for Congress to change our trade laws to require a vote on Section 301 tariffs. After all, in 1776, the American colonists declared their independence in part to escape the authority of a King who cut off our trade with all parts of the world.

Another skeptic of Trump’s latest excuse for tariffing Americans is Jim Bacchus. A slice:

But there is scant logic in some of the distinctions the administration has made in doing so. Especially, nothing appears to have been done to set tariffs at different levels for different countries, depending on the seriousness of the alleged human rights violations. Tariffs of 10 percent will be imposed on a group of countries that have supposedly imposed a partial prohibition on imports made by forced labor, while tariffs of 12.5 percent will be applied on a group of countries that have not imposed any legal prohibition at all. But there has seemingly been no attempt to distinguish between these countries based on the extent of their actual imports of products tainted by forced labor.

If justifiable distinctions have been made here based on human rights failures, why is the same tariff of 12.5 percent being applied to imports from China and Switzerland? In addition, why have countries such as Afghanistan, Belarus, and Myanmar—where the United States has identified significant abuses of forced labor—been excluded from these new tariffs? And is it only a coincidence that these new tariffs seem for some reason to add up to sums approaching the previous Trump tariffs that were struck down by the Supreme Court of the United States in its ruling under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 and by other federal courts since?

It can, of course, be assumed that the president and his trade team do oppose forced labor. Their record thus far supports that assumption. But all these questions about these new tariffs suggest that they are being applied more as a means of finding a new way to help replace the tariffs that the courts have ruled illegal than as a means of combating the human rights abuses of forced labor.

Travis Fisher and David Simon cheer this fact: “The doomslayers are shaping America’s energy policy.” A slice:

The important lesson is more philosophical than technical. The shale revolution was not centrally planned into existence. It emerged from decentralized experimentation, private investment, risk-taking, and a government that respects property rights and otherwise gets out of the way. In other words, it emerged from the exact kind of society Simon believed produced human progress.

Few public officials understand that lesson better than Secretary of Energy Chris Wright.

Long before entering government, Wright argued that abundant energy is the foundation of modern human flourishing. Clean cooking, refrigeration, transportation, clean water systems, modern medicine, industrial production, and computing power all depend on enormous amounts of energy.

The optimistic worldview shared by [Julian] Simon and Wright has taken decades to reach the mainstream and influence policymakers. However, today, it looks like the future.

A Trump administration lawyer believes that the executive branch has the legal authority to bulldoze the Statue of Liberty.

George Will writes wisely. Two slices:

Jonathan Alpert, a therapist uneasy about the professional company he keeps, writes in “Therapy Nation” that between 2011 and 2023, the number seeking mental health treatment “skyrocketed” from 31.6 million to 59.2 million — about 1 in 6 Americans. Alpert believes in therapy, but blames the booming “therapy industry” for a “therapy-obsessed culture” of dependence, self-absorption, self-pity, complaining, blaming, venting and cultivated misery. Proudly fragile as victims of their circumstances, more and more Americans regard every discomfort as a “trauma” (the Greek root of the word is “wound”) to be healed by therapy laced with pharmacology. Resilience wanes and the concept of responsibility blurs.

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The English language has been infused with such categories from one precinct of the therapy profession. It teaches that disagreeable character traits are jumbles of curable “disorders” for which the individual is not responsible. Before this enlightenment, people had to make do with primitive categories. For example, someone with [Graham] Platner’s array of disorders would have been diagnosed as: a jerk.

GMU Econ alum Romina Boccia and Ivane Nachkebia warn that the looming crisis for Social Security is real and major.

Bob Graboyes tells of “a menagerie of 80 VPs, Speakers, Presidents Pro Tem, and Secretaries of State and Treasury who were first-in-line to inherit the White House from 47 presidents.”

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… is from page 63 of Thomas Sowell’s 1999 book, Barbarians Inside the Gates:

The worry has been that Microsoft would be “unfair” to competitors or use its “market power” to “monopolize” the industry or do other equally vague and often undefinable things. At the heart of all this is a confusion between injuring competitors and injuring competition.

When competition is working as a process, some competitors are almost certain to be hurt. Those for whom equality is not just an ideal but a dogma cannot accept this. Sinister theories are one result of their attempts to reconcile their dogma with a reality that repeatedly mocks it.

DBx: Yes. And today, such sinister theories are spun not only by economically uninformed progressives, but also by economically uninformed “national conservatives.”

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Thanks again to John Stossel for interviewing me a couple of months ago – and to his excellent team for somehow making me appear to be more articulate than I am. This is the full-length interview, which has just been released.