Bill Colton’s letter in today’s Wall Street Journal is excellent:
Phil Gramm and Michael Solon provide both evidence and clarity regarding the consumer harm done by the administration’s disastrous tariff fixation in their op-ed “The Trump Tax Increase of 2026” (April 29).
In my lifetime, I have voted Republican because of the party’s reliable pursuit of policies based on economic fundamentals: open markets, free trade, cost-effective regulation and minimum government intervention. President Trump’s trade policies clearly fail any reasonable test of economic reason—so where are sensible Republican voices in the House and Senate? Asleep at the switch it seems.
It’s particularly discouraging because the damage done by tariffs isn’t a complicated topic in economics. God help us if both parties choose now to ignore economic fundamentals.
Eric Boehm is correct: “Trump’s new European car tariffs demonstrate why his ‘deals’ are worthless.” A slice:
When President Donald Trump struck a trade deal with the European Union in July, officials on both sides stressed how it would ensure long-term stability to trans-Atlantic trade.
The Trump administration called the deal a “generational modernization of the transatlantic alliance.” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said it “restores stability and predictability” by locking in 15 percent tariffs on most European goods exported to the U.S., while most American imports to Europe would be exempt from tariffs.
In other words, Trump got what he wanted out of that deal: A reduction in tariffs on American exports and the establishment of a new, permanent baseline tariff on European goods. European leaders also felt like they’d won something: the 15 percent tariff was lower than the 25 percent tariff Trump had threatened, and the deal would stop Trump from hiking tariffs the next time he was in a bad mood.
So much for that.
On Friday, Trump announced that he would raise tariffs on European-made cars to 25 percent. (Those tariffs are authorized by Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, so they are not affected by the Supreme Court’s ruling in February that limited some of the president’s power to impose tariffs unilaterally.)
Responding to U.S. trade representative Jameison Greer’s economically ignorant defense of U.S. tariffs on Americans’ purchases of imported pick-up trucks, Adam Ozimek tweets: (HT Scott Lincicome)
I think if you believe domestic truck manufacturers can’t compete but we want to guarantee small truck production stays here at a cost to consumers just say that. There is no world where this is boosting global competitiveness or helping them “perfect their model”.
National Review‘s Charles Cooke understandably is flabbergasted by Elizabeth Warren’s dishonesty. A slice:
What fun it must be to play poisoner and physician.
In 2024, after the Biden administration successfully blocked a merger between JetBlue and Spirit Airlines, Senator Elizabeth Warren was elated. “This,” she tweeted out excitedly, “is a Biden win for flyers!”
Last week, however, as Spirit prepared to close its doors, Warren struck a different note. “The Big Four airlines (American, Delta, Southwest, United),” she lamented, “control 75% of the U.S. market. Fewer choices = higher prices for you.”
Well, then.
Aware, perhaps, that her supposed “win for flyers!” has been seamlessly transmuted into “fewer choices,” Warren is now helping the police look for the real killer. “Spiking fuel prices from Trump’s war,” Warren wrote on Saturday, “was the nail in the coffin for twice-bankrupted Spirit airline. FWIW, JetBlue merger failed because a judge, appointed by Ronald Reagan, said the deal was illegal.”
Superficially, both of those statements are true. It is, indeed, the case that the “nail in the coffin” was “spiking fuel prices,” and that prices spiked because of “Trump’s war.” It is also the case that “a judge, appointed by Ronald Reagan,” endorsed the government’s brief. But neither of those facts comes close to justifying the position that Warren took in 2023, or to letting her and the politics she espouses off the hook. As Warren herself notes, Spirit was in bad shape. It had been “twice-bankrupted,” it was heavily in debt, and both its fleet and its routes had considerably diminished in size. That phrase that Warren used — “nail in the coffin” — ineluctably implies that, by the time the fatal action occurred, there was already a corpse, and that it was inside a coffin that had been almost perfectly sealed. And so there was. Spirit, by April of this year, was such a mess that any noticeable disruption — be it a jump in costs, a strike, or even a period of terrible weather — was liable to drive it into the ground. Which is why, seeing this coming, the airline had tried earlier to merge with JetBlue. If Elizabeth Warren wishes, we can all point at Donald Trump and agree that his decision to invade Iran drove in the final nail. And then, having done that, we can ask about all the others.
Jimmy Alfonso Licon explains that “the knowledge problem dooms municipal grocery stores every time.” Here’s his conclusion:
Mamdani’s grocery store will fail. Even if shoppers save a dollar over Food Bazaar, that pound of apples will include appropriated tax dollars, food waste, labor distortions, and a thousand other costs that will make it wildly more expensive than the sticker would indicate. The real price is far more expensive than a market competitor’s, even if the shelf price doesn’t show it.
The price of apples is a secret language, the communication of a billion bits of dispersed, organic, intuitive knowledge of costs, trade-offs, and alternatives. All that information, over time and geography, quietly working away in the minds of Washington apple growers and migrant fruit pickers, beekeepers and cider makers, interstate truck drivers and NYC shelf stockers, is infused into the price sticker on a pound of apples in a market-driven grocery store. And Mamdani, like hubristic dreamers before him, thinks he can wipe all that away, slap on a price that looks like success to the voters, and hide all the rest in your tax bill.
Samuel Abrams reflects on the upbringing of “faculty brats” such as Zohran Mamdani and Katie Wilson, each the child of prominent academics – and each now mayors of big American cities. Two slices:
The term faculty brat isn’t an insult. It is a description of formation. Plenty of faculty children learn to be rigorous and humble. A growing number doesn’t; they instead emerge confident, articulate, ideologically coherent and almost entirely insulated from the consequences of being wrong.
I first encountered the type as an undergraduate at Stanford and later as a graduate student at Harvard. The faculty brats were at home with the buildings, the rituals, the language, the professors. Classmates and professors alike described them as the most privileged students on campus. Elite preparatory schools produce faculty brats, too. The category has migrated upward over the past generation, into the highest reaches of finance, technology and now city government. The fluency is the same. So is the insulation. And so, I now realize, is the unearned authority.
…..
The pattern extends beyond finance. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani is the son of Mahmood Mamdani, a professor of government at Columbia and one of the most prominent postcolonial theorists in the American academy, and noted filmmaker Mira Nair. The future mayor attended Bank Street, then Bronx Science, then Bowdoin. By his own description, his upbringing was “privileged.”
In Seattle, mayor Katie Wilson is the daughter of two Binghamton University biology professors, David Sloan Wilson and Anne Barrett Clark. Her parents helped pay for her years at Oxford. They were still paying her bills, including child care, into her 40s. She’s 43. When it became a campaign issue, Ms. Wilson defended the arrangement as “relatable.”
Both mayors are intelligent. Both are well-versed in the moral vocabulary of the institutions that produced them. Both now govern cities full of people who live inside the exact constraints—rent, payroll, trade-offs, consequences—from which they have been spared. The heart of the problem isn’t that they’re unqualified. It’s that they’re unacquainted.
The deeper issue is the monoculture that produced them. On campus, trade-offs can be abstracted away. Policies are often debated for their symbolic meaning rather than their practical effects. Moral clarity becomes a substitute for empirical testing. Dissent is treated as ignorance or bad faith. That works inside a seminar room. It fails in a city. And it produces leaders who mistake the applause of their peers for evidence that they are right.
None of this is inevitable. Universities still have the capacity to form serious, grounded citizens. But doing so requires reintroducing friction. It means real engagement with economics, scarcity and the unintended effects of well-meaning policy. It means time spent outside the academic bubble.
The Editorial Board of the Washington Post tells how Transportation secretary Sean Duffy – thankfully – won out over Commerce secretary Howard Lutnick to prevent a U.S. government bailout and takeover of Spirit Airlines. A slice:
When President Donald Trump suggested that the federal government “just buy” Spirit Airlines, Duffy stood up for taxpayers. “There’s been a lot of money thrown at Spirit, and they haven’t found their way into profitability,” he said on April 21. “If no one else wants to buy them, why would we buy them?”
Phil Magness is a fan of Stephen Macedo’s and Frances Lee’s book, In Covid’s Wake. A slice:
Macedo and Lee’s investigation of the COVID era surveys multiple similar incidents in the United States and abroad. They recount how Scott Atlas, a dissenting member of the US COVID task force who opposed lockdowns, was censured and pilloried by the Stanford faculty senate for his stance. They walk the reader through the debate over COVID’s origins, showing how political considerations privileged a natural outbreak at a Chinese wet market and discouraged investigation into a possible lab-leak incident at a nearby Chinese government facility that studied bat coronaviruses. They explore how scientific journals overstated the evidence for masks, following months of contradictory claims by health officials and an ambiguous scientific literature behind them. The resulting study paints an alarming portrait of scientific collapse during the worst pandemic in a century – one where the normal mechanisms of hypothesis testing, peer review, and, at an even more fundamental level, the ability to voice scientific dissent succumbed to intense political pressures to maintain a uniform professional “consensus” behind a pro-lockdown, pro-mask, pro-mandate policy response.
The book itself is part history of how this policy response came to be, part diagnostic analysis of its failures, and part warning about the dangers that the COVID response portends for a democratic society in future public health emergencies. The authors approach these subjects as political scientists who started from different sides of the COVID issue – one began the pandemic with reservations about the emerging lockdown policies, while the other acquiesced to the initial alarm of “two weeks to flatten the curve.” Both began to notice that something was amiss with the scientific response, particularly as it privileged and embraced an aggressive COVID containment policy that eschewed Western democratic norms and resembled China’s authoritarian governance structure.
My Mercatus Center colleague Rebecca Lowe is well worth listening to.
Time and again, biologists baffled by some apparently futile or maladroit bit of bad design in nature have eventually come to see that they have underestimated the ingenuity, the sheer brilliance, the depth of insight to be discovered in one of Mother Nature’s creations. Francis Crick has mischievously baptized this trend in the name of his colleague Leslie Orgel, speaking of what he calls “Orgel’s Second Rule: Evolution is cleverer than you are.”
Has anyone ever asked what a full professor is full of? In some trendy new fields, the title “empty professor” would be more appropriate.
We were slow to realize that the most prevalent reason for market failure was government itself. Governments were driven by false economic ideology – heavy industry, protection, import substitution – and also became increasingly self-serving and corrupt.
