Warren Meyer is appropriately skeptical of Trump’s sincerity in calling for a world of zero tariffs.
Eric Boehm writes that “Trump May Have Sabotaged His Tariff Plans With Anti-Canada Tweets.”
A consumer and an economist talk protection scarcityism.
Art Carden explains that we’re wasting resources making solar panels in America – and waste, let us never forget, is bad for the environment.
I love especially the closing of George Will’s latest column:
The “art of the deal,” according to the supposed Rembrandt of this art (a six-time bankrupt), seems to be this: Ask for the universe, settle for one of Jupiter’s minor moons, claim that the moon is actually the center of the universe and was the real goal all along, and that only he — not Metternich, not Kissinger — could have plucked this flower, safety, from the nettle, danger.
However, the common denominator in most mishaps of governing — in both domestic (Prohibition, 1930s protectionism, the Great Society, 1970s wage and price controls, etc.) and foreign policies (Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, Iraq, Libya, etc.) — is the belief that the world is more malleable than it is, that inertia is less powerful than it is, that social variables can be made to vary as we wish them to. But, then, such mishaps were in the era B.R. — Before Rembrandt.
The Wall Street Journal‘s indispensable Mary Anastasia O’Grady clarifies Venezuela’s recent, hellish history. Here’s her appropriate conclusion:
Chávez was inaugurated in February 1999, in the midst of a recovery in oil prices and with the bolivar at 576 to the dollar. He tripled down on socialism, exacerbating a long history of destroying capital that would lead to today’s disaster.
Shikha Dalmia calls for abolishing ICE.
