Tweet [1]
Here’s David Brooks on the rise of the thuggish use of the label “amnesty [2].” A slice:
For centuries, conservatives have repeated a specific critique against state power. Statism, conservatives have argued, has a tendency to become brutalist and inhumane because a bureaucracy can’t see or account for the complexity of reality. It tries to impose uniform rules on the organic intricacy of human relationships. Statist social engineering projects cause horrific suffering because in the mind of statists, the abstract rule is more important than the human being in front of them. The person must be crushed for the sake of the abstraction.
This is exactly what the Trump immigration policies are doing. Families are ripped apart and children are left weeping by the fences constructed by government officials blindly following a regulation.
GMU Econ alum Lawrence McQuillan sets millennials straight about the true nature of socialism [3].
Are there too many or too few jobs? [4]
Dan Mitchell explains many of the ways in which Trump is wholly wrong about trade [5].
Are you suffering tariff fatigue? [6]
Dan Ikenson argues that, when it comes to trade, Trump isn’t irrational but he is wholly mistaken [7].
Angry at China, Trump punishes Americans [8]. A slice:
Forgotten by Trump is the simple truth that the division of labor is arguably the most powerful economic concept in the world. A division of labor doesn’t put us out of work as much as it frees us to specialize in the form of work most commensurate with our talents. Picture a near-deserted island: if two people are dividing up work on the island, the arrival of eight more won’t render the original island inhabitants unemployed. It will just mean that ten people will produce exponentially more than two simply because the addition of eight new able-bodied people will free all ten to specialize even more.