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My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy – writing again in the New York Times – reveals how rent-seekers and their enablers in government conceal tariffs’ true costs. A slice:

Even worse is the legislatively required bias that the United States International Trade Commission must exercise against American consumers of imports when deciding whether or not to impose duties on foreign producers accused of selling their goods for less than they should or selling unduly subsidized products. These trade remedies are called antidumping, and countervailing duties and deciding whether or not to impose them is a core function of the I.T.C. As my colleague Christine McDaniel, a trade economist and former adviser to the I.T.C. chairman, and I exposed in a recent paper published by the Mercatus Center, when I.T.C. commissioners make their determinations in such cases, they’re actually forbidden by statute from considering the impact of these so-called trade remedies on downstream industries — those consumers of goods and services hit by the tariffs.

It’s a glorious day for all who love and cherish the economic way of thinking: Armen Alchian’s and William Allen’s indispensable textbook is now available in a new version, edited by Jerry Jordan, and under the new title, Universal Economics. This book is essential.

Bob Higgs ponders participatory fascism.

Speaking of the economic way of thinking, Elaine Schwartz explains why you might want some “price gouging.”

Democratic socialism is poetry, not economics.

Chelsea Follett reminds us how dangerous childhood was just a few generations ago.

Claude Barfield reacts to Trump’s newly renegotiated trade deal with Mexico.

And here’s Tyler Cowen on the ‘new’ NAFTA.

The great Richard Epstein concludes that “classical liberalism with strong property rights, freedom of contract, and free trade is the only engine to economic prosperity.

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