George Will offers lessons to be learned from Trump on trade. A slice (second link added):
[Richard] Reinsch, editor of Law & Liberty, says today’s conservative critics of capitalism, whose policies would enlarge government and make gross domestic product smaller than it otherwise would be, want government planning to enlarge the manufacturing sector (currently 8 percent of employment; manufacturing employment has declined in almost every Western nation) because of its supposed wage premium. But as of December, the average hourly wage for production and nonsupervisory workers in manufacturing was $22.46; for such workers in the private-sector service industry, it was $23.53.
Kevin Williamson is rightly unimpressed with Adrian Vermeule’s “common-good constitutionalism.” A slice:
I believe that Professor Vermeule has enough wit to understand that he and others like him have simply taken the intellectual apparatus of progressivism, with its contempt for individual liberties and its faith in the magisterial state, and proposed filling that box with right-wingery rather than left-wingery, albeit right-wingery of the anti-capitalist and anti-liberal kind: Not only will we have to do away with “libertarian assumptions central to free-speech law” but also “libertarian conceptions of property rights.” Another way of saying “libertarian conceptions of free speech and property rights” would be “free speech and property rights.”
And here’s John O. McGinnis on Vermeule.
My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy laments the CDC’s failure.
Alberto Mingardi bemoans the tangle of red tape that stifles individual initiative.
Vincent Geloso – writing wisely about the wisdom of something that long ago disappeared (namely, fiscal discipline) – is correct to reach this conclusion: “Thus, there is one certain lesson: there is a need to return to older, proven, public finance traditions that make deficits the exception rather than the norm.”
