Vance embodies the serrated edge of MAGA politics. He checks many boxes of fealty, from praising a favorite of “national conservatives,” Hungary’s autocrat, Viktor Orban, to what Vance delicately calls “the post-2020 thing”: He says there should have been “alternative slates of electors” to force a Jan. 6 debate on whether the election was stolen. This counts as MAGA moderation.
Stephanie Slade reports that J.D. Vance “has a troubling history of engaging in illiberal rhetoric.” A slice:
Vance, a former U.S. Marine and graduate of Yale Law School, has a troubling history of engaging in illiberal rhetoric. He argued on the Senate campaign trail that conservatives should “seize the administrative state” and use it “for our own purposes” rather than trying to roll it back. He floated the idea that a Republican president could simply ignore court rulings he doesn’t like. He called for seizing the assets of nonprofits that promote “woke” ideology and redistributing them to politically favored groups. And he told The American Conservative in 2021 that his voters “hate the right people.”
When I followed up on that comment with his campaign, a spokesperson reiterated that “JD Vance strongly believes that the political, financial and Big Tech elites…deserve nothing but our scorn and hatred.” But on Saturday, after a gunman shot at Trump during a rally, killing at least one bystander, Vance blamed overheated rhetoric from Democrats for the act.
Mr. Trump’s choice also suggests he’s so confident in his electoral prospects that he didn’t need a running mate to reach swing voters. Perhaps he’s right, though we suspect the White House is relieved he didn’t choose a more experienced and reassuring political figure.
Phil Magness, I believe, correctly assesses Trump’s pick of Vance.
Trump’s tariff plan is “economically ignorant, geopolitically dangerous, and politically misguided,” says Scott Lincicome, head of Cato’s Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies. He adds that Paul Winfree, Trump’s Domestic Policy Council deputy in 2017, has denounced the tariff proposal, saying it “would impose a massive tax on the folks who it intends to help.”
According to the Peterson Institute for International Economics, the Trump tariffs “would reduce after-tax incomes by about 3.5 percent for those in the bottom half of the income distribution,” and “would cost a typical household in the middle of the income distribution at least $1,700 in increased taxes each year.”
The Center for American Progress reports that Trump’s tariffs “would amount to a roughly $1,500 annual tax increase for the typical household, including a $90 tax increase on food, a $90 tax increase on prescription drugs, and a $120 tax increase on oil and petroleum products.” .
Erica York, senior economist at the Tax Foundation, says Trump’s 10 percent tariff ring “would amount to a $300 billion annual tax hike, reducing the size of the US economy by 0.7 percent and eliminating 505,000 jobs.” That’s before we even consider foreign retaliation.
GMU Econ alum Nikolai Wenzel gives two thumbs down to Batya Ungar-Sargon’s book, Second Class. A slice:
Ungar-Sargon demonstrates a deep misunderstanding of basic economic theory. Throughout the book, she seems to praise policies that have long ago been debunked as laden with unintended consequences. I say she seems to do so, because sometimes it’s not quite clear if she’s editorializing through her interviewees. She appears to love unions – which have a long track record of being as good for the few insiders as they are awful to the many outsiders. Minimum wages are helpful to the workers who garner them, but damaging to those who are excluded, often permanently, from the labor market as a result. Ungar-Sargon rightly recognizes welfare cliffs as problematic (many workers often lose net income from increased wages, as they lose their welfare benefits past a certain threshold), but she would tinker with an inherently flawed system, rather than ditching it entirely in favor of civil society. Tariffs and migratory restrictions may indeed protect some domestic workers, but at great expense to others, along with deadweight losses, zombie industries, and higher prices for all.
Russ Roberts talks with Diana Schaub about “lessons from Lincoln.”
Timothy Sandefur disagrees with Randy Barnett’s argument that libertarianism needs to be updated. Four slices:
In other words, libertarianism is skeptical, even pessimistic, about human capacities—especially those of the humans who wield government power, and are as fallible as the rest of us, if not more so. Precisely because libertarianism does not make idealized assumptions about people’s behavior—and holds that utopia is impossible—it concludes that the least bad alternative is to leave people free to make their own choices (subject to legal accountability if they harm others). After all, they have a stronger incentive to avoid bad decisions in their own lives than any outsider could possibly have.
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These three strands of the libertarian synthesis—the moral argument, the knowledge problem and the public choice problem—can be summarized simply: You have no right to run my life; you don’t know how; and if you try, you’ll mess it up. And these ideas are not the fruit of any abstract “ideal theory,” but represent the hard-learned lessons of centuries of oppression and inefficiency at the hands of bullies, busybodies and bureaucrats, who continuously claim they can fix our problems, if only we obey.
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True, one can imagine a “Gattaca”-style dystopia in which private companies connive to excommunicate people to such a degree as to effectively curtail their freedom. But the libertarian answer to that is simple: freedom of competition. Let people bothered by such connivance start their own businesses to offer alternatives. True, this isn’t a perfect solution, but since libertarianism isn’t an “ideal theory,” it eschews utopianism and seeks the second-best solution—competition.
And competition has, in fact, worked quite well. In recent years, for example, conservatives bothered by what they view as “censorship” by X and Facebook have had plenty of other options. When X (formerly Twitter) cancelled President Donald Trump’s account, he started TruthSocial. Others started Parler. There’s also GETTR, Gab, MeWe, CloutHub, FrankSocial, Bluesky, Threads, Mastodon, Reddit, Discord, Tumblr, TikTok, SproutSocial—not to mention YouTube, Twitch, Vevo, Rumble, PeerTube, Joystream, DTube, Crackle, LBRY, or Substack, Typepad, WordPress, Squarespace, BlueHost ….
Competition is a far preferable—and more realistic—way to address concerns about collusion than to expect bureaucrats to somehow thwart that collusion without themselves falling prey to the knowledge and public choice problems. Such an expectation really would represent an “ideal theory”—a utopian assumption that ignores both history and libertarian principles. Yet Barnett appears to embrace just that assumption.
Take his [Barnett’s] suggestion that cellphone companies or other communications businesses be declared “common carriers,” or “creatures of the state,” so that government can compel them to carry messages they would prefer not to. That’s hardly a new idea—it’s just another name for the antediluvian “fairness” and “equal time” doctrines, mid-20th-century policies whereby government forced broadcasters to carry messages they disagreed with in order to achieve what politicians considered adequate “balance” in political debate. The results were predictable: Public discourse was stifled; bureaucrats favored messages they preferred at the expense of those they didn’t; planners failed to anticipate market demand—and the constitutional rights of broadcasters were violated for decades. The abandonment of these doctrines in the 1980s led to a blossoming of broadcasting options, giving rise to Rush Limbaugh and Al Franken, Fox News and MSNBC, One America News and CNN.
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Libertarians understand that the problems caused by bad choices that individuals and businesses have the right to make are usually too complicated to be resolved except in the messy, complicated world of civil society—and that this requires us to roll up our sleeves and get involved: to join clubs and volunteer organizations; to contribute to organizations that help the poor, or educate children or preserve historical treasures; to protest businesses that pollute the environment, or treat workers badly or that try to screen our calls. Libertarianism doesn’t promise to solve our problems, as “ideal theory” political creeds do; instead, it charges us with the responsibility to find solutions freely.
