GMU Econ alum Alex Salter explains that “there’s nothing conservative about deficits and debt.” A slice:
Republicans are marching towards a high-stakes November election. Alas, they seem to have left some important conservative principles behind. The 2024 GOP Platform is notable for what it omits: its lack of commitment to fiscal responsibility is a major oversight.
Neal McCluskey busts the myth that universal school choice is a “giveaway to the rich.”
As Scott Lincicome and I noted in a 2023 Cato paper recommending better approaches to US-China economic tensions, Washington should prioritize cultivating deeper trade and investment ties with Asian countries, including Vietnam. Rejoining the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership, of which Vietnam is a member, is a wise idea. So, too, is reclassifying Vietnam’s nonmarket economy status.
Rhetorically, most of Washington’s policy community is rightly worried about several Chinese economic practices. Yet when policymakers have an opportunity to strengthen the US’s economic and strategic position vis-à-vis China, shortsighted protectionism and parochialism continue to triumph.
Scott Lincicome reports on new polling about Americans’ attitudes toward globalization. A slice:
So, Cato’s in-house pollster Emily Ekins and I wrote our own questions and commissioned our own nationwide survey (with help from polling outfit YouGov), the results of which we released today—results that contradict much of what you hear about Americans’ views on trade and globalization.
To be clear, it’s not all good. The 2,000 Americans we polled aren’t committed Hayekian free traders (LOL). They think some wacky things about economics and policy. And they do have an affinity for tariffs, U.S. manufacturing, and buying American.
Yet they also support trade and trade agreements (and even “globalization”) by large margins and tend to think that trade has been mostly good for their own living standards, for their communities, and for the nation. (Even Trump voters or people with less education and income think this, by the way.) And, most important for today, poll respondents reverse their nationalist preferences when faced with the economic and practical realities that usually accompany American protectionism. Especially its price tag.
GMU Econ alum Dominic Pino talks about trade and national security with Samuel Gregg.
Brent Orrell talks with Russ Roberts about Russ’s latest book, Wild Problems.
Wilfred Reilly reviews Jeremy Carl’s The Unprotected Class. A slice:
The lead voice behind the New York Times’ lauded 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones, is on record calling the white race “the biggest murderer, rapist, pillager, and thief in the modern world.” Despite this, the 1619 educational curriculum—much of which conveys basically the same point of view—is one of the more popular educational supplements in American schools. Major magazines and journals, at the level of Salon, quite regularly run articles with titles like “White Men Must Be Stopped–the Future of Mankind Depends on It.”
I—perhaps unsurprisingly, as a sardonic Black guy—do not agree with every point Carl makes. The idea that any native-born Americans, citizens of the world’s richest and most powerful country, where formal discrimination against almost everyone has been illegal for 60 years, are “oppressed” is a bit rich. It is to be hoped that besuited white men do not adopt the leaning-forward-with-begging-bowl posture that is already unbearable enough when affected by minority teenagers or aqua-haired campus feminists.
