For the unfamiliar, modern monetary theory is a fringe school of economic thought arguing that the federal government, as the sole issuer of legal tender, can issue virtually limitless amounts of new money to fund itself. Bucking thousands of years of evidence that such reckless policies lead to currency devaluation, advocates shirk all blame when inflation occurs, insisting instead that prices increased due to “corporate greed” and “price gouging.”
Perhaps some of that sounds familiar.
Over the last four years, the federal government essentially stumbled into a modern monetary theory-style monetary crisis. The Biden-Harris administration began its term assuming it could “run the economy hot” while also avoiding inflation. They added another multi-trillion-dollar stimulus to Trump-era COVID relief spending, believing they could escape the repercussions of its price tag. Then inflation spiraled out of control.
Jim Bovard is correct: “Protectionism is more idiotic than it looks.” Three slices:
Washington hustlers are loudly promising to enrich the nation by selectively blockading American ports. Unfortunately, the Trump team and the growing horde of protectionist pundits sound clueless about America’s long record of trade follies.
Instead, we are encouraged to presume that politicians merely need to issue a few commands and federal bureaucrats will instantly apply their wisdom to remedy our economic problems. But unless politicians intend to ban all imports or inflict the same tax on all imports, then government officials will need to make distinctions between products.
In the past, Customs Service employees wrestled heroically with great questions such as “Is a popcorn popper an electrothermic appliance or an electrical article?” and “Is a jeep a truck or a car?” The United States has thousands of different tariff classifications, with tariffs ranging from zero to more than 100 percent. Naturally, tariff-classification rulings are often disputed with a passion that would have made St. Thomas Aquinas proud.
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Customs agents took to the ramparts to protect Americans from TV Ducks — cotton products made to sit on the arm of a couch and hold a TV remote control. Robert Capps, who owned a small company in Skyland, North Carolina, ordered a large shipment of the products from China — but the Customs Service prohibited their entry in 1995. Customs claimed that the little novelty items belonged in the same tariff category as bedspreads — and thus that Capps needed a textile import quota before he could import them. No U.S. company was making TV Ducks, but Customs officials were hellbent on protecting American consumers from the product. Capps hired a lawyer, who quickly convinced a federal judge to overturn the edict. However, the Justice Department appealed the decision and dragged the case out for a year and half, costing Capps millions of dollars in lost sales before a higher panel of federal judges again trounced the agency.
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The feds continue to persecute common sense on this score. In March 2024, Ford paid $365 million to settle U.S. Customs claims that, 15 years earlier, it had “imported Transit Connect vans with “sham rear seats and other temporary features” from Turkey that made them appear to be passenger vehicles, for which an import tax of 2.5 percent must be paid rather than the 25 percent duty applicable to cargo vehicles.”
Megan McArdle explains that “media bias is hurting Democrats. Really.” Three slices:
As the news media moved left, we lost that trust. By 2024, less than one-third of the country had a “great deal” or a “fair amount” of trust; another third said they had “not very much” trust, and the remainder said they had “none at all.” The fact that there’s a clear partisan skew suggests this is connected to our politics. In the latest Gallup survey, 54 percent of Democrats said they had high trust in the media, while only 27 percent of independents and 12 percent of Republicans did.
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In fact, the stories that mattered the most during this year’s campaign were the ones where we had given Democrats the most “help.” In the 2020 election cycle, Democratic primary contenders counted on us to give them room to move well to the left, especially on social issues, which is how Harris created the fodder for this year’s negative ads against her. This cycle, Democrats counted on us to downplay Biden’s shocking and obvious decline. The issue was handled with kid gloves, under threat of blowback from campaign operatives, readers and even fellow journalists.
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I can’t guarantee that Democrats would have won this year if they’d gotten the message sooner and cut Biden loose in time to find a better candidate than Harris, or at least let her stand up a full campaign. But they certainly would have had a better shot than they gave themselves by trying to use the media as campaign surrogates. Until both Democrats and the media realize their mistake, this will keep happening.
John Tierney reports on “the new election gurus.”
Saul Zimet is understandably no fan of philosopher Kohei Saito’s Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto. [DBx: Zimet is correct that real-world capitalism must be compared with real-world, not idealized, governments – and that the comparison favors capitalism. But Zimet concedes too readily that capitalism is often “shortsighted.” The exchangeability of private property rights causes prices today to reflect expectations of future values. This process of capitalization incites even people who are most impatient for current satisfaction to take a long-run view.]
Emma Camp decries the Biden administration’s insistence on lawlessly “forgiving” student loans.
