The Acton Institute’s John Pinheiro has this very good letter in today’s Wall Street Journal:
In response to warnings about empty store shelves (“Tariffs Shrink the Economy,” Review & Outlook, May 1), President Trump said: “Maybe children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, you know, and maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally.
This “doll defense” is worth considering. What Italian philosopher Augusto del Noce(1910-89) called the pure bourgeois of the licentious, irreligious and consumerist West is a sad affair. We ought to wonder whether we’d be better off having fewer possessions piling up in our homes. We might even come out financially ahead buying two expensive dolls rather than 30 cheap ones.
Whatever the answer, though, this well-intentioned, top-down coercion is paternalistic government in the truest sense. Such a government takes the place of parents because it thinks it knows better than they do. In this case, it would even choose our children’s toys to keep us from buying imports or what bureaucrats think is too many.
Effective central planning is impossible anyway, because no one can possess the information I do about why I make certain choices. Better than a paternalistic bureaucracy planning my material and spiritual well-being from afar is one that stays out of the way while I freely pursue such affairs. My duty in the market is to be a moral agent. The government’s duty is to uphold the rule of law and not place artificial obstacles in my way.
President Donald Trump made headlines this week when he seemed to suggest that American families might be able to afford fewer toys due to his trade policies.
“Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls,” Trump said on Wednesday, “and maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally.”
That was Trump’s most direct admission yet about the potential costs of his trade war—which could reduce the average household’s income by nearly $3,800 this year, according to the Yale Budget Lab’s estimates.
But this was not a run-of-the-mill gaffe or another case of Trump saying the quiet part out loud. If anything, Trump was merely underlining a sentiment that’s gained traction on the political right in recent years: that Americans should be forced to pay higher prices for basic goods and household items.
The so-called de minimis provision that exempts packages of $800 or less from duties is scheduled to end at just after midnight Eastern time on Friday for goods made in China and Hong Kong, after President Trump in early April ordered the end of the policy.
The change will leave most shipments, including those carried by FedEx or United Parcel Service, subject to the new 145% base tariff on all Chinese products, as well as additional levies based on the nature of the products. Steep fees on packages containing merchandise from China shipped via the international postal network kick in at the same time.
George Will explains that “the Trump GOP’s attacks on universities advance the left’s agenda.” Two slices:
Republicans rejoicing about breaking academia to the saddle and bridle of federal government supervision demonstrate that we have two parties barely distinguishable in their shared enthusiasm for muscular statism. As “conservatives” mount sustained attacks on left-dominated educational institutions, they advance the left’s perennial agenda — the permeation of everything with politics.
Such statism will extinguish the core conservative aspiration: a civil society in constant creative ferment because intermediary institutions — schools, businesses, religious and civic organizations — are given breathing room, and are free to flourish or fail without supervision from above by a minatory central authority.
…..
Government presumptuousness that struts on campuses will not strut only there: Secretaries of state wield a law that says an alien is deportable if the secretary has a “reasonable ground to believe” that the alien’s “presence or activities” would “potentially” have serious adverse “consequences” for U.S. foreign policy. This potentially life-shattering discretion presupposes judicious, temperate secretaries of state, forever.
