Adam Millsap explains that “trade does not create a national security externality.” A slice:
If instead the government is viewed as a means for protecting the rights of citizens, with no objectives of its own, then all the costs of national security can be internalized. Citizens, through the democratic process, then choose the proper level of national security and trade considering these costs. Tariffs may have a role to play in the solution, but they should be compared to other remedies such as direct taxation, and only if citizens concede that national security is in fact being underprovided.
Ken Krawford’s letter in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal is spot-on:
Gerard Baker’s column “Have We Dodged the Tariff Disaster?” (Free Expression, May 6) reminded me of the old joke about a man who jumped without a parachute from a 10-story building. A woman on the fourth floor sees him from her window and asks: “Hey, how’s it going?” The man replies: “So far, so good!”
National Review‘s Judson Berger reflects on the bizarro, topsy-turvy politics of the U.S. in 2025. A slice:
Christian Schneider observed evidence of these temporal glitches last month, when Democratic Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer warned of the risk of using tariffs indiscriminately, even though, as Christian wrote, trade protectionism has been “a foundational issue for Democrats for decades.” This, as erstwhile free traders on the right cheer tariffs.
More jarring has been the inversion on the matter of “abundance.”
Noah Rothman earlier this year wrote (skeptically) about the emerging “progressive abundance agenda,” as expounded in a new book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. Fast-forward a few weeks, and President Trump has, improbably, put himself on the other side of the question, making the case for accepting scarcity if that’s what it takes to see his tariffs through. What’s more, he’s doing it in the language of Bernie Sanders, echoing the ethos of the World Economic Forum.
Another option, for those who can afford it, is just to stop working. Some people can get a little tired of toiling for much of the year just to fund the Beltway swamp. Who thinks the country will be better off if energetic entrepreneurs decide to call it a career a few years before they otherwise would? Our economy thrives when everyone has an incentive to work, save and invest.
Alberto Mingardi reviews John Hasnas’s Common Law Liberalism. Three slices from Mingardi’s review:
For one thing, the law is not exclusively legislation: that is, norms purposefully produced by lawmakers. Nor are those norms the ones that actually make for peaceful coexistence for most of our life. Some of the most important norms regulating our activities are still the outcome of the “old” common law—”rules that were abstracted from series of cases thought to represent just resolutions of past disputes.” Some are still based on custom and habit.
For another, the silhouette of a “realm of unregulated voluntary transactions is a theoretical construct with no referent in reality,” because human action is always regulated—by, Hasnas maintains, “ethics, custom, and the common law,” all of them being “emergent orders in which rules evolve as a result of human interaction but are not the output of any identifiable human will.” What economists simplify in the model of the free market is not a space free of regulations but only one in which the government has not stepped in yet.
Beliefs and customary practices, Hasnas argues, are themselves the outcome of trial-and-error attempts to reduce the degree to which individuals’ actions can cause harm to others. “Common law civil liability evolved to address the harmful actions that are not suppressed.” Economists seem to think civil liability is either absent or irrelevant. Most people may believe that legislation is necessary because civil liability would not disincentivize harmful action strongly enough. Yet, “the evidence suggests not that civil liability is a regulatory force but that it is too strong.” Hasnas’s case in point is a product liability suit, the infamous 1994 McDonald’s coffee cup case.
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Hasnas acknowledges that the dominant political culture, among social scientists as well as among ordinary people, is overwhelmingly in favor of political law. Should not law be purposeful; for example, shouldn’t it pursue the common good? And, perhaps more important, should not the law be grounded in some level of consent? Norms springing out of a political assembly reflect the consent that emerged in such an assembly, which, in turn, emerged out of some elections before.
But, again, look around. What are norms for? The theoreticians’ fascination for building a just society are at odds with political law as we know it in practice, as a system in which law-making is opportunistically used to the benefit of specific groups in society, no matter how grandiose the words which are used to justify it.
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F.A. Hayek, writes Hasnas, “famously compared the price mechanism to a system of telecommunications that enables human beings to coordinate their economic activities. Customary law is similarly a system of telecommunications that enables humans to coordinate their social interaction as to avoid violence and facilitate joint pursuits”.
But isn’t that law, regardless of how it was produced? Hasnas’s sober prose does not aim to convince the reader that customary law, or common law, would always perform better. There can be “legal failure”, in the sense that an acephalous legal system, with no planner nor direction, can indeed lack in producing certain norms the public, at some point, may think it needs. Yet what political legal systems do not produce are “what Hayek referred to as rules of just conduct—general rules of universal application that do not favor the interests of any particular group.” The mere fact of entrusting somebody with the task of writing (and abolishing and rewriting) norms makes for them being at the service of some groups in society instead of others.
