Perhaps the food and beverage industry can adjust by finding alternative forms of packaging, and perhaps America’s aluminum and steel industries can increase production to replace some of the metals hit by high tariffs, but, if that happens (past precedent would suggest that that is far from clear) it is unlikely that they will be able to match the pre-tariff import prices. And any increase in production will take time.
Trump’s food tariffs will push up food prices (even if we don’t know yet how much). The increase in packaging costs may give them an extra nudge.
Vance Ginn isn’t impressed with American Compass’s, et al.’s, The Techno-Industrial Policy Playbook. A slice:
National conservatives claim that free markets abandoned America’s heartland. In reality, government failure drove investment away. Rust Belt cities like Detroit, Cleveland, and Buffalo didn’t wither because of capitalism. They collapsed under decades of poor policy choices: excessive taxation, inflexible labor unions, hostile zoning rules, bloated public payrolls, failing schools, and declining public safety. Businesses didn’t leave out of disloyalty — they left because politicians made it unprofitable to stay.
Meanwhile, jobs and capital flowed to states that protected economic freedom and other countries where it was more profitable. States like Texas, Florida, Tennessee, and even Colorado have outperformed many of their peers through stronger spending limits, more predictable tax environments, and competitive labor markets. Where policymakers trusted people over bureaucracies, prosperity followed. That’s not a failure of capitalism — it’s a case study in how markets respond to better limits on government, though those states could use more limits.
The playbook also claims that manufacturing is the backbone of national strength. That’s a romanticized notion more than a modern reality. America hasn’t deindustrialized — we’ve modernized. The US remains the world’s second-largest manufacturer, accounting for about 17 percent of global output. Real manufacturing production has nearly doubled since the 1990s. What’s declined is manufacturing employment, largely because of productivity gains. Machines now do what workers used to. That’s not a decline. That’s economic progress. The push to bring back those jobs, even through heavy subsidy or coercion, misses what most Americans actually want. They don’t long to return to factory floors. They seek flexible, meaningful, and often service-oriented careers in tech, finance, or entrepreneurship. We shouldn’t funnel workers back into yesterday’s economy. We should expand their freedom to pursue tomorrow’s opportunities.
Also writing insightfully about markets and industrial policy is Michael Strain. A slice:
Free markets also create the conditions for political freedom – another traditional conservative commitment. Vance is quite right that markets are the best way to coordinate people across a complex society. When the government tries to do the coordinating, its size and scope necessarily increase.
For example, both the left’s large social programs and the MAGA right’s industrial policy and trade wars attempt to substitute government policy for the coordinating function of markets in determining the composition of private consumption, investment, industry, and employment. That results in more expansive and intrusive government. And when the government is putting its thumb – or, more accurately, its fist – on the scale to determine the prices you face and the occupation you practice, political liberty is both diminished and threatened.
Phil Magness’s latest letter in the Wall Street Journal is a gem:
Roland Fryer’s “The Economics of Slavery” (op-ed, June 18) draws attention to several lessons that economists and historians have brought to light by studying the institution of slavery. Mr. Fryer correctly notes that the plantation system was immensely profitable for the wealthy elite of the antebellum South and that there is a long tail of poverty left in the practice’s wake. These economic realities demonstrate the exploitative nature of the institution as well as its moral abominations.
Yet Mr. Fryer doesn’t broach another dimension of slavery’s economics: namely, that the institution largely depended on government support. Fugitive slave patrols, military expenditures to fend off the threat of slave revolts and censorship of abolitionist materials by the post office were necessary to secure the institution’s economic position. These policies transferred the burden of enforcing the slave system from the plantation masters on to the taxpaying public. Many of the Confederate states cited the feared loss of these public expenditures in their secession declarations of 1861.
Those who mischaracterize slavery as a case of “capitalism run amok” would do well to remember Lord Mansfield’s ruling in Somerset v. Stewart (1772), the landmark abolitionist case: Slavery is “so odious, that nothing can be suffered to support it, but positive law.” Take away its legal sanction and subsidy, and slavery’s entire economic edifice crumbles.
Phillip Magness
The Independent Institute
Nobody ever had a baby for the tax break. That’s a simple reality that doesn’t seem to have dawned on the social conservatives pushing what they call “family friendly” provisions in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act currently working its way through the Senate. The bill contains several provisions that advocates say will be a boon to new parents and shore up the struggling American family. Don’t count on it.
Birthrates across the West have been plummeting for decades. In 1960, the average American woman had 3.65 children in her lifetime. That’s fallen to about 1.6. It’s a big problem in need of an urgent solution. But the fix won’t be found in the tax code. European countries have showered families with tax incentives and child-care subsidies for years. All to no effect.
In France, the law guarantees generous parental benefits, including paid leave, cash birth grants, child-care payments, mortgage support, and lower fares on public transit. For all this largess, fertility is no higher in France than in the U.S. In Hungary, the example par excellence of family-friendly public policy, birth rates are lower than they are here—and falling.
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The best thing the government can do to support families is to give them the gift of a growing economy. There are plenty of policies proven to do just that and pro-family Republicans should support them. A future full of possibilities to work and consume, to invest in education and save for the future, is worth far more to parents than any one-time payment or targeted tax break. Opportunity is what American families need, not entitlements.
The pronatalists will argue that the law is a teacher. If the government signals that it values children and families, then prospective parents will look past the social and cultural factors keeping them on the sidelines of the baby game. That’s asking a lot from one piece of legislation, no matter how big or beautiful.
