Jim Dorn exposes the immorality of protectionism. A slice:
But beyond making everyone worse off in material terms, tariffs and protectionism also violate the principles of freedom and justice that are the hallmark of a free society, or what Adam Smith called a “great society.” Limiting the range of choices open to people via protectionist measures clashes with the fundamental, natural right to be free to choose, bounded by a just rule of law. When the law is used to coerce people and prevent mutually beneficial exchanges rather than safeguard persons and property, the moral fabric of society is eroded.
The utilitarian argument for free trade is essential, but the moral and strategic case for free trade must be vigorously emphasized and defended. The best way to make America great again is to safeguard free trade and show the world that voluntary market exchange under a liberal constitutional order is a surer path to human dignity and progress than protectionism.
According to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, “President Donald Trump is committed to bringing in trillions of dollars in new investment into the United States.”
Unfortunately, Trump’s advisors do not seem to share that goal. Peter Navarro, Trump’s senior counselor for trade and manufacturing, says foreign investment in factories like BMW’s in South Carolina is a “scam” that “doesn’t work for America.” Such factories are responsible for more than half of all vehicles assembled in the United States.
If they remain in place, Trump’s tariff hikes will continue to be a big roadblock to foreign investment. Tariffs on raw materials and imported components drive up the cost of producing goods in the United States, discouraging new international investment here.
More fundamentally, U.S. tariffs and quotas that restrict imports leave our trading partners with fewer dollars to invest in our economy and to purchase U.S.-made exports. The more we import, the more dollars our trading partners have available to invest in the United States. The less we import, the less international investment we receive.
It keeps happening—some shiny new idea or technology promises to solve all our problems. Give power to experts to arrange affairs “scientifically,” and poverty, oppression, disease, war and all human ills will disappear. Today, we are asked to trust artificial intelligence.
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Hayek called this “the fatal conceit”—the assumption that central authority can gather and use all relevant knowledge. Just as Soviet planners couldn’t capture the distributed knowledge embedded in economic decisions, today’s AI systems can’t aggregate and optimize all relevant social knowledge. Human behavior is too complex. Cultural context is too important and can’t be formalized.
This isn’t an argument against AI, but rather for humility about its limits. AI works best as a tool that enhances rather than replaces human judgment. It can help us process information, identify patterns and generate options. But it can’t substitute for the irreducibly human work of navigating competing values, managing trade-offs and living with uncertainty.
History suggests that attempts to engineer human complexity away don’t eliminate it. They merely drive it underground, where it erupts in unpredictable and often destructive ways.
Ramesh Ponnuru, unfortunately, is correct: “Republicans continue to profess deep concern about the federal debt even as their top priority is to pass a bill that will increase it by trillions of dollars.” Two slices:
But that’s not what the Republicans are doing. They’re not cutting projected spending by nearly enough to bring it in line with revenue — and they’re cutting that revenue further. The main driver of increased federal spending is not benefits for illegal immigration or “woke” programs, as Republicans sometimes suggest. It’s Medicare and Social Security. They get costlier every year without any active decision by Congress and the president. Existing law puts their growth on autopilot. Republicans have ruled out most ways of changing it.
They don’t want to pay the political price that would come from trying to rein in the growth of those programs. But they are making a choice to keep spending at a level they are not willing to fund.
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It would have been better if the tax cuts of the last several decades had accompanied spending restraint that kept the debt in check. But deficits were tolerable a generation ago. As the debt and the population of retirees rise, cutting taxes while increasing spending has become more and more reckless. The cynical take is that Republicans keep coming up with one phony argument after another to evade the fiscal truth. The more alarming truth is that they have done a good job of fooling themselves.
You’ve probably heard the claim that fossil fuels are heavily subsidized by the federal government. The Biden administration estimated there were at least $35 billion of fossil fuel subsidies in the tax code alone. Elon Musk recently expressed a similar sentiment, insinuating that oil and gas receive subsidies comparable to those received by electric vehicles and solar.
This common refrain simply doesn’t hold up. Official government data show that renewables are subsidized 30 times more than fossil fuels. Most of the subsidies are in the tax code, where 94 percent of the fiscal cost goes to green energy technologies. And even this breakdown is overstated. Most of what critics label as fossil fuel subsidies are standard tax treatments available to many industries.
In reality, the claim that fossil fuels are heavily subsidized simply doesn’t withstand scrutiny. While a few narrow subsidies exist and should be eliminated, the real outlier in the tax code isn’t fossil fuel subsidies but the scale of preferential treatment granted to renewable energy technologies.
Jay Schalin decries “the antisocial mind of the “Land Acknowledger.” (HT George Leef)
Yep – Zohran Mamdani does indeed talk like an unreconstructed communist.
