President Trump said Monday he is “delighted” to give American farmers “$12 billion in economic assistance.” According to Mr. Trump, this money will be coming from his tariffs, which is interesting, in that much of the pain farmers are feeling is also coming from his tariffs. Now watch, as the left hand pays off the right.
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“Trade wars are good, and easy to win,” Mr. Trump once boasted. Then why does he keep needing to divert billions of dollars to compensate the people whose livelihoods are collateral damage? Mr. Trump promised “Liberation Day.” He’s offering farmers a bailout instead.
Trump’s tariffs are also a small-business-killer in other industries, including manufacturing. The big guys can navigate this (or pay someone to do it for them). The little guys don’t stand a chance.
My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy, decries “the bipartisan war on prices.” A slice:
Take legislation introduced earlier this year by what would have once been an unlikely duo: Sens. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) and Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.). Their “10 Percent Credit Card Interest Rate Cap Act“—also reflecting a Trump idea from the 2024 campaign—sounds compassionate. Who enjoys paying 25 percent interest?
In practice, price controls of all sorts are disastrous. Credit card interest rates are high because unsecured consumer lending is very risky. They’re the price for the lender taking a chance on a person. If the government artificially caps rates far below the market rate, banks will stop lending to riskier borrowers. That doesn’t just mean broke shopaholics. It includes the working single parent using a financial last resort before payday.
Just as rent controls can create a housing shortage by reducing the attractiveness of supplying those homes, interest-rate caps can create a credit shortage. They put millions of working-class Americans—the people proposals like these are supposed to protect—at risk of being “debanked.” Stripped of their credit cards, some will turn to payday lenders, loan sharks, and pawn shops, whose charges are far higher.
It gets worse. A cap this low wouldn’t merely shrink credit availability; it would invert it. At 10 percent, banks would only lend to the safest, highest-income borrowers. Credit cards would become a luxury product for the affluent—a financial advantage while everyone else is pushed into the financial shadows.
Jennifer Huddleston warns against siccing the antitrust dogs on app stores.
Arnold Kling ponders conservatism.
Why are these executives paid so much? [Starbucks CEO Brian] Niccol’s career offers an interesting example. He is among the highest-paid CEOs in the food industry, and he previously worked for Taco Bell and Chipotle. Both times, he led successful turnaround efforts, and Starbucks needs one. The company has been closing stores and cutting its workforce while its stock price has stagnated for several years.
It’s too early to tell how Niccol will do at Starbucks, but his record at Chipotle is complete, and it’s remarkable. Niccol became the CEO of Chipotle in 2018. By the time he left for Starbucks in 2024, Chipotle’s revenue had doubled and its stock value had octupled.
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The question becomes: How much credit does the CEO deserve? Ten percent? Five percent? Chipotle’s answer during Niccol’s tenure: less than 1 percent.
The company’s market capitalization, the total value of all outstanding shares of its stock, on the day Niccol became CEO in March 2018 was about $9 billion. When he left in August of last year, it was about $77 billion.
That means, over six years, the shareholders of Chipotle paid Brian Niccol a mere $167.3 million to increase their wealth by $68 billion. He got paid about 0.2 percent of the wealth he helped create.
Sick with gout, depressed over the death of his wife, and worried what would happen to their nine surviving children, Mason often refused summons for his service in assemblies away from home. But in the spring of 1776, as the American colonies inched toward independence, he went to Williamsburg to serve in the convention that would design a new constitution for Virginia as well as a declaration of rights. Mason largely wrote the drafts, including the first right enumerated: “That all men are born equally free and independent, and have certain inherent natural rights. . . among which are the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”
Sound familiar? Copies of the draft Virginia Declaration of Rights appeared in Philadelphia just as the Continental Congress assigned Jefferson to a committee to write a “declaration of independence.” In fairness, Jefferson didn’t boast of any “originality” in his quickly written work. The Declaration, he explained in his response to Henry Lee, “was intended to be an expression of the American mind. . . harmonizing sentiments of the day.” Indeed, had Jefferson attempted to do otherwise, his fellow delegates would not have agreed to affix their names to his work.
Jefferson, with some editing help from his fellow delegates, did exactly what they needed him to do and perfected the phrasing. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” The improvement on Mason’s version is, to borrow a phrase, self-evident.
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Fashionable as it’s become to argue that it was in defense of slavery that the colonists ultimately declared independence, it’s not true. As historians like Gordon Wood and Jack Rakove have pointed out, the forces leading to independence were already, to borrow Washington’s analogy, “like a snowball in rolling” long before Dunmore printed his proclamation. Only in desperation did he resort to emancipation and, even then, not for the slaves he himself owned.
Rich Lowry rightly excoriates Tucker Carlson. Two slices:
It’s passing strange that a self-styled defender of Western civilization and scathing critic of the persecution of Christians would find so much to like about Qatar, which is not part of the West and suppresses Christianity (apostasy from Islam is illegal, and so is proselytizing for a non-Islamic faith, while public worship is restricted for non-Islamic faiths).
Also, it doesn’t make sense for a free man making a stirring statement about freedom to do it by cozying up to an unfree country like Qatar.
In fact, Qatar is as inapt a location for making such a statement . . . as Russia (although Doha’s grocery stores are probably even better than Moscow’s).
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The aforementioned Russia is another country that Carlson puffs up, and it, too, is illiberal and hostile to the West.
All this just speaks to how deeply disaffected Tucker Carlson is with the West as it exists now and its course over the last 80 years or maybe more. It says it all that he is much more prone to attack Winston Churchill than the emir of Qatar.
For pilgrims and dissenters, the embrace of a place outside America with a different culture and different system always involves an implicit, and often explicit, critique of America.
So it is with Carlson and Qatar. The kingdom may trample on basic human rights, but it is orderly, illiberal, and not in any danger of being talked into becoming allies with Israel by the Jewish lobby.
What’s not to like?
