The plaintiff blamed large corporations for her adolescent sadness, body dysmorphia (dismay about her appearance) and other consequences of her obsessive consumption of the corporations’ products. Such blaming flows from this toxic idea: Individual agency is so flimsy and attenuated that accountability for an individual’s behavior must be located beyond the individual. This infantilizing premise leads to paternalism, then to domestic authoritarianism.
If human beings are soft wax, passively shaped by the promptings of the culture in which they are situated, then controlling the culture becomes an imperative and encompassing political project. Government must guarantee the wholesomeness, as government defines this, of everything said, read, heard, thought and taught.
A few years ago, a Senate committee approved legislation empowering government officials to force social media platforms to remove material that could “harm” minors. Harm, however, has become an elastic and metastasizing concept: Minors are said to be harmed by content that makes them “anxious.” Reducing the anxiety of adolescents will keep government busy.
Bryan Riley looks back on the year following “Liberation Day.” A slice:
The manufacturing sector suffered. According to Trump’s Liberation Day executive order, “The decline of U.S. manufacturing capacity threatens the U.S. economy in other ways, including through the loss of manufacturing jobs.” Here’s what happened next:
- Under Liberation Day tariffs, the ratio of manufacturing workers to total nonfarm employment fell to the lowest point since 1939, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics started tracking this data.
- The U.S. manufacturing sector shed 100,000 jobs from January 2025 to April 2026.
- U.S. manufacturers hired 388,000 fewer workers in 2025 than in 2024.
- According to the ISM Manufacturing Index, a monthly survey of U.S. manufacturing purchasing managers, manufacturing contracted for nine consecutive months after Liberation Day tariffs were imposed before rebounding slightly in January and February 2026.
This, too, from Bryan Riley: A twitter thread challenging U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer’s inept attempt to defend Trump’s “Liberation Day” punitive taxes on Americans’ purchases of imports. (HT Scott Lincicome)
Also reporting on the economic damage done by Trump’s protectionism is Richard Stern.
The Tax Foundation’s Erica York and Emily Kraschel assess the consequences of “Liberation Day.” A slice:
President Trump predicted tariffs would “direct hundreds of billions of dollars and even trillions of dollars into our Treasury to strengthen our economy and pay down debt.” And his advisors, such as Peter Navarro, estimated that the new tariffs would bring in $600 billion a year.
The Liberation Day tariffs undoubtedly raised taxes for the US Treasury—but far short of what the Trump administration predicted. Before the Court ruled against the IEEPA tariffs in February, they generated approximately $166 billion in tariff payments. Altogether, tariffs brought in $264 billion in customs duties from January through December 2025, accounting for 4.9 percent of total tax receipts for the calendar year. The net revenue generated by the tariffs is less, because tariffs mechanically reduce how much revenue is raised by income and payroll taxes. Though the tariffs increased tax revenues while they were in effect, federal debt has continued to grow under President Trump.
A second reason why it’s mistaken to conclude that Smith celebrated greed is that, when he identified actual instances of greed, he vehemently opposed it.
Smith despised above all the special privileges granted by the government. Most famously, he criticized producers who seek government protection from foreign competition. Because protectionism allows producers to extract more than their fair share from consumers, Smith denounced this greed with (as he described it) “a very violent attack.”
Smith understood that what people earn in competitive markets is just and honorable, even though motivated by self-interest. He also understood that grasping for more by seeking special privileges from the government is greedy and, thus, unjust and dishonorable.
David Henderson reviews Phil Gramm’s and my 2025 book, The Triumph of Economic Freedom. A slice:
One of the myths commonplace in the past few years is that free trade, especially free trade with China, has “hollowed out” out US manufacturing. Proponents of that view are numerous on the left and on the right. What these proponents often point to is the substantial decline in the number of jobs in manufacturing. Between June 1979, when the number of manufacturing workers reached its peak, and October 2024, the number of workers employed in manufacturing fell by 34 percent. But, note Gramm and Boudreaux, that doesn’t mean that we lost manufacturing. They write, “In inflation-adjusted dollars, manufacturing value added reached its all-time high in the second quarter of 2024.” This level, they note, was 34 percent higher than its level when China joined the World Trade Organization in 2000.
The reason output rose while employment fell is that worker productivity rose a lot. With more-productive workers, fewer workers are needed for a given output. This phenomenon is worldwide. Since the early 1970s, manufacturing employment as a share of total employment has fallen in Australia, Canada, France, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, and the UK. This has even happened more recently in China.
The “culprit” is not free trade. The authors cite a 2017 study by Ball State University economists Michael Hicks and Srikant Devaraj that found that about 88 percent of recent job losses in US manufacturing were due to productivity improvements rather than to imports.
What about the idea that in various trade agreements “we” have reduced our tariff rates more than our trading partners have? The opposite is true. Under NAFTA, the authors note, Mexico’s government reduced its tariffs on US imports from about 12.5 percent to zero, Canada’s tariffs on US imports fell from about 4.2 percent to zero, and US tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico fell from 2.7 percent to zero. Moreover, after China joined the WTO, Beijing cut its average tariff rate from 14.6 percent in 2000 to 4.7 percent in 2014. The US government didn’t change its tariff rate on imports from China.
