And in the 1930s, the court declared that economic liberty is inferior to “fundamental” rights. Hence the pernicious judicial “restraint” of deferring to any government abridgments of economic liberty for which a court can imagine a “rational basis,” even when the abridgment is patent rent-seeking.
In Oklahoma, you can be buried in a cardboard box, or a shroud, or nothing. But not in a casket unless the purchase of it enriches the state’s funeral cartel. Continuing judicial deference to Oklahoma’s casket racket would be dereliction of the judicial duty to take seriously incontestable facts, including undeniable and unsavory legislative motivations.
In an effort to “simplify” compliance, President Trump signed a new presidential proclamation restructuring how its Section 232 “national security” tariffs on steel, aluminum, and copper — and the finished goods made from them — are calculated. The rules took effect today, April 6. For businesses that import anything containing metal, the changes are significant, and not necessarily in the direction the White House is advertising.
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A simple example illustrates the impact. Consider a product worth $1,000 that contains $200 worth of steel. Under the old system, a 50% tariff applied only to the steel content, resulting in a $100 duty. Under the new system, a 25% tariff applies to the full $1,000 value, resulting in a $250 duty. Despite the lower rate, the total tariff paid is significantly higher. So while the structure may be simpler on paper, it is likely to increase costs for many importers in practice. Software can help manage complexity, but it cannot offset a broader tax base.
So yes, the process has been simplified, but only through making many goods subject to heavier tariffs. It seems unlikely that many US importers will consider this a win. Software can help with complexity, but no amount of computing power will get around this de facto tariff increase.
Trump’s tariffs rest on a simple belief: trade deficits are bad. They aren’t, but this dogma is hardly new. Exactly 250 years ago, Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations to dismantle the same myth advanced by the anti-trade warriors of his day: the mercantilists.
By Trump’s mercantilist logic, Iran is doing us a favor by closing the Strait. The U.S. runs a multi-billion-dollar trade deficit in oil passing through the Strait from Persian Gulf nations. By shutting it down, the IRGC is helping tilt the balance of trade in our favor.
In response to this fact (as reported by the New York Times) – “ArcelorMittal, a European steel maker, is donating tens of millions of dollars of foreign steel for President Trump’s new ballroom” – Scott Lincicome tweets:
Every time I think I’ve seen the most ridiculous tariff thing, they totally top themselves.
It’s impressive, really.
Smith identifies the doctrines and practices of the mercantilist economics that dominated the eighteenth-century European world as gradually putting Britain and the 13 colonies at odds with each other. By virtue of imposing higher costs on trade for American colonists and placing significant restrictions on the colonists’ economic liberty, mercantilist economic policies would gradually cause American colonists, Smith believed, to reconsider the benefits of belonging to the British Empire.
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Finally, Smith believed that the mercantilist policies that determined the parameters for trade between America and Britain were characterized by a significant injustice: that the people who benefited the most from these structures were those merchants and companies (like the EIC) with close connections to the government. Britons and Americans alike, Smith thought, should ask themselves whether the interests of such individuals has “been considered more than either that of the colonies or that of the mother country.” The whole “project” of mercantilism, as Smith described it, was “altogether unfit for a nation of shopkeepers; but extremely fit for a nation whose government is influenced by shopkeepers.” Such cronyism was, for Smith, ultimately bad for the long-term economic development of both America and Britain, and, above all, unjust by virtue of being based upon legal privileges and rampant influence-peddling.
This is exactly what makes Smith such a pleasure to read. His own principles—no unnecessary words, a “natural order of expression”, and a linear sentence structure—give him true clarity. His sentences do not require you to puzzle them out once you reach the end. For anyone with a serious curiosity about the ways of the world, Smith is of undeniable importance—and he writes with the care all common readers wish to find in long and difficult books.
Although The Wealth of Nations does require a lot of attention, it is not an enemy to its readers’ understanding, unlike so many other great treatises. Smith points his prose carefully, to make all thousand pages as plain and understandable as they can be.
Brent Skorup makes clear “why the FCC shouldn’t have the power to threaten CNN.”
Reason‘s Matt Welch is correct: “Viktor Orbán and his American apologists all deserve to lose.” A slice:
Five days before an election that threatens to unseat the longest-serving and most corrupt government within the European Union, Vice President J.D. Vance kicked off a campaign speech in Budapest Tuesday night by declaring, “We have got to get Viktor Orbán reelected as Prime Minister of Hungary, don’t we?”
This raises some intriguing questions about we.
Does we refer to the American companies doing business in Hungary who were hit with anti-foreigner “windfall taxes” in 2022 to plug Orbán’s latest budget deficits? Maybe it’s the boys from General Electric, who made a historic 1989 investment in the region’s first major privatization deal, only to see their financial wing get pushed out of the country in 2014 when Orbán began renationalizing banks?
We know that we isn’t referring to Hungarian citizens living in America, because those who go vote at their local embassy or consulate are almost certain to back Orbán’s opponent, the front-running Péter Magyar. And we’re damn certain it isn’t the overwhelming majority of Americans who sympathize with Ukraine rather than Russia in the ongoing war next door, given that barely a day goes by without another embarrassing leak of a top official kissing Vladimir Putin’s ring amidst an electoral campaign—very much including the events attended yesterday by Vance—whose main villain has been Volodomyr Zelenskyy.
