My Mercatus Center colleague Rebecca Lowe – a native of Great Britain – tells why she loves America. A slice:
The values underlying the Declaration of Independence — freedom, equality, justice — don’t belong to any place. Yes, you might find them here in America more than you find them in other places. That’s one reason I live here. And you might find them in John Locke’s work more than you find them in other people’s works. But they reflect truths about humanity; about what it is to be human. They reflect moral truths. So they are John Locke’s, and Americans’, only in a loose descriptive sense.
I love America, and I love the Declaration of Independence, not because of great phrases like “the pursuit of happiness”. But because America and the Declaration of Independence represent a commitment to the pursuit of moral truth. And there’s nothing more important to me — or for all of us.
Lafayette chose to fight for America after he became enamored with the cause for independence. In 1778, he wrote: “The moment I heard of America I loved her; the moment I knew she was fighting for freedom I burnt with a desire of bleeding for her; and the moment I shall be able to serve her, at any time, or in any part of the world, will be the happiest of my life.”
On the one hand, since geopolitical risk is and always has been a factor in corporate capital allocation, we could simply let market actors price in the potential for Chinese export stoppage and adjust accordingly. That’s not just an optimistic theory drawn up on Econ 101 blackboards. In the middle of the pandemic, the world’s top semiconductor manufacturer, TSMC, responded to market risk dynamics by planning a new plant in Arizona — two years before Congress would pass industrial-policy legislation on semiconductors. In the minerals sector in 2023, six months after China announced its new export controls on gallium and germanium, an American company announced a massive discovery in Wyoming, as I wrote about for National Review Online (“New Wyoming Dig Shows Limits of China’s Export Controls,” January 22, 2024). Consistent with the laissez-faire attitude is trade with non-adversarial countries, environmental regulatory reform, and innovation to reduce the importance of the vulnerable minerals altogether.
“Detroit once ruled Canada’s car Industry. Trump’s tariffs may end that.” A slice from this New York Times report: (HT Scott Lincicome)
At the industry’s peak around the turn of the last century, cars and trucks, most made by U.S. manufacturers, accounted for nearly 40 percent of all exports from Ontario, Canada’s industrial center and most populous province.
The massive factories and the hundreds of thousands of workers they employed underscored the tight bonds between the United States and Canada.
For over 60 years, Canada’s auto industry had thrived from free trade agreements that sent much of its production to the United States. By ending tariffs, those agreements also made cars built in American factories affordable for Canadians, a boon to U.S. industry.
But Mr. Trump’s tariff campaign is shattering that dynamic, hollowing out the once-mighty Detroit-based carmakers in Canada. The future of a free-trade agreement that has knit together Canada, the United States and Mexico is also up in the air.
David Bier reports on just how radically restrictive immigration policy has become under Trump. A slice:
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced Friday that it will cease granting green card applications except in extraordinary circumstances. In short, DHS grants green cards when a qualified immigrant who is inside the United States applies to adjust their status to legal permanent residence. Now, every legal immigrant must leave the country—that is, self-deport—even if they are qualified for a green card and even if leaving would disqualify them.
The policy is a radical expansion of DHS’s “quiet quitting” on legal immigration that has been going on for months. As I previously detailed, DHS—or, more precisely, its component known as US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS)—has slashed green card approvals in half over the last year. This drop came primarily from not processing applications. Now USCIS’s new memorandum details a plan for mass denials. USCIS has gone from the “quiet-quit” to walking out on 1.2 million green card applicants.
