George Will writes of the collapsing center of American politics. A slice:
The American Enterprise Institute’s Ruy Teixeira, a center-left Democrat, describes a perverse dialectic of “Trumpian overreach”: The more Trump is flamboyantly provocative, the more Democrats lurch into “histrionic, radical, ineffective responses.” He controls the shrillest Democrats by triggering them, and they propel their party toward self-indulgent, self-destructive choices, such as [Abdul] El-Sayed.
[DBx: U.S. politics today makes me want to sing – in a sad, minor chord – “Clowns to the left of me / Jokers to the right.”]
Arnold Kling wisely rejects what he calls “brokenist economics.” A slice:
But when it comes to economics, I am against the brokenists. On the left, the brokenists advocate socialism. They are wrong.
On the right, the brokenists use “neoliberalism” as a boo-word. They claim to be superior to mainstream economists. The particular brand of right-wing brokenism that appeals to JD Vance believes that mainstream economics is harmful. As Akash Chougule writes,
JD Vance has been making an argument similar to those in DSA, simply wrapped in the language of conservatives: that free markets undermine human dignity because they are incompatible with the moral order.
In fact, the Catholic integralists, like Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule, reject the Enlightenment ideas that shaped America. They want to turn the clock back to before John Locke.
Consider one of the biggest challenges facing American businesses in the midst of President Donald Trump’s global trade war: As of Thursday afternoon, no one knew what tariffs would be charged on which imports entering the country as soon as Friday morning.
Trump is no stranger to improvisational, make-it-up-as-you-go policy, but even by his standards, this is pretty ridiculous.
To understand the wild uncertainty facing American businesses this week, you have to back up a few months. In February, the Supreme Court struck down many of the tariffs Trump had imposed last year when it ruled that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) did not grant presidents the power to impose tariffs. Trump responded by implementing a 10 percent “global tariff” via a different legal mechanism: Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974.
But that law only allows for temporary tariffs that last a maximum of 150 days, unless Congress votes to extend them, which it has not. As a result, the tariffs Trump imposed in February will expire at midnight tonight.
The Trump administration had 150 days to provide some clarity and stability to American businesses that buy and sell things overseas. It did not do that.
“You’ll have to stay tuned, and you’re gonna be busy over the next few days,” U.S. Trade Rep. Jamieson Greer told The Wall Street Journal earlier this week when asked about the upcoming tariff deadline.
That’s, uh, not very helpful. The U.S. economy is not a reality show. The Trump administration should stop acting like it is.
Many trade analysts described the administration’s action as designed to replicate the tariff system the court toppled this year. The senior administration officials said the president’s concern over forced labor was genuine. They noted that the U.S. prohibition on goods produced with involuntary labor is more than a century old.
[DBx: Who is gullible enough to believe that the Trump administration is choosing not to ‘put America first’ because it is so intent on righting wrongs done abroad?]
My GMU Econ and Mercatus Center colleague Pete Boettke and I recently discussed Adam Smith.
Last year, 36,640 Americans died in traffic crashes. That was the fewest since 2019, yet it still works out to more than 100 fatalities per day. The new generation of vehicles quietly accumulating mileage on our streets offers enormous promise to bring the number down even more and more each year.
Over at Marginal Revolution, economist Alex Tabarrok reminds us that as of March, Waymo’s driverless vehicles had logged more than 220 million miles across five of its areas of operation. Compared with human drivers on the same roads over the same period, and counting every crash regardless of fault, the Waymo Driver was involved in 94 percent fewer crashes causing serious or fatal injury. It also experienced 82 percent fewer airbag deployments and 93 percent fewer injury crashes involving pedestrians.
Jack Nicastro explains that the “App Store Freedom Act” would be bad for freedom. A slice:
ASFA marks a dramatic departure from existing antitrust and unfair competition laws, which are already more than able to provide substantial relief for these types of practices, as shown by courts’ prohibitions of certain anti-steering mechanisms in Epic v. Apple and Epic v. Google. Indeed, unlike the Sherman Antitrust Act, the bill requires no demonstration of market power or dominance before its strictures apply. Moreover, its bans do not require plaintiffs to show anti-competitive harm or allow defendants the opportunity to present procompetitive justifications.
