In the simmering American crisis before 1776, Britain’s colonial governments relied on informers to help them enforce provocative laws restricting the colonists’ economic rights. Those governments also used “writs of assistance,” which empowered customs officials to search buildings for smuggled goods. These search warrants were not limited to particular times and places, and could be issued without any specified suspicion of illegal activity.
In 1791, lingering resentment of writs of assistance resulted in the Bill of Rights, including the Fourth Amendment. It guarantees a right “of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.”
So, why do the tens of millions of smartphone-carrying travelers who enter the United States each year not have a reasonable expectation of privacy regarding their phones? What reasonable reading of the text and history of the Fourth Amendment exempts border agents from its strictures? What permits them to examine travelers’ contact lists, call histories, messages, voicemails, emails and photographs?
Also writing about unlawful ‘law enforcement’ is Autumn Billings.
The Brits themselves don’t seem to see it. When asked to imagine how they’d fit into the 50-state U.S. economic hierarchy, they rank themselves in the top 10. That is so far off the mark as to qualify as delusional. The U.S. contains within itself more than four dozen economic statelets that are more productive per-capita than the place that once produced Rolls-Royce, the Beatles, Harry Potter and my No. 1 guy, Daniel Day-Lewis.
Mississippi drinks their milkshake.
Over the summer, Americans got a huge kick out of the European soccer fans who expressed amazement at the abundance they encountered while here for the World Cup. It wasn’t only our material wealth that dazzled, but our kindness and generosity. Somehow these visitors landed on our shores thinking the entire country was at daggers drawn over politics—that American society is a roiling mess of racial resentment and economic inequality.
Gee, I wonder where they got that impression?
Americans are also susceptible to misimpressions. Many Americans have convinced themselves they are living in a stagnant, unjust hellhole. They have trouble accepting what visiting Europeans can clearly see. Americans have more, give more, can do more, and live better than anyone in history.
You should stop complaining and thank your lucky stars you were born in the U.S. of A. Things could be so much worse.
One of the latest victims of U.S. tariffs is a third-generation family business in New Jersey. The Gellert Global Group imports Canadian cheeses, and the food supplier says it’s facing $40 million in additional annual costs after President Donald Trump slapped a 50 percent import tax on dairy products this summer as part of his feud with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney.
The company’s lawsuit this week challenging the legal basis for the tariffs tees up another showdown over free trade. In February, the Supreme Court decided 6-3 that Trump lacked authority under a 1977 emergency powers law to impose his “Liberation Day” tariffs. Almost immediately, Trump imposed similar duties under Section 122 of the 1974 Trade Act. The U.S. Court of International Trade struck those down.
After that, administration officials apparently dug through dusty filing cabinets in search of new justifications. In July, Trump invoked a 96-year-old provision buried inside one of the more atrocious pieces of legislation in American history: the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. That 1930 law deepened the Great Depression and has become synonymous with the folly of protectionism. Raising tariffs to help domestic producers prompted other countries to retaliate, causing a collapse in U.S. exports.
The laws of economics are unchanged. A tariff is a tax on importing something, and American buyers pay it. Tariffs protect politically favored producers by forcing everyone else to pay more: manufacturers buying inputs, retailers stocking shelves and families shopping for groceries.
GMU Econ alum Dave Hebert corrects Oren Cass. A slice:
So what have been the accomplishments over the past two years in the steel industry? For starters, the producer price index for steel mill products has jumped 48.6 percent since Trump took office. Cleveland-Cliffs’ latest quarterly results show improved profitability and higher shipments. Those are meaningful improvements for the company, but they are hardly surprising. When steel buyers have fewer options, the remaining sellers get more orders and can charge higher prices.
Still, higher profits for a protected producer receiving a $500 million subsidy are woefully insufficient evidence that the country is better off as a whole. For that, we need to look at people in downstream industries who are buying the now more expensive steel.
The domestic auto industry was positioned as a showcase for tariffs. As users of steel, particularly the steel products made in Middletown, their experiences matter for an overall assessment. The results have not been good. Nationally, motor vehicles and parts employment has fallen by about 13,000 jobs since Trump took office. In Michigan, a key state in the upcoming midterms the president has repeatedly promised his tariffs would help, has shed 2,600 jobs over the year ending in August. Automation, vehicle demand, canceled EV programs, and model turnover all play a role in this. Still, higher prices for steel products and longer lead times clearly cannot be helping the situation.
Meanwhile, politics worked exactly the way we would expect it to. Ohio’s congressional delegation wrote a letter to the Department of Energy urging them to keep the award alive. Vice President JD Vance, himself a Middletown native, announced the deal in his hometown. A small, well-organized group got a $500 million subsidy while the costs have been spread across taxpayers and steel buyers.
The idea of marrying government-paid conservation with government reduction of farmland started as something of a subterfuge. In 1933, as part of the Roosevelt administration’s effort to prop up falling crop prices, Congress enacted the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA). This was the infamous law that led to killing over six million piglets and sows, causing public outrage.
The AAA raised prices. But three years later, the Supreme Court struck down the Agricultural Adjustment Act, finding that its tax-and-subsidy scheme improperly allowed the federal government into agricultural regulation reserved to the states by the Tenth Amendment. (That decision has never been formally overturned, but its restrictions on the role of the government have disappeared.)
Just two months later, the FDR administration came up with another law, the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act (SCDAA), building on the recently created Soil Conservation Service (now called the Natural Resources Conservation Service). The new law justified controls on crop production to protect the soil and to curb erosion. “The goal was still to raise prices by reducing surplus crops,” explains historian Chandler Hansen, “but now it had the added benefit of implementing conservation practices to improve the health of the land.”
So, the USDA’s early conservation efforts were primarily to get around a stubborn Supreme Court. To be sure, the Depression and the Dust Bowl were wreaking havoc in farm country. But the acceptability of conservation provided cover for the farmers’ more pressing issue of holding up prices. According to Erik Lichtenberg of the American Enterprise Institute, the CRP is still an “afterthought.” Commenting on the CRP and a smaller conservation program (called EQIP), he recently wrote: “But they serve that function [environmental protection] only to the extent that it coincides with their main goals of protecting agriculture’s natural resource base and supplementing farmers’ incomes.”
