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Joe Lancaster reports that Trump’s tariffs might soon increase Americans’ car-insurance premiums. A slice:

But if tariffs remain in place, the report estimates the average national rate will go up by 7 percent

Granted, parts from Canada and Mexico that comply with the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) from Trump’s first term are exempt from his new tariffs; just over 50 percent of all auto parts imported in 2024—around $100 billion worth—came from Canada and Mexico.

But that means nearly half of all imported auto parts are still subject to hefty taxes.

Japan, for example, accounts for nearly 12 percent of the global market in automobile exhausts; even though Trump announced last month he would lower Japan’s tariff rate to 15 percent, that’s a 15-percent tax Americans will have to pay simply because the president demands it.

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy, explains that “Trump’s war on economic data is a dangerous move for MAGA’s own agenda.” A slice:

Still, flaws are different from bad faith. While I am glad the administration is drawing attention to the need for reform at the bureau, it’s going about it the wrong way. First, firing the commissioner, as Trump as did last week, won’t fix the system. Second, as Dominic Pino pointed out in National Review, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick recently disbanded the Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee, an expert advisory group that was actively working on this accuracy problem. Composed of unpaid professionals from academia and industry, the committee had been helping the bureau and other statistical agencies explore ways to improve data quality by boosting response rates—drawing on lessons from the United Kingdom, Canada, and Germany. Its elimination was not a cost-saving move but a decision that undercuts ongoing efforts to strengthen the integrity of federal economic data, even as the administration publicly expresses frustration with the quality of those same data.

The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal reports on a new study the findings of which are no friendly to the case for a guaranteed annual income. A slice:

Progressives and a growing faction of Republicans support cash handouts as an important answer to America’s social ills. So readers might want to know about a study published as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research that finds $1,000 monthly payments have few long-term benefits.

Researchers with the nonprofit OpenResearch and several universities ran a randomized controlled trial to test the impact of a cash transfer on lower-income, working-age Americans. One group received $1,000 every month for three years—$36,000 total—no strings attached. The other were paid $50 a month to participate as a control group.

OpenResearch says the study showed that “parents improved their parenting practices and made meaningful investments in their children and themselves.” But drill down, and the findings are uninspiring.

Those who received the $1,000 payments did report better parenting behavior in surveys, though they may have been more inclined to say this because they were receiving free money. They also spent more money on their children. On the other hand, they reported that their children experienced more developmental difficulties and stress than the control group. The authors suggest that parents receiving cash might simply have been more attentive to their children’ problems than those in the control group.

Notably, while the transfer payments reduced parents’ self-reported stress levels during the first year of the study, the “effects were short-lived and dissipated by the second year,” the researchers write.

“Wall Street Isn’t Daycare: Interns Meet the Real World.”

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… is from page 35 of Thomas Sowell’s 2008 volume, Economic Facts and Fallacies:

Often the character of a community includes a bucolic setting or expansive views of the surrounding area which those who live there cherish. But they did not buy those settings or those views or pay to have them guaranteed to remain the same in perpetuity. Other people with other preferences have had the same rights under the Constitution, at least until courts began to erode both property rights and the “equal protection of the laws” prescribed by the Fourteenth Amendment. Political authorities in various jurisdictions began to take advantage of that erosion of property rights to pass restrictive housing laws under a variety of politically attractive names such as “open space,” “smart growth,” and the like. Such restrictions have been especially prevalent in overwhelmingly upscale liberal communities such as those in coastal California, where concerns are often expressed for the poor, for minorities, and for children – all of whom are among those most often forced out of such communities by high housing prices.

DBx: Yes.

And, of course, by “liberal,” Sowell really means “progressive.”

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Just out of curiosity, I compared the change in the Dow Jones Industrial Average over roughly the first nine months since Trump’s 2024 election (meaning, up to yesterday’s [August 7th’s] close) with the change in the DJIA over the same time period since Trump’s 2016 election.

On election day 2024 (November 5th) the DJIA closed at 42,221.88; yesterday, August 7th, 2025, the DJIA closed at 43,968.64.

On election day 2016 (November 8th), the DJIA closed at 18,332.74; on August 10th, 2017, the DJIA closed at 21,844.01.

In the nine months since Trump was elected in 2016, the DJIA rose by 19.2%.

In the nine months since Trump was elected in 2024, the DJIA rose by 4.1%.

Make of this fact what you will.

I myself don’t make too much of it; the U.S. economy is huge and dynamic and is affected by many forces, with government policy being only one (although a uniquely important one). Yet I also don’t believe that these figures are without any information content.

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David Henderson finds significant weaknesses in John Lott’s attempt to give economic legitimacy to Trump’s tariffs. A slice:

But how are tariffs a viable alternative for making foreigners pay for defense? Surely John Lott, a first-rate economist, understands that the bulk of the burden of a tariff is typically borne by importers, not exporters, of the taxed good.

Note the irony. On the one hand, Lott seems to want to ignore the assertions Trump has made over the years in favor of tariffs as a protectionist tool. On the other hand, he seems to accept uncritically Trump’s claim that the exporters pay the tariffs.

Also taking issue with John Lott’s interpretation of Trump’s tariffs is Phil Magness, at his Facebook page::

A crucial but unstated problem with Lott’s argument in this piece:

If tariffs are primarily a tax revenue measure, as he argues, then all of the “emergency” legal pretexts that Trump used to implement them via IEEPA executive orders (“trade deficits,” an alleged fentanyl smuggling crisis) are outright false on their face.

If tariffs are just “a tax like any other,” then they cannot be imposed by unilateral executive decree. Lott’s entire argument unwittingly concedes their unconstitutionality.

Economist Brian Albrecht nicely summarizes six reasons why economists so strongly oppose tariffs.

GMU Econ alum Dominic Pino, writing at the Washington Post, exposes the folly of Trump’s obsession with U.S. “goods trade deficits” – an economically meaningless concept – and with the use of tariffs as a means of attempting to eliminate these phantom menaces. Three slices:

By now, you’re probably also familiar with the free-trader case against raising prices and distorting markets with tariffs to address this supposed “trade deficit” problem. In “The Wealth of Nations,” Adam Smith wrote that “nothing … can be more absurd than this whole doctrine of the balance of trade.”

But it’s also worth pointing out that it’s just as easy to make a nationalist case against trade surpluses.

As it stands, nationalists already don’t like the trade surplus the U.S. does have. They demean jobs in finance and tech as unmanly and hold intangible products to be less vital than tangible ones, even though the U.S. services trade surplus is nearly $300 billion.

…..

But having a trade surplus doesn’t necessarily mean more domestically sourced products. Germany also has a highly globally integrated economy, and imports equaled 38 percent of Germany’s gross domestic product last year. Imports only equaled 14 percent of U.S. GDP last year. So despite Germany’s trade surplus and America’s large trade deficit, Germany imports almost three times as much as the U.S. does relative to the size of the economy.

That means not only is the German economy less “self-sufficient,” but German workers are laboring to produce more for foreigners — including Americans, since the U.S. had an $84.8 billion goods trade deficit with Germany last year. What’s nationalist about sending the fruits of your labor abroad?

…..

Meanwhile, not only do top South Korean and Japanese companies sell far more cars in the U.S. than they do in their home countries, but they also invest billions of dollars in the U.S. to build state-of-the-art factories that Japanese and South Koreans will never work in. According to nationalists, shouldn’t they be investing that money in good-paying jobs in Japan and South Korea instead of sending capital abroad to make American workers and car buyers better off?
You can play this game all day. Mercantilist logic is infinitely malleable, and it produces a surplus of the absurdity that Smith was talking about way back in the 1700s. The truth is that voluntary trade makes both sides better off, and the balance of trade is an accounting convention that is irrelevant to overall economic health.

Alan Blinder is rightly critical of Trump’s tariffs. Two slices:

While it keeps changing, the average tariff rate on U.S. imports now stands at its highest level in about a century—more than six times as high as when President Biden left office. Mr. Trump seems proud of this. But these high tariffs are poor economics, bad foreign policy and almost certainly illegal.

Tariffs are discriminatory sales taxes levied only on imported goods. All taxes affect the economy’s efficiency, as Republicans once understood. And sales taxes aimed at goods hurt people with lower incomes the most, as Walmart shoppers are learning.

At the macro level, tariffs are stagflationary: They push prices up and slow economic growth. They also deprive the nation of what economists call “the gains from trade,” which means acquiring goods that are cheaper, better or simply more in line with consumer preferences than domestic offerings. In some cases, governments set tariff rates so high that they make importing particular items prohibitively expensive. A contemporary example of that is our current 100% duty on electric vehicles from China. In other cases, domestic producers simply can’t make some of the things we import. Think bananas from Guatemala.

…..

What the law actually says is that presidential authority under IEEPA “may only be exercised to deal with an unusual and extraordinary threat . . . to the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States, if the President declares a national emergency with respect to such threat.”

What national emergency? President Trump has declared one emergency after another. But where’s the “unusual and extraordinary threat” from trade imbalances? They don’t threaten national security, foreign policy, or the U.S. economy. Come to think of it, what do they threaten?

The legal case is now before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit after the administration lost in a lower court. It’s a good bet that the administration will lose this appeal and take the case to the Trump-friendly Supreme Court. The court’s obsequiousness to Mr. Trump is in for a real test. Will it dance around clear constitutional prose?

Now whoever would a-thunk that U.S. industrial policy might result in the president of the executive branch of the U.S. government interfering in the internal operations of a private company that received some of the industrial-policy booty? The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal explains. Two slices:

Is Intel finally discovering the wages of industrial policy? See President Trump’s demand Thursday that CEO Lip-Bu Tan resign. Mr. Trump likes to boss companies around, but Intel has made itself especially vulnerable owing to its dependence on federal largesse.

“The CEO of INTEL is highly CONFLICTED and must resign, immediately,” Mr. Trump wrote Thursday on Truth Social. What provoked the President’s ire? Hard to tell, but Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton on Tuesday sent Intel a letter expressing concern “about the security and integrity of Intel’s operations and its potential impact on US national security.”

Mr. Cotton cites Mr. Tan’s leadership at San Jose-based Cadence Design Systems from 2009 to 2021. Cadence last week pleaded guilty and paid $140 million to resolve Justice Department charges that it violated export controls by selling chip design products to a Chinese military university.

According to its plea deal with the government, employees of Cadence’s China subsidiary concealed their violations from company export-compliance personnel. It’s not clear whether or when Mr. Tan became aware of the violations, though the company sought to crack down in 2021.

…..

Intel has been the biggest beneficiary of the largesse. Last year the Biden team announced up to $8.5 billion in direct grant funding and $11 billion in low-cost loans. But Intel has had execution problems and has repeatedly delayed construction of a new plant in Ohio owing to weak demand.

Intel’s “Silicon Heartland” factory was supposed to be finished in 2025, but now the target date is 2030. “Intel will further slow the pace of construction in Ohio to ensure spending is aligned with market demand,” the company said last month. Subsidies couldn’t drum up demand for Intel chips any more than they could electric vehicles.

Intel last year cut 15,000 jobs but continues to lose money. News reports this year said Trump officials were trying to broker a deal in which TSMC would invest in and run Intel’s U.S. plants. But with no white knight in sight, Mr. Tan announced plans to shrink Intel’s workforce by more than 20% by year end.

So much for claims the Chips Act would boost jobs. The U.S. has lost 21,000 semiconductor manufacturing jobs in the last year. The shots at Mr. Tan may have more to do with frustration over failed industrial policy than national security. Republicans who helped Democrats pass the Chips Act are partly at fault.

National Review‘s Andrew Stuttaford hopes that Trump’s elimination of the de minimis exception from tariffs on Americans’ small purchases from abroad will – by better-exposing ordinary Americans to the reality that U.S. tariffs are taxes on Americans – have the unintended, salubrious consequence of driving home to more Americans the reality of the burdens of U.S. tariffs. Here’s his conclusion:

There will be few more vivid demonstrations to people of the fact that a tariff is indeed a tax — and a tax paid by Americans — than having to pay it directly.

That may be instructive.

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… is from page 200 of a 1961 edition of James Boswell’s 1791 The Life of Samuel Johnson as this passage is found on the back cover of the December 1992 issue of the Journal of Political Economy:

I mentioned Dr. Adam Smith’s book on the “Wealth of Nations” which was just published, and that Sir John Pringle had observed to me, that Dr. Smith, who had never been in trade, could not be expected to write well on that subject any more than a lawyer upon physick. JOHNSON. “He is mistaken, Sir; a man who has never been engaged in trade himself may undoubtedly write well upon trade, and there is nothing which requires more to be illustrated by philosophy than trade does. As to mere wealth, that is to say, money, it is clear that one nation or individual cannot increase its store but by making another poorer: but trade procures what is more valuable, the reciprocation of the particular advantages of different countries. A merchant seldom thinks but of his own particular trade. To write a good book upon it, a man must have extensive views. It is not necessary to have practised, to write well upon a subject.”

DBx: It’s worth noting that the tory Samuel Johnson (pictured here) and the liberal Adam Smith were not deep admirers of each other, although there was mutual respect.

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Here’s a letter to a new correspondent.

Mr. K__:

Thanks for your latest email. You write:

I am not an economist so pardon my ignorance, but I don’t follow your and John Lott’s disagreement.

I appreciate the opportunity to clarify my last post.

Almost all economists from Adam Smith forward have staunchly opposed tariffs. Yet – and here’s the crucial point – it’s more accurate to describe that opposition as being to protectionism. This opposition is to the widespread notion that the general populace of a country can be enriched by protecting domestic producers from foreign competition. It’s opposition to the popular belief that protecting domestic producers from competition increases domestic employment, raises domestic wages, fuels domestic economic growth, and is necessary to ensure an appropriate “balance of trade.”

The case against protectionism as a means of improving the economy is so powerful, both theoretically and empirically, that protectionism can be dismissed as a sound economic policy as a matter of principle.

But because tariffs have been, and remain, the dominant means of protection, opposition to protectionism is commonly expressed as being opposition to tariffs. This wording would present no problem if tariffs’ only function were protection. Tariffs, however, can be used for purposes other than protection, especially to raise revenue.

Because John Lott is correct to observe that all taxes distort private economic decision-making, there’s no reason in principle to dismiss the possibility that taxing imports can be part of a system of raising revenue in the least-distorting way possible. Although, as economist Brian Albrecht explains, tariffs have many shortcomings even as a revenue-raising device, the opposition to tariffs for which economists are famous is opposition to protective tariffs, not to what are called “revenue tariffs.”

It’s true that Trump and his supporters – having to do P.R. for a harmful policy that Donald Trump has been obsessed with for at least 40 years – sometimes mention revenue, national security, Brazilian internal legal issues, and other non-protectionist goals to justify the administration’s tariffs. But these non-protectionist goals are not the main purpose. Protectionism is.

I urge you to read the vast bulk of what Trump has said about trade over the decades – and the vast bulk of what he says today; consult his 2017 inaugural address; scour the case for tariffs made by Peter Navarro, Robert Lighthizer, Stephen Miran, and other of Trump’s close trade advisors; sample some of the many books, essays, and tweets by Oren Cass and other “National Conservatives” who generally support Trump’s trade policies. What you’ll discover is that they are consumed with fear that America’s economy has been “hollowed out” by free trade (it hasn’t) and that U.S. trade deficits are a calamity (they’re not). Their solution to these (imaginary) problems is protective tariffs. And it’s to this protectionist “solution” that I and other serious economists object and continue to believe, with good reason, will do damage to the American economy.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

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Here’s a letter to the New York Post

Editor:

John Lott’s attempt to shield Trump’s tariffs from the criticisms of economists misses the mark (“Hey, experts — admit what you got so wrong on Trump’s tariffs,” August 7, 2025). I and other economists oppose these tariffs because, in both intent and effect, they are protectionist. These levies are meant to restructure the U.S. economy and eliminate trade deficits by dramatically reducing imports. It is this protectionist effort that we oppose, and that we predict will inflict economic harm on ordinary Americans.

Mr. Lott, however, inexplicably treats the debate as if it’s not about protectionism but, rather, about the best way to raise revenue, ensure national security, and pry open foreign markets.

Nearly every economist, including me, admits that tariffs might well have a role to play as part of the mix of taxes to raise revenue, as well as to achieve narrowly targeted national-security goals.

As for the claim that these tariffs pried open foreign markets, much of this is exaggerated. Worse, because U.S. tariff rates are now multiple times higher than before Trump took office – a fact consistent with these tariffs’ protectionist intent – we Americans are paying higher prices and the allocation of American resources is distorted, just as economics predicts.

Only by ignoring the main, protectionist purpose of the president’s tariffs is Mr. Lott able to paint economists as clueless ideologues whose objections to these tariffs have allegedly been proven wrong by Mr. Trump.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

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Phil Magness and Alberto Mingardi, writing in the Wall Street Journal, decry Trump’s elimination of the de minimis exemption of small mail- and on-line order purchases from abroad; now, even small purchases from abroad will be tariffed. A slice:

Proponents of tax increases on others seldom like to pay them personally. Tariffs are no different. The White House claims its tariff revenue is coming from foreign countries, but Americans will soon pay new levies on small packages from abroad because of an executive order President Trump signed last week.

On Aug. 29, the U.S. will end its de minimis exemption, which grants Americans a tax break for small mail-order purchases from abroad. For the first time since 1938, international packages will arrive with a tariff bill to be paid by the recipient. That means your next eBay purchase from Europe will incur a 15% tax. Your online coffee order from Brazil will face a 50% markup. And everyday purchases from Amazon Haul, or its Chinese competitor Temu, will come with a surcharge matching the tariff on its origin country. If a postal carrier isn’t equipped to calculate the fee according to Mr. Trump’s ever-changing tariff schedule, the new tax is a minimum $80 flat rate per package. In total, Mr. Trump’s order will put tariffs on the estimated 1.36 billion packages that Americans receive every year from online purchases that were previously tax-exempt.

Tax hikes are seldom rewarded at the ballot box. That’s why the White House is trying to justify its order by saying the de minimis exemption is abused to send fentanyl and other synthetic opioids undetected. The vast majority of fentanyl smuggled into the U.S. comes from one country: Mexico. But Mr. Trump is ending the de minimis exemption for packages from all countries. Although fentanyl is a deadly drug, there’s no evidence that taxing worldwide e-commerce will stop drugs from entering the U.S.

Also from Phil Magness is this essay at Law & Liberty in which he offers a credible explanation for the relative reserve (so far) of other governments in retaliating against Trump’s tariffs. A slice:

Trump may be playing with fewer cards than he realizes when he attempts to negotiate tariff deals. The EU and other governments know that time is on their side with both the tariff lawsuits and the US political climate. And that recognition changes the dynamics of their strategies by shifting them away from retaliation. Consider the possible scenarios.

The biggest risk to Trump right now is that the appellate and Supreme Courts both strike down his IEEPA tariff orders, and with them every “deal” he has secured to date. Courtroom outcomes are never guaranteed, and they tend to operate on the judges’ own schedules, but this outcome could conceivably occur in a matter of months. If that’s the case, then the EU has every incentive to take the 15 percent tariff “deal” and just wait it out until the courts make their determination.

Suppose that the Supreme Court punts on the case for procedural reasons, or finds a rationale for upholding the tariff policies. Even in this scenario, waiting may still be the more prudent strategy for the EU and other trading partners abroad. They may be banking on Trump losing one or both houses of Congress in the 2026 midterms, as often happens to the incumbent president’s party. If the Democrats regain the majority, they will almost certainly remove a procedural rule that Republican Speaker Mike Johnson imposed back in April to prevent floor challenges to Trump’s IEEPA tariffs (Johnson adopted this rule because he currently lacks the votes to defeat a direct challenge if a handful of free-trade Republicans break ranks and vote with the Democrats). An opposition Congress would make it more difficult for Trump to enact tariffs by executive decree, thereby limiting his ability to use them as leverage for his “deals.”

David Hebert explains that “tariffs tanked GDP, not imports.” A slice:

GDP is meant to measure the amount of production that happens in a country. Since “production” is difficult to measure in and of itself, the Bureau of Economic Analysis instead measures “expenditures.” This makes sense because, if we think about it, any time we spend money on a good, someone else must have produced that good that we bought.

But what about people who buy American-made products who do not actually live in America? Clearly, we should count that spending, too. Lo and behold, we do, which is why we add exports to American spending totals, reflecting the production that happened here despite the spending happening elsewhere.

Because the BEA, however, tallies all the spending that Americans do in a given period, and Americans also spend money on imported goods, that spending on imports would also be included in this expenditure method. To fix this, the BEA simply subtracts the value of all the goods that we import from other countries.

Caleb Petitt reviews the legal briefs against Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs.

My Mercatus Center colleague Jack Salmon makes clear that Trump’s trade ‘deal’ hurt Americans. Two slices:

Behind the fanfare lies a stunning truth: these so-called “trade deals” are actually a massive tax hike on American consumers and businesses. The White House may call it market access, but what we’re really getting is market restriction.

Rather than negotiating mutually beneficial tariff reductions, these agreements have instead carved out politically targeted protections for select sectors while hiking duties on a wide array of imports.

…..

The administration’s messaging is clear: these agreements will “open” foreign markets to U.S. businesses. But let’s be honest, Japan, the U.K., and Vietnam have long been major trading partners with relatively open markets. The true effect of these deals is to make imports more expensive for Americans by replacing lower tariffs with much higher ones.

This is not trade liberalization. Its protectionism rebranded. And it contradicts decades of economic understanding about the benefits of free trade. If anything, these moves are more about serving narrow political interests than promoting prosperity.

Former Speaker of the U.S. House Paul Ryan (R-WI) is correct about Trump’s tariffs:

They justified tariffs based on trade deficit… But then they threw a tariff on Brazil at 50%, and we have a trade surplus with Brazil. There’s no rationale for this other than the president wanting to raise tariffs based upon his whims, his opinions.

GMU Econ alum Dominic Pino reviews Ezra Klein’s and Derek Thompson’s Abundance. Three slices:

In Abundance, authors Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson clearly state their thesis in the introduction: “To have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need. That’s it.” And that’s the problem. Their thesis doesn’t make sense because they fail to consistently define the word that appears three times in that statement: “we.”

Klein and Thompson see their book as a missive to the American left and an antidote to the “degrowth” ideology that has taken hold in parts of it. Their vision for “abundance liberalism” is more about a shift in focus and emphasis than an entire ideological overhaul for the left. It has spurred debate within the left about whether it presents an opportunity to correct some of the mistakes that cost Kamala Harris the 2024 election or is merely a “neoliberal” wolf in sheep’s clothing.

It is neither. People who are more favorable to free markets may be tempted to applaud left-wing authors, conceding that government isn’t always the answer, but Klein and Thompson still don’t understand the role of individualism and markets in creating the abundance they desire.

…..

They are clear about what they want. Their vision of the future involves a lot of green energy, mass transit, housing construction, and research and development investment. They want vertical farming, lab-grown meat, automated technology, and supersonic airplanes.

Some of this vision sounds attractive to me. Some of it does not. That’s fine, and it’s true of all visions of the future. But they assert that this vision is the future that “we” want. I should be included in “we,” but I am not.

…..

Individuals are the ultimate decision-makers in a society. They are naturally part of groups (families) and often choose to organize themselves into other groups (corporations, governments, religious institutions, etc.) in ways that are healthy and beneficial. But individuals in the end have to choose to show up to work, use their brains to come up with new ideas, and persuade others that those ideas are worth developing.

One reliable way to get other people to do things for you is to allow them to make money from doing it. And there is already a mechanism by which that happens: markets. People get paid for coming up with good ideas and providing goods and services that make other people’s lives better. The development and expansion of markets around the world have delivered more abundance than thousands of years’ worth of human thought possible.

One reason markets work is that they do not need there to be “a single set of answers.” They work with decentralized information spread throughout society that is possessed and used by different individuals. That information condenses into a price, which is a signal to others that informs their decisions. They allow for the appearance of top-down coordination where none exists, and they perform better than attempts at top-down coordination because they incorporate information that top-down planners cannot access.

The answer Klein and Thompson are yearning for is markets. But they are respected American liberals, and respected American liberals can’t run around referencing Adam Smith or F. A. Hayek or Milton Friedman. So they’re just lost, aimlessly writing about stuff they want other people to do for them.

George Will wonders how much longer humanity’s luck will continue to protect us from the devastation of nuclear war. Here’s his conclusion:

Thucydides said three things cause wars: honor, fear and interest. Come Wednesday, 29,220 days will have passed since the first use of a nuclear weapon, and 29,217 since the second. What in humanity’s carnage-strewn history of honor-driven angers, rational and irrational fears, and ideologically defined interests suggests there will not be a third, and then others?

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… is from page 180 of Gordon Wood’s great 1991 book, The Radicalism of the American Revolution:

Independence, declared David Ramsey in a memorable Fourth of July oration in 1778, would free Americans from that monarchial world where “favor is the source of preferment,” and where “he that can best please his superiors, by the low arts of fawning and adulation, is most likely to obtain favor.”

DBx: And yet here we Americans are in 2025 with a national government that, with abandon, doles out favors such as tariffs and subsidies – and threatens punishments, such as are delivered with the hammers and tongs of the regulatory state and through lawfare.

Blame belongs both to Democrats and Republicans. For more than a century now the Constitutional architecture has been rearranged to give the government generally – and the executive branch in particular – ever-greater discretionary power. The naive belief (and no belief can be more naive) is that as long as those persons wielding power hold their offices through some connection to the results of majority-rule elections, the power-wielders will pursue ‘the will of the people’ which, being vox populi is as near as possible to vox dei. And these power-wielders, being invested by their democratic elevation with superhuman knowledge, wisdom, and goodness, it would not pay the venal amongst us to petition or plead with them for special favors.

Far too many Americans – always obsessed with achieving, by whatever means, the political object du jour– over the past century-plus have increasingly abandoned the noble, liberal ideas of America’s Founders.