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Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal.

Editor:

You’re correct that the U.S. economy is now showing signs of the inevitable damage done by Mr. Trump’s tariffs (“The Trump Economy Stumbles,” August 2). Yet some of your wording carelessly grants too much credit to the administration’s case for protectionism.

You write that “much of the world will now pay 15%, if Mr. Trump sticks to his deals.” Not so. Because – as the evidence shows – pre-tariff import prices aren’t falling, what you mean is that Americans will now pay 15% for imports from much of the world.

It’s therefore inaccurate also to say, as you do, that failure of other countries to retaliate with tariffs of their own means that “that these countries seem willing to absorb the 15% tariff.” These countries are indeed willing to absorb the shrinkage of their U.S. markets rather than risk the further shrinkage that a trade war would cause. But because the president’s tariffs are paid by Americans, the people who are ‘absorbing’ the bulk of the tariffs aren’t foreigners but, rather, American firms and households who are paying the higher prices.

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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… is from page 5 of Roderick Floud’s, Nobel-laureate Robert Fogel’s, Bernard Harris’s, and Sok Chul Hong’s fascinating 2011 book, The Changing Body: Health, Nutrition, and Human Development in the Western World since 1700:

[T]here is no doubt that from 1700 to 2000, over the course of some 12-15 human generations, all the features of this schema have been transformed in ways never seen before in human history. In the process, humankind has gained equally unprecedented control over its environment – even if it has sometimes misused that control – through the invention and application of new forms of technology. One sign of that control is that, in most if not quite all parts of the world, the size, shape, and longevity of the human body have changed more substantially, and much more rapidly, during the past three centuries than over many previous millennia. There were, of course, evolutionary changes to our bodies during those past millennia, but the change that has occurred in recent times is of a different character. It has come about, within a timescale which is minutely short by the standards of Darwinian evolution, through the application of technology, in particular to food production and distribution and to the development of means of combatting disease.

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Yesterday I wrote about the claim, made by a Trump administration lawyer during oral arguments, that Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs were in response to a “spike” in the U.S. trade deficit. As I noted, the closest the “Liberation Day” Executive Order comes to specifying any such spike is when it complains that the U.S. goods trade deficit in 2024 was 40 percent higher than that ‘deficit’ was in 2019. As I also noted, that 40-percent hike was indeed larger than the 15-percent increase in the goods trade deficit in the previous five-year period.

But (and these days this fact cannot be repeated too often) a goods trade deficit is an economically meaningless – indeed, illegitimate – concept. It’s the economic equivalent of people writing about human health and medicine while focusing on the four humors, or of judges determining the likelihood that someone committed a crime by consulting chicken entrails.

Because people produce and consume goods and services – and given that 80 percent of U.S. GDP today is services – to be at all legitimate, analyses and discussions of trade must consider goods and services.

So was there any recent “spike” in the U.S. trade deficit of goods and services that the Trump administration can point to as justification for the “Liberation Day” tariffs? No. In 2024, the inflation-adjusted U.S. trade deficit in goods and services was 68 percent larger than it was in 2019. But in 2019, this inflation-adjusted ‘deficit’ was 77 percent larger than it was in 2014.

In other words, the only time period that the “Liberation Day” Executive Order comes close to identifying as one over which there occurred an emergency spike in the trade deficit (2019-2024) is a time period during which the trade deficit in goods and services rose by a smaller percentage amount than it rose during the previous five-year period.

Of course, in the end – because U.S. trade deficits are largely phenomena for Americans to applaud rather than to oppose – all this administration talk of trade deficits being an economic emergency is utterly misguided. But if anyone insists on quaking in fear over U.S. trade deficits, then that quaking should be over the deficit in goods and services – and that deficit did not spike in any time period over which Trump & Co. can credibly claim to have prompted his April 2nd announcement of his “Liberation Day” tariffs.

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Phil Gramm and I are grateful for these reviews of our book, The Triumph of Economic Freedom: Debunking the Seven Great Myths of American Capitalism:

Anne Bradley writing for the Acton Institute. A slice:

Among the good news found in Triumph of Economic Freedom is that even readers not well-versed in economics or steeped in stats will find this book accessible. It boasts a “just the facts” approach, taking us chapter by chapter through the myths we can’t seem to shake. Gramm and Boudreaux invoke the great Thomas Sowell on the very first page, who argues that political differences emerge from “people reasoning from fundamentally different premises … have different visions of how the world works.”

Sowell has written about the constrained and unconstrained vision of man. The realities of human nature bind man in the constrained vision; the unconstrained vision sees man as malleable, able to be shaped and formed, bent to the common good. The unconstrained vision is factually incorrect yet appealing to policymakers and anyone who desires government power. The constrained vision accurately captures man as he is, finite and fallible, operating out of self-interest rather than full-time benevolence. The American founders understood the concept of self-interest and, as such, recognized the need for limited government.

Thus, we almost always start on the wrong foot when it comes to understanding economic history, which hinders our ability to make better policy for the future. The authors point out that at the country’s founding, the government was limited in both size and scope. It took until 1918 for the federal government to spend its first trillion dollars, and up until 1900, government spending as a percentage of GDP was around 7%; today it is around 33%. Deficits have proliferated through the 20th and into the 21st century, with no end in sight.

This is an untenable path that will not end well. The authors are all too familiar with this. This book is unique in that it’s not a vitriolic rant against progressives and Democrats; there are many such books already, and they hardly change hearts and minds. Instead, this book presents a careful study of evidence that the authors argue has influenced public opinion over the past century, leading to a substantial expansion of government in both its size (what it spends) and scope (what it influences or controls).

John Goodman (part I and part II). Two slices:

As we approach our country’s 250th birthday, there is no better time to reflect on where we have been and how we got here. Yet Americans are surprisingly ignorant about our past.

As I noted in Part I, the book The Triumph of Economic Freedom by Phil Gramm and Donald J. Boudreaux is a useful remedy. Together the authors have combed through the scholarly literature and savagely dismantled myths about our economic history—myths that are routinely taught in high schools and colleges across the country.

…..

Far from protecting the public from the excesses of capitalism, the Progressive Era gave us government regulations designed to help producers, not consumers, in the marketplace.

And here’s Phil Gramm discussing our book.

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Richard Reinsch exposes the economic and factual fallacies that infuse so much of the work of Oren Cass, Kevin Roberts, and other “National Conservatives.” Two slices:

The purpose of an economy is to meet the needs of consumers, since consumption is the ultimate reason why we work. Conclusions follow this truth. One is that consumers don’t have the responsibility to keep certain workers employed. The producer must serve the consumer. Should we be required to buy things that are redundant or that we don’t need or want, to keep existing businesses alive? That is the absurd logic of Cass’s inversion of the consumption-production relationship. Moreover, feeding, housing, and clothing one’s family are essential expenses. How is making these consumption expenses more expensive pro-family?

We are all consumers, and redefining the economy around manufacturing workers inevitably leads to a cronyism framework in which the government supports special interests. In serving the consumer, by contrast, we best unlock the dynamism and creativity that crowns a market economy. Consumer choices determine which products or economic actions will best locate our comparative advantage and which will not. Through this process of discovery, investors gain a better understanding of where to invest, workers learn where to work, and producers determine the resources they need to bring goods and services to the market. How does the process appear when we focus on workers and government policies that attempt to engineer wages and economic sectors, while inherently favoring some sectors over others? What knowledge is relied upon? Where does it come from? How will it be deployed? Who are the decision makers? But rather than one more Massachusetts liberal or DC economic nationalist attempting to run our lives, the better part of wisdom remains the singular standard of consumer choice and how this choice is calculated, which inherently relies on core economic concepts that will always shape economic reasoning and best conduce to an economy of plenty.

…..

We should consider another set of economic truths. Did the working class meet its demise at the hands of free trade, NAFTA, and the WTO as Cass and Roberts insist? No. As AEI economist Michael Strain and investor Clifford Asness observe: “The wages of nonsupervisory workers—roughly the bottom 80 percent of workers by pay, including manufacturing workers and service-sector workers who are not managers—have grown by around 60 percent over the past two generations. Over the past three decades, inflation-adjusted wages for typical workers have grown by 44 percent.”

Strain and Asness cite a different finding on overall wealth accumulation, observing that data from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) notes that “families in the 51st to 90th percentiles of the wealth distribution had an average wealth of $1.3 million in 2022, the most recent year data are available. That’s up from around $500,000 in 1990, after adjusting for inflation.”

What about those with low incomes, Strain and Asness inquire? “The CBO’s income data show that inflation-adjusted post-tax-and-transfer income for the bottom 20 percent of households more than doubled from 1990 to 2021.” And “these families saw their average real wealth triple from 1990 to 2022.” Poverty rates have declined using the government’s official measure from above 20 percent in 1960 to 11 percent today. The standard is relative, so some poverty will always be found.

What about the boys down at the plant? Are we overlooking them?

In their famous paper describing the “China Shock,” David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson observed a 13-year period from 1999 to 2011, concluding that imports from China resulted in a 21 percent decline in manufacturing employment, or a net loss of 2.4 million jobs. Numerous scholars have since questioned these findings of such job losses, reducing the number by half or even more. We should note the number of jobs created in America by imports, which economists also point to in evaluating China Shock. I don’t diminish job losses or the psychological toll they exert. It is a natural part of any freely functioning economy, however, and an inherent aspect of capitalism and America’s economic history. Six million jobs were also created during this same period in other sectors of the economy. Economist Jeremy Horpedahl has recently tested the jobs and incomes of the 10 cities most negatively affected by the China Shock. His findings indicate that most of them currently boast more jobs than they did in 2001. Moreover, these same cities have higher real wages for workers at every income level. Amidst the current push for reindustrializing America, we might wonder who will fill the already 450,000 open manufacturing jobs? Declinist narrative and DC opportunity mill meet economic reality.

Dominic Pino talks with Jeremy Horpedahl about the many mistaken notions long accepted about the state of the American economy.

Capitolism author Scott Lincicome reports on the increasingly visible damage done to the American economy by the policies of Joe Biden & Co. – many of which policies are being continued by Donald Trump & Co. A slice:

This summer marks three years since the United States embarked on a new and massive industrial policy experiment, with President Joe Biden signing the CHIPS Act and Inflation Reduction Act in July and August 2022, respectively. Capitolism has repeatedly expressed concerns about those laws, based on both U.S. industrial policy’s long history of challenges and snippets indicating that the same old problems are reemerging once again. You might recall, in particular, that I’ve been skeptical of the widely touted increase in U.S. manufacturing construction spending, not because it was fake (though inflation surely has tempered the spending’s real dollar-value) but because we simply didn’t yet know what all those dollars were getting us. Now that we’re at three years, however, the picture is becoming clearer—as are some of the industrial policies’ large and unseen costs.

The obvious place to start is with still-struggling Intel. The recipient of the CHIPS Act’s largest grant (along with billions more in tax credits) confirmed last week that it will again delay completion of the first phase of its Ohio mega-complex to at least 2030 or 2031. As you may recall, Intel’s now-“retired” CEO announced the Ohio project in 2022 as part of the company’s rather blatant push to get the CHIPS Act passed, promising the complex would be operational this year. Now, however, the Ohio facility’s future is in doubt, as Intel’s new CEO is cutting back on capital expenditures—he believes the previous management overinvested (gee, I wonder why?)—and recently suggested the company might abandon advanced chipmaking altogether. Some analysts also believe that Intel should abandon chip manufacturing to focus on other core businesses, but—given the company’s domestic manufacturing footprint and political importance—they’re skeptical that the U.S. government would let that happen.

This is not, to put it mildly, a great situation.

Of course, not all CHIPS Act headliners are doing as badly as Intel, but others’ U.S. projects also raise concerns. Industry leader TSMC, for example, is now producing some advanced semiconductors in Arizona, but—as National Review’s Dominic Pino reported last October—that facility wasn’t spurred by CHIPS money. We’ve discussed, moreover, that the Arizona factory’s current output is less advanced than its best Taiwan-made chips, relatively small, and relatively costly. TSMC doubled down on that last point in April when it hiked U.S. prices substantially, and the most recent figures put its Arizona-made chips at 5 to 20 percent pricier than those from Taiwan. More and better U.S.-made chips are coming from TSMC, but—as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent just lamented—the fully operational Arizona factories will satisfy just 7 percent of U.S. demand and are also being further delayed by high costs and red tape. (And they’re still being flown to Taiwan for packaging—at least for now.)

Speaking of red tape and delays, Micron’s huge memory chip facility in upstate New York hasn’t even broken ground yet and won’t do so until at least late November, thanks in large part to state and federal environmental regulations and other CHIPS Act requirements (including social policy ones). Given that Micron still “needs to obtain dozens of permits, from the federal Environmental Protection Agency to the town of Clay,” even this new timeline appears optimistic. Regardless, the current best case is that Micron’s first factory won’t come online until 2029 and its entire complex won’t be cranking until 2045. (Anyone wanna bet?) And analysts doubt that the struggling firm’s New York output will be “cost competitive.”

Other subsidized New York semiconductor facilities, it should be noted, are suffering similar delays.

The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal describes the day that Trump’s tariff-defending lawyers had in court yesterday as “rough.” A slice:

As one judge told Mr. [Brett] Shumate, it seems “you’re asking for unbounded authority” to impose tariffs. Yes he is. But as the small business plaintiffs argue, the President isn’t a king, and the Constitution doesn’t let him command the trade tides.

GMU Econ alum Caleb Petitt writes insightfully about the exceptions that Adam Smith made to his exceptions to his case for unilateral free trade. A slice:

Moreover, he warned against the temptation to overstate the need for gradual liberalization. Manufacturers would tend to overstate their reliance on protection, and labor markets were quite flexible and could rapidly adapt to shocks. For example, after a war, soldiers and sailors rush back into the labor market, which handles those situations well. Smith expected that the same would be true with labor-market churn after sudden liberalization.

Smith is a well-known defender of free trade, which is why his exceptions might garner significant attention. That attention should be tempered by the recognition that Smith did not see them as blank checks for policymakers. It would serve us well to heed his warnings.

Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberly Strassel applauds the rise of “the climate right” – “one that fully engages on the science.” A slice:

It couldn’t come soon enough. What’s become obvious in recent years—thanks to the taste of it we got with the Biden administration—is that climate hysteria is one of the greatest threats to freedom in modern times. The more cynical of its promoters seized on it for that reason—as a justification for total power. If day-to-day human activity is causing the Earth to melt, government must control the day-to-day: what we drive, what we eat, what products we buy, what industries exist (and don’t), where we live. Anyone who disagrees with the regime’s reigning narrative—the collective requirement to address the “existential” threat—is branded the climate version of an “enemy of the people”: a “denier.” It’s corrosive.

The right this week debuted its new strategy, and Americans received the bigger scientific picture. Long may that healthy, vigorous debate—the essence of good science—continue.

Reason’s Liz Wolfe rightly decries the ignorant and vile leftists who applaud the murder of successful business people. A slice:

They [these leftists] seem to want a regression to the Dark Ages: an unsophisticated economy with no landlords, no insurers, no complex markets. They see complexity in the economy, the reason for which is beyond their comprehension, as parasitic.

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… is from page 186 of Gordon Wood’s great 1991 book, The Radicalism of the American Revolution:

Yet it is important to realize that the Revolution suddenly and effectively ended the cultural climate that had allowed black slavery, as well as other forms of bondage and unfreedom. With the revolutionary movement, black slavery became excruciatingly conspicuous in a way that it had not been in the older monarchial society with its many calibrations and degrees of unfreedom; and Americans in 1775-1776 began attacking it with a vehemence that was inconceivable earlier.

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This morning I listened to the first hour of oral arguments before the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in the case of V.O.S. v. Trump – the case challenging Trump’s April 2nd, 2025, “Liberation Day” tariffs. Both because I have listened to too few such arguments before appellate courts, and because the audio quality was often too poor for me to clearly hear what some of the judges were saying, I here offer no assessment of which side the court will likely favor when it announces its decision. But I will offer here one observation.

The attorney for the administration, Brett Shumate, was compelled by his task to repeat the economically ludicrous argument that U.S. trade deficits are a national emergency. When pressed by one of the judges to explain how an economic phenomenon that has persisted “for decades” is an emergency, Shumate asserted that Trump was motivated by a recent “spike” in the trade deficit.

Has there actually been any such “spike”? I heard no judge ask about this matter during the main presentations (which are all that I listened to). So let’s look.

The April 2nd Executive Order (No. 14257) says nothing about any such spike or recent upsurge or swelling of the trade deficit. Here are the E.O.’s opening paragraphs:

I, DONALD J. TRUMP, President of the United States of America, find that underlying conditions, including a lack of reciprocity in our bilateral trade relationships, disparate tariff rates and non-tariff barriers, and U.S. trading partners’ economic policies that suppress domestic wages and consumption, as indicated by large and persistent annual U.S. goods trade deficits, constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and economy of the United States. That threat has its source in whole or substantial part outside the United States in the domestic economic policies of key trading partners and structural imbalances in the global trading system. I hereby declare a national emergency with respect to this threat.

On January 20, 2025, I signed the America First Trade Policy Presidential Memorandum directing my Administration to investigate the causes of our country’s large and persistent annual trade deficits in goods, including the economic and national security implications and risks resulting from such deficits, and to undertake a review of, and identify, any unfair trade practices by other countries. On February 13, 2025, I signed a Presidential Memorandum entitled “Reciprocal Trade and Tariffs,” that directed further review of our trading partners’ non-reciprocal trading practices, and noted the relationship between non-reciprocal practices and the trade deficit. On April 1, 2025, I received the final results of those investigations, and I am taking action today based on those results.

Large and persistent annual U.S. goods trade deficits have led to the hollowing out of our manufacturing base; inhibited our ability to scale advanced domestic manufacturing capacity; undermined critical supply chains; and rendered our defense- industrial base dependent on foreign adversaries. Large and persistent annual U.S. goods trade deficits are caused in substantial part by a lack of reciprocity in our bilateral trade relationships. This situation is evidenced by disparate tariff rates and non-tariff barriers that make it harder for U.S. manufacturers to sell their products in foreign markets. It is also evidenced by the economic policies of key U.S. trading partners insofar as they suppress domestic wages and consumption, and thereby demand for U.S. exports, while artificially increasing the competitiveness of their goods in global markets. These conditions have given rise to the national emergency that this order is intended to abate and resolve.

Note that Trump here complains about “large and persistent annual U.S. goods trade deficits” – nothing here (or elsewhere in the E.O.) about any sudden upsurge or ‘spike’ in trade deficits generally (that is, trade in goods and services). Note also that Trump’s complaint is about “U.S. goods trade deficits” with individual countries – a concept that’s economically irrelevant.

The closest this Executive Order comes to suggesting a ‘spike’ is this passage on page 8:

I have declared a national emergency arising from conditions reflected in large and persistent annual U.S. goods trade deficits, which have grown by over 40 percent in the past 5 years alone, reaching $1.2 trillion in 2024.

Over the previous five years, from 2014 to 2019, the increase in the U.S. “goods trade deficit” was about 15 percent – and so, yes, 40 percent is significantly larger than 15 percent. But the E.O. doesn’t do even as much as I did in the previous sentence to put this 40-percent increase in perspective. Has there never been another five-year period when this (economically meaningless) “goods trade deficit” increased by a percentage amount comparable to 40 percent? I don’t know, and I’ll bet that neither Trump nor his lawyers know. I certainly heard nothing from the government lawyer, in today’s oral argument, about perspective on this matter.

It cannot be said too strongly that “goods trade deficits” mean nothing economically. These “deficits” are no more economically meaningful than “yellow-things trade deficits” or “things-shorter-than-four-feet trade deficits.” Nearly 80 percent of U.S. production is of services, so even if you insist on supposing that tangible things are, as an economic matter, categorically different from intangible things, the fact that the U.S. runs so-called “goods trade deficits” is no more surprising than is the fact that Antarctica in July is cold.

In a follow-up post I’ll look at the economically meaningful concept of trade in goods and services, given that, in today’s oral argument, that seems to have been what the attorneys and the judges we talking about – or, at any rate, that’s what someone who did not read the executive order would likely think they were talking about.

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… for having me as a guest to discuss Phil Gramm’s and my book, The Triumph of Economic Freedom.

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My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy, continues her crusade against the U.S. government’s fiscal irresponsibility. A slice:

Maybe we wouldn’t keep operating this way—pretending like minor trims are major reforms while refusing to tackle demographic and entitlement time bombs ticking beneath our feet—if we stayed focused on the question of what, considering the cost, we’re willing to pay for.

Otherwise, it’s too easy to continue committing a generational injustice toward our children and grandchildren. That’s because all the benefits and subsidies that we’re unwilling to pay for will eventually have to be paid for in the future with higher taxes, inflation, or both. That’s morally and economically reprehensible.

Admitting we have a problem is hard. Fixing it is even harder, especially when politicians obscure costs and fail to recognize the following realities.

Mike Munger makes clear that SALT deductions oblige some people (namely, today’s citizens in red states and future taxpayers in all states) to subsidize the government ‘demanded’ by other people (namely, today’s citizens in blue states). A slice:

As I have argued for years, starting when I sometimes got little policy pieces discussed by Rush Limbaugh, US policy is “DAFT” — Deficits Are Future Taxes. Since we are not cutting spending, a SALT deduction is a tax increase. The SALT deduction increases the deficit; deficits are future taxes, so SALT deductions are straightforward tax increases.

National Review‘s Andrew Stuttaford explains that

central planners, such as those trying to design an industrial policy, are not known for their ability to think everything through. That’s not always their fault. Life is complicated, business is complicated. What is their fault is their belief, let’s call it their fatal conceit, that they can think everything through.

…..

One of the features, for the political class, of a protectionist regime is the way that it can help in the process of building a clientelist regime by giving it something else to “sell.” Company X asks for special treatment here, Union Y requests a tweak to the rules there. Certain “clients,” however, can be too important to ignore, especially as, say, midterms draw closer, raising interesting questions about who really is setting policy.

Here’s Warren Coats on the U.S.-Japan trade ‘deal.’

Jim Dorn reports on “Yiwu: China’s Free-Market City.”

The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal applauds a recent appellate-court opinion that helps to rein in the galloping administrative state. A slice:

In 2016 the Labor Department accused Sun Valley Orchards, a fourth generation farm in New Jersey, of breaching an employment agreement on H-2A visas. Labor imposed hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines through an in-house administrative proceeding. The agency requested penalties and then approved them, serving as prosecutor, judge and jury.

Sun Valley’s owners, Joe and Russell Marino, with the help of the Institute for Justice, sued under the Administrative Procedure Act, claiming the Constitution entitles them to a hearing in a regular federal court. A district court dismissed the claim, but on Tuesday the Third Circuit panel ruled unanimously that the Labor Department’s proceedings against Sun Valley must be handled by a federal court, not an administrative tribunal.

John Stossel is correct: “You shouldn’t need a license to talk.”

Also correct is Arnold Kling:

My sense is that the central dogma of partisan Democrats is that they are the best political party because they are morally and intellectually superior to other Americans. Contemplating otherwise is as difficult for the moderate wing of Klein and Yglesias as it is for the wokest of the woke.

The classic analysis of this core belief is Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy. Sowell argues that people on the left who are politically engaged behave as if they were anointed with wisdom that others lack. This belief is so strongly held that nothing counts as evidence against it. It is an axiom, not an empirically falsifiable proposition.

The anointed see opposition not in terms of a mere difference of opinion. It is illegitimate. Their yard signs that say “We believe” in science, justice, and so on are nothing less than an accusation that you don’t believe in such things unless you are on their team.

…..

For the anointed, losing the confidence of the public is like falling off a horse. The “abundance movement” is, like the ill-fated Robert F. Kennedy candidacy, a campaign to get the anointed back on to the horse.

The blind spot of the anointed is their inability to see that they do not belong on the horse to begin with. There is no class of Americans that is morally and intellectually superior to everyone else. Instead, each of us should be modest about what we claim to be the best way to approach political problems.

You can stir up resentment in America by talking about inequality. You can rail against “oligarchs,” landlords, and grocery stores. Or you can champion “abundance,” meaning the ability of government to build things without its own regulations getting in the way. But if you do so from the standpoint of assuming your own moral and intellectual superiority, you will find your popularity is limited, and deservedly so.

Many thanks to Winston Bates for this fine review of Phil Gramm’s and my book, The Triumph of Economic Freedom.