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The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal reports this predictable reality: “President Trump says his tariffs will help workers, but the biggest beneficiaries to date appear to be corporate rent-seekers.” A slice:

Consider Lourenco Goncalves, the Cleveland-Cliffs CEO who tried but failed to block Nippon Steel’s acquisition of U.S. Steel. Now he’s using tariffs to pitch his steel plants to foreign buyers.

Cleveland-Cliffs, one of the largest U.S. steelmakers, on Monday reported a $247 million loss in the second quarter. That’s nothing to celebrate. But the company’s stock price surged 12% because the company said U.S. tariffs have led to record shipments and buoyant prices, which cut the company’s first-quarter loss by half. Political intervention to limit competition tends to do that.

Mr. Trump in February eliminated steel tariff exemptions for trading partners like Canada. Last month he doubled the steel tariffs to 50% when he blessed the Nippon-U.S. Steel deal, ostensibly to please the United Steelworkers union. Cleveland-Cliffs is “uniquely positioned to benefit from this new reality,” Mr. Goncalves said.

He also said Mr. Trump’s 25% tariffs on autos and auto parts will help domestic car makers, which could boost demand for American-made steel—that is, unless higher car prices depress sales. Cleveland-Cliffs is the U.S. auto industry’s biggest steel supplier.

Tariffs could have another benefit for Cleveland-Cliffs: They will make its factories more attractive to foreign buyers. “Going forward, foreign competitors need to acquire steel capacity within the United States if they want to participate in this desirable market,” the CEO said.

The U.S. market for steel is especially desirable now because tariffs let domestic manufacturers pad their margins.

Dominic Pino reflects on Jeremey Horpedahl’s recent busting of some “China Shock” myths. A slice:

One narrative goes like this: China joined the WTO with U.S. support in 2001. This worked great for the U.S. economy as a whole and helped China get rich, but it hollowed out specific U.S. communities affected by trade, especially those with many manufacturing jobs, which have been turned into economic wastelands where no one can find work, and the jobs that do exist are poorly paid. This “China shock” is responsible for dissatisfaction with the U.S. economy and needs to be corrected through robust protectionism and manufacturing subsidies.

Jeremy Horpedahl tests this narrative against the facts from the ten metropolitan areas that “China shock” scholars said were most affected by trade with China. Most of them have more jobs today than they did in 2001, and all of them have higher real wages for workers at every income level.

Alan Dlugash is harsh – justly so – on what he calls “Trump’s cringeworthy trade letters and his ignorance on trade deficits. A slice:

Trump’s trade letters, posted on Truth Social and detailed by the White House are a clownish display of economic ignorance, fixating on bilateral trade deficits as evidence of America being “taken advantage of.” These letters reveal a shocking fundamental misunderstanding of trade and deficits, risking inflation, retaliation, and economic chaos.

The Editorial Board of the Washington Post hits the nail on the head: “In the long run, tariffs don’t hurt American consumers because they cause inflation or tank the stock market; they hurt because they make it harder for people to get the things they want.” [DBx: Let’s hope that the WaPo‘s Editorial Board continues to correctly understand tariffs when these punitive taxes on Americans are imposed, maintained, or raised by a future Democratic administration.]

Roger Ream talks with Daniel Hannan about the dangers of executive power.

The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board rightly describes the MAGA lawfare against the Fed as “lunacy” – a (pre-Milei) “Argentine-level mistake.” A slice:

The Congresswoman [Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, a Trump-aligned Republican from Florida] is trying to criminalize what at its core is an argument over monetary policy. Mr. Powell’s term as Chair ends next May and it’s certain he won’t be reappointed. Whatever Mr. Powell’s rhetorical inexactitude, it’s madness to create a new precedent for prosecuting officials for policy disagreements. Doing so is the road to the hyper-politicized monetary policy you’d expect in Argentina.

Jason Sorens makes a powerful case for allowing Americans to purchase automobiles on-line. A slice:

Before Amazon.com existed, you had to buy books — and any number of other things — at physical stores. If you wanted a new washer or refrigerator, you had to go to a Sears store.

Now imagine if, even worse, there were different stores for different manufacturers of refrigerators: one store for Whirlpool, another for LG, yet another for Bosch, and so on.

That’s just how most of us are forced to buy cars in the United States. Twenty-eight states, including Georgia, prohibit car manufacturers from selling directly to consumers with only narrow exceptions.

Although wisely wishing it were otherwise, Arnold Kling agrees with “with [Theodore] Dalrymple and [Coleman] Hughes in their pessimism about getting the unconstrained vision out of the political bloodstream.”

Who’d a-thunk it?: “Rent prices are falling fast in America’s most pro-housing cities.”

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… is from page 338 of the “Random Thoughts” section of Thomas Sowell’s 2010 book, Dismantling America:

There are too many people, especially among the intelligentsia, who will never appreciate the things that have made this country great until after those things have been destroyed – with their help. Then, of course, it will be too late.

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Here’s a letter that I sent on July 13th to the New York Times; it was not published.

Editor:

In your interview with economist Pietra Rivoli, she conveys much-needed wisdom about trade and tariffs (“Policy or Cudgel? A Trade Economist on Trump’s Hardball Tariffs.” July 13). But she’s mistaken to say – obviously referring to the Voluntary Export Restraints on Japanese automobiles negotiated by Pres. Reagan – that “the reason we have Japanese auto manufacturing plants in the United States is because of the actual or the threat of trade barriers, quotas, tariffs and so forth. Ronald Reagan scared the Japanese manufacturers.”

As economists David Hebert and Marcus Witcher explain,

Volkswagen began building manufacturing plants in Pennsylvania in 1978 and Honda built its first plant in Ohio in 1979, two years before the VER, building motorcycles. Seeing their successes, Honda then announced more plants being built in 1980, which began opening from 1982 to 1986…. In fact, if we look at the data, we see about $652 million of foreign direct investment in 1981 versus $5.3 billion in 1994 when the VER ended. In other words, a 700 percent increase in foreign investment. That sounds like a lot until we see that from the increase from 1994-1999: a 770 percent increase in just five years as compared to the fourteen years of the VER, increasing foreign investment in the US auto sector from $5.3 billion to a staggering $46.1 billion.

Also worth noting is the fact that, even if the threat of trade restrictions was the chief driver of most foreign automobile manufacturing in the U.S., it’s doubtful that this development was good for the U.S. economy as a whole. The workers and inputs in those automobile factories were drawn from other firms and industries. There’s good reason to believe that resources used in facilities that are profitable only because of tariffs generate less economic value than those resources would have generated in their pre-tariff uses.

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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Marian Tupy and my GMU Econ (and Mercatus Center) colleague Peter Boettke, writing in today’s Wall Street Journal, bust the myth that AI will enable government planning to replace free markets. Two slices:

Economic coordination isn’t a problem to be solved by computing an optimal answer. It emerges from the decentralized decisions and adjustments made by billions of economic actors—each with their own plans, preferences, and knowledge—in an ongoing, evolutionary process. Certain rules and institutions are essential for transforming decentralized decision-making into orderly and socially beneficial outcomes. The three Ps—property rights, prices, and profit and loss—provide the three Is—information, incentives and innovation.

“Prices enable people to engage in economic calculation, which forms the basis for the rational allocation of scarce resources among alternative ends. Prices also function as decentralized feedback loops. “A price is a signal wrapped up in an incentive,” note Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok. This dual signal communicates information about relative scarcities and simultaneously encourages economic actors to adjust their plans accordingly. When lithium prices rise, producers and consumers conserve, recycle, innovate, and explore alternatives.

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AI’s economic champions confuse data processing with discovery and overlook how incentives shape the data AI receives. If political actors influence prices, then the input into algorithms is already distorted. “Garbage in, garbage out” still applies—only now the garbage is processed faster and packaged in technical jargon. AI may appear precise, but it has the same blind spots that doomed prior central planning efforts.

Centralizing decisions also distorts behavior. Entrepreneurs anticipating expropriation or opaque regulations may withdraw, reduce investment, or exit entirely. Consumers may hoard or barter. The very data planners rely on become unreliable as people adapt their behavior to avoid being captured by the system. Our research on post-socialist transitions shows that meaningful price signals only re-emerged after private exchange and budget discipline were restored. Computational power didn’t restore order—institutional reform did.

GMU Econ alum Jeremy Horpedahl looks carefully at the “China Shock.” Three slices:

Here’s a shocking fact: all of the MSAs [metropolitan statistical areas] hit hard by the China Shock still managed to have significant and positive real wage growth across the distribution since 2001, the earliest comparable data in the BLS OEWS data, conveniently timed at the beginning of the China Shock (note: for Cleveland, TN the data is first available in 2005, since it was not recognized as an MSA until 2003). Wage gains in several of these places, in fact, are better than the national trends.

…..

Perhaps wages are rising because people are dropping out of the labor force, thus artificially boosting the wages we observe in the OEWS data. That could be the case if the workers losing their jobs have below-average wages. When we look only at manufacturing jobs, all ten of these MSAs saw manufacturing employment fall since 2000, even though some of them saw recovery after the Great Recession. However, as we will see below, gains in jobs in other sectors offset those manufacturing job losses in almost all of these cities.

…..

As Adam Ozimek has recently pointed out, the resiliency of highly educated cities and commuting zones likely isn’t a coincidence or a mere correlation. It’s much more likely that it is a causal relationship, and there are good reasons a more-educated city would be better able to adapt to heavy exposure to the China Shock. So if there are policy implications to economically homogenous, lower-educated cities being less resilient in the face of an economic shock, it is that education and economic diversification would help, not trade barriers.

Scott Lincicome clarifies “the great tariff ‘inflation’ confusion.” Three slices:

One of this year’s more annoying yet persistent tariff defenses—including from a certain Oval Office Tariff Man and his trusty VP sidekick—is that tariffs can’t possibly be bad for American consumers or the U.S. economy because they haven’t caused “inflation.” In fact, a string of moderate 2025 reports from the two most common U.S. inflation gauges—the consumer price index (CPI) and the personal consumption expenditures price index (PCE)—have elicited victory laps from tariff defenders and even a detailed report from the President’s Council of Economic Advisers supposedly showing that the U.S. tariffs Trump imposed this year simply haven’t generated the “inflationary” pressures that tariff critics hysterically predicted. Tuesday’s new CPI print, which covered June and came in about where everyone was expecting, elicited more of the same, as did yesterday’s less-salient producer price index, which Vice President J.D. Vance jumped on to suggest “the economics profession doesn’t fully understand tariffs.”

So, has Trump proven the “experts” and “economists” wrong once again?

In short, no. Even leaving aside the wonky methodological mistakes (and blatant cherrypicking) that Vance and others tariff defenders have made, their recent “inflation” obsession reveals either a fundamental cluelessness about how tariffs and “inflation” interact—and about how most actual “economists” view the issue—or a cynical belief that you’re clueless, too.

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Put another way, global tariffs will increase the price level but not its rate of change (aka “inflation”)—at least not in the longer term. Thus, most economists expect the CPI or PCE to tick up this year because of Trump’s tariffs, but only temporarily. (In general, the widely held view among various professional economists is that we’ll see a gradual, 1-ish percentage point increase in the CPI and PCE figures, peaking later this year and early next but mostly subsiding after 2026.) Those higher prices still mean pain for American consumers, of course, but the increase wouldn’t technically be “inflation” as economists understand and define it. And any CPI uplift we do see in the coming year or so will pale in comparison with the recent post-pandemic inflation we’ve lived through, because imported goods are still relatively small shares of Americans’ total spending.

So, from a theoretical perspective, discussions of tariffs emphasizing their effect on the overall CPI number and “inflation” are mostly missing the boat. It’s an issue, especially given all the uncertainty right now, but it’s not the issue—and few serious economists have said otherwise. (Far more of them, in fact, have said just the opposite.)

…..

Then there’s the issue of foreign exporters eating the tariff costs by lowering their prices—Trump’s favorite excuse. As we’ve discussed, this is possible under the right circumstances but didn’t happen much during Trump 1.0, as American companies and consumers instead ate almost all of the tariffs’ costs. This time around, however, Goldman notes that there are some very early signs that foreign exporters, mainly Chinese, “have absorbed about 20% of the cost of tariffs”—an outcome that makes some sense given the sheer size of the tariffs, lingering inflation pain here, and widely reported deflationary problems in China. If these preliminary data hold, it’d be a shift from recent U.S. tariff experience but would still mean that Americans are paying about 80 percent of the tariffs’ cost—not exactly a huge Trump win. Other evidence, it should be noted, shows foreigners paying even less.

As tariffs really start to bite, the big questions will be whether foreign exporters keep eating some costs if it becomes clear tariffs are here to stay and how the remaining “80 percent” (or more) filters through the U.S. economy and into consumer prices—for both imports and domestic goods and services. And here, too, there are reasons to expect that the new costs won’t fully be evident in topline U.S. consumer price (inflation) data.

Michael Cannon makes clear that if Medicare and Medicaid “were drugs, regulators would pull them from the market.” A slice:

Yet Congress has never demanded a randomized, controlled trial to investigate whether Medicare and Medicaid improve health, much less conditioned their existence on two successful trials. One might think such measures are unnecessary. Subsidizing medicine delivers more health, right?

Not necessarily. Medicare and Medicaid impose rules that reduce healthcare quality. They increase prices for private-sector medical care and health insurance. They require taxes that reduce incomes, financial security and potentially economic growth. They have subsidy phaseouts that discourage upward mobility. Any health gains would have to overcome the health losses these factors introduce. It isn’t even clear whether the additional medical care that subsidies purchase improves health.

Multiple randomized, controlled trials examining subsidized medical care have failed to find health improvements. The Oregon Health Insurance Experiment measured the effects of giving Medicaid to the lowest earners among the able-bodied adults in ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion population. Like other randomized trials, it found that subsidies led to additional medical care but no discernible improvements in physical health.

Failing to detect a relationship isn’t the same as proving that a relationship doesn’t exist. Many non-randomized studies that compare people with Medicare or Medicaid with people without it suggest those programs do save lives. On the other hand, the Oregon study’s more reliable design found that some non-randomized studies likely overstate Medicaid’s potential health effects, whether due to random chance or because they compare apples to oranges. Still other non-randomized trials cast doubt on Medicare and Medicaid’s effects on health, including one that found that Medicare had no discernible effect on elderly mortality, even after spending 10 years and $515 billion subsidizing healthcare for seniors.

Jacob Sullum looks at Trump’s defamation suit against the Wall Street Journal.

Skot Sheller reports that Javier Milei is serious about federalism.

David Henderson explains the power of thinking at the margin.

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… is from page 207 of Matthew Hennessey’s wonderful 2022 book, Visible Hand:

Market capitalism isn’t perfect – what economic arrangement is? – but I defy you to name an alternative that allows people to follow the course they set for themselves as far as talent and ambition will carry them, regardless of race, color, creed, or family name. The circumstances of your birth don’t matter in an environment that rewards effort and encourages personal improvement. In the long scope of human history, the upward mobility enabled by free markets is rare – so rare you could only call its existence here and now a miracle. We’re all luckier than any of us realize to be living inside a miracle.

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I’m a fan of the (again pitiable) New Orleans Saints. Further, despite living for most of my adult life in the DC area, I’ve never much liked Washington, DC’s, NFL franchise. And when the Washington Redskins changed their name a few years ago to the Washington Commanders, my dislike of DC’s professional football team only intensified: I detest the mindless wokeness of that move and sensed that, should the team restore its previous name, I might come actually to cheer for it from time to time.

I’d applaud the new owners of the franchise if they chose to restore the old name “Redskins,” but my applause for them would be even more enthusiastic if they resist the obnoxious, officious, and utterly inappropriate demand issued by the president of the executive branch of the U.S. government to restore the name “Redskins.”

Evidence, of course, is superabundant that Trump has no respect for the rule of law – that Trump thinks that his power is unbounded – that Trump is instinctively authoritarian. But his attempt now to interfere in a matter that is none of his business, either personally or institutionally, underlines the man’s contempt for property rights and limited government.

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Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Robert Zoellick hopes that the Biden-Trump era of economic oppression will end in 2028. Three slices:

Despite their political differences, Donald Trump and Joe Biden seem to agree on economics. Both believe the White House should direct the American economy by favoring companies and courtiers.

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Presidents Trump and Biden have been big spenders, exploding the national debt. Both erected barriers to trade to protect friendly interests, which were then supposed to dance to presidential tunes. Both viewed the U.S. economy nostalgically and favored older industries. Mr. Trump ignores America’s competitive edge in the services trade, and Mr. Biden embraced the progressive wing’s suspicion of tech.

Neither recognized that trade negotiations should establish rules to help the country’s most vibrant and growing sectors. Their international economic policies presume a zero-sum, old-style mercantilist fight to divide wealth among nations, instead of enabling markets to enlarge win-win gains. Mr. Biden blocked foreign direct investments to please unions, while Mr. Trump opts for “golden shares” and partial corporate nationalization.

Messrs. Trump and Biden financed their industrial policies through bigger deficits. Easy monetary policies hid the increased expense. But we are now entering an era of rising costs, higher prices, pressures on productivity, and nervousness about debt financing and the dollar.

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The U.S. should capitalize on its appeal. American universities draw talent from around the world. University boards and administrators need to reverse progressive fads and add institutes that challenge groupthink. The remedy should be through the public spotlight and private action, not federal government mandates. The U.S. should play to its national strengths: openness to ideas, people, goods, and capital, fostering continuous reinvention.

The U.S. is the best-positioned country in the world to face the challenges of energy security and additional supply while transitioning to a mix of sources that recognize climate costs. America has the resources, new technologies, entrepreneurs, and venture capital—plus unmatched capacity to integrate all four when prices drive incentives.

Public narratives shape U.S. trade policy. The disaster in the 1930s of Smoot-Hawley’s high tariffs and international retaliation created an opportunity to lower barriers over the rest of the 20th century. Stories dramatizing the Rust Belt and fears of globalization have had the opposite effect. Mr. Trump’s chaotic tariffs—reversing 80 years of greater opening at home and abroad—will raise prices and hurt U.S. competitiveness. Public dissatisfaction will make a new trade and growth agenda possible.

Several months ago, Larry Reed remembered the too-little-remembered U.S. Secretary of the Treasury and great champion of free trade, Albert Gallatin.

Jonathan Sine ponders the future of Chinese manufacturing. (HT Tyler Cowen)

Mohamed Moutii notes what shouldn’t – but, alas, what today nevertheless does – need noting: The U.S. government deporting millions of immigrants isn’t good for the U.S. economy.

Jeff Jacoby decries what he rightly describes as Trump’s “brutal immigration crackdown.” A slice:

THE WHITE HOUSE continues to revel in its brutal immigration crackdown and to insist that mass raids, deportation without due process, ghastly detention camps, sweeping arrests of people with no criminal record, and expulsion of asylum-seekers and even US citizens are what Americans voted for when they returned President Trump to office. But the public is having serious second thoughts.

A slew of recent polls shows that a majority of Americans no longer favor Trump’s hard-line approach toward undocumented immigrants. The more aggressively the administration moves against noncitizens, the greater the backlash from voters.

Gallup reported this month that only 35 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of immigration — far below the 62 percent saying they disapprove. A year ago, 55 percent of the public wanted immigration curtailed; now only 30 percent do. At the same time, 79 percent of respondents — an all-time high — say that immigration is a good thing for the country.

Reason‘s Matt Welch explains “how Trump’s travel crackdown is hurting Americans at home and abroad.” A slice:

As the Trump administration began snatching college students, detaining legal European tourists, denying entry to British crust-punks, rejecting transgender passports, deporting tattooed Salvadorans, insulting the sovereignty of Canadians, and floating plans to ban visitors from 43 countries, the domestic travel and tourism industry braced itself for bad news.

“Historical data underscores that trade and geopolitical tensions influence travel demand,” warned the research firm Tourism Economics in late February. The group had previously estimated that inbound visits to the U.S. in 2025 would rise 8.8 percent over last year; now it was forecasting a 5.1 percent drop. What’s more, inbound travel spending this year “could fall by 12.3 [percent], amounting to a $22 billion annual loss.”

Sure enough, the year-over-year foreign visitor numbers in March were brutal. Down a jaw-dropping 18.4 percent, they were led by a sharp drop-off from America’s No. 1 supplier: Canada.

Arnold Kling reflects insightfully on DIY vs. specialization and trade.

The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal remembers Ed Fuelner, who died last week at the age of 83. A slice:

Born outside Chicago in a German-American Catholic family, Feulner attended Regis College in Denver where he discovered conservative ideas. Barry Goldwater was an early political influence. “You have to choose between liberty and equality,” Feulner told John Miller of National Review. “I picked liberty.” Each year he published an essay by thinkers who defined conservative principles.

Russ Roberts talks with James Marriott about reading.

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… is from page 53 of the twentieth-anniversary edition of Albert Hirschman’s 1977 book, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph [footnote deleted; link added]:

Elsewhere Locke says that “Freedom of Men under Government” means “not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, Arbitrary will of another man.” Uncertainty in general and man’s inconstancy in particular therefore become the arch-enemy that needs to be exorcised.

DBx: I fear that a naive understanding of democracy misleads many people – left, right, and center – to suppose that as long as the men and women who exercise power are elected to office, or are appointed by individuals who are elected to office, or are under the supervision of officials who are appointed by individuals who are elected to office, then the exercise of power is not arbitrary. I fear, that is, that even the most terrible exercises of power will be misconstrued as consistent with the rule of law as long as there is some democratic election somewhere in the train of events that led to the government officials’ exercise of power.

Among the most dangerous fallacies that modern people embrace is the notion that regularly held majority-rule elections are sufficient to keep the power of government officials properly bound.

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George Will explains “how Trump dominates and corrupts the private sector.” Four slices:

After six months, with seven times that much time remaining, Trump 2.0 seems as transformative as the New Deal was, but different. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s legacy was the institutional architecture of the welfare and regulatory state. Donald Trump’s legacy will be a demonstration: How a purely transactional politician, untethered from any political philosophy and uninterested in norms of self-restraint (e.g., unforced respect for the separation of powers) can exploit this architecture for unconstrained executive power.

Trump’s ever-shifting and contradictory rationales for tariffs (curing trade deficits, strengthening national security, punishing ingratitude, etc.) reveal that protectionism is not an economic policy but a political strategy for aggrandizing personal power. His tornado of tariffs-by-whim produces an endless auction as businesses bid for beneficial whims: intensifications of, or exemptions from, tariffs.

As the American Enterprise Institute’s Dalibor Rohac says, when tariffs are multiple and malleable private rent-seeking (bending government for preferential treatment or for injurious treatment of competitors) displaces entrepreneurial talent and shrewd management as the path to economic success. Rent-seeking has always been with us, but not on today’s scale as innumerable factions become genuflecting supplicants, groveling for presidential favors.

The most statist administration in U.S. history has replaced capitalism with what economists call “economic repression”: government supplanting the market by restraining or compelling economic activities for political objectives.

…..

After a 18-month administrative-state farce involving faux “national security” worries, the government has allowed the sale of U.S. Steel to a private corporation headquartered in a close ally (Japan). Trump has, however, in effect nationalized U.S. Steel, which must give to presidents, in perpetuity, a “golden share” in the corporation. The New York Times explains: “U.S. Steel’s charter will list nearly a dozen activities the company cannot undertake without the approval of the American president or someone he designates.”

The ban on TikTok is a misguided law passed by large congressional majorities and unanimously affirmed by an excessively deferential Supreme Court, its intelligence perhaps bewitched by presidential solemnities about “national security.” The law, which went into effect Jan. 19, stipulates that to facilitate the sale of the app to a non-Chinese entity, the president can grant one extension, up to 90 days, of nonenforcement.

Trump has now ordered two more extensions, while disregarding the law’s stipulation that he justify an extension to Congress by certifying concrete progress toward TikTok’s divestiture. This is not enforcement discretion, it is nullification of a law — a veto without an opportunity for Congress to override it. In 1838, the Supreme Court termed “entirely inadmissible” the idea that the president has (as English kings once had) a “dispensing power” to “license illegal conduct” or the power “to forbid … execution” of laws. Never mind constitutional morality. Trump is not mistaken in regarding laws as mere whispered suggestions from Congress until it rediscovers its pride and grows a spine.

…..

Today’s administrative state, suffocating society with enveloping laws and regulations, can be wielded like a cudgel by a president enjoying seemingly limitless discretion as congressional majorities choose to be ciphers. A president without constitutional scruples is not limited by institutions that are theoretically, but not actually, rivalrous.

…..

Today’s shambolic civic life, with the public sector dominating and corrupting the private sector, reveals this: The Founders’ elegant architecture of institutions for liberty under limited government guarantees nothing when the institutions are inhabited by the unenlightened.

Ed Fuelner has died at the age of 83. This piece, written with Mike Pence, was published just a week or two ago; it warns of the dangers to populism. (HT Phil Magness) A slice:

Rather than advance the American-led internationalism of our country at the height of its powers, populism complains that our allies and trading partners have taken advantage of us, and that we need tariffs to settle the score, even at the expense of our own national security and economic growth. Rather than uphold the long memory of the British colonists, who were suspicious of monarchical government’s abuse of power, populism clamors for more centralization in Washington to work our will for the common good. Rather than Edmund Burke’s belief that men have “a right to the fruits of their industry and to the means of making their industry fruitful,” populists insist we weaponize the administrative state to compel businesses to act in our favor.

The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal decries the Trump administration’s abuse of antitrust and its contemptuous disregard for the First Amendment. Two slices:

The Biden Administration stretched antitrust laws for political ends, and now the Trump crowd is doing the same. The latest exhibit is the Justice Department’s bizarre legal filing in a lawsuit (Children’s Health Defense v. WP Company) by anti-vaccine activists against media companies.

…..

Justice claims that antitrust laws bar even “tacit” collusive agreements, which can involve merely a “‘wink and a nod’ or an informal ‘gentleman’s agreement or understanding.’” Under this standard, the media coverup of Joe Biden’s decline could be an antitrust violation.

One irony is that Biden officials threatened big digital platforms with antitrust regulation if they didn’t censor alleged misinformation. The Trump DOJ is doing the reverse. Its legal filing threatens platforms with antitrust liability if they take down content for whatever reason because doing so would suppress viewpoint competition.

Peter Earle uses the changing chicken sandwich to celebrate capitalism. A slice:

A recent meme points to the ubiquity of chicken sandwiches across major fast food chains as supposed evidence of stagnation in capitalism. If twelve top firms offer a similar product, the argument goes, how innovative can an economic system truly be?

But that line of reasoning badly misrepresents both the nature of competition and the role of iterative improvement in markets. The explosion of chicken sandwich options is not a sign of creative bankruptcy — it’s a case study in product refinement, branding evolution, and consumer-focused differentiation. Far from signaling sameness, the chicken sandwich wars reveal how even within a narrow category, firms continuously jockey to win customer loyalty, and with it, market share.

Chicken dishes — especially fried chicken and chicken sandwiches — have become a cornerstone of American food culture, driven by its broad appeal, versatility, and relative affordability. In recent years, chicken sandwiches have surged in popularity, with the 2019 “chicken sandwich wars” showcasing consumer demand and brand competition. Today, nearly every major fast food chain (in industry parlance, a quick-service restaurant or QSR) offers at least one signature chicken sandwich, alongside consumer favorites like traditional beef burgers. Every firm named in this meme has innovated in some way or another — more frequently, in several.

Yale University undergraduate Lauren Kim is rightly critical of this reality: “Students rarely hear the moral case for markets.” A slice:

But the academic environment nonetheless remains tilted toward left-leaning ideas, especially when it comes to economics. I asked Lawrence Reed, former president of FEE, why free-market ideas receive less attention than more interventionist ideas in today’s universities. He cited Thomas Sowell, who once wrote, “The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive.” Sowell discusses how academic Marxists are unaffected by the blatant failures of socialism in the real world, claiming that professors can produce whatever content they want as long as the topic is ideologically fashionable enough. He concludes that leftists concentrate in places where it doesn’t matter whether or not their ideas “stand the test of performance,” leading many of them to be drawn to academia.