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… is from chapter 1 of William Graham Sumner’s 1885 volume, Protectionism: the -ism Which Teaches that Waste Makes Wealth:

There are only three ways in which a man can part with his product, and different kinds of taxes fall under different modes of alienating one’s goods. 1st. He may exchange his product for the product of others. Then he parts with his property voluntarily, and for an equivalent. Taxes which are paid for peace, order and security, fall under this head. 2d. He may give his product away. Then he parts with it voluntarily without an equivalent. Taxes which are voluntarily paid for schools, libraries, parks, etc.,etc., fall under this head. 3d. He may be robbed of it. Then he parts with it involuntarily and without an equivalent. Taxes which are protective fall under this head. The analysis is exhaustive, and there is no other place for them. Protective taxes are those which a man pays to his neighbor to hire him (the neighbor) to carry on his own business. The first man gets no equivalent. Hence any one who says that a tariff is not a tax would have to put it in some such category as tribute, plunder, or robbery. In order, then, that we may not give any occasion for even an unjust charge of using hard words, let us go back and call it a tax.

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The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal hopes that the U.S. Supreme Court reins in the use of the banana-republic practice of civil asset forfeiture. Two slices:

One progressive fiction about the Supreme Court is that it’s busy serving billionaires and big corporations. Far more often its best work is defending individuals against state power, and on Monday the Justices agreed to hear the case of an Alaskan bush pilot who had his airplane seized over a few cases of beer (Jouppi v. Alaska).

…..

Governments increasingly use criminal and civil forfeitures and fines to pad their budgets. In 2023, 45 states collected nearly $300 million, according to the Institute for Justice, which represents Mr. Jouppi. This aggressive law enforcement diminishes American civil liberties, and the excessive fines clause should be a shield against such overreach. Mr. Jouppi’s plane sure looks like it qualifies.

Scott Lincicome makes clear that “Trump’s new tariffs aren’t about forced labor — they’re about restoring the tariff wall.” A slice:

In my new column at The Dispatch, I show why these tariffs have almost nothing to do with forced labor and instead are just “a ham-fisted way to reinstall Trump’s tariff wall and protect it from another IEEPA-like defeat in federal court.” Five issues stand out:

1. The administration said the tariffs were coming before the investigation ended. President Trump, Treasury Secretary Bessent, and US Trade Representative Greer all publicly and explicitly promised that the tariffs and their revenue would replace the struck-down IEEPA regime before the investigations even started.
2. The requisite report on “forced labor” is remarkably thin. USTR’s investigation only took 82 days and generated a 98-page report to cover 60 economies, devoting little more than half a page to each, much of it the exact same empty passages copied and pasted 60 times—far short of the rigor demanded of such a consequential and far-reaching trade action. The report also contained no evidence or analysis – none – of targeted economies’ forced labor policies causing actual harm to US companies or commerce. It’s all just assumed. Nor did the USTR explain why it applied the same punitive 12.5 percent tariff rate to Angola, Libya, Russia, Venezuela, and Kazakhstan—developing countries that rank low on the Walk Free forced labor index (and have other issues!)—as it did to developed, “good actor” countries like Norway, Japan, Switzerland, and Australia.
3. The United States is hardly a forced labor angel. Section 307 of the Tariff Act of 1930 has prohibited imports made with forced labor, but was lightly enforced for over 80 years due to wide exceptions, and the Trump administration’s enforcement of the law has been much more lenient than the Biden administration’s efforts. Furthermore, the US ranks 19th among the 60 economies for the prevalence of forced labor.
4. The tariff cure dramatically overshoots the forced labor disease. Some back-of-envelope math puts a proportionate tariff at 0.5 to 0.84 percent; Peterson Institute economist William Cline, using a different model, gets 0.23 to 0.25 percent. USTR is proposing 10 to 12.5 percent, a rate and resulting revenue (see figure below) that far exceed what could be considered a proportional response to the problem.

Eric Boehm explains that Trump’s new ‘forced labor’ tariffs are likely illegal. A slice:

Ostensibly, these tariffs are meant to combat “forced labor.” The Trump administration says the tariffs are the result of an investigation into 60 foreign economies that “fail to prohibit or to effectively enforce a prohibition on the importation of goods produced wholly or in part with forced labor.”

Immediately, a logical problem emerges. The announcement says that the 10 percent tariff will apply even to countries that “impose a forced labor import prohibition,” as long as the administration believes that prohibition is not being adequately enforced. It is unclear what, exactly, a foreign country would have to do to get removed from that list. That makes it fairly obvious that combating forced labor is a pretext for what the Trump administration really wants to do: have more tariffs.

And here’s National Review‘s Andrew Stuttaford on Trump’s new tariffs punitive taxes on Americans’ purchases of imports. A slice:

After the Supreme Court struck down tariffs introduced under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the president responded by announcing a new global tariff of 15 percent. This was based on Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, which allows for the application of various Band-Aids to problems arising out of large and serious U.S. balance-of-payments deficits. The administration’s use of Section 122 to impose tariffs (which was unprecedented) has come under legal attack. But at this point that’s moot (apart from the tricky issue of the tariffs that have already been paid), as Section 122 tariffs could last no longer than 150 days, a period that has just expired.

Protectionists can relax, however. The administration will now be taking action under the Trade Act’s Section 301, a widely drawn provision that allows the U.S. to take action if its trade representative determines that an act, policy, or practice of a foreign country is unreasonable or discriminatory and burdens or restricts U.S. commerce, and that action by the United States is appropriate. It has been used to impose tariffs fairly frequently before. In this case, tariffs have been slapped on countries for failing to “impose and effectively enforce a prohibition on the importation of goods produced with forced labor.”

The timing is . . . convenient.

GMU Econ alum Erik Matson writes wisely about Alexander Hamilton. A slice:

The real tell for Hamilton comes in the “Report on Manufactures” when he considers potential counterarguments to his positions. He spends the opening sections of the “Report” establishing the point that manufacturing is no less productive than agriculture. He proceeds to make his case that a booming manufacturing sector would serve America well—and be incredibly profitable. He then takes on the natural question: If manufacturing would be so profitable in America, why does the government need to subsidize it? His answer is surprising, and in a way, it is the centerpiece of his entire outlook in political economy.

Americans—like all people—in Hamilton’s view are too much inclined toward agriculture, too averse to risk-taking, and too committed to the status quo. Americans want to move westward and be left alone. Americans are not sufficiently aware of or interested in profit opportunities. Americans for Hamilton can perhaps be captured with J.R.R. Tolkien’s description of hobbits: “[T]hey love peace and quiet and good tilled earth: a well-ordered and well-farmed countryside was their favourite haunt. They do not and did not understand or like machines more complicated than a forge-bellows, a water-mill, or a hand loom, though they were skillful with tools.”

In Hamilton’s own words: “The desire of being an independent proprietor of land is founded on such strong principles in the human breast, that, where the opportunity of becoming so is as great as it is in the United States, the proportion will be small of those… who would be diverted from it towards manufactures.”

“Experience teaches,” continued Hamilton, “that men are often so much governed by what they are accustomed to see and practise, that the simplest and most obvious improvements, in the most ordinary occupations, are adopted with hesitation, reluctance, and by slow gradations.” So, Hamilton believed the federal government ought to subsidize industrial activity as a way of inspiriting an overly conservative, agricultural population to take up profitable industrial activities.

The irony is that Hamilton himself was an incredibly entrepreneurial and ambitious man, surrounded by an entire cohort of entrepreneurial, ambitious men who rebelled against the most powerful empire in the world and forged a brand-new model of government. Hamilton had every reason to think that Americans, by virtue of self-selection, were of all people less inclined to the status quo than most people and more attuned to profit opportunities. Tocqueville certainly thought so when he visited America in the 19th century: “The American follows not only a calculation of his gain, but an impulse of nature” in trade. But for one reason or another, Hamilton was simply distrustful of the natural market process

Bob Gelfond writes insightfully about free-market money.

The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal applauds U.S. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan’s defense of the Court against the charge that it’s a rubber-stamp for Trump. A slice:

The Supreme Court is no “rubber stamp” for President Trump. Take it from liberal Justice Elena Kagan. “That is a bad rap,” she said, defending the honor of her institution and her colleagues this week at a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals judicial conference. She cited especially this year’s 6-3 ruling against President Trump’s effort to aggrandize his tariff powers.

“Tariffs is probably the key policy issue for this President. I mean, something he campaigned on, he ran on, he cared an enormous amount about,” Justice Kagan said, according to Politico. “I don’t think that there are all that many decisions in the recent times, where a court strikes down such an important policy to a sitting President.” A glaring counter-example from 2012 is the High Court’s, uh, creative 5-4 decision to uphold ObamaCare.

Mr. Trump has pushed the bounds of executive power, but so did his Oval Office predecessors, and the current Administration’s record at the Court is mixed at best. Another big one for the loss column this term was Mr. Trump’s order trying to redefine birthright citizenship.

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… is from page 68 of Steven Pinker’s 2025 book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows…:

Rationality is not like a buyer and seller haggling over a price until they split the difference. After all, why should we expect reality to just happen to lie midway between the convictions of two people who find themselves in an argument?

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Here’s a letter to the Washington Post.

Editor:

On July 23^rd the Trump administration announced new tariffs meant to punish foreign governments for failing to adequately prevent “forced labor.” As you report, “senior administration officials said the president’s concern over forced labor was genuine” (“Trump sets new tariffs to punish use of ‘forced labor,’ replacing expiring import taxes,” July 24).

I’m touched by the president’s change of heart. Until yesterday, he was all about ‘putting America first.’ But no more! Mr. Trump’s concern for exploited foreign workers now runs so deep that, to right this wrong, he is willingly foisting higher prices on American consumers and businesses.

His MAGA base will undoubtedly turn on him for abandoning his ‘America First’ policies. But we must applaud Mr. Trump’s poignant move to compel all Americans to make sacrifices to improve the lot of the world’s poorest.

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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George Will writes of the collapsing center of American politics. A slice:

The American Enterprise Institute’s Ruy Teixeira, a center-left Democrat, describes a perverse dialectic of “Trumpian overreach”: The more Trump is flamboyantly provocative, the more Democrats lurch into “histrionic, radical, ineffective responses.” He controls the shrillest Democrats by triggering them, and they propel their party toward self-indulgent, self-destructive choices, such as [Abdul] El-Sayed.

[DBx: U.S. politics today makes me want to sing – in a sad, minor chord – “Clowns to the left of me / Jokers to the right.”]

Arnold Kling wisely rejects what he calls “brokenist economics.” A slice:

But when it comes to economics, I am against the brokenists. On the left, the brokenists advocate socialism. They are wrong.

On the right, the brokenists use “neoliberalism” as a boo-word. They claim to be superior to mainstream economists. The particular brand of right-wing brokenism that appeals to JD Vance believes that mainstream economics is harmful. As Akash Chougule writes,

JD Vance has been making an argument similar to those in DSA, simply wrapped in the language of conservatives: that free markets undermine human dignity because they are incompatible with the moral order.

In fact, the Catholic integralists, like Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule, reject the Enlightenment ideas that shaped America. They want to turn the clock back to before John Locke.

Eric Boehm explains what shouldn’t – but, alas, what today nevertheless does – need explaining: “The U.S. economy is not a reality show. The Trump administration should stop acting like it is.” A slice:

Consider one of the biggest challenges facing American businesses in the midst of President Donald Trump’s global trade war: As of Thursday afternoon, no one knew what tariffs would be charged on which imports entering the country as soon as Friday morning.

Trump is no stranger to improvisational, make-it-up-as-you-go policy, but even by his standards, this is pretty ridiculous.

To understand the wild uncertainty facing American businesses this week, you have to back up a few months. In February, the Supreme Court struck down many of the tariffs Trump had imposed last year when it ruled that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) did not grant presidents the power to impose tariffs. Trump responded by implementing a 10 percent “global tariff” via a different legal mechanism: Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974.

But that law only allows for temporary tariffs that last a maximum of 150 days, unless Congress votes to extend them, which it has not. As a result, the tariffs Trump imposed in February will expire at midnight tonight.

The Trump administration had 150 days to provide some clarity and stability to American businesses that buy and sell things overseas. It did not do that.

“You’ll have to stay tuned, and you’re gonna be busy over the next few days,” U.S. Trade Rep. Jamieson Greer told The Wall Street Journal earlier this week when asked about the upcoming tariff deadline.

That’s, uh, not very helpful. The U.S. economy is not a reality show. The Trump administration should stop acting like it is.

Alas, the announcement of the administration’s new scheme to tax – a.k.a. “tariff” – Americans’ purchases of imports was announced late yesterday, as summarized by this Washington Post headline: “Trump sets new tariffs to punish use of ‘forced labor,’ replacing expiring import taxes.” A slice:

Many trade analysts described the administration’s action as designed to replicate the tariff system the court toppled this year. The senior administration officials said the president’s concern over forced labor was genuine. They noted that the U.S. prohibition on goods produced with involuntary labor is more than a century old.

[DBx: Who is gullible enough to believe that the Trump administration is choosing not to ‘put America first’ because it is so intent on righting wrongs done abroad?]

My GMU Econ and Mercatus Center colleague Pete Boettke and I recently discussed Adam Smith.

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy, decries the lethal opposition to self-driving cars. A slice:

Last year, 36,640 Americans died in traffic crashes. That was the fewest since 2019, yet it still works out to more than 100 fatalities per day. The new generation of vehicles quietly accumulating mileage on our streets offers enormous promise to bring the number down even more and more each year.

Over at Marginal Revolution, economist Alex Tabarrok reminds us that as of March, Waymo’s driverless vehicles had logged more than 220 million miles across five of its areas of operation. Compared with human drivers on the same roads over the same period, and counting every crash regardless of fault, the Waymo Driver was involved in 94 percent fewer crashes causing serious or fatal injury. It also experienced 82 percent fewer airbag deployments and 93 percent fewer injury crashes involving pedestrians.

Jack Nicastro explains that the “App Store Freedom Act” would be bad for freedom. A slice:

ASFA marks a dramatic departure from existing antitrust and unfair competition laws, which are already more than able to provide substantial relief for these types of practices, as shown by courts’ prohibitions of certain anti-steering mechanisms in Epic v. Apple and Epic v. Google. Indeed, unlike the Sherman Antitrust Act, the bill requires no demonstration of market power or dominance before its strictures apply. Moreover, its bans do not require plaintiffs to show anti-competitive harm or allow defendants the opportunity to present procompetitive justifications.

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… is from chapter 1 of William Graham Sumner’s 1885 volume, Protectionism: the -ism Which Teaches that Waste Makes Wealth:

Any one who says that it [a tariff] is not a tax must suppose that it costs nothing, that it produces an effect without an expenditure of energy. They do seem to think that if Congress will say: “Let a tax of—per cent. be laid on article A,” and if none is imported, and therefore no tax is paid at the custom house, national industry will be benefited and wealth secured, and that there will be no cost or outgo. If that is so, then the tariff is magic. We have found the philosopher’s stone. Our congressmen wave a magic wand over the country and say: “Not otherwise provided for, 150 per cent.,” and, presto! there we have wealth. Again they say: “Fifty cents a yard and fifty per cent. ad valorem;” and there we have prosperity! If we should build a wall along the coast to keep foreigners and their goods out, it would cost something. If we maintained a navy to blockade our own coast for the same purpose, it would cost something. Yet it is imagined that if we do the same by a tax it costs nothing.

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… is from page 57 of Thomas Sowell’s 1999 book, Barbarians Inside the Gates:

One of the grandiloquent phrases used to silence those who complain about the economic costs of government policies to reduce some remote danger is this: “It’s worth it, no matter what it costs, if it saves just one life!”

This kind of talk might allow the anointed to feel nobler than thou, but stifling the economy with safety regulations – killing the goose that lays the golden egg – will itself cost human lives. A faster growing economy can easily save more lives than trying to stamp out some danger that affects very few people, if it affects anybody.

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This letter of mine will appear in the print edition of tomorrow’s Washington Post:

The July 19 news article “The U.S. saw the first ‘China Shock.’ Now the world gets the sequel.” reported that David Autor and his co-authors found that increased U.S. trade with China from 1999 through 2011 “displaced 2.4 million U.S. manufacturing jobs.” However, 2.4 million jobs is an upper-bound estimate of all jobs — manufacturing and nonmanufacturing — lost to trade with China. The estimate of manufacturing jobs lost is 985,000.

Perspective is also needed. A loss of 2.4 million jobs over a 13-year span is an average monthly job loss of 15,385. Yet from December 2000 (the earliest date for which good data is available) through December 2011 — thus, for the vast bulk of the “China Shock” years — each month, on average, saw about 2 million jobs destroyed. Even the maximum-estimated number of “China Shock” job losses is less than 1 percent of total job losses during those years.

The relatively minuscule number of jobs lost to increased trade with China combines with the far larger role that technology plays in destroying manufacturing jobs to suggest that the rise of Trumpian protectionism owes less to actual economic occurrences than to poorly informed tales about trade.

Donald J. Boudreaux, Fairfax

The writer is an economics professor at George Mason University.

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Eric Boehm is correct: “The trade war caused exports to Canada to fall. Now, Trump is pointing to that fact to justify more tariffs.” Two slices:

Even by the standards of Trump’s second term—which once included the attempt to place tariffs on an island inhabited only by penguins—this latest move against Canada seems economically illiterate and legally dubious. Like with all his tariffs, it will primarily be Americans who pay the cost.

…..

The Trump administration promised that its more bellicose approach to trade would pay dividends for American businesses, but now it is pointing to declining overseas sales as justification for an even more bellicose approach to trade. It turns out that pissing off the people who live in a neighboring country—a country that’s full of customers for American businesses—is a shortsighted strategy for economic growth. Who could have guessed? But no matter what happens, the White House’s answer is always the same: more tariffs. This is no way to run an economy or engage in international relations.

And here’s the Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board on Trump’s latest round of tariffs punitive taxes on Americans’ purchases of goods from Canada. Two slices:

What do you know? President Trump is conceding that his blunderbuss border taxes are harming U.S. business as other countries retaliate. So now he’s whacking Canada harder for punching back. The trade brawl could leave both countries with more bruises than a hockey fight.

The White House on Monday exhumed Section 338 of the 1930 Tariff Act to impose 50% tariffs on hundreds of Canadian goods, including hockey sticks, honey, beer, down feathers, fishing rods and golf clubs. The tariffs are set to take effect in 30 days, which means he’s using tariffs as leverage to win concessions from Canada.

He may also enjoy showing off his new tariff bazooka. Section 338 lets the President impose tariffs up to 50% on countries that discriminate against “commerce of the United States, directly or indirectly” in relation to foreign countries. No previous President has used this power, which hails from the disastrous Smoot-Hawley Act.

The provision was intended to let the President retaliate against countries that impose tariffs on the U.S. Mr. Trump is using the law to punish Canada for retaliating against his tariffs. His tariff order cites Canada’s 25% tariffs on U.S. cars that exceed certain quotas, which were a response to Mr. Trump’s 25% duties on motor vehicles and parts. According to the order, U.S. motor vehicle exports to Canada subsequently fell 22%, while Canadian imports from other countries increased.

…..

That may be why Mr. Trump is justifying his tariffs as retribution for Canada’s treatment of U.S. autos and dairy, which are key industries in the Midwest. But Canada is the second largest U.S. trade partner after Mexico, and Mr. Trump’s tariffs are complicating cross-border supply chains, raising costs and creating uncertainty for business.

The more Mr. Trump keeps swinging recklessly, the more Americans are likely to think there’s only madness in his tariff methods.

Phil Gramm and Jeb Hensarling bust myths about the 2008-2009 financial crisis. A slice:

Gramm-Leach-Bliley, of which one of us was the principal Senate sponsor, amended the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act to allow banks, securities companies and insurance companies to affiliate under well-capitalized financial-services holding companies. But it didn’t deregulate anything. It established the Federal Reserve as a new superregulator overseeing all financial services holding companies. All activities of banks, security companies and insurance companies continued to be regulated under the same laws and by the same regulators as before, and by any measure Gramm-Leach-Bliley holding companies held up better during the financial crisis.

Contrary to the popular narrative, for at least three decades preceding the housing crisis, financial regulators gained more power and larger budgets and hired more personnel than ever. The Mercatus Center has found that from 1970 until the housing bubble burst, regulatory restrictions increased 250% and the number of regulatory personnel grew about 77%. There is no evidence that things would have been different if financial regulators had more authority or resources.

Ilya Somin exposes a contradiction at the heart of today’s so-called “Democratic Socialism.” A slice:

There is a blatant but generally ignored contradiction between socialism and prison abolitionism. Socialism requires making a wide range of economic transactions illegal, and those laws have to be enforced by some system of punishment. If, like the DSA, you want to ensure that “[f]ood, education, energy, medicine, and transportation aren’t for-profit businesses,” but instead make them “common goods,” you will have to make it illegal to provide those goods and services for profit and punish people who violate the relevant laws.

Historically, attempts to do this created vast black markets, especially since government control of these and other industries routinely resulted in shortages and low quality, caused by knowledge problems and poor incentives. I was born in the Soviet Union. Almost all my adult relatives and their friends and acquaintances were involved in illegal black market transactions of various kinds. Often, it was the only way to get even minimally decent-quality goods and services, including food, medicine, and transportation. For example, my mother’s two cousins operated a black-market auto repair business, which prospered because the official state-owned auto repair shops were predictably terrible and unreliable.

Socialist governments sought to suppress these activities through massive coercion. If they did not, the extent of black market activity would have been even greater, and socialism would have been even further undermined.

Similar logic applies to sweeping economic regulations that fall short of complete socialization. If, like many socialists, you want to impose severe rent control or very high minimum wages, you will have to punish people who dare rent out housing at higher rates or hire workers at lower wages. And such black market activities are predictable, because high minimum wages price numerous lower-skilled workers out of the market (thereby increasing unemployment) and rent control predictably creates housing shortages.

Brad Birzer reviews Aeon Skoble’s remarkable book, Deleting the State. A slice:

The Founders were skeptical of political community and coercive power more generally. In every way, they sought to limit political activity. The Founders—all citizen-philosophers and reliant upon history rather than abstract theory—gave us an escape clause in the Declaration of Independence: “But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.” Note, it is not just a right, but a duty to throw off such government. Further, of course, the Declaration offered a beautiful but minimalist image of the human person—made in the image of the Creator, endowed with certain unalienable rights, among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The Northwest Ordinance of 1787, the blueprint for the republic’s western expansion, represents the most radical limitation on the political sphere during the Revolutionary period. Its Article II notes first that the common law is to reign supreme (thus, a truly conservative aspect of the Founding), but, second, that no association—family, school, business, or church—freely entered into and devoid of fraud may ever, in any circumstances, be limited by the political body or the political will. The Congress, upon being created (or recreated) under the Constitution, immediately reaffirmed the Northwest Ordinance, giving it a status no other law in history has had.

The Constitution, of course, properly understood, is nothing if not a restraining document. In case anyone wondered exactly what the Constitution could do, Amendments 9 and 10 restrict it to just its most minimal functions, demanding, for all intents and purposes, a literal reading of the document. If one has to engage in speculative interpretation of the Constitution, he or she has already failed. Either the meaning is plain, or it cannot be implemented.

Thus, the Founders did everything possible to help civil society flourish by limiting the political sphere as much as possible. Thomas Jefferson, of course, stated what should have been so obvious in his first inaugural address: “A wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.”

And yet despite all of these limitations, the federal government metastasized, especially in the century and a half since the Progressive period (1890–1920) began. Under Woodrow Wilson, under Franklin Roosevelt, under Lyndon Johnson, under both Bushes, under Barack Obama, under Joe Biden, and under Donald Trump, the government has become a cancer, uncontrollable and swallowing everything in its path. As the republic became a democracy, arrogance, violence, and imperialism became the norm, with the political sphere a body of locusts devouring all before it. Today, our constitution is entirely distorted (with, arguably, only the Supreme Court serving its original purpose), with government claiming authority over practically every aspect of social life.

My Mercatus Center colleague Jack Salmon predicts that the cost of living in Great Britain will soon rise even higher.

Kamden Mulder reports on a case – to be heard next term by the U.S. Supreme Court – on the banana-republic practice of civil asset forfeiture.