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… is from page 13 of the 1991 Robert Schalkenbach Foundation edition of Henry George‘s 1886 book, Protection or Free Trade:

Protection, moreover, has always found an effective ally in those national prejudices and hatreds which are in part the cause and in part the result of the wars that have made the annals of mankind a record of bloodshed and devastation – prejudices and hatreds which have everywhere been the means by which the masses have been induced to use their own power for their own enslavement.

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Phil Magness reminds us that tariff powers now claimed by the Trump White House were rejected by the Reagan White House. Two slices:

In his latest bid to salvage his protectionist trade agenda, President Donald Trump imposed a new 10% tariff on all imports to the United States. To justify this move, Trump cited the existence of a trade deficit and invoked an obscure clause of the Trade Act of 1974, called Section 122. This clause allows the president to impose tariffs for up to 150 days; however, its provisions only apply in the presence of a “large and serious United States balance-of-payments deficits.”

Trump’s use of Section 122 is illegal because the United States does not currently have a balance-of-payments deficit. This term referred to a drawdown on official gold and other currency reserves of the United States under the old Bretton Woods currency peg system, which was abandoned in the early 1970s and officially terminated in 1976. Under the current floating exchange rate regime, the U.S. balance of payments is officially zero. Trump errs in trying to change the definition of “balance-of-payments deficit” to mean a common trade deficit, or the situation where the United States imports more goods and services than it exports. Yet as Marc Wheat and I show in a recent article for National Review, this was not Congress’s intention when it passed the Trade Act of 1974.

Trump’s novel reinterpretation of Section 122 faces another problem. He is the first president to attempt to use this clause for a reason. Previous administrations have examined its text in detail and come to the conclusion that Section 122 simply does not apply to common trade deficits.

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Trump’s interpretation of Section 122 s not only a misreading of its terminology—it’s a misreading that past administrations investigated in response to similar trade deficit conditions. As [Martin] Feldstein’s testimony shows, the Reagan Administration explicitly rejected Trump’s current argument and found that a “balance-of-payments deficit” did not exist under the current floating exchange rate system.

Back in September, Roberto Salinas-León eloquently defended free trade against Trump’s protectionist assault. A slice:

In a report by the Fraser Institute (“US Economic Freedom in a Trade War”), Robert Lawson and Matthew Mitchell highlight a slew of unquestionable facts. It is revealing, and sad, that every country “singled out for treating” the US unfairly is, incredibly, more open to trade than the US itself. The effective tariff rate, at one point since the onset of the new trade war, was as high as 28%, comparable to Sudan or Djibouti. While the sting in prices and lower growth has yet to be fully felt across US consumers and producers, the fact remains that income per capita in the 15 countries with the lowest effective tariffs is 4.5 times greater than in the 15 countries with the highest tariffs. The complex gamut of reciprocal tariffs has knocked the US from 56th to 76th place in the world “in terms of freedom to trade,” and out of the top ten in overall economic freedom.

Let us be clear: the economic arguments for tariff walls and protectionism are nothing more than a version of neo-mercantilism, where one nation’s benefit entails another nation’s loss. This is the conviction behind Trump’s oft-cited claim that “we are getting ripped off” and his obsession with the word tariff. But members of his economic team (with the salient exception of Peter Navarro, the worst trade economist “in history”) should know better: wealth creation is based on open competition, innovation, and consumer sovereignty. Tariffs, whether 1% or 100%, constitute new taxes that arbitrarily distort prices, disrupt market signals, and expropriate hard-won earnings from people who simply want to get ahead via open commerce.

The main economic argument in favor of tariffs is the disequilibrium in the balance of trade. The great enemy is, supposedly, the trade deficit. If the US buys more from abroad than it sells outside its borders, then the sellers are literally “stealing” from the buyers. But how can balancing the amount sold with the amount bought lead to fairness, or “reparation” of jobs lost? The balance of trade is not a corporate balance sheet—unless one interprets wealth as a fixed quantity of goods in a zero-sum world.

Scott Lincicome tweets:

The Jones Act is officially so Bad that the only people the lobbyists can find publicly defending the law are internet commenters lol

Jim Geraghty reports that the U.S. economy is now in the doldrums. Two slices:

Friday’s job numbers brought evidence suggesting that the gloomy types accurately saw weakness in the economy that the official numbers obscured. The latest release from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics showed a loss of 92,000 jobs in February, with downward revisions for the two months before that. Employers added just 181,000 jobs in 2025, around 70 percent fewer than BLS’s initial estimate of 584,000, and the revised numbers are getting worse, not better. Hiring Lab, the economic research arm of the jobs site Indeed, has concluded that “the labor market has averaged essentially zero net job creation over the past six months.”

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If companies are growing increasingly risk averse in Trump’s second term, part of the reason is a spectacularly erratic president who has become a one-man force for economic unpredictability and instability. Trump started his second term by launching a trade war against the whole world, subsequently lost a Supreme Court decision on tariffs, threw a public tantrum claiming the court had been “swayed by foreign interests,” and then turned around and imposed new tariffs to replace the old ones under a new justification.

Trump loves intervening in markets as much as his new best buddy, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and at any given moment, any company can find itself denounced on Truth Social as being run by “Leftwing nut jobs.” One day the artificial intelligence company Anthropic has a $200 million contract with the Pentagon; the next, Trump orders “EVERY Federal Agency in the United States Government to IMMEDIATELY CEASE all use of Anthropic’s technology.”

The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal applauds the Institute for Justice for its lawsuit against the Department of Labor for its disregard of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that attempts to rein in the administrative state. A slice:

The Supreme Court held in Jarkesy (2024) that agencies must bring claims rooted in common law and involving “private rights” in Article III courts where defendants are entitled to a trial by jury. The Rosses say that breach of guest workers’ contracts—which DOL is seeking to enforce with penalties—is a common law claim that belongs in federal court.

Chief Justice John Roberts stressed in the Jarkesy majority opinion that government penalties “designed to punish or deter the wrongdoer” are a “prototypical common law remedy.” While the Court didn’t draw a bright line between public and private rights, the Chief noted “even with respect to matters that arguably fall within the scope of the ‘public rights’ doctrine, the presumption is in favor of Article III courts.”

A DOL in-house judge disagreed. The judge held that the Court’s Jarkesy ruling doesn’t apply to the Rosses even though the Third Circuit Court of Appeals last summer invalidated DOL’s use of in-house agency courts in an H-2A case involving a New Jersey vegetable farm. The DOL judge said that ruling doesn’t apply in other judicial circuits.

The Institute for Justice says other federal agencies have also tried to cabin Jarkesy’s holdings. Advocates of administrative tribunals claim they’re more efficient than federal courts, but the Ross case belies this conceit. Their formal administrative hearing is scheduled for September, nearly five years after their DOL audit.

If agencies had to bring cases in federal court, they might be more judicious about which they pursue and less likely to harass innocent businesses. Permitting “Congress to concentrate the roles of prosecutor, judge, and jury in the hands of the Executive Branch,” as the Chief noted in Jarkesy, “is the very opposite of the separation of powers that the Constitution demands.”

GMU Econ alum Paul Mueller explains why Adam Smith remains relevant 250 years after the publication of An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.

Jeffrey Miron shares new evidence that competition, combined with the self-interest that’s oh-so-satisfying for economically clueless pundits to deride, reduces racial discrimination.

Chelsea Follett takes us on a tour of pre-industrial New York City. A slice:

As late as the mid-nineteenth century, pigs roamed freely through New York City streets, acting as scavengers, and nearly every household maintained a vegetable garden, often fertilized with animal manure.

Indoor air quality was no better. A drawing from Mary L. Booth’s History of the City of New York depicts a seventeenth-century New Amsterdam home with smoke from the fireplace swirling through the room. Indoor air pollution remains a serious problem today in the poorest parts of the world, as smoke from hearths can cause cancer and acute respiratory infections that often prove deadly in children. One preindustrial writer railed against the “pernicious smoke [from fireplaces] superinducing a sooty Crust or furr upon all that it lights, spoyling the moveables, tarnishing the Plate, Gildings and Furniture, and Corroding the very Iron-bars and hardest stone with those piercing and acrimonious Spirits which accompany its Sulphur.”

That said, before industrialization, though inescapable filth coated the interiors of homes, the average person owned few possessions for the corrosive hearth smoke and soot to ruin. By modern standards, New Yorkers—like most preindustrial people—were impoverished and lacked even the most basic amenities. According to historian Judith Flanders, in the mid-eighteenth century, “fewer than two households in ten in some counties of New York possessed a fork.” Many were desperately poor even by the standards of the day and could not afford housing. One 1788 account lamented how in New York City, “vagrants multiply on our Hands to an amazing Degree.” Charity records suggest that the “outdoor poor” far outnumbered those in almshouses.

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… is from this recent Substack post by Arnold Kling:

If Constitutional norms are not sufficient to check those in power, the line between a republic and an authoritarian regime gets blurry.

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The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board decries the Elizabeth Warren-inspired, Trump-supported bill that would, among other harmful measures, ban institutional investors from owning single-family rental housing units. Two slices:

The Senate’s 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act is a melange of some 40 bills. Call it a blueprint for a bigger Washington. It establishes multiple grant and loan programs for “affordable” housing while expanding federal power over local zoning. The worst provision is a ban on large investors purchasing single-family homes to rent.

Companies like Amherst and Invitation Homes that buy and then rent single-family homes have become a popular scapegoat for high housing prices. The real leading culprit is the Federal Reserve’s pandemic-era monetary policy. Historically low mortgage rates followed by inflation fueled price appreciation and resulted in a lock-in effect for owners that is constricting the supply of homes for sale.

Large investment firms mopped up foreclosed homes after the 2008 housing crash, placing a floor on prices. They account for less than 1% of the single-family housing stock, and the number of rental homes has declined on net by 900,000 since 2017. They manage fewer homes in pricy markets like Los Angeles (0.3%), Boston (0.02%) and Washington, D.C. (0.07%).

President Trump thinks the investor ban polls well and likes to say “people live in homes, not corporations.” But who does he think lives in rental homes—hedge fund managers? Most tenants are lower-income. The Senate bill could force many of them out of their homes.

…..

Imagine how a Democratic administration will exploit this sweeping power. How about a nationwide eviction moratorium or rent control? The bill also instructs the Housing and Urban Development Department to establish housing “best practices” for local governments—solar panels on all homes!

Oh, and don’t forget a grant program to reward local governments that “promote dense development” and “mixed-income housing,” an idea Ms. Warren campaigned on during her presidential bid in 2020. She sent out an exuberant press release on Tuesday listing all of the left-wing groups endorsing the bill.

Eager to claim a housing victory, the White House is pressuring Senate Republicans to pass the bill and wants the House to accept it. But why do Republicans want to provide a down payment for Ms. Warren and fellow progressives to expand Washington control over housing in their states?

The Washington Post‘s Editorial Board distinguishes effective from counterproductive ways to decrease the cost of oil and gasoline. A slice:

On the other hand, repealing the Jones Act, which would allow non-U.S. tankers to transport oil between U.S. ports, would immediately have salutary effects. The decrepit Jones Act fleet makes it cost prohibitive to move products from Gulf Coast refineries to the Northeast or the West Coast. The Trump administration is reportedly considering waiving the law, and there is already legislation introduced in Congress to repeal it. That’s a great idea regardless of anything happening with Iran.

David Hogberg explains what shouldn’t – but, alas, what today nevertheless does – need explaining: “Price controls will not help patients.” A slice:

Anthony Lo Sasso of the University of Wisconsin-Madison warns that price controls will give larger pharmaceutical companies a significant advantage. “Even well-intentioned price controls can sometimes reshape market structure in unintended ways,” Lo Sasso said. “Firms with diversified portfolios and global operations may be better able to adapt than smaller companies reliant on only a few products. Generally, policymakers need to consider whether MFN could inadvertently increase concentration even as it attempts to reduce prices.”

Jacob Sullum is correct: “Trump’s new tariff plan still asserts a crisis that does not exist.” A slice:

When imports exceed exports, the difference is balanced by inflows of loans, capital, and other transfers. That is why, as the government’s lawyers conceded during the litigation over Trump’s IEEPA tariffs, a trade deficit is “conceptually distinct” from a balance-of-payments deficit.

Trump has now changed his tune and his terminology.

Many governments are now forging trade agreements to avoid the uncertainties unleashed by Trump’s protectionist ‘policies.’ Jim Bacchus urges these governments to pursue their new agreements within the WTO. A slice:

As the Trump administration imposes a barrage of illegal and unprecedented tariffs on an ever-increasing number of imported products, the rest of the world is showing that it can continue trading despite these tariffs and without the United States. Other countries are lowering trade barriers with each other by concluding new bilateral and plurilateral trade agreements, and exporters are reconfiguring supply chains to route around American protectionism. Regardless of whether the United States remains indispensable to the global economy, international trade continues—and increasingly so—without the United States.

At the same time, these countries should not be doing what they have mostly been doing: forging new trading arrangements outside the World Trade Organization (WTO). Although the temptation to go outside the WTO legal framework is understandable, the better course would be for the other 165 WTO members to redouble their efforts toward trade liberalization within the institution while pursuing a different approach. That approach should be WTO-based plurilateralism that can build up to multilateralism, which is precisely how, over decades, the original General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) evolved into the WTO.

Scott Lincicome tweets:

Industrial policy FTW: “China’s Tariff-Defying Export Boom Leaves Its Factory Workers Behind: Workers who powered a tariff-defying boom tell a grim story of falling wages and vanishing jobs.” https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-03-09/china-s-tariff-defying-export-boom-leaves-its-factory-workers-behind

Sam Gregg reflects on Adam Smith’s deeply human vision. A slice:

The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations are thus, despite their different foci, methodologically similar works. But they are also unified by an overarching goal: that of introducing improvement into the human condition and changing the world for the better. While Smith was devoted to his scholarly endeavors, he was also anxious to advance a reformist agenda: one that removed the economic fetters of the mercantile system and instead allowed people to pursue lives marked by mature liberty, personal responsibility, and virtue, free of subservience to those who, thanks to the mercantile system, had acquired legal and economic privileges from the state.

Underpinning that reform agenda is a profound awareness, revealed in both The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations, of the interdependencies that characterize the commercial societies then emerging in the European world, especially Britain and its North American colonies. Far from being a society of radical individualists, the picture of human relations that arises from Smith’s two books is one in which people are morally and economically dependent on one another.

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… is from page 237 of George Will’s 2021 book, American Happiness and Discontents: The Unruly Torrent, 2008-2020 – a splendid collection of many of Will’s columns over these years; (the essay from which the quotation below is drawn originally appeared in the Washington Post’s print edition on March 26th, 2015):

Actually, Americans incessantly “outsource” here at home by, for example, having Iowans grow their corn and dentists take care of their teeth, jobs at which Iowans and dentists excel and the rest of us do not. LeBron James could be an adequate NFL tight end, but why subtract time from being a superb basketball player? The lesson, says [John] Tamny, is that individuals – and nations – should do what they do better than others and let others do other things.

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In my latest column for AIER I reflect on my now-long career of teaching introductory microeconomics at the collegiate level. A slice:

I’ve taught Principles of Microeconomics (“ECON 101”) regularly now for nearly a half-century. The first such course I taught was in the Fall Quarter of 1982 at Auburn University, my first year of graduate school there (after having received an M.A. in economics earlier that year from NYU). And except for a few years in the 1990s, I’ve taught ECON 101 every semester since, including in many summers. The total number of “micro principles” students whom I’ve taught over these years is likely in the neighborhood of 12,000. Mostly, I teach this course in auditoriums that hold between 200 and 350 students.

I never tire – and I’m sure that I never will tire – of walking into a classroom to introduce mostly 18-year-olds to the economic way of thinking. It’s still great fun and immensely rewarding, for I do regularly see the proverbial light bulbs being lit over many students’ heads.

My ECON 101 course is taught as if it’s the only economic course my students will ever take. Unlike many professors, I do not teach Principles of Microeconomics to prepare my students for Intermediate Microeconomics, which is the next course up in the curriculum. Some such preparation occurs, I’m pleased to report, but that’s all incidental. My chief goal is to inject my students with the rudiments of the economic way of thinking in order to inoculate them against the most virulent fallacies that are likely to try to infect their minds as they go through life.

What does that inoculation look like in practice? It begins with lessons such as these:

• Those of us alive in the modern, industrial world are among the materially richest human beings who ever lived, by far.
• There’s no such thing as a free lunch.
• In economic matters, there are no solutions, only trade-offs.
• Prices and wages set on markets are not arbitrary; market prices and wages reflect underlying economic realities as they also guide buyers, sellers, employers, and workers to better coordinate their plans and actions with each other.
• Profits in markets are not ‘extracted’ from workers or consumers; profits are the rewards for creatively using resources in ways to better satisfy consumer desires.
• Trade across political borders differs in no relevant economic respects from trade that occurs within political borders.
• Collective or political decision-making is done by the same imperfect and self-interested human beings who decide and act in private markets.

The above list is only a sample; it doesn’t exhaust the topics that I cover in the course. But were I to make an exhaustive list of those topics, some of what most other ECON 101 teachers teach would not be found on my list. I long ago stopped drawing cost curves and teaching the theories of so-called “perfect competition” and “monopolistic competition.” Whatever insights into the real-world economy and market processes are offered by these theories, if they exist at all, are too meager to justify the time required to ‘teach’ them. I instead spend far more time than is conventional teaching both basic public-choice economics and international trade.

No student passes my course without learning that real-world market processes must be compared to real-world political processes rather than to ideal political processes. Likewise, every student who passes my ECON 101 course learns that protectionism neither increases nor decreases domestic employment, and that trade deficits are balanced out by capital inflows.

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Phil Magness explains how Justice Clarence Thomas went awry in his dissenting opinion in Learning Resources. Here’s his conclusion:

In 1774, Thomas Jefferson prepared a lengthy legal treatise outlining the causes of the colonies’ protest against the crown. Its text became something of a rough draft for the Declaration of Independence’s list of reasons for their separation from Britain. As Jefferson wrote, “The exercise of a free trade with all parts of the world, possessed by the American colonists, as of natural right, and which no law of their own had taken away or abridged, was next the object of unjust encroachment.” Jefferson followed this indictment with a detailed survey of the acts of the British Parliament that intruded upon American commerce with the world, both by taxation and regulatory restriction. Jefferson clearly situated these offenses under the legislative acts of a parliament in which the colonists had no representation. As he concluded his section on trade restrictions, “The true ground on which we declare these acts void is, that the British parliament has no right to exercise authority over us.”

Justice Thomas and his defenders would be wise to consult Jefferson’s words as they apply to the present tariff controversies.

Also unimpressed with Justice Thomas’s Learning Resources dissent is John Grove. A slice:

By overtheorizing the textual basis of nondelegation, Thomas’s vision would seem to allow Congress to drastically transform the constitutional order authorized by the document’s ratifiers.

Ilya Somin, a GMU colleague over in the Scalia School of Law, writes about the legal challenges to Trump’s latest attempt to unlawfully impose tariffs punitive taxes on Americans’ purchases of imports. Two slices:

Today, the Liberty Justice Center filed, Burlap and Barrel, Inc. v. Trump, a lawsuit challenging Donald Trump’s massive new Section 122 tariffs. LJC is the same group that I worked with on V.O.S. Selections v. Trump, the IEEPA tariff case decided by the Supreme Court last month. I am not one of the attorneys on this new case. But I completely support it and its objectives. This case is the second challenging the Section 122 tariffs, following one filed by 24 state governments, last week.

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In a recent Boston Globe article, I explained why the enormous Section 122 tariffs are illegal. In addition to going beyond the statutory text, they also run afoul of the “major questions” doctrine, and nondelegation limits on Congress’ power to delegate its authority to the executive.

Phil Magness tweets: (HT Scott Lincicome)

At a 1984 Senate Finance Committee hearing they asked Marty Feldstein if Section 122 could be used to impose tariffs to counteract the trade deficit. He answered no, and succinctly explained why this was a confusion of terms.

Trump’s new tariffs are illegal.

Mary Julia Koch – a freshman at Harvard in Spring 2020 – remembers the horror of covid hysteria that began six years ago this week. A slice:

But for those beginning adulthood when the virus hit, Covid is impossible to forget. I spent 17 months of college at home, enduring a blur of camera-off Zoom classes and unmuting to “raise one’s hand.” When I returned in fall 2021 for my junior year, Harvard allowed no more than 10 people to socialize in a dorm room at once, despite mandatory vaccination, weekly testing and 10 days of isolation in a hotel room if we got sick. We had to wear masks at all times, including in the dining halls. It was harder to recognize people, communicate with friends and understand lectures.

It didn’t help that my college and a slew of others launched anonymous hotlines for students to report Covid rule violations. Most students shrugged off the mask mandate, but some stared daggers if your mask wasn’t perfectly fitted—or if you flashed a bare face on a walk outdoors. Campus inched closer to a surveillance state than a college community.

Kimberlee Josephson writes wisely about economic productivity.

Ben Zycher, in this recent letter in the Wall Street Journal, expresses his understandable frustration with “science guy” Bill Nye’s poor grasp of the science:

Bill Nye “The Science Guy” invokes everything except science in his criticism of the Environmental Protection Agency’s rescission of its 2009 finding that greenhouse-gas emissions endanger public health (“The EPA Is Wrong About Greenhouse Gases,” Letters, Feb. 25).

Contrary to the EPA 2009 predictions: There has been a decline in smog levels from 1980 to 2024. There has been no trend in hurricane numbers or intensities since 1973. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change finds no change in global flooding. There has been no trend in the EPA heat wave index since 1895, except for the 1930s. Several studies show a decline in net mortality from heat and cold. U.S. wildfires have declined sharply since 1926, and global wildfire acreage declined 24% between 1998 and 2015. Global droughts have declined about 0.5% per decade since 1950. Global per capita food production has increased 40% since 1980. And the latest peer-reviewed research reports no acceleration globally in sea-level rise. The Science Guy’s argument is fact-free.

David Henderson exposes “Ellen Wald’s misunderstandings about gasoline shortages and oil markets.”

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… is from page 337 of the “Random Thoughts” section of Thomas Sowell’s 2010 book, Dismantling America:

What is especially disturbing about the political left is that they seem to have no sense of the tragedy of the human condition. Instead, they tend to see the problems of the world as due to other people not being as wise or as noble as themselves.

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Tom Hazlett, writing in the Wall Street Journal, explains the dangers of the Radio Act of 1927’s “equal time rule” – a rule now being wielded to no good purpose by Trump’s Federal Communications Commission. A slice:

Proponents say the Equal Time Rule fosters media coverage of politics and affords political candidates greater public access. Critics say it has outlived its usefulness, as today’s media landscape offers a cornucopia of platforms unknown in 1920s America. The critics are right, except for one thing: The rule has never been useful and has always functioned mostly to suppress coverage for challengers.

As University of Texas law professor Lucas A. Powe Jr. wrote in his 1987 book, “American Broadcasting and the First Amendment,” the Federal Communications Commission and courts “have virtually always . . . interpreted the statute, despite its precision, to assist those who hold power. Moreover, when it has come time to legislate, the Congress has blatantly used section 315”—the Equal Time statute — “to bolster the position of those already holding political office.”

In February, a CBS attorney alerted Stephen Colbert that interviewing U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico, a Texas Democrat, on his TV show could invite equal-time demands from other candidates. Doling out free “equal time” or risking a fine for noncompliance is expensive.

Mr. Colbert went ahead and interviewed Mr. Talarico but their conversation ran not on TV but on (unregulated) YouTube. It received about 85 million views across social media, compared with Mr. Colbert’s roughly 2.5 million household audience on CBS.

New media has been a godsend for free speech. But there is no good reason to cling to bad ideas from the Coolidge era for traditional programming. “Equal time” requirements tax free speech and turn debates into media circuses. The networks won’t broadcast them, and major-party candidates boycott them.

Also critical of the FCC – but on a different matter from the one addressed by Tom Hazlett – is the Editorial Board of the Washington Post. A slice:

The FCC wants to set caps on the number of calls that happen with people abroad while giving customers the choice to speak with someone in the United States. The bureaucracy would also like to force cable, internet and phone firms to disclose the location of whoever is taking your call and require language proficiency requirements.

A classic move by socialists looking to expand the reach of the state is to find experiences that people find frustrating and promise that bigger government can help. It’s a tactic more common among figures like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) than a Republican-controlled FCC, but this isn’t the first time Chairman Brendan Carr has embraced a bigger role for government.

His most aggressive tactics include threatening the licenses of networks like ABC and CBS through “news distortion” investigations, notably pressuring Disney to temporarily suspend comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s show, which had the predictable effect of making the comedian more popular.

Managing how private firms handle call centers will backfire too. More agents moved overseas because it made economic sense, and companies could find enough human capital to provide a needed level of service. (Millions of Indians and Filipinos would no doubt ace an English proficiency test.) If consumers valued native-English speakers enough, they would value companies who raise prices to provide a better call experience with more expensive agents.

Vance Ginn rightly pleads for antitrust to be made boring again. Two slices:

The Federal Trade Commission’s recent appeal in its antitrust case against Meta and the government’s new appeal in the Google search case are not just legal headlines. They are signals to capital markets about how political the federal government wants antitrust policy to be.

If we keep pushing antitrust toward populist storytelling instead of consumer harm, we will get less investment, slower innovation, and weaker competition. Antitrust works best when it is boring. Not toothless, but disciplined.

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In the past few years, however, antitrust laws have been turned into a political Swiss Army knife. Under the Biden administration, Lina Khan’s FTC pushed a structural, populist approach that often treated “big” companies as inherently suspicious, even when consumer harm was difficult to prove. Now, some voices on the right — in and out of the Trump administration — are tempted to copy the same playbook for different reasons, using antitrust laws to punish perceived “bias” or to settle cultural grievances.

The Biden and Trump administrations may have different slogans, but they are making the same economic error.

Phil Magness writes about Carl Schmitt, “the Nazi philosopher behind the postliberal right.” Two slices:

In Part I of this series, we examined postliberalism’s war on economics — how its proponents blame free markets for every social ill while demonstrating little grasp of the discipline they attack. But postliberalism’s ambitions are ultimately Constitutional; its deeper project is dismantling the Madisonian order (the separation of powers and checks and balances within the federal government created to prevent anyone from accumulating too much power).

The entire intellectual apparatus for this anti-constitutional attack is built on borrowed Nazi jurisprudence and historical fabrication. To understand this history, we need to follow a single intellectual thread: from Carl Schmitt to 9/11 to the White House.

The fading political memories of the George W. Bush administration have become something of a stand-in for postliberalism’s broader assault against pre-Trump conservative politics. The “neoconservative” blunders during the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars are a recurring postliberal complaint — a symbol of the wing of the Republican Party that it aims to bury once and for all under Trump and Vance, their favored successor in 2028.

Yet for all its posturing as a conservative sea change, postliberal theory has more in common with Bush-era foreign policy than it cares to admit (as we are now seeing in Iran).

The main intellectual link comes in the person of Carl Schmitt, an eccentric German legal theorist from the early 20^th century. Once a leading conservative academic figure in the Weimar Republic, Schmitt fell into disrepute after 1933 when he joined the Nazi Party and wrote the legal justifications for Hitler’s seizure of power. Schmitt’s involvement with Nazism rightfully wrecked his postwar academic career, yet he managed to retain a stream of academic interlocutors who saw flashes of brilliance, or at least provocative insight, in his writings on constitutional theory.

…..

Postliberals have spent years denouncing the 1619 Project as a radical assault on American identity — so have I. They were right that it was radical; the 1619 Project declared America’s founding irreparably tainted by slavery.

Patrick Deneen, the subject of the first installment of this series, makes an identical move. He just has a different original sin: not slavery, but individual liberty itself.

Both are refounding projects. Both treat 1776 as a problem. Both have serious historical errors. And both reject political liberalism.

At this point, Vermeule, Deneen, and other postliberals run into a practical branding problem for their ideology. Tearing down the Madisonian constitutional order and recasting it as a relic of past errors smacks of Critical Race Theory, or the 1619 Project, “Cultural Marxism,” or any number of similar political bugbears to the American right. Founder-bashing has never had a particularly receptive audience among conservatives.

J.D. Tuccille reflects on Adam Smith’s Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. A slice:

Environmental fetishes are recent justifications for interfering in market transactions, but old fears that international trade is somehow unfair also, once again, underlie political interference in commerce. Last April, the protectionist Trump administration published a trade report promising that the president’s policies would “reduce our destructive trade imbalance…by putting America First” with tariffs and other restrictions on trade.

Adam Smith was familiar with such arguments and dismissed them as nonsense.

“To lay extraordinary restraints upon the importation of goods of almost all kinds, from those particular countries with which the balance of trade is supposed to be disadvantageous, is the second expedient by which the commercial system proposes to increase the quantity of gold and silver,” he wrote. “Nothing, however, can be more absurd than this whole doctrine of the balance of trade, upon which, not only these restraints, but almost all the other regulations of commerce, are founded….Trade which, without force or constraint, is naturally and regularly carried on between any two places, is always advantageous, though not always equally so, to both.”

Whether for novel environmental reasons or in the name of old-fashioned nationalism, government interference in economic activities is often justified on the grounds that people are “selfish.” By that, of course, politicians mean that people act for their own reasons and not to advance the priorities of those in office. But to Smith, that was part of the productive glory of a free society.

Also celebrating the 250th anniversary of the publication of Adam Smith’s great 1776 book is my GMU Econ colleague Dan Klein.

Mark Skousen, too, marks the 250th anniversary of the publications of Smith’s marvelous 1776 study.

Bjorn Lomborg makes clear “how reality destroyed Europe’s green energy dreams.” A slice:

Stagnant or sluggish economic growth persists as a chronic problem, exacerbated by high energy costs, regulatory burdens, and demographic pressures, limiting prosperity and the ability to fund public services or innovation. Pensions and aging populations pose a looming fiscal crisis, with pay-as-you-go systems strained by longer life spans, lower birth rates, and insufficient reforms, threatening unsustainable debt burdens on future generations. Lack of constraints on immigration and integration failures have fueled social tensions, security concerns, and political polarization, ranking high in recent surveys alongside irregular migration flows as a top worry for many citizens.

These overlapping crises and concerns explain why the EU’s once near-obsessive focus on climate has receded so precipitously—Europeans now demand balanced attention to a full spectrum of threats that directly impact security, prosperity, and their daily life—the world is becoming scarier, while more costs are coming into focus.

David Bier tweets: (HT Scott Lincicome)

Ask: “Should Americans be allowed to accept free stuff from foreigners?”
Then ask: “Should Americans be allowed to accept almost free stuff from foreigners?”