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… is from page 125 of Charles King’s 2024 book, Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel’s Messiah:

Early-childhood mortality was so expected, in fact, that in official documents “infancy” was itself understood to be a cause of death distinct from infectious diseases such as consumption and smallpox. Four of Susannah Cibber’s five siblings, for example, had died while infants, as had at least two of her children.

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George Will demolishes the Trump administration’s absurd attempts to justify its lawless military attacks on Venezuelan boats. Two slices:

Channeling his inner Humpty Dumpty (“‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — nothing more nor less’”), Donald Trump has decided that this hypothetical fentanyl from Venezuela might be a “chemical weapon” (like mustard gas or sarin?). An odd one, that Americans pay for and ingest.

If the boats are, as U.S. intelligence sources supposedly know, carrying drugs (intelligence sources knew Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction existed), they are pulled to America by the demand for drugs by Americans who poison themselves. The national tragedy of 80,000 U.S. fatal overdoses last year is not ameliorated by, it is deepened by, terminological obfuscations that erase the agency of drug users.

The president says each boat strike prevents 25,000 overdose deaths. Reason’s Jacob Sullum says this means he already has saved 350,000 lives, six times the number of U.S. lives lost in Vietnam. But, then, Attorney General Pam Bondi has said that in his first 100 days in office, Donald Trump saved “258 million lives” (75 percent of the U.S. population) by intercepting fentanyl shipments.

The U.S. Coast Guard specializes in at-sea interdictions. And using Reaper drones and Hellfire missiles against boats is (as a former U.S. ambassador to Venezuela told the Economist) like “trying to cook an egg with a blowtorch.” One wonders: Is this what U.S. pilots and drone operators enlisted to do?

…..

Secretary of State Marco Rubio is puzzled: “We have deployed U.S. assets and interests all over the planet, but when we do it in our own hemisphere … everyone sort of freaks out.” (“Freaks out.” Imagine such teenager-talk from other secretaries of state — say, John Quincy Adams or Dean Acheson.) What is the antecedent of Rubio’s pronoun “it”? Deploying “assets and interests”? Hardly “everyone,” but some people have questions about activities antiseptically described as “lethal kinetic strikes.”

Nobel Peace Prize laureate María Corina Machado will soon release a manifesto for freedom for her homeland of Venezuela, as reported here by the Editorial Board of the Washington Post. Two slices:

The winner of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize has written a thoughtful and important “Freedom Manifesto” that she plans to publish on Tuesday and shared with us first. In it, she argues that the freedoms of speech and assembly, as well the right to vote securely and without any form of manipulation, must be inviolable. Machado puts particular emphasis on the need to protect property ownership as a fundamental right.

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It only took one generation for socialism to ruin Venezuela and impoverish most of its people. The damage caused by Maduro and Hugo Chávez before him won’t be quickly undone, but it’s possible. Machado envisions Venezuela becoming “a pillar of democratic and energy security in the western hemisphere, and the unwavering promoter of liberty around the world.” Of course, there’s no guarantee that a post-Maduro Venezuela immediately becomes a thriving, free-market democracy, but we commend Machado for imagining a better future for Venezuelans to rally around.

David Stockman explains that “Ronald Reagan would have abhorred Trump’s tariffs. He believed presidents should rein in the Leviathan, not direct markets.” Three slices:

When it comes to economic policy, Donald Trump is a statist menace. Full stop.

His obsession with tariffs isn’t grounded in just classic protectionist aid to domestic industries, but actually embodies a much grander and more dangerous Caesarian notion: Namely, that America is a giant corporation and Trump its all-powerful CEO, empowered to gallop around the globe cutting great big beautiful deals to bring investment, jobs, production, societal uplift and foreign policy victories, too, pouring into America’s hinterlands.

In that context, the Donald has tortured the nation’s poorly drafted trade statutes into economic battering rams, thereby enabling him to deploy tariffs for any purpose that suits his momentary fancy.

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Meanwhile, Trump’s claim that Ontario’s ad was a fraud because Ronald Reagan loved tariffs, too, is truly preposterous. The Gipper, for whom I worked as Director of the Office of Management and Budget from 1981–1985, was a true-blue believer in free markets and would have never dreamed of storming around the globe making ad hoc economic deals while sliding by the seat of his pants. President Reagan believed that government was the problem, not the solution, and that its main job was to get out of the way to the maximum extent possible so that businesses and entrepreneurs operating on the free market could take care of investment, job creation, and the resulting rise in societal wealth.

Yes, he deviated from strict free trade a few times, but I know from personal experience that it wasn’t because he thought tariffs, quotas, or other protectionist measures would help. In the case of the largest deviation from free trade — the 1.68 million cap on Japanese auto imports — President Reagan got flat-out tricked.

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At the end of the day, Ronald Reagan would have abhorred the entire Trumpian TariffPalooza. That’s because he knew that in a free economy, the job of the President is to keep the Leviathan on the Potomac at bay, not usurp the jobs, income, and wealth-creating function of free men on free markets.

Reason‘s Eric Boehm sensibly asks: “The ’emergency’ that demanded huge tariffs on Swiss imports is now over. So what was the emergency?” A slice:

When President Donald Trump ordered a whopping 39 percent tariff on all imports from Switzerland earlier this year, he did so, of course, by claiming there was a national emergency.

Officially, Trump’s executive order pointed to “large and persistent annual U.S. goods trade deficits” that, the president claims, “constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and economy of the United States.” Because this was part of Trump’s push for what he called “reciprocal” tariffs, the executive order also pointed toward “foreign trading partners’ disparate tariff rates” that were supposedly to blame for the trade imbalance.

Right from the start, that didn’t make a whole lot of sense.

For one, Switzerland had minuscule tariffs (an average rate of 0.2 percent) on American imports. As I pointed out at the time, if Trump were seeking “reciprocal” tariffs with the Swiss, he would have to lower America’s tariffs rather than raise them.

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Cynical observers might note that Trump’s decision to reduce the tariffs on Swiss goods came just days after a Swiss delegation lavished the president with a variety of expensive gifts. Trump reportedly received a gold Rolex watch and an engraved gold bar estimated to be worth $130,000. It is illegal for U.S. presidents to accept gifts worth more than $480, but the White House says Trump accepted the gifts on behalf of his presidential library, which likely makes them legal.

It wouldn’t be the first time Trump responded favorably after receiving some luxurious enticements. In August, Trump granted Apple a special exemption from huge tariffs targeting high-end computer chips made in other countries just days after Apple CEO Tim Cook made a special trip to the White House and left behind a 24-karat gold tchotchke for the president.

National Review‘s Editors urge Trump to go much further with his newly announced reductions in tariffs punitive taxes on Americans’ purchases of imports. A slice:

The coffee tariffs are a function of the president’s abiding belief that tariffs are, by definition, good. It is true that they generate revenue — taxes tend to do that — but at the cost of higher prices for consumers. The administration has been at pains to deny the latter part of that equation, but, under pressure to do something about prices after the Democratic victories in the off-year elections, it is now admitting the obvious.

Previewing the tariff relief on food on Fox News the other day, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said it would come regarding commodities we don’t grow in the United States, “coffee being one of them. Bananas, other fruits, things like that. So that will bring the prices down very quickly.”

The grocers are pleased. “Today’s action should help consumers, whose morning cup of coffee will hopefully become more affordable, as well as U.S. manufacturers, which utilize many of these products in their supply chains and production lines,” the head of an industry group observed when the move was announced.

It would behoove the administration to apply this logic more broadly. By one estimate, tariffs are costing the average American household roughly $1,800 this year, while more than half of tariffed goods are used to make products here in the United States. It is true that China — a predatory power hostile to the U.S. — is a special case and that threatening tariffs can be a way to gain leverage in negotiations, but arguably Trump’s most significant economic initiative has been to increase prices on consumers after winning a campaign on the promise that he’d lower them.

The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal reports a fact about modern America that is inconsistent with assertions from the likes of MAGA and American Compass all the way over (the very narrow ideological distance) to the progressive left that there is a ‘shortage’ of good-paying manufacturing jobs in the United States. A slice:

Corporate CEOs are keeping their heads down these days, lest they get chopped off by the Trump Administration. So last week’s remarks by Ford Motor CEO Jim Farley deserve credit for candor, as well as for the public service of telling politicians a hard truth about the American labor force.

Mr. Farley told a podcast last week that he can’t find enough skilled mechanics to run his auto plants. Specifically, Ford can’t fill 5,000 mechanic jobs that pay $120,000 a year.

“We are in trouble in our country. We are not talking about this enough,” Mr. Farley said. “We have over a million openings in critical jobs, emergency services, trucking, factory workers, plumbers, electricians and tradesmen.” He said Ford is struggling to hire mechanics at salaries that Ivy League grads might envy.

“A bay with a lift and tools and no one to work in it—are you kidding me? Nope,” Mr. Farley lamented. “We do not have trade schools” in this country. He’s right to a large degree. Few high schools teach trades these days. Community colleges are mostly remedial high school education, and government worker-training programs have poor results.

Government subsidies for college and graduate education have encouraged the young to go to college even though they might be better off learning a trade. This has created a skills mismatch in the labor market. Unemployment among young college grads is increasing, while employers struggle to hire skilled manufacturing workers, technicians and contractors.

My Mercatus Center colleague Satya Marar reveals “the many tradeoffs of Trump’s ‘Fat Shot’ deal.”

“You Asked for It, Brother! . . . And now you’re getting it good and hard!”

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Mark Skousen wisely argues against wealth ‘redistribution’ by government. A slice:

Socialism is in vogue again. Critics of capitalism call the market economy unfair, arguing that big corporations don’t pay low-income employees a living wage. They draw on studies showing that inequality has grown dramatically in both income and wealth. Their solution: a highly progressive income tax, or even a wealth tax, on the superrich, and a minimum wage of $20 an hour or more.

These economically destructive measures are unnecessary and would disrupt the positive changes happening in capital-labor relations. The private sector is quietly solving the inequality problem without more redistribution and wage controls.

How? Companies both large and small offer generous profit-sharing programs for employees—401(k) plans, stock options and discounted stock-purchase plans.

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… is from page 319 of George Will’s 2021 book, American Happiness and Discontents: The Unruly Torrent, 2008-2020 – a splendid collection of many of his columns over these years; (the column from which the quotation below is drawn was originally published in the Washington Post on October 20th, 2016):

That purpose, as Hanna Holborn Gray, a former president of the University of Chicago, once said, is not to make young adults comfortable, it is to make them think. Since 1975, however, universities have embraced the doctrine that speech that offends people actually harms them, mentally and even physically. The decision to treat young adults as fragile and perpetually vulnerable to victimization coincided with academia’s turn away from the world: Fifty years ago, student assertiveness concerned momentous issues of war and civil rights. Today, students have macro tantrums about micro-aggressions (e.g., sombreros). Time was, students rebelled against universities acting in loco parentis. Today, they welcome having their sexual and other social interactions minutely subjected to government regulations administered by Pecksniffs with PhDs.

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The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal reports that “Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent all but concedes that border taxes are raising consumer prices.” Two slices:

The tariff costs are hitting home, literally. Prices have increased 6.9% for bananas and 18.9% for coffee over the past 12 months, according to government figures. Who wouldn’t be cranky about paying $6 for a dark roast cup of joe? Trump officials say exporters pay the tariffs, but consumers see the opposite each day at Starbucks.

Businesses have been passing on the border taxes to consumers to varying degrees. Some are also slowing hiring and putting investments on hold because of tariff uncertainty. Consumer sentiment on the University of Michigan’s survey last week fell to a near record low—near the same level when inflation peaked at 9.1% in June 2022.

….

Mr. Bessent also blamed the Biden crowd for the “affordability mess,” which is true as far it goes. But Mr. Trump’s tariffs are making daily life less affordable now. Americans want a tariff reprieve for more than coffee and bananas.

“Trump’s tariffs are costing companies. Keeping up with them may cost even more.” (HT Scott Lincicome) Two slices:

Businesses from Wall Street to main street are struggling to comply with President Donald Trump’s byzantine tariff regime, driving up costs and counteracting, for some, the benefits of the corporate tax cuts Republicans passed earlier this year.

Trump has ripped up the U.S. tariff code over the past year, replacing a decades-old system that imposed the same tariffs on imports from all but a few countries with a vastly more complicated system of many different tariff rates depending on the origin of imported goods.

To give an example, an industrial product that faced a mostly uniform 5 percent tariff rate in the past could now be taxed at 15 percent if it comes from the EU or Japan, 20 percent from Norway and many African countries, 24 to 25 percent from countries in Southeast Asia and upwards of 50 percent from India, Brazil or China.

“This has been an exhausting year, I’d say, for most CEOs in the country,” said Gary Shapiro, CEO and vice chair of the Consumer Technology Association, an industry group whose 1,300 member companies include major brands like Amazon, Walmart and AMD, as well as many small businesses and startups. “The level of executive time that’s been put in this has been enormous. So instead of focusing on innovation, they’re focusing on how they deal with the tariffs.”

Upping the pressure, the Justice Department has announced that it intends to make the prosecution of customs fraud one of its top priorities.

The proliferation of trade regulations and threat of intensified enforcement has driven many companies to beef up their staff and spend what could add up to tens of millions of dollars to ensure they are not running afoul of Trump’s requirements.

The time and expense involved, combined with the tens of billions of dollars in higher tariffs that companies are paying each month to import goods, amount to a massive burden that is weighing down industries traditionally reliant on imported products. And it’s denting, for some, the impact of the hundreds of billions of dollars of tax cuts that companies will receive over the next decade via the One Big Beautiful Bill Act championed by the White House.

“Every CEO survey says this is their biggest issue,” said Shapiro.

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The nonpartisan think tank’s new report, “Unintended Consequences: Trade and Supply Chain Leaders Respond to Recent Turmoil,” is the first in a new series exploring how companies are navigating the evolving trade landscape, he said.

One of the main findings is that it has become very difficult for companies to make decisions, “given the high degree of uncertainty” around tariff policy, [Matthew] Aleshire said.

The Editorial Board of the Washington Post warns Seattle residents of the economic damage that will be done to them by their new socialist mayor, Katie Wilson. Two slices:

Who is Wilson? She does not own a car. She lives in a rented 600-square-foot apartment with her husband and two-year-old daughter. By her own account, she depends on checks from her parents back east to cover expenses. To let them off the hook, she seeks to force residents of Seattle to pay for “free” child care and other goodies.

Fourteen years ago, after working odd jobs as a barista, baker, lab technician and legal assistant, Wilson co-founded an advocacy group called Transit Riders Union to agitate for better public transportation, paid for by new and higher taxes. She says she decided to challenge Mayor Bruce Harrell (D) earlier this year after he opposed a new tax on high earners to pay for housing construction. She campaigned on a local capital gains tax, a digital advertising tax and a statewide wealth tax.

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Like the mayor-elect in New York, Wilson wants to open government-run grocery stores, despite their record of failure. She suggested during a September event that she won’t allow private supermarkets to close locations that aren’t profitable. Instead, she wants to require them to give more notice and pay generous severance packages to their employees. “Access to affordable, healthy food is a basic right,” Wilson said.

Wilson may be less constrained than Mamdani. Fellow progressives also toppled the incumbent president of the Seattle City Council and the city attorney while picking up two other seats. Only two of the seven council members have served more than one term. There are not many silver linings here, except that the country may be able to more quickly see the failures of their policies — which could prevent voters in other cities from falling for socialism.

Paul McDonald describes “the savage heart of socialism.”

Mitch Daniels decries the the warping of public norms. Two slices:

Allow me to start at the relatively trivial end of the list. Profanity is suddenly mainstream. Once unacceptable words, specifically the one you know I’m thinking of, are everywhere. From comedians who apparently couldn’t get laughs without them, to politicians who must think it makes them look tough, the grossness has now infected even our formerly proudest and most stately publications. However one might wish, it seems unlikely that once the vulgar becomes commonplace, society will ever re-rule it out of bounds.

The infantilization of political debate, and personal demonization of opponents, may similarly have ratcheted downward, although on this score one can imagine some recovery. At some point, the public could tire of playground insults and asinine nicknames, and start asking for a little more substance from those elected to serve them. Interminable stalemate, especially when the country enters a stretch of serious economic or national security difficulty, could trigger a collective demand to “Grow up.”

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Cronyism has enjoyed a good run lately. The Biden administration’s lavish funding of politically aligned unions and nonprofits has been succeeded by pay-to-play favoritism of the old-fashioned kind. For the moment, the public is passively tolerant. But a Credit Mobilier, Teapot Dome or Watergate-like episode could well send a pendulum back toward higher ethical expectations.

Finally, there is lawfare. Both sides’ hands are filthy, and the ugly game of tit-for-tat may continue. But here, there is the opportunity for the nation’s courts to play both a restraining and a tutorial role.

Writing at the Wall Street Journal, the Cato Institute’s Michael Cannon argues that “Congress should codify [Trump’s] first-term easing of restrictions of short-term limited-duration insurance.” A slice:

When President Obama saw how many people preferred ObamaCare-exempt plans, he kneecapped the competition. For 20 years, presidents from both parties had allowed short-term plans to last up to 12 months. But in 2016 Mr. Obama prohibited them from lasting more than three months, which reduced consumer protections and stripped coverage from patients after they got sick.

In 2018 Mr. Trump removed those restrictions and freed those plans to offer greater protection. He clarified that federal law allows short-term plans to last 36 months and to offer renewal guarantees. Renewal guarantees give patients who develop expensive illnesses the perpetual right to re-enroll in their health plan at healthy-person premiums.

Multiple federal courts upheld Mr. Trump’s rule as a reasonable and valid interpretation of existing law—including its clarification that the law allows renewal guarantees to offer longer-term protection to people in short-term plans.

Freeing consumers from ObamaCare’s hidden taxes made coverage dramatically more affordable for the majority of enrollees. The Congressional Budget Office found that consumers could purchase a “comprehensive major medical policy” at premiums “as much as 60 percent lower than premiums for the lowest-cost bronze plan.” Premiums fell so much that people could afford health insurance without a government subsidy. Perhaps that’s why President Biden rescinded Mr. Trump’s action in 2024.

Congress can make health insurance affordable for millions, without spending a dime, by codifying Mr. Trump’s 2018 rule into law.

Tim Starr unpacks the deceptions, fallacies, and moral rot that infect the heart of the work of Darryl Cooper, the ‘historian’ who was slathered with praise by Tucker Carlson.

Here’s Samuel Gregg on “Tocqueville versus the Groypers.” Three slices:

Politically speaking, [Arthur de] Gobineau’s racialist principles led him to favor conspicuously authoritarian governments. Initially, Gobineau dismissed the Second Empire established in France shortly after Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup d’etat of 1851 as a mere facsimile of true monarchy. By the mid-1850s, however, Gobineau was full of praise for Napoleon III’s regime. It exemplified, to his mind, the centralized authority that rulers needed to control unruly populations. The consequences for liberty were, to Gobineau’s mind, irrelevant.

Gobineau’s adulation of Napoleon III put him in an entirely different political camp from Tocqueville. The latter never hid his antipathy to the Second Empire’s authoritarianism or the unconstitutional way the regime had come to power.

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Against such positions, Tocqueville affirmed a proposition that he regarded as self-evident: that being the essential “unity of the human race.” For Tocqueville, there were no superhumans or subhumans. There were simply humans. That self-evident truth, Tocqueville believed, was foundational to his brand of liberalism as well as natural law and Christian morality. By contrast, Tocqueville insisted, Gobineau’s suppositions about race led to the conclusion that we live in a world in which “there are only victors and vanquished, masters and slaves by fact of birth.” It was no coincidence, Tocqueville stated, that Gobineau’s “doctrines are approved, cited and commented upon … [by] the owners of negroes in favor of eternal servitude.”

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In short, there was nothing redeemable about Gobineau’s race theories and their consequences for politics because the more Gobineau articulated them, the more Tocqueville recognized that they were marked by an inner logic that was not only empirically false but morally reprehensible. That made Gobineau’s racialist views something that could only stain any institution or political movement that flirted with them.

In his time, Tocqueville refused to accord any legitimacy whatsoever to such positions wherever they reared their heads. He also declined to let individuals advancing or tolerating such ideas off the intellectual and moral hook. In our time, there should be no hesitation on our part to do the same.

Jimmy Alfonso Licon reflects wisely on AI.

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… is from page 88 of Thomas Sowell’s Compassion Versus Guilt, a 1987 collection of some of his popular essays; specifically, it’s from Sowell’s October 6th, 1986, column titled “Bogeyman Economics”:

According to bogeyman economics, monopolies are a constant threat to jack up prices and “exploit” the consumer. The irony is that far more anti-trust cases have been prosecuted against companies for lowering prices than for raising prices. When a more efficient company cuts prices and its competitors lose business because they cannot afford to do the same, that is when they turn to the feds.

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Megan McArdle celebrates the fact that, in modern America, innovation that was once pie-in-the-sky is routine. A slice:

The happy ending to this story is that technological change has made pie crust easier — not as easy as cake, maybe, but still something a competent beginner can master with a small amount of effort. Food processors simplify the laborious process of cutting fat into flour, and chef J. Kenji Lopez-Alt has developed not one but two foolproof pie crust recipes for novices who own such a machine. I’d encourage readers who think pies are too difficult to give one a try, roll them out (videos on the internet will show you how to do this), then put them in the freezer to await Thanksgiving morning.

But I’d also ask them to think about how technology might be used to recapture other things they miss. Childhood foods you’ve lost, for example. At the end of my father’s life, I managed to reproduce his beloved snow pudding, a now-forgotten lemon dessert that turns out to be delicious and easy to make with an electric stand mixer. Then think bigger: Could safer self-driving cars revive the once-common sight of children playing in the street? Could a productivity boom driven by artificial intelligence give us more time to invest in our communities? Could manufactured housing make it easier to form families, or might robots reverse our demographic decline by taking over the dreary housework that kids generate?

GMU Econ alum Abby Hall Blanco and her co-author Chrysanthi Skaliotis warn residents of New York City of the economic damage that their Mayor Mamdani is about to inflict on them. A slice:

Rent control offers an immediate political payoff. The new mayor can be viewed as helping renters. The long-term consequences — shrinking supply, deteriorating buildings and hindering construction — are delayed and spread out amongst the population of New York City. They are noticed years down the road, when we come back and it’s even harder to find an affordable apartment. Simply put, it allows Mamdani to claim victory and praise in the short run, while the worst effects will only be realized long after he’s out of office.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown updates us on Lina Khan’s efforts to impose her economically ignorant notions on New Yorkers. A slice:

With Khan’s influence, we can expect the future Mamdani mayoral administration to get creative and, perhaps, unconstitutional—in its application of existing laws and authorities to enact Mamdani’s agenda, which includes things like city-run grocery stores, free child care and bus rides, nearly doubling the minimum wage, and a freeze on raising rents.

Paul Moreno reviews G. Edward White’s new biography of Robert Jackson. A slice:

Jackson’s unhappy career on the Court resulted from his inability to fuse or completely separate the roles of advocate and judge. Though brought up in the world of progressive “Legal Realism,” which conflated law and politics, he retained some sense of the classical belief that law could be separated from politics—the “natural law” belief that law was discovered, not made, which White has called the “oracular” view of judging. White notes that before he was on the Court, Jackson was “not a committed ideological partisan in the same manner as many who served with him in the Roosevelt administration … but he was a team player.” He was as political as Roosevelt needed him to be, ardently denouncing New Deal opponents as plutocrats and fascists. But he knew that the Court was different, and many of his Roosevelt-appointed fellow Justices did not.

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… is from page 158 of Milton Friedman’s 1953 paper “The Case for Flexible Exchange Rates,” as this paper is reprinted in Friedman’s 1953 collection, Essays in Positive Economics:

In brief, it [free trade] is desirable in its own right as one of the basic freedoms we cherish; it promotes the efficient use of resources through an appropriate international division of labor and increases consumer welfare by maximizing the range of alternative on which consumers can spend their incomes; it facilitates international political amity by removing potent sources of conflict between governments.

DBx: Indeed. Seldom has the liberal, civilization-enhancing case for free trade been summarized so succinctly.

Every protectionist intentionally endorses a policy that reduces individuals’ freedoms by giving power to government officials to override individuals’ peaceful choices. Every protectionist, usually out of ignorance, endorses a policy that makes the great bulk of his or her fellow citizens poorer. Every protectionist recklessly endorses a policy that creates greater frictions between governments and, thus, raises the prospects of hot shooting wars.
…..
Milton Friedman died on this date – November 16th – in 2006.

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My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy, had Scott Lincicome and me as guests on this latest of her podcasts. We discussed trade and Trump’s punitive taxes – a.k.a. tariffs – on Americans’ purchases of imports.

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George Will continues to decry the U.S. government’s fiscal incontinence. Two slices:

The International Monetary Fund forecasts the U.S. government debt will be above 7 percent of GDP every year until 2029, with the debt reaching 143.4 percent of GDP by the decade’s end. The Congressional Budget Office projects the debt increasing for decades. As a percentage of their GDPs, Italy’s and Greece’s debts are expected to decline, and to be exceeded by the U.S. debt’s percentage in 2030.

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With annual deficits approaching $2 trillion even with the economy humming, and with defense spending down to around 3 percent of GDP (above 13 percent during the Korean War; above 9 percent during peak Vietnam), what can cause sustained economic growth of at least 5 percent to cope with the debt’s growth? Artificial intelligence? A risky reliance. Revenue from the president’s perhaps unconstitutional tariffs? A net drag on the economy.

A nation that used to borrow for emergencies now is mired in a perpetual emergency because it is borrowing — $2.6 trillion annually projected by 2034 — to fund current consumption of government goods and services.

John Puri reports on the Trump administration’s punitive taxes – a.k.a. protective tariffs – on Americans’ purchases of pasta. Three slices:

Another week, another imported product the administration thinks Americans consume too much of. The president’s doctrine of protectionism requires that citizens be shielded from their own economic preferences, redirecting their money toward things the government finds more appropriate. Today’s forbidden purchase is Italian pasta.

Under his highly questionable IEEPA authorities, President Trump has unilaterally imposed a blanket tariff of 15 percent on imports from European Union members, including Italy. Now, his administration is slapping an additional 92 percent tariff on 13 companies that supply the bulk of the $770 million in pasta that Italy exports to the United States. In conjunction, these duties will ensure that no American can enjoy Italian-origin spaghetti or macaroni without paying a 107 percent tax.

This staggering tax is expected to function as an embargo, effectively barring Italian pasta from the U.S. market. Chefs and shoppers will be forced to turn to domestic producers. The U.S. pasta lobby (yes, that is a real thing) is no doubt ecstatic that a large chunk of their competition — the birthplace of their product, in fact — is being kneecapped by the federal government. In addition to limiting the inconvenient choices available to consumers, the new pasta tax will likely enable domestic producers to raise their own prices.

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Antidumping laws are yet another example of Congress delegating its Article I tariff power to the executive branch. On paper, the president is limited in the duties he can impose by the need for factual determinations — of too-low foreign prices, injury to domestic producers, and calculation of the dumping margin. In practice, however, because Congress vested these fact-finding powers in the executive branch, the president is limited only to what his bureaucracy’s creative accounting can justify.

As anyone versed in public choice theory would expect, antidumping laws are fertile ground for lobbyists and government favoritism — rewarding well-connected firms with dampened competition. Companies seeking protectionism often use antidumping duties as a means to get around international agreements that limit U.S. tariff rates. In fact, antidumping investigations are typically initiated by a domestic company, supposedly “on behalf of” its industry. In the case of Italian pasta, the investigation that led to the 92 percent duty was triggered by two U.S. companies that make pasta domestically.

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Any law that empowers a single body — all too often the executive branch — to decide which consumer products Americans are permitted to buy should be incompatible with a republican system of government designed to secure natural rights. Conservatives appreciated this principle when President Obama attempted to unilaterally ban incandescent lightbulbs and functional appliances by regulatory fiat, purportedly for the customer’s benefit. Regrettably, it’s now a Republican administration that is trying to banish Italian pasta from Americans’ kitchen tables.

“Trump plays defense on tariffs as Americans face rising food prices.” Two slices:

Prices on many everyday items, however, continue to soar. Through September, the most recent data available, coffee prices were up 19 percent over the previous 12 months, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Bananas were up 7 percent.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told “Fox & Friends” on Wednesday that tariff cuts would “bring the prices down very quickly.” Bessent previously has said that foreign exporters and U.S. retailers were bearing most of the tariff burden, leaving consumers mostly unscathed.

…..

Having effectively conceded that tariffs are contributing to high prices, the administration has opened the door to demands for further modifications in its strategy, said Ed Gresser, vice president at the Progressive Policy Institute in Washington.

U.S. importers this year have paid far more in tariffs on a wide range of consumer products, including automobiles, vacuum cleaners and makeup, Gresser said. Tariffs on imported coffee have cost Americans $358 million so far this year, up from $1.3 million last year, according to U.S. International Trade Commission data.

But tariffs on automobiles have cost more than 36 times as much — amounting to $13 billion.
“There is a heavy price for this policy, and families are paying a lot of it,” said Gresser, who was a trade official in the first Trump administration.

Also writing about higher food prices caused by Trump’s tariffs punitive taxes on Americans’ purchases of imports is Reason‘s Eric Boehm. A slice:

The moves announced Thursday may help make coffee more affordable, but this is ultimately less than a half-measure. As Axios notes, those four countries account for just 7 percent of U.S. coffee imports. Most coffee (and many other items) will still face higher tariffs. Trump’s tariffs are estimated to cost the average American household around $1,800 this year—so some small relief on grocery prices might be appreciated, but that is hardly solving the problem the White House has created.

Samuel Gregg continues, with this new paper, to write insightfully about trade. A slice:

Protectionism, however, is detrimental to America’s economic and national security interests. This paper lays out a framework for how the United States can advance a trade liberalization agenda for the Asia–Pacific that reflects present geopolitical conditions. National security considerations always shape trade policy and a full liberalization of trade throughout the region is unlikely. Nevertheless, American efforts to promote a strategic liberalization of trade with nations throughout the Asia–Pacific region will serve America’s economic interests, as well as strengthen America’s position in its geopolitical contest with China.

In response to Trump insisting that trade deficits are an “emergency” and Thomas Piketty insisting that differences in monetary incomes are an “emergency,” Clifford Asness tweets: (HT Scott Lincicome)

Trade balances are not an “emergency” and shouldn’t be used to arbitrarily imperially impose tariffs.

Inequality is not an “emergency” (that doesn’t mean it’s not a serious issue) and shouldn’t be used by this debunked socialist to try to impose his views through world government.

Horseshoe theory never loses these days.

The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal is correct: “Republicans don’t seem to have any priorities beyond populist stunts.” A slice:

Democrats will run against Republicans next year on the cost of healthcare and enhanced pandemic-era subsidies for ObamaCare. Republicans can dodge the subject and hope voters don’t notice, which is a losing strategy. Or they could offer a health freedom agenda that would create more private insurance options. If any Republicans have been thinking about this, we haven’t heard it.

How about pro-growth tax policy? Republicans have a rare chance to use budget reconciliation again during this Congress to dodge the Senate 60-vote rule for tax and spending bills. The news here is that Republicans don’t seem to have any idea what they would put in such a bill.

They won’t index capital-gains income for inflation because that might be seen as helping the affluent. They won’t cut spending because Democrats will object and call them mean. They won’t try more welfare reforms for, well, the same reason. They won’t even try to reform the budget process that automatically increases spending each year in the “budget baseline.”