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… is from page 656 of the 1988 collection of Lord Acton’s writings and notes to himself (edited by the late J. Rufus Fears), Essays in Religion, Politics, and Morality; specifically, it’s a note drawn from Acton’s extensive papers at Cambridge University:

We contemplate our ideas in the sunlight of heaven, and apply them in the darkness of earth.

DBx: Yes.

The human mind, unable to comprehend the countless details always in play in real-world human society, necessarily forms its theories about society, including about the economy, abstractly. An essential feature of a sound theory is recognition of the inescapable, irreducible complexity of reality. Such a theory will therefore never attempt to describe or predict in detail; it also warns against the hubris of the human mind attempting to do too much.

Unsound theories – which are the playthings of unwise or arrogant individuals – treat the limited features of reality that can be comprehended by the human mind as all that is relevant about reality. Pleased with the pretty and always simple pictures conjured by such abstract theorizing, unwise or arrogant individuals mistakenly conclude that their theories – their pretty and simple pictures – are reliable guides to all the details of reality that must be dealt with if reality is to be made to look like their pretty pictures.

It’s best to have simple rules for a complex world.

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Eric Boehm details some of the projected costs of Trump’s proposed tariffs. Two slices:

Whether passed through Congress or enacted with the stroke of a presidential pen, higher tariffs will ultimately fall on American consumers. A new report this week by the National Retail Federation, a trade association that represents grocers, department stores, and online sellers, estimates that Trump’s proposed tariffs would “reduce American consumers’ spending power by $46 billion to $78 billion every year the tariffs are in place.”

Those estimates depend on many variables that won’t be known for sure until an executive order or tariff legislation is made public, of course. But there is broad agreement among economists that higher tariffs will make Americans poorer—the only question is by how much?

…..

There are a lot of moving parts here, and there’s still time for Trump to reconsider this foolish idea—or for his advisors and key figures in Congress to talk him out of it. The one thing we know for sure is that, if more tariffs are headed our way in 2025, consumers will have the least influence over the process and will end up bearing most of the cost.

Judge Glock applauds Houston’s lack of land-use zoning.

Marcos Falcone warns of “the linguistic disadvantages of liberalism.”

C.J. Ciaramella has a really good idea.

James Taranto makes sense:

Abortion no doubt is a voting issue for many women (and men), and it seems plausible, even likely, that Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization gave Democrats a boost in 2022 and even 2024. But the idea that it was going to lead to a mass change in voting behavior when the parties have been polarized over the issue since 1980 never made sense.

Billy Binion celebrates Halloween.

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… is from page 267 of Thomas Sowell’s 1999 book, Barbarians Inside the Gates:

It is one of the pathetic signs of the “me generation” that some people think it is a defense of some government policy to say, “I benefitted from it.” Nazis benefitted from Hitler!

DBx: Yep.

I cannot count the number of times I’ve heard or read someone who, after correctly identifying Ms. Smith and Mr. Jones as workers who would lose their jobs if tariffs are cut, asserts that ‘therefore, cutting tariffs is an unjust, harmful economic policy.’

The mature person recognizes that he or she is not the only person in the world. The sober grown-up recognizes that he or she is entitled to the same rights, but not to more ‘rights,’ as are possessed by everyone else. Yet most pleas for protectionism rest on the implicit presumption that the individuals who stand to benefit from protection are more deserving than are the many other individuals who are harmed by protectionism.

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Juliette Sellgren talks with David Henderson about this year’s newly minted Nobel laureates in economics.

My GMU Econ and Mercatus Center colleague Tyler Cowen, writing at Bloomberg, explains that Trump’s proposed tariffs will not work as Trump and many other protectionists suppose they will work. Two slices:

Trump has promised to impose stiff tariffs of up to 60% on China, as well as lower tariffs on other trading partners, and some members of the conservative intelligentsia are cheering him on. They make several arguments, but at least one is increasingly tenuous: that 19th century tariffs, which reached 35% in the 1890s, helped build the US into an industrial power.

A new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research shows that tariffs probably did more harm than good. Using meticulously collected industry-level and state-level data, the paper traces the impact of specific tariff rates more clearly than before. The results are not pretty.

One core finding is that industries with higher tariffs did not have higher productivity — in fact, they had lower productivity. Tariffs did raise the number of US firms in a given sector, but they did so in part by protecting smaller, less productive firms. That was not the path by which the US became an industrial giant, nor is it wise to use trade policy to keep lower-productivity firms in business. Not only does it slow economic growth, it also keeps workers in jobs without much of a future.

These results contradict the traditional protectionist story — that tariffs allow the best firms to grow larger and capture the large domestic market. In reality, the tariffs kept firms smaller and probably lowered US manufacturing productivity.

The paper also finds that the tariffs of that era raised the prices for products released domestically. That lowers living standards, and should give a second Trump administration reason to pause, as he just won an election in which inflation was a major concern. The finding about inflation also counters another major protectionist argument: that tariffs eventually lower domestic prices because they allow US firms to expand and enjoy economies of scale. That is the opposite of what happened.

…..

Of course, defenders of Trump’s tariff proposals will question the results of this study. But they should not mistake residual uncertainty about this episode in US history as an argument for protectionism. History is always uncertain, and the pro-tariff account of the protectionists was a just-so story in the first place, lacking firm causal proof. Their version of events has been subject to a systematic examination, and is now all the harder to take at face value.

Tunku Varadarajan profiles Democrat Ruy Teixeira. Three slices:

Did you feel the joy on Tuesday night? Ruy Teixeira sure didn’t. He held his nose and voted for Kamala Harris, but he found her “distinctive policy ideas, to the extent she had them, questionable. I was definitely not a big enthusiast, but I voted for her anyway.” His “historical loyalty” to the Democratic Party meant that he couldn’t bring himself to vote for Donald Trump. “A lot of the obvious things that bother people about Trump bothered me too,” he says. Mr. Trump is “a bit too chaotic and unpredictable, and it seemed risky to me.” Mr. Teixeira didn’t buy into “all this baloney about how he’s going to institute fascism, but Trump did make me kind of nervous.”

Mr. Teixeira, 72, is a longtime Democrat who is distraught about the direction his party has taken. In 2002, he and John Judis published “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” which predicted a dominant future for his party. It didn’t come to pass. Two decades later he resigned from his fellowship at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning Washington think tank that had become a cauldron of woke conformity, and joined the center-right American Enterprise Institute, of which I am also a fellow.

In a Zoom interview from his home in Silver Spring, Md., he says the ideological impulses that made his old workplace intolerable were the same forces that “consigned Kamala Harris and the Democrats to defeat in the election.”

“Millions of people,” he says, “swallowed their nervousness about Trump and said, ‘Well, he’s unpredictable. Maybe a bit of a risk. But I don’t want to see another four years of the Biden-Harris administration.’ ” These “normie voters”—working-class Americans who aren’t “enclosed in the professional-class bubble”—cost the Democrats the White House and the Senate majority.

…..

At the same time, working-class voters are “not on board with the Democrats’ climate catastrophism,” Mr. Teixeira says. “They are not anti-fossil-fuels the way that most Democrats seem to be these days.” Climate shibboleths, “a matter of almost religious faith among dominant elements of the Democratic Party,” have distorted policy priorities to an extent that makes voters angry.

“They think this is not good. They see that the whole clean-energy-transition obsession has not been good for capitalism writ large,” Mr. Texieira says. “The most important thing Democrats should be for is, basically, prosperity, for upward mobility, for dynamic economic growth, for getting rid of some of these stupid regulations that prevent people from doing stuff.”

…..

The party also needs to “give up on this equity baloney and start talking about equal opportunity, and fairness, which is what people really believe in.” He pleads: “Go back to Martin Luther King. He had the right idea. You ought to judge people by their character, not the color of their skin.” He cites Bill Clinton, who had “a lot of great instincts on a lot of this stuff. An important aspect of his career is that he ran and won in a place like Arkansas. And that’s really different from running and winning in California, or New York, or Illinois.”

GMU Econ alum Dominic Pino writes intelligently about the outcome of this past Tuesday’s election. A slice:

I don’t believe that Kamala Harris lost because American voters are racist and sexist. They voted for Barack Obama twice in huge numbers not that long ago, and there are more women in Congress and more women as governors today than ever before in U.S. history. Americans vote for candidates who are good at politics and share their values, regardless of race or sex.

But if I did believe that American voters were racist and sexist, and I wanted to win the presidential election, I would not have nominated a non-white woman in that election.

I especially would not have replaced the white man who is the incumbent president, in an election against a white man, with a non-white woman less than four months before that election.

Chris Edwards offers some budget-cutting suggestions to president-elect Trump.

Thomas Berry and Ethan Yang decry the banana-republic practice of civil asset forfeiture.

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… is from page 312 of Gordon Wood’s splendid 2009 volume, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815:

In no country in the world did public opinion become more awesome and powerful than it did in increasingly democratic America.

DBx: Ideas do matter. The way we talk does matter. What is taught – formally and informally – will affect the character of the people and the quality of laws and of government policies. Whether or not our understanding of history is correct is relevant.

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In my latest column for AIER I explain why my three, dear siblings voted for Trump. A slice:

My siblings naturally think of themselves as adults. They despise politicians, celebrities, and journalists treating them as children who both need and crave parental coddling and discipline. Listening to my brothers and sister talk about Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, Gavin Newsom, and “What’s the name of that b%&#h from Queens?” revealed to me that they react to much of what the modern state does as a sensible and responsible 22-year-old would react to an overbearing parent who refuses to stop treating him or her as a child, and who tries to purchase deference and docility from the 22-year-old by offering the person money.

Unlike some of our grandparents, my siblings are not a bit racist or homophobic. Nor, however, do they believe that because they are white – and two are male – they bear the original sin of being an oppressor. The presumption of each is that every able-bodied adult ought to be, and can be, responsible for himself or herself.

Identity politics is as foreign and loathsome to them as raw steak would be to a fawn.

Although we were all raised Roman Catholic, only one sibling regularly attends mass; the other two are indifferent to religion. The attitude of all is live and let live.

My siblings hate people in Washington, Baton Rouge, Nashville (my brothers now live in Tennessee), or Hollywood telling them how to think about other people or what pronouns are prescribed and proscribed. My siblings resent the supposition that they are incapable of taking care of themselves – that, because they aren’t in the top one or ten percent, they have been cheated either by the fates or by fat cats and, therefore, that they are entitled to money earned by others.

My siblings voted for Trump because Trump thumbs his noses at presumptuous elites. They are well-aware that Trump is an especially flawed human being, and they would react in horror if Trump were to attempt to grab a third term as president. My siblings have not the slightest itch to live under government by a strongman. Quite the opposite. They see Trump as protection from strongmen. You might disagree with my siblings’ assessment, but I’m here to tell you that it’s genuine.

At bottom, my siblings’ support for Trump isn’t an elevation of Trump but a rejection of progressivism – of arrogant and meddlesome elites, and of elite notions many of which my siblings believe to be (to quote one of my brothers) “looney-tooney.” When I proposed to them that their support for Trump over Harris is really a rejection of woke progressivism, each enthusiastically agreed, although each also said that he or she really hadn’t before thought of the matter in that way. They just instinctively find today’s progressivism to be deeply obnoxious. And who with any sense can blame them?

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Elizabeth Nolan Brown anticipates the joy of bidding good riddance to Lina Khan.

Even before being appointed FTC Chair, Khan was one of the leaders of a strange—and often infuriating—school of thought about antitrust law. Known as neo-Brandeisians, new structuralists, or sometimes (by critics) as “hipster antitrust,” this school dismissed the idea that antitrust’s purpose should be to protect consumer welfare. Instead, neo-Brandeisians were concerned with an abstract promotion of competition—a fixation leading to the conviction that businesses getting too big, successful, or dominant was itself something to be feared and stopped.

Proving actual harm to consumers was out; proving that practices harmed a big business’ competitors was the new game. But under these rules, doing anything that successful businesses do—including innovating, bundling products for improved efficiency, and acquiring new products—could be considered part of an antitrust law violation.

As you might imagine, this is a philosophy that could prove bad for not just business but for consumers, too.

It also proved legally dubious. Under Khan’s leadership, the FTC has embarked on a series of enforcement fiascos and racked up an impressive roster of losses in court. This has been the silver lining of Khan and her ilk’s novel ideas about antitrust law: they’re often out of line with modern legal standards for how to interpret antitrust cases and current conceptions about the proper role of the FTC.

Colin Grabow warns that the Biden administration wants to tighten the protectionist Buy American Act.

Ann Bauer explains why, in 2024, she voted voted against the Democrats. A slice:

My people were so bathed in righteousness, they’d become a living satire. For three months, I sat on a Minnesota water-conservation board with wealthy travelers who kept golf courses green while recommending water rationing for farmers. The group’s leader proposed we stage a “Pearl Harbor level” event that would scare the public into taking shorter showers.

Any objection to such ideas is met with gentle murmuring about xenophobia or fascism. Yard-sign speech is rhetorical kryptonite, especially in an all-blue place.

That’s what Americans like me voted against. We didn’t vote for Mr. Trump. We voted to stop the cancerous mutation of well-intended ideas, misused by institutions, turned self-serving and dictatorial by an elite few. This is the story of so many catastrophes, from Lysenkoism and the internment of Japanese Americans to weapons of mass destruction and the Patriot Act. We’ve been watching parallel manias unfold on myriad fronts.

Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberly Strassel rightly criticizes the media for its behavior during the campaign. A slice:

In a world with a competent press, Mr. Biden’s failing constitution would have been front-page news in time for Democrats to confront the unpleasant (yet manageable) reality of needed change. A primary would have produced a tested nominee, likely one less encumbered by the Biden record. As Harris adviser (and Obama veteran) David Plouffe complains that Team Biden created a “hole” too “deep” for his sidekick to dig out of, don’t forget the industry whose job it is to call out political fiction, but instead wrote the “Joe Is Fine” novel.

Arnold Kling decries the anti-intellectual turn of much of higher education in the U.S. A slice:

I can pinpoint the exact moment when I started to lose sleep over higher education in America. This was in the Spring of 2012, at my daughter’s graduation ceremony at Brandeis University. The main graduation speaker was in the midst of a not-memorable talk when she said “and I read this morning in the New York Times that America will be more than 50 percent non-white by 2050.”

To me, this would have been a straightforward observation, neither good news nor bad news. But the students greeted it as if they had just heard that their favorite sports team had won a championship or their favorite political party had won an election. They whooped and hollered and cheered for several minutes. It was by far the biggest applause line of her entire speech.

That outburst made me want to ask for a tuition refund. I realized that the students had been taught to be reflexively anti-white. At an institution where young people are supposed to learn critical thinking and careful perspective-taking, they instead had acquired a simple-minded way to view the world: minorities good, white people bad.

GMU Econ alum Dominic Pino writes that Thomas Massie would be a very good choice to be the next Secretary of Agriculture. A slice:

Under Biden, the rest of the world has been following the U.S. in implementing more-invasive industrial policies to further subordinate economic production to government’s will — except Javier Milei in Argentina. It would be great to see a reversal of that trend under Trump — and to see the U.S. no longer leaving Milei stranded in his quest for shrinking government.

The biggest hindrance to appointing Massie secretary, though, will be other Republicans. Agriculture socialism is bipartisan, and many of the top agriculture states are represented by GOP senators. If Massie were to be confirmed, it would almost certainly be conditional on his promising to not go full Milei, even though that is what the USDA needs. Any major reforms would also face opposition from the interest groups that benefit from them and the bureaucrats who would be tasked with implementing them.

GMU Econ alum Jon Murphy discusses a problem with government planning of the economy.

Michael Peterson reports on Argentina’s economic progress under the leadership of Javier Milei.

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… is from Milton and Rose Friedman’s October 1997 Hoover Digest essay, “The Case for Free Trade”:

Few measures that we could take would do more to promote the cause of freedom at home and abroad than complete free trade. Instead of making grants to foreign governments in the name of economic aid – thereby promoting socialism – while at the same time imposing restrictions on the products they produce – thereby hindering free enterprise – we could assume a consistent and principled stance. We could say to the rest of the world: We believe in freedom and intend to practice it. We cannot force you to be free. But we can offer full cooperation on equal terms to all. Our market is open to you without tariffs or other restrictions. Sell here what you can and wish to. Buy whatever you can and wish to. In that way cooperation among individuals can be worldwide and free.

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This morning I listened on NPR to an economically naive report titled “Workers scored wins in the election — including in business-friendly red states.” Even before the NPR host turned the spot over to the reporter, I knew that a more accurate title for the report would be “Workers suffer losses in the election — including in business-friendly red states.”

I knew this because I was certain that the report is about hikes in minimum wages, as well as about mandated leave and other labor-market interventions. And, of course, that’s exactly what the report is about.

Not once – listen for yourself- does the reporter as much as acknowledge that these interventions come with trade-offs. There’s no recognition that forcing employers to pay higher wages might reduce the quantity of labor those employers employ. There’s no recognition that forcing employers to offer paid leave to workers will cause declines in wages or other fringe benefits.

No. The unthinking presumption is that employers will respond to these interventions simply by transferring more of their wealth to their employees.

I’m simultaneously amused and saddened that so many people go through life with such a bizarre understanding of economic reality.