The Trump administration keeps pursuing creative ways to impose tariffs after setbacks in the courts and amid a lack of support on Capitol Hill. The latest gambit came late Tuesday when the U.S. trade representative announced plans to raise tariffs between 10 percent to 12.5 percent on 60 countries for not being aggressive enough about combating the use of forced labor in their supply chains.
This is clearly a pretext for protectionism. If it weren’t, China wouldn’t be subject to the same new import taxes as Japan, South Korea and Switzerland.
I am extremely skeptical of the claim that all of these sixty countries – including numerous affluent liberal democracies – are actually more lax about importing goods produced by forced labor than the US is. And if forced labor were really the concern, there would be no reason to impose massive tariffs on virtually all imports from those nations, even though the vast majority of those goods have little or no connection to forced labor. It sure looks like the forced labor issue is just a pretext for large-scale protectionism of the same kind courts blocked earlier. This looks like yet another presidential power grab seeking to usurp Congress’ authority over tariffs, granted by Article I of the Constitution.
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Ultimately, the new Section 301 tariffs appear to be yet another attempt to give the president a blank check to impose tariffs at will. The same is true of the administration’s plans to use Section 301 to target “structural excess capacity,” which rely on the absurd premise that it is somehow an unfair trade practice for countries to be able to produce more goods than they can use themselves.
This is just outrageous.
Gale Pooley tells of how the Gillette company “built an abundance revolution.” Three slices:
Simple ideas often appear obvious in retrospect, but simplicity is usually the far edge of genius.
Men’s facial fashions were shifting rapidly in the late 1800s: the beard was out, the clean-shaven chin was in, and the mustache had to be perfect. To maintain this look, men either visited the barber two or three times a week, or shaved themselves, a risky alternative. The “cutthroat” straight razors demanded constant sharpening, and punished even small mistakes — especially for beginners or anyone pressed for time.
[K.C.] Gillette’s insight was simple: don’t sharpen the blade — replace it with something safe, affordable, and convenient.
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Under Gillette, shaving ceased to be a tedious chore performed with a dangerous blade. It became part of the modern masculine ideal. The right razor promised confidence, precision, cleanliness, and success — the same virtues embodied by the athletes and heroes in his advertisements.
Later, using an elaborate formula, Gillette figured that the monetary value of the time men saved each year using his razor was equal to the entire capital of US Steel, valued at around $1.5 billion at the time.
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What began as a dull blade before a mirror in Boston became a revelation: knowledge can redeem time. Gillette became a global engine for transforming human ingenuity into billions of dollars of value and billions of liberated hours.
In 1903, Gillette sold 51 razors. A century later, Procter & Gamble purchased the company for $57 billion. Steel did not become more valuable. Steel is abundant and nearly worthless without the mind. The value resided in the invisible architecture of human creativity — metallurgy, machinery, chemistry, branding, logistics, engineering, and trust — accumulated across generations and poured into a single morning ritual. Accumulated manufacturing knowledge compressed time prices downward, making what was once a luxury nearly universal.
“Do you trust the government to control AI?”
And while Sanders frames “tech oligarchs” as modern-day robber barons, he proposes an idea commonly used by real oligarchs and authoritarians across the world to prop up illiberal regimes, illegally funnel money, and wield unchecked power over their citizens.
In Russia, President Vladimir Putin is draining the country’s National Wealth Fund for his war in Ukraine, against the advice of the nation’s financial monitors. Iran uses its National Development Fund to finance terrorist groups such as Hezbollah, Hamas, and its shadow police force, while Saudi Arabia’s wealth fund is regularly used to facilitate human rights abuses, according to a 2024 report from Human Rights Watch. While it’s unlikely that an American wealth fund would be used this nefariously, recent cases of fraud show it’s not unreasonable to assume that an unappropriated pot of hundreds of billions of dollars could tempt officials.
George Will applauds Lamar Alexander’s new memoir. A slice:
Edmund Burke, the fountainhead of modern conservatism, warned against purely performative politicians, of which America today has a surfeit. They “make themselves bidders at an auction of popularity,” and become “flatterers instead of legislators.” By them, “moderation will be stigmatized as the virtue of cowards, and compromise as the prudence of traitors.”
Arnold Kling writes of the books that he has re-read.
Ryan Streeter remembers the late Economic Nobel laureate Edmund Phelps. A slice:
His 2013 book, Mass Flourishing, makes the case that “relatively modern-capitalist economies are more rewarding in nonmaterial terms than the relatively corporatist or socialist economies.” Societies that encourage and reward indigenous innovation by freely allowing investment and competition to select the winners and losers, rather than state actors and rent-seekers, always come out ahead. But, again, this is not merely a statement about policies and institutional arrangements. “[A]s important as institutions and policies may be, we must recognize that every economy is a culture or mix of cultures, not just policies, laws, and institutions,” Phelps writes.
The economic culture of a nation consists of prevailing attitudes, norms, and assumptions about business, work, and other aspects of the economy. These cultural forces may affect the generation of nonmaterial rewards indirectly through their influence on the evolution of institutions and policies, but also very directly through their impact on participants motives and expectations.
Put another way, he writes that an “economy may owe its vibrancy – its readiness to apply newly discovered technologies and adopt newly proven products – to one or more components of its economic culture; an economy may owe its dynamism – its success at using the creativity of people to achieve indigenous innovation – to some other components in its cultural repertoire.”
What mattered to the economy was a mad commitment to trying, venturing, experimenting, now suddenly under primary liberalism permitted without let or hindrance – nay, encouraged – in which a proletarian like Edison or Franklin or Faraday could participate.
Thus [Alfred] Marshall
Is it an advantage, however, for a nation to set up manufactures on its own territory which, in order to furnish it with a certain money income and quantity of production, absorb more funds than the purchase of these products would have required? We can reply in the affirmative only in supposing that if these funds were not thus employed, they would not be employed at all. Now, this supposition is clearly absurd. If these funds were not employed in this way, they would be employed in some other way and more advantageously. This is to say that with a portion of these resources one would buy products which the whole lot of them is now used in producing, while the remainder would be redirected to some other branch of production which it would vitalize. Governments, in forcing their subjects to manufacture themselves things they would not voluntarily have manufactured, force them to employ their resources inefficiently. They diminish the output of their capital and their labor. They therefore diminish their wealth and thereby the national wealth.
Tollison saw few differences between antitrust law enforcement and the perhaps more familiar industry-specific regulation of prices and entry conditions (e.g., public utilities). Both are vulnerable to influence by well-organized, politically powerful special interests having stakes in policy processes and, in catering to such lobbying pressure, undermine rather than promote competition.
