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… is from Jim Bacchus’s August 8, 2025, Cato@Liberty post titled “International Economic Chaos: Trump’s Remade Global Order”:

The tendency to count as wins for the president new terms for trade that, by any economic measure, are clearly losses for American businesses, workers, and consumers is a function of a pervasively cynical political atmosphere in which triumphs are based on the achievement of what is sought rather than on the actual merits of the result. Trump has “won” on trade because some countries have capitulated and other countries do not have the economic leverage to challenge the United States one-on-one, not because what he has supposedly won is worth winning for the American people and the American economy. Sought though it may be, trade protectionism is a form of slow economic suicide for the country that pursues it.

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Fareed Zakaria, writing in the Washington Post, eloquently corrects many of the fallacies believed by MAGA-types (and also by many – most? – progressives’) about the American economy. Two slices:

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s measure of median disposable household income in America was higher than in all but one advanced industrial economy as of 2021 — higher than Switzerland, Germany, Britain and Japan. The exception is tiny Luxembourg. In fact, America’s median disposable household income is about double that of Japan.

And as Noah Smith points out in an excellent essay, America’s median income has not been stagnant, as conventional wisdom tells us; it has been growing briskly over the decades. Smith notes that real median personal income has risen by 50 percent since the 1970s. Hourly wages, adjusted for inflation, are up substantially since the 1990s. And the hourly wages of the bottom third of Americans are up by even more: over 40 percent.

…..

Look at Flint, Michigan, and Greensboro, North Carolina — often seen as classic towns that were devastated by the loss of manufacturing. Over the past two and a half decades, real wage growth for the poorest is up more than 40 percent in Flint and over 26 percent in Greensboro.

These are not anecdotes. The Brookings Institution in 2018 looked at 185 urban industrial counties that had lots of manufacturing jobs in 1970 and discovered that 115 had managed to transition from manufacturing, improving residents’ well-being. Only 14 of these industrial communities could still be defined as “vulnerable.” Remember, unemployment in the United States has been close to a 50-year low for more than three years now.

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy, writes that we Americans “better hope the Trump tariffs are transitory.”

Jim Bacchus decries Trump’s destruction of the rules-based global trading system. A slice:

While President Trump takes a victory lap following the capitulation of many of America’s trading partners to his arbitrary trade demands and the application of astronomical tariffs to imports from other countries worldwide, and while the piles of additional tariffs on US imports add more and more to the prices of purchased goods, it is worth pausing to note what has now been cast aside along with the long-established legal and economic arrangements of modern civilization. The loss of global public goods to humanity from these myopic and misguided US actions involves much more than may be immediately apparent in the accumulating effect of the tariffs as taxes on trade.

The flagrant violations of international law in the imposition of the tariffs are so numerous that few bother even to mention them anymore. Who continues to point out that these arbitrary actions by the United States are inconsistent with the basic laws of nondiscrimination that are supposed to guide and govern world trade under the auspices of the World Trade Organization (WTO)? Brazil and some other countries are seeking consultations on these illegal tariffs in WTO dispute settlement, but is it even certain that the United States will bother to show up in the Geneva legal proceedings? A request for consultations on a trade dispute must be heeded under WTO rules, but does that still matter?

Likewise, the domestic economic price of the tariffs is increasingly accepted as a given. Congress is intimidated to the point that it is unwilling to reclaim its constitutional authority over trade from the executive branch, and so arbitrary tariffs based on both unsound trade reasons and unpredictable nontrade reasons are now viewed as nearly inevitable. Although economists report that the tariffs are increasingly taking a toll on American competitiveness and the American cost of living, and although this toll will surely rise with the imposition of the latest global tariffs, this is providing little political motivation for change. We appear to have decided as a country simply to assume the existence of the added price of a certain portion of US protectionism in every international exchange of goods. The American people are losing, but Trump is “winning,” and this is largely what is reported.

Phil Magness accurately captures what it feels like to be a trade economist during the reign of Trump.

Reflecting on Trump’s firing of the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as well as Commerce secretary Howard Lutnick’s termination of the the Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee, William Silber understandably concludes that “fake economic news may arrive sooner than you think.” A slice:

Mr. Lutnick’s explanation for terminating the Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee made no sense. Input from disinterested experts drawn from across industry and academia is a good idea. But now it seems that Mr. Lutnick was taking marching orders to fulfill his boss’s desire to control economic data. On Aug. 1 President Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the agency that releases the government’s monthly employment report. The president claimed the most recent numbers were “phony” and “rigged” to make him and Republicans look bad.

Mr. Trump’s assertion that the numbers are rigged has no basis in fact. The employment data are often revised, like all numbers based on surveys, but no evidence impugns the objectivity of the government’s statistical releases. It may be that Mr. Trump cleared the way to appoint a BLS director who might help manipulate a politically more important statistical target.

George Leef understandably is a fan of Phil Magness’s book The 1619 Project Myth. Two slices:

It is useful to have frequent reminders that people often resort to deception to peddle their beliefs. The book The 1619 Project Myth by Phillip W. Magness is highly valuable in that regard, as it devastates the historical accuracy of “The 1619 Project” published by The New York Times.

That long magazine piece was the brainchild of one of its writers, Nikole Hannah-Jones, who used it to make her breathtaking claim that the true date of America’s founding was not 1776, but rather 1619, the year when the first slaves were landed in North America.

Why say that?

The answer is that, like so many “progressives,” Nikole Hannah-Jones wants to undermine the idea that the United States was founded to increase the people’s freedom and replace it with the notion that the nation’s founding was rooted in slavery and oppression. The American Revolution was fought, in her telling, to preserve slavery, which the colonists feared was going to be ended by the British government. Moreover, she and several of her co-authors maintained, the effects of slavery are still with us. What better way to get people to think of America as a terrible nation that’s in need of radical (or revolutionary) transformation?

…..

If there was ever the slightest doubt as to the political purpose of the 1619 Project, it was erased when Hannah-Jones, in the subsequent Hulu TV series based upon it, called for the nation to pay reparations for slavery. That idea has long been dismissed by scholars of all races as unjust and economically ruinous. Nevertheless, she blithely stated that reparations were needed to atone for our racist past and, to explain how we could pay for the trillions it would cost, told viewers that the government can afford anything it wants just by printing enough money. How do we know that? Because a few crank economists who subscribe to Modern Monetary Theory say so. Thus, the 1619 Project combines false history with ludicrous economics to promote the statist agenda.

Wall Street Journal columnist Andy Kessler celebrates the demise of “fuel efficiency” standards. A slice:

Tired of ugly cars and SUVs that all look the same? Check out crossovers like the Honda CR-V, the Ford Escape and the BMW XM—the last with a staggering $160,000 price tag. The three vehicles look almost identical—an unintended consequence, believe it or not, of 50-year-old Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards. But gasoline-mileage rules were effectively tossed in July’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which could usher in a new era of big, beautiful auto design.

Most didn’t notice CAFE’s demise. It turns out that you can’t kill mileage standards in a reconciliation bill, so Congress quietly zeroed out its penalties via Section 40006, which “eliminates the civil penalty for a violation by a manufacturer of the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards.” Clever.

Steven Greenhut is correct: Trump and his MAGA followers are forever dishing out insults, yet when they themselves are the object of mocking humor, they – being thin-skinned, as all people without genuine self-assurance are – get furious.

The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal wisely warns of the dangers of having Stephen Miran on the board of the Federal Reserve. Two slices:

President Trump likes to stir things up, and he’s done it again with his choice of Stephen Miran to fill an open seat on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. We can’t recall when a President nominated to the Fed someone whose abiding policy conviction is to weaken the U.S. dollar.

…..

But his ambition goes beyond tariffs. In that 2024 essay he laid out other policy options for negotiating a weaker dollar and diminishing its reserve-currency status. One idea is to tax foreigners who hold U.S. Treasury debt as an incentive to hold less of it. This would amount to a de facto default on current debt.

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… is from page 38 of Razeen Sally’s superb 1998 book, Classical Liberalism and International Economic Order:

Both Hume and Smith assail the mercantilist Weltanschauung of a zero-sum international marketplace with rigidly limited opportunities, inevitably leading to the presumption that one nation’s gain is another nation’s loss. Both forcefully expounded the opposing contention that international trade is mutually beneficial or positive-sum in nature: home employment and national wealth are fostered, not endangered, by free trade.

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… is from page 322 of the 1990 Liberty Fund edition of David Ramsay’s 1789 The History of the American Revolution; Ramsay here writes about the few weeks and months immediately following the promulgation of the Declaration of Independence:

The flattering prospects of an extensive commerce freed from British restrictions, and the honours and emoluments of office in independent states now began to glitter before the eyes of the colonists, and reconciled them to the difficulties of their situation.

DBx: Pictured here is David Ramsay (1749-1815).

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The Wall Street Journal‘s Tunku Varadarajan says this about Trump’s new tariffs on imports from India: “He has a point about New Delhi’s relationship with Russia, but 50% tariffs are a counterproductive policy.” A slice:

“Hang on a minute!” they’re sputtering in New Delhi. The biggest purchaser of Russian oil is China, which has binged on $158.7 billion worth of the stuff in the past 2½ years. That has put $39.4 billion more Chinese dollars than Indian ones into Mr. Putin’s war chest. Yet Mr. Trump has whacked India, not China, with Russia-related sanctions. This is part of a confounding pattern of trade warfare in which the president is notably more aggressive toward nonadversarial countries—allies and partners like Canada, Mexico, the European Union, Japan, South Korea and now India—than he is with most U.S. adversaries.

David Henderson revisits Jagdish Bhagwati’s splendid 1988 book, Protectionism.

Walter Olson busts the myth that “legal checks on a president’s power ‘diminish the votes of the citizens who Elected Him.’” A slice:

One might start by noting, as many Cato writers have over the years, that the concept of a presidential mandate is almost completely notional, even in landslide elections, let alone the sort won by Trump against Kamala Harris, in which the popular vote margin was 1.5 percent. Some of Trump’s voters, for sure, did back his position favoring mass deportations; others warmed instead to his talk on tax cuts, energy development, and staying out of overseas wars. Does he have a mandate for every issue he spoke about, for only some, or what? The divination of mandates inevitably depends on the discretion of each interpreter.

Reason‘s Eric Boehm isn’t surprised that the increasingly blurry line separating the private from the public – a blurriness only further encouraged by the Trump administration – fuels cronyism. [DBx: Trump’s collectivism is surely less ‘woke’ than is the collectivism that awaits us Americans when the Democrats return to power, but it’s collectivism nevertheless. And its collectivism of any sort – collectivism regardless of the language it uses and irrespective of the particular groups that it favors and those that it oppresses – that should be rejected.]

George Will reflects on Greg Mankiw’s sharp analysis of the public-debt crisis that increasingly looms in the United States. A slice:

There are, he [Mankiw] says, five ways to “stop this upward trajectory” of debt: extraordinary economic growth, government default, large-scale money creation, substantial cuts in government spending and large tax increases. The probability of each is low.

Extraordinary growth? The internet managed to “revolutionize” work and leisure without igniting extraordinary economic growth. Coming innovations (e.g., artificial intelligence, biotechnologies) will be life-changing but are unlikely “to establish an entirely new growth path.”

Government default? The United States “is not immune to the political and economic forces that can make default an attractive option.” When Franklin D. Roosevelt took the nation off the gold standard, many U.S. bonds had clauses ensuring their value in gold bullion. FDR abrogated those clauses. Although the Supreme Court upheld (5-4) his power to do this, it was, Mankiw says, “without doubt” a default.

In 2016, candidate Donald Trump, in an exchange with a reporter, was asked how he would handle the national debt. He answered: “renegotiate” it. “You go back and you say hey, guess what, the economy crashed, I’m going to give you back half.” Trump, Mankiw notes, has shown “that he is willing to expand the Overton Window (the range of policies and arguments deemed acceptable in political discourse). Remember this exchange the next time someone says that a default on U.S. government debt is unimaginable.”

Large-scale money creation? This would be intended to fuel inflation, which is slow-motion repudiation of debts. Bondholders are paid back in dollars worth much less than those they used to purchase the bonds.

Thanks to Alan Reynolds for endorsing Phil Gramm’s and my book, The Triumph of Economic Freedom.

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… is from page 14 of Adrian Wooldridge’s 2021 book, The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World:

Before it took over the world, meritocracy was the rallying cry of the oppressed and marginalized everywhere. Feminists demanded that they should be allowed to compete for jobs and educational distinctions and judged by the same standards as men…. The working classes seized on the meritocratic principle to prove that they were just as good as their supposed social betters.

DBx: Yes. How ironic, therefore, that meritocracy is today derided by the ‘woke’ and many progressives as an idea designed to keep oppressed and marginalized people under the heels of the rich and powerful.

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Joe Lancaster reports that Trump’s tariffs might soon increase Americans’ car-insurance premiums. A slice:

But if tariffs remain in place, the report estimates the average national rate will go up by 7 percent

Granted, parts from Canada and Mexico that comply with the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) from Trump’s first term are exempt from his new tariffs; just over 50 percent of all auto parts imported in 2024—around $100 billion worth—came from Canada and Mexico.

But that means nearly half of all imported auto parts are still subject to hefty taxes.

Japan, for example, accounts for nearly 12 percent of the global market in automobile exhausts; even though Trump announced last month he would lower Japan’s tariff rate to 15 percent, that’s a 15-percent tax Americans will have to pay simply because the president demands it.

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy, explains that “Trump’s war on economic data is a dangerous move for MAGA’s own agenda.” A slice:

Still, flaws are different from bad faith. While I am glad the administration is drawing attention to the need for reform at the bureau, it’s going about it the wrong way. First, firing the commissioner, as Trump as did last week, won’t fix the system. Second, as Dominic Pino pointed out in National Review, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick recently disbanded the Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee, an expert advisory group that was actively working on this accuracy problem. Composed of unpaid professionals from academia and industry, the committee had been helping the bureau and other statistical agencies explore ways to improve data quality by boosting response rates—drawing on lessons from the United Kingdom, Canada, and Germany. Its elimination was not a cost-saving move but a decision that undercuts ongoing efforts to strengthen the integrity of federal economic data, even as the administration publicly expresses frustration with the quality of those same data.

The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal reports on a new study the findings of which are no friendly to the case for a guaranteed annual income. A slice:

Progressives and a growing faction of Republicans support cash handouts as an important answer to America’s social ills. So readers might want to know about a study published as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research that finds $1,000 monthly payments have few long-term benefits.

Researchers with the nonprofit OpenResearch and several universities ran a randomized controlled trial to test the impact of a cash transfer on lower-income, working-age Americans. One group received $1,000 every month for three years—$36,000 total—no strings attached. The other were paid $50 a month to participate as a control group.

OpenResearch says the study showed that “parents improved their parenting practices and made meaningful investments in their children and themselves.” But drill down, and the findings are uninspiring.

Those who received the $1,000 payments did report better parenting behavior in surveys, though they may have been more inclined to say this because they were receiving free money. They also spent more money on their children. On the other hand, they reported that their children experienced more developmental difficulties and stress than the control group. The authors suggest that parents receiving cash might simply have been more attentive to their children’ problems than those in the control group.

Notably, while the transfer payments reduced parents’ self-reported stress levels during the first year of the study, the “effects were short-lived and dissipated by the second year,” the researchers write.

“Wall Street Isn’t Daycare: Interns Meet the Real World.”

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… is from page 35 of Thomas Sowell’s 2008 volume, Economic Facts and Fallacies:

Often the character of a community includes a bucolic setting or expansive views of the surrounding area which those who live there cherish. But they did not buy those settings or those views or pay to have them guaranteed to remain the same in perpetuity. Other people with other preferences have had the same rights under the Constitution, at least until courts began to erode both property rights and the “equal protection of the laws” prescribed by the Fourteenth Amendment. Political authorities in various jurisdictions began to take advantage of that erosion of property rights to pass restrictive housing laws under a variety of politically attractive names such as “open space,” “smart growth,” and the like. Such restrictions have been especially prevalent in overwhelmingly upscale liberal communities such as those in coastal California, where concerns are often expressed for the poor, for minorities, and for children – all of whom are among those most often forced out of such communities by high housing prices.

DBx: Yes.

And, of course, by “liberal,” Sowell really means “progressive.”

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Just out of curiosity, I compared the change in the Dow Jones Industrial Average over roughly the first nine months since Trump’s 2024 election (meaning, up to yesterday’s [August 7th’s] close) with the change in the DJIA over the same time period since Trump’s 2016 election.

On election day 2024 (November 5th) the DJIA closed at 42,221.88; yesterday, August 7th, 2025, the DJIA closed at 43,968.64.

On election day 2016 (November 8th), the DJIA closed at 18,332.74; on August 10th, 2017, the DJIA closed at 21,844.01.

In the nine months since Trump was elected in 2016, the DJIA rose by 19.2%.

In the nine months since Trump was elected in 2024, the DJIA rose by 4.1%.

Make of this fact what you will.

I myself don’t make too much of it; the U.S. economy is huge and dynamic and is affected by many forces, with government policy being only one (although a uniquely important one). Yet I also don’t believe that these figures are without any information content.