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As 2024 draws to a close, the Mercatus Center’s annual fundraising campaign is in full swing.

The institution, ideas, and principles that underlie a flourishing society — free markets, voluntary cooperation, and the freedom to pursue one’s goals without unnecessary interference — aren’t just abstract notion; they are the foundation of prosperity, and they require constant vigilance and education to preserve.

I’m honored to be part of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Mercatus is more than a research institution – it’s a force for advancing the ideas that improve lives and protect liberty. Through thoughtful scholarship, insightful policy analysis, and unparalleled educational programs, Mercatus plays a critical role in promoting sound economics and limited government.

Unlike many voices in today’s crowded and noisy public square, Mercatus remains committed to reality-based economics and a respect for the voluntary arrangements and the entrepreneurial creativity that make progress possible. Our work inspires scholars, educates policymakers, and informs citizens to understand the world as it is rather than as how wishful thinkers might imagine it to be.

The end of the year is a critical fundraising time for nonprofit organizations such as ours. If you share my belief that liberty and sound economics are worth defending, I encourage you to support Mercatus with an end-of-year gift. You can do so by following this link. Your donation is tax-deductible and directly funds our world-class student fellowship programs, policy research, and outreach efforts.

Here’s to a new year filled with opportunity and prosperity – and a warmer embrace of liberty.

All my best to you and yours for the holiday season and 2025, and my deepest thanks for visiting Cafe Hayek.

Don

P.S. Pictured above is my late, great colleague Walter Williams, who died four years ago – but whose spirit still animates our efforts.

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Several weeks ago, Jordan McGillis drew important lessons from relatively recent U.S. history about industrial policy. Two slices:

The truth, however, is not so clear. Even the deal’s ardent supporters acknowledge that it resulted in a decade of high auto prices for American car-buyers. “[VER] raised prices for consumers by an average of 8%, costing American consumers an additional $5.1 billion,” American Compass wrote in 2022. It believes these imposed costs were justified, however, because “within the decade it had prompted nearly three times that much in foreign direct investment and brought 26,600 new auto-assembly jobs to the American South and Midwest.” Compass founder Oren Cass again lauded VER in July on The Ezra Klein Show, calling the Toyota Camry “the most American car on the market.”

But VER’s imposed costs, their distribution effects, and the economic benefits they purportedly brought to America require more attention. First, VER’s real-world effects contradicted the rhetoric the Reagan administration offered to the American people when it pushed Japan to accept the policy in 1981. As Steven Berry, James Levinsohn, and Ariel Pakes unearthed in an analysis for the American Economic Reviewin 1999, U.S. Trade Representative Bill Brock told the New York Times the day after the agreement was reached that while it would help the domestic industry, it would not restrict car sales “enough to affect the price.” In fact, VER “increased Japanese prices fairly dramatically,” Berry found.

Damningly, the VER policy’s implicit tax fell disproportionately upon the most cost-conscious car buyers. Japanese carmakers had found such success in America in the 1970s and early 1980s because they offered affordable vehicles with good fuel economy, while Detroit continued to churn out inefficient land yachts. In 1980, the year before VER was established, the average Japanese car was sold in the U.S. for $6,585, while the average domestic car was sold for $7,758.

The cost-conscious car buyers interested in Japanese cars and the savings they offered—and the even more cost-conscious buyers on the used market as the effects of the policy filtered down—were precisely the Americans who paid for Detroit’s “breathing room.” By 1986, the fifth full year under VER, the cost of a Japanese car had risen to $8,229 and that of a domestic car to $9,223. The additional cost for new cars took money that Americans could have invested or spent elsewhere in the economy in the absence of VER. The total effect of the policy, Berry estimated, was a net national welfare loss of close to $3 billion.

…..

VER supporters justify these costs by arguing that the policy induced foreign direct investment and yielded 100,000 jobs or more in the long run. But foreign firms were already exploring U.S. production prior to VER. Germany’s Volkswagen, not a Japanese firm limited by VER, was the first modern foreign carmaker to set up shop stateside. When American consumer preference shifted after the first oil shock in 1973, Volkswagen responded decisively: it purchased a plant from Chrysler in 1976 in New Stanton, Pennsylvania. By 1978, VW was finishing 800 units of its Rabbit model per day to meet the booming demand in America for small cars that Detroit’s Big Three failed to capture. Japanese firms’ later success at making cars in the U.S. only affirms that Volkswagen was onto something when it moved into Pennsylvania in the 1970s. (Like the Japanese carmakers, Volkswagen would later make cars in southern states with more flexible, less union-dominated labor-market arrangements.)

Meantime, the Reagan administration’s fixation on the auto industry entrenched domestic car makers, despite their diminished dynamism. Berry et al. figured that VER gave Detroit a cumulative profit boost over the 1980s of $10 billion. Allowing Detroit to feel more pain would have been difficult politically, but it may have disabused U.S. manufacturers of bad habits. Instead, the Big Three lumbered on, fell back into the pattern of producing gas guzzlers when oil prices were again low in the 1990s, and went back to Washington hat in hand amid the 2008 Financial Crisis.

Explaining “the bitter irony of Donald Trump’s attack on U.S. Steel,” David Henderson reveals just how utterly ignorant are Trump and J.D. Vance about international commerce.

And Reason‘s Eric Boehm shows that Trump is no real friend of U.S. firms and workers – not even those producing steel. Two slices:

A few hours after the American stock markets closed on Monday night, President-elect Donald Trump announced that he was “totally against” the sale of U.S. Steel to a Japan-based competitor.

“As President, I will block this deal from happening,” Trump promised.

When those same stock markets opened this morning, shares of U.S. Steel sank by more than 7 percent immediately (and are down nearly 8 percent as of this moment).

That’s a tidy illustration of the cost of government intervention in the deal between U.S. Steel and Nippon Steel. Even though Biden’s ongoing attempts to block the salewere likely priced into the stock long ago, Trump’s promise on Monday night seemingly wiped out more than 7 percent of U.S. Steel’s value.

What’s even more remarkable is that the politicians who favor this intervention—including Biden, Trump, and others like Sen. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio), Trump’s incoming vice president—continue to frame it as being in the best interest of U.S. Steel.

…..

In a fun twist of fate, the same federal government that for so long protected U.S. Steel from competition is now blocking the company’s owners from selling the remnants. That would be funny if it weren’t so utterly not the government’s business.

John Stossel reports on how labor unions “are fighting to keep U.S. ports more dangerous and less efficient.”

Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley wonders if we’ll ever hear the end of the lame argument for slavery reparations. Two slices:

More than 90% of enslaved Africans were sent to the Caribbean and South America between the 16th and 19th centuries, while only about “6 percent of African captives were sent directly to British North America,” according to historian Steven Mintz. Although the trans-Atlantic slave trade receives far more attention today, the trans-Saharan slave trade—which involved Arabs transporting captives from black Africa across the Sahara Desert and the Persian Gulf to the Islamic world of North Africa and the Middle East—involved a larger number of African slaves and lasted for a much longer period.

“It is striking,” Harvard scholar Orlando Patterson wrote, “that the total volume of African slaves acquired by Muslim masters is greater than the total acquired by Europeans in the Americas.” Nor, Mr. Patterson stressed, was slavery unique to Africa, Europe and the Islamic world or to a particular stretch of time. “There is nothing notably peculiar about the institution of slavery,” he wrote. “It has existed from before the dawn of human history right down to the twentieth century, in the most primitive of human societies and in the most civilized. There is no region of the earth that has not at some time harbored the institution. Probably, there is no group of people whose ancestors were not at one time slaves or slaveholders.”

…..

Earlier this week, California Assemblyman Isaac Bryan said he would introduce legislation to require the University of California and California State University to give admissions preferences to the descendants of slaves. “For decades universities gave preferential admission treatment to donors, and their family members, while others tied to legacies of harm were ignored and at times outright excluded,” said Mr. Bryan, who represents parts of Los Angeles. “We have a moral responsibility to do all we can to right those wrongs.”

But the real moral obligation is to stop discriminating by race altogether, not change who’s on the receiving end, which is all his legislation would do. Mr. Bryan and others seeking reparations need to decide whether they want justice, or payback.

Mike Munger decries the taxing, by government bureaucracies, of our time and effort.

Here’s the Washington Post obituary for CEI founder and long-time leader, Fred Smith.

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… is from Martin Wolf’s November 12, 2024 Financial Times column titled “Manufacturing fetishism is destined to fail” (original emphasis):

In manufacturing, tasks are repetitive and must be done precisely in a controlled environment. This is perfect for robots. The overwhelming probability then is that in a few decades nobody will work on a production line. In some ways, that is a pity. But the work was also dehumanising. Surely, we can do better than hanker nostalgically for this inescapably vanishing past.

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Oren Cass
American Compass

Oren:

Your recent criticism of the Cato Institute’s “Faces of Globalization” video series overflows with misunderstanding, error, and insinuation. Although short on both facts and economic logic, you’re long on assertions – assertions that you obviously hope will carry the day simply because you express them as if they are what they are emphatically not: indisputable realities.

For example, you assert that “government [trade] agreements and trade deficits” have “eviscerated American industry, hollowed out communities across the country, and devastated millions of lives.”

U.S. industrial production hit an all-time high in September 2018, almost 43 years after America began running its still-unbroken string of annual trade deficits in 1976, 25 years after NAFTA took effect in 1994, and 17 years after China joined the WTO in 2001. This production has since fallen a bit, no doubt partly because the Trump-Biden tariffs raise the prices of many inputs used by American producers. Nevertheless, this production is today only 1.8% below that all-time peak of just six years ago. This fact combines with another – namely, that U.S. industrial capacity is now at an all-time high – to utterly belie your claim that American industry has been “eviscerated.”

And although you continue to assert that U.S. trade deficits damage the U.S. economy, you’ve yet to explain why. The U.S. runs trade deficits because foreigners wish to invest in America and to use dollars as a reserve currency. Can you tell us why such investment harms Americans, especially given that the size of both America’s and the world’s capital stock can and does generally grow? See the point above about U.S. industrial capacity, and note also that the inflation-adjusted size of the capital stock in America was, in 2019 (just before the pandemic), 178% larger than it was in 1975. (This capital stock in 2019 was also 66 percent larger than it was when NAFTA took effect and 36 percent larger than when China joined the WTO.)

In your essay you suggest that the only foreign investments that helps us are foreign direct investments. But you’re mistaken. For example, the willingness and ability of foreigners to use dollars to buy shares of stock on the NYSE increases American corporations’ incentives and abilities to expand and improve their operations.

As for the use of dollars as a reserve currency, please explain how we Americans are impoverished insofar as foreigners send us goods and services and ask to receive in exchange only engraved pieces of paper (or digital versions thereof)? Put differently, how is our economic well-being threatened by the fact that among our most valuable and highly demanded exports is a relatively stable medium of exchange?

Finally, where, exactly, are all the hollowed-out communities and lives devastated by trade? The U.S. is huge, so it’s easy to find at any time some hard-luck places and persons. But what serious evidence do you have that America today is suffering unduly from trade? As Stephen Rose points out, according to a Bureau of Labor Studies survey

24 million workers were either laid off or discharged per year from 2000 (the first year of the survey) to 2019. In contrast, the yearly manufacturing loss due to imports was 310,000 a year (this number would be 120,000 jobs lost per year if the gains from more exports were included). In other words, the number of workers who involuntarily lost jobs each year from U.S. employers was 70 times more than the job losses from imports.

If America really is, as you suggest, a nation beset with economic devastation, the blame clearly can’t be placed on international trade. But the deeper point is that you, President-elect Trump, and other protectionists – in order to better peddle your poisonous policies – wildly overstate the damage that economic change sparked by trade inflicts on America as you also wildly underestimate the health, dynamism, and robustness of America’s economy.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

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Eric Boehm warns of the “taxpocalypse” that awaits Americans if Congress doesn’t soon cure its fiscal incontinence.

Desmond Lachman reminds Trump and his fellow American protectionists that “America is not an economic island.” A slice:

Our economic performance is not determined by us alone, but as we learned during the 1997 Asian currency crisis, the 1998 Russian debt default, and the 2010 Eurozone debt crisis, our economy and financial system can be impacted adversely by untoward foreign economic developments. Maybe if President-elect Trump recognized that our economy was not an island, he might have second thoughts about his proposed resort to draconian tariffs that would be damaging to world economic prosperity that in turn would come to our shores.

Much as Trump might want America to go it alone behind high tariff walls, the fact of the matter is that the US economy is highly integrated in the world economy. As such, if Trump’s high tariff policy has the effect of tipping the European and Chinese economies into recession and of inviting trade retaliation, those economies troubles might come back to adversely impact both our economy and our financial markets. That could cause serious political trouble for Trump in the 2026 mid-term Congressional election.

Tyler Cowen, writing at Marginal Revolution, is correct about Michael Pettis:

I am usually loathe to turn MR space over to negative attacks on others, but every now and then I feel there is a real contribution to be made.  I have been saying for years that Michael Pettis flat out does not understand international economics, and yet somehow he is treated as an authority in the serious financial press.  Here is his recent tweet storm.  It is wrong.

Here’s the abstract of a new paper by Anders Ydstedt and Rainer Zitelmann: (HT Dan Klein)

Attitudes towards the rich are far more positive in Sweden than in France, Spain, Germany, and Italy. Attitudes towards the market economy are also more positive in Sweden than in all other European countries, except Poland. Although Sweden is perceived by some as a model of ‘democratic socialism’, it has been 50 years since that this was – almost – the case. Today, Sweden is one of the ten most economically free countries in the world, although income tax is still above average. Corporate taxes are moderate, however, and inheritance, gift, and wealth taxes have been abolished. This article presents the findings of two surveys conducted by Ipsos MORI in Sweden. The first survey focused on perceptions of the rich, the second explored attitudes towards the market economy and capitalism.

In the wake of père Biden pardoning fils Biden, Wall Street Journal columnist Gerard Baker understandably asks: “What was that about preserving democratic norms?” A slice:

It turns out we didn’t have to wait until Jan. 20 for the tyranny to start. The Democrats were right all along when they warned that a bad outcome would give us a president ready to abuse power to serve his own interests and lie about it. But it’s Joe Biden leading the way.

On a human level it’s easy to empathize with Mr. Biden’s decision Sunday to pardon his son Hunter. The decision will ensure that Hunter avoids prison time for crimes he’s already been convicted of and prosecution for any crimes he committed between 2014 and this Sunday.

Joe Biden is a father, first and foremost. What parent, equipped with a magical power granted to him by a dusty document to wipe away a child’s errant behavior and shield that child—even a grown one—from punishment, wouldn’t be tempted to exercise it? Only a saint would allow the law to take its course out of a sense of duty to a higher moral principle. Joe Biden is no Thomas More.

For him, the degree of parental self-denial required would have been even greater than for most parents. President-elect Trump has made it clear, both in his rhetoric and in a stream of law-enforcement-related cabinet nominations, that he is intent on “retribution” against his political opponents. Having dubbed them the “Biden crime family,” it is a near certainty that Mr. Trump, absent a comprehensive pardon, would have had his Justice Department spend the next four years hounding the younger Mr. Biden. The older one, too, presumably.

President Biden could argue that the lawful-but-unethical pardon precedent is now so deeply established—not least by his predecessor—that granting clemency to his own son could hardly be considered beyond political norms. If you doubt that, consider the pardon granted to Ivanka Trump’s father-in-law, Charles Kushner, who is now on track to enjoy a stint in the ultimate offender rehabilitation program as U.S. ambassador to France.

And yet, for all that, the Hunter pardon is a lamentable one, another bruising blow to the institutions of American democracy.

At his Facebook page, Phil Magness reacts to papa Biden’s pardon of junior Biden:

Every single person prosecuted for tax evasion under the Biden admin’s ramped-up enforcement policies should demand a pardon right now.

The gun charges involved a bad law that is seldom prosecuted, making it at least defensible to pardon. But the tax evasion charges were serious, and guilt was certain. Biden made the prosecution of tax evaders a top priority in his administration, so pardoning his son for the same offense is an obscene injustice even if the presidential pardon power is absolute.

My Mercatus Center colleague Ben Klutsey talks with C-SPAN about bridging the political divide.

Iain Murray tells of Milton Friedman’s revenge. A slice:

Friedman has been on the outs for a while. It’s nothing new for the left to deride him—as a Young Conservative in the UK in the ‘80s I would frequently be attacked as a “monetarist,” by people who had no idea what monetary policy was, such was his perceived influence over Margaret Thatcher. Leftists continue to this day to launch harsh broadsides against his memory. Yet recently, even self-proclaimed conservatives have consigned him to history in terms just as severe as Joe Biden.

Senator Josh Hawley, for instance, told the National Conservatism conference this year, “Now we need not the ideology of Rand or Mill or Milton Friedman, but the insight of Augustine.” Rusty Reno, the editor of First Things, criticizes him in his book, Return of the Strong Gods. Yoram Hazony invokes Friedman’s Free to Choose in The Virtue of Nationalismto critique it. And Compact Editor Sohrab Ahmari commented, “Whiney voice: But, but, but, what would Milton Friedman say?” when the Hungarian government instituted price controls, to which Ross Douthat of the New York Times responded, “He would say that this won’t work as intended, presumably.” (Spoiler: they didn’t.)

Bjorn Lomborg reports that “climate-change colonialism keeps poor countries impoverished.” A slice:

When people need jobs and food, it is immoral to give them solar panels instead. Poverty kills nearly 10 million people annually through related problems such as infectious diseases and hunger. By comparison, the climate-change toll is tiny. Extreme weather took an average of 9,000 lives each year over the past decade. There are many core development priorities wealthy nations could fund that would quickly and efficiently save lives and create economic growth. These include reducing the scourges of malaria and tuberculosis, improving learning outcomes and cutting maternal and neonatal deaths. Carbon mitigation in poorer countries, on the other hand, will generate only a minuscule temperature reduction about a century from now.

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… is from page 1 of Alecia Waite Cassidy’s, Edward Tower’s, and Xiaolu Wang’s excellent September 2016 paper, “Manufacturing Fetishism: The Neo-Mercantilist Preoccupation with Protecting Manufacturing”:

We find the manufacturing share is not significantly correlated with a higher standard of living. Nor is it related significantly and consistently to economic growth.

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Here’s a letter that Phil Gramm and I submitted several days ago to the New York Times (which was not published):

Editor:

Matthew Schmitz’s defense of Donald Trump’s proposed tariffs (“There’s One Person Trump Absolutely Needs in His Administration,” Nov. 22) is based on factual error and faulty logic. For example, it’s untrue that China’s December 2001 admission to the World Trade Organization accelerated the loss of manufacturing jobs. Manufacturing jobs as a percentage of nonfarm jobs peaked in U.S. in November 1943; from then to December 2001 this percentage fell at an average monthly rate of 0.166%. Since China joined the WTO, the rate of decline has slowed to 0.144%.* Manufacturing jobs have declined over the post-war decades, not chiefly because of trade, but because of the development of new technology – just as technology was the chief source of the decline in agricultural employment in the 20^th century, as employment in agriculture fell from 40% of the labor force in 1900 to 2% in 2000. This pattern is clearly evident in developed and developing countries, including China.

As an example of faulty logic, Mr. Schmitz uses an election poll to dismiss economic analysis and historical evidence. A majority of voters might well have said that they would support a pro-tariff candidate, but polling results hardly justifies waving off a long-standing conclusion from more than two centuries of evidence.

U.S. History offers no example of protective tariffs fueling sustained and widely shared economic growth.

Sincerely,
Phil Gramm
Mr. Gramm, a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, was chairman of the Senate Banking Committee.
Helotes, TX

and

Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA

* Calculated by the authors from FRED Economic Data, St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank, “All Employees, Manufacturing (MANEMP)” divided by “All Employees, Nonfarm (PAYEMS).”

DBx: We thank Caleb Petitt for his research help with this letter.

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Wall Street Journal columnist Allysia Finley applauds the nomination of Jay Bhattacharya to head the National Institutes of Health. Two slices:

Lockdowns endangered democracy, the economy and children’s learning. The confused public-health establishment nonetheless embraced them. Mr. Trump initially went along but reversed course after Scott Atlas, a Covid adviser, arranged for Dr. Bhattacharya and other lockdown critics to educate Mr. Trump about the damage.

Mr. Trump proved more open-minded than the mainstream experts, who continue to insist that lockdowns and school closings saved lives despite the evidence to the contrary. Such small-minded zealots again showed their authoritarian side by pressuring social-media companies to suppress lockdown contrarians.

Twitter blacklisted Dr. Bhattacharya in 2021 after he tweeted an article he had written on age-based risks, noting that “mass testing is lockdown by stealth.” He was right. Many school districts later dropped their mandatory Covid testing policies because so many kids with mild or no symptoms were forced to stay home.

Dr. Bhattacharya didn’t deliberately court controversy. People who know him describe him as apolitical and unassuming. Over two decades in academia, he published dozens of wonky papers, such as “Provider visit frequency and vascular access interventions in hemodialysis” and “Heterogeneity in healthy aging.”

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The pandemic is over, but liberal group-think in science continues on issues like climate and race thanks to the NIH’s support. Consider the NIH-funded “UnBIASED” study led by professors at the University of Washington and University of California, San Diego, which seeks to use machine learning to detect “hidden bias” in interactions between doctors and patients. Its stated goal is to develop tools to alert doctors of their unconscious racism, sexism and homophobia “to shift the balance of power toward more equitable health outcomes.”

Your tax dollars at work. Dr. Bhattacharya’s top charge at the NIH will be returning the agency to its original mission of funding innovation rather than political science masquerading as real science.

Wall Street Journal columnist Mary Anastasia O’Grady ponders Justin Trudeau’s Canada. A slice:

Things have only deteriorated further since Israel came under attack. As National Post journalist Michael Higgins noted last weekend, no one begrudges Mr. Trudeau his leisure time at a pop concert and he can’t control the schedule of marauders. But what happened in Montreal was only the latest outbreak of anti-Israeli extremism. As Mr. Higgins wrote, “These pro-Palestinian/Hamas-supporting demonstrations have been happening since the savagery of October 7 and the Liberal government and Trudeau have been missing in action.”

The hoodlums’ trashing of Montreal caught the government off-guard. But somehow Mr. Levant was immediately intercepted, labeled a troublemaker and carted away. Something isn’t right in Canada’s “democracy.”

Who’d a-thunk it?: “Joe Biden pardons his son Hunter.”

The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal warns of entrenching pro-union – meaning, anti-worker – enforcers at the National Labor Relations Board. A slice:

Yet workers at large would pay the price for more years of Ms. [Lauren] McFerran’s rulings. The NLRB under her leadership has torn up several precedents to silence opposition to union organizing. In last year’s Lion Elastomers decision, the board overturned a 2020 precedent to exempt union organizers from many employer rules against harassment, including racist taunts and sexual slurs. Under this notion of union impunity, the NLRB previously tried to force Amazon to rehire an organizer who called a colleague a “gutter b—” over a bullhorn.

Other recent rulings have made it illegal for employers to address their workers frankly. In Siren Retail Corp., decided last month, the board ruled that a manager committed a labor violation when she told employees that unionizing would harm their “direct relationship with leadership.” When workers choose a union to represent them, they close off part of their dialogue with managers, and the board had upheld managers’ right to say so in Tri-Cast Inc. (1985). The McFerran NLRB tossed that precedent on a 3-1 vote and ordered the company to halt its “threatening” speech.

George Selgin is no fan of the U.S. government stockpiling Bitcoin as an alleged means of strengthening the U.S. dollar’s role in global markets.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown explains “why Kamala Harris lost.” A slice:

If Harris has any personal political priorities or animating ideology at her core, they’ve been buried so deep as to basically be undetectable—entirely subsumed by skilled pandering to the progressive zeitgeist. That’s why Harris has a reputation as a flip-flopper. That’s why she spent so much of her short 2024 campaign walking back positions she took during the rather different days of 2019 and 2020. And it’s why she tried hard not to stake out strong positions on most issues this time around.

Yes, Harris had reproductive rights on her side. But while that’s been a huge issue this election, it’s only one issue—and not even one where Trump, who says he doesn’t want a nationwide abortion ban, totally disagrees.

Though Harris’ campaign largely avoided detailed policy proposals, we did get some glimpses of what a President Harris hoped to have in store for us. It included an incoherent “Medicare at Home” benefit, national rent-control policies, tax hikes on businesses, giving $25,000 to first-time homebuyers, giving “1 million loans that are fully forgivable” to “Black entrepreneurs and others” who want to start businesses, and some form of federal price controls for groceries—or, at least, a federal clampdown on price gouging, whatever that would have turned out to mean. And a continuation of Biden-era foreign policy, hostility toward mergers, intrusion into health care (including forcing insurance companies to cover over-the-counter contraception, and perhaps all sorts of over-the-counter products, with no cost sharing), and a weird fixation on so-called junk fees.

Stone Washington reviews Neil Gorsuch’s and Janie Nitze’s book, Over Ruled. Two slices:

Gorsuch and Nitze chronicle the monetary and human costs of excessive regulations, particularly from the federal bureaucracy. Their book collects stories of everyday Americans on the receiving end of regulatory overreach.

Over Ruled begins with an exploration of the ever-more imperial character of America’s legal system. Federal regulations grow more voluminous, complex, and obscure with each passing year. Even seasoned attorneys and judges can struggle to understand these mandates. The number of federal crimes has more than doubled since 1982, and the number of regulations carrying civil monetary penalties has reached a staggering 300,000.

As a result, the federal government can increasingly punish people for non-criminal offenses. Consider the case of fisherman John Yates, who possessed fish in his catch branded as “undersized” by a federal agent and threw them overboard before the matter could be investigated. Yates was robbed of his livelihood, separated from his family for 30 days, and sentenced to three years of supervised release. Despite ultimately winning his case at the U.S. Supreme Court, he suffered devastating financial and reputational damage.

…..

In Over Ruled, Gorsuch and Nitze underscore the importance of “men and women being willing to stand up, even at a high personal cost, to defend the rights to democratic self-rule, equal treatment, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that belong to us all.” Their book offers inspirational stories of courageous individuals who embody these ideals and defied administrative tyranny.

Here’s David Henderson’s weekly reading for December 1, 2024.

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… is from page 1 of economist Christopher Meissner’s 2024 book, One from the Many: The Global Economy Since 1850:

Integration between countries is like a new technology. It has the capacity to give us more of what we want while using fewer resources.

DBx: Yes. In fact, all trade has this happy benefit. You acquire chicken for your dinner from the supermarket, rather than raise chickens yourself, because the time and effort you’d spend raising chickens is too costly to you. This principle holds if the supermarket is in the same Zip Code as you or in another Zip Code … or in another state … or in another country. You specialize at producing what you produce best and then trade the fruits of your efforts for the fruits of the efforts of countless other individuals, near and far. Trade is indeed very much akin to a technique that enables you to transform that which you produce into that which you wish to consume.

The machine pictured above turns the likes of corn, petroleum, lumber, and pharmaceutical products into the likes of automobiles, smartphones, clothing, and coffee. The cargo ship – that great tool of international trade – is so very marvelous that it turns almost anything that the people of one country produce into almost anything that those same people wish to consume.

It’s utterly mysterious to me why so many well-meaning people continue to insist that this technology is dark and dangerous. In reality, it’s stupendously marvelous, for it enables and encourages us all to be of use to us all.