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3 weeks ago | 
econlib.org | David Henderson |Kevin Corcoran |Pierre Lemieux
President Trump has now unveiled his outline of the higher tariffs he proposes. They are much higher and, therefore, much more destructive of people’s wealth, than I or, apparently, many others had expected. Trump claims to be doing this in the interest of reciprocity. In his Rose Garden speech, he noted, correctly, that you should judge countries’ openness to trade not just based on their explicit tariff rates but also based on their other barriers to trade.
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3 weeks ago | 
econlib.org | Pierre Lemieux |Scott Sumner |David Henderson
The student of economics and especially of public choice theory should expect politicians to lie—and he is certainly not disappointed in America these days. Politicians are ordinary individuals. An ordinary individual is tempted to lie when he considers it is in his interest to do so. I take lying to mean intentionally conveying a statement that one knows to be false. A milder form of lying would be conveying a statement that one suspects would be revealed false if a low-cost verification were done.
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3 weeks ago | 
econlib.org | David Henderson |Max Molden |Pierre Lemieux
On March 7, 2025, I highlighted Herb Stein’s article “Balance of Payments,” which appeared in David R. Henderson, ed. The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. That led to a lively discussion in the Comments section. Frequent commenter Warren Platts noted that the U.S. Net International Investment as a percentage of GDP has gone downhill since about 2007 and now sits at minus 90%. That might sound scary and it did make me wonder.
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3 weeks ago | 
econlib.org | Pierre Lemieux |Scott Sumner |David Henderson
To analyze society and the economy, and especially if the goal is to coerce peaceful individuals, an understanding of basic economics should be a must. Economics is needed to think clearly about the social consequences of individual actions and government interventions.
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3 weeks ago | 
econlib.org | David Henderson |Chris Edwards |David Friedman |David Friedman’s Substack
by Chris Edwards, Cato at Liberty, March 24, 2025. Excerpt:There are two sides to the inefficiency of federal spending. Spending is funded by taxes, which distort the working, investing, and entrepreneurial choices of individuals and businesses. Each additional dollar in income taxes causes about 40 to 50 cents of damage to the private sector beyond the tax amount itself. That damage is called deadweight loss.
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4 weeks ago | 
econlib.org | Pierre Lemieux |Scott Sumner |David Henderson
I wonder how Christians who favor the current US government’s war on immigrants can reconcile their stance with Leviticus 19:34, which reads (King James version):But the stranger who dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself, for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt. Would they reply that the Bible is merely epic poetry? Or are they CINOs—Christians In Name Only?
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1 month ago | 
econlib.org | Pierre Lemieux |John Phelan |David Henderson
The TikTok saga, which will soon rebound, seems to belong to the theater of the absurd. I tell the story up to late January in the just published Spring issue of Regulation. My piece is available online in an html or pdf version. The first paragraph summarizes the absurd affair:Imagine you are watching a play by theater of the absurd playwright Samuel Beckett or Eugène Ionesco.
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1 month ago | 
econlib.org | John Phelan |David Henderson |Scott Sumner
In his new book Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America, Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation argues that, “China believes it has a mandate to rule the world,” and that it is using trade balances to accomplish this. This is an old tactic.
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1 month ago | 
econlib.org | Scott Sumner |David Henderson |Pierre Lemieux
Valerie A. Ramey of the Hoover Institution has a new NBER paper that examines the impact of lump sum transfer payments on aggregate demand. Here is the abstract:
This paper re-evaluates the effectiveness of temporary transfers in stimulating the macroeconomy, using evidence from four case studies. The rebirth of Keynesian stabilization policy has lingering costs in terms of higher debt paths, so it is important to assess the benefits of these policies.
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1 month ago | 
econlib.org | David Henderson |John Berlau |J.D. Tuccille |Eric Boehm
by John Berlau, Law & Liberty, March 20, 2025. Excerpts:The phrase “regulation without representation” also connotes the battle that George Washington and other American patriots fought against taxation without representation. But in researching my book George Washington, Entrepreneur, I found that “regulation without representation” is more than just linguistically connected to the causes of the Revolutionary War.
