Don Boudreaux

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Articles

A Country Is Not A Company

Jan 18, 2025 | cafehayek.com | Don Boudreaux

Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal:Editor:Robert Rubin identifies three reasons why running a government differs from running a business (“The Limits of ‘Running Government Like a Business’,” January 18).
Pandemonium, Not Policy

Jan 15, 2025 | cafehayek.com | Don Boudreaux

Here’s a reply to a recent correspondent. Ms. C__:Thanks for your follow-up e-mail to my note. You write that I “wrongly scrutinize President Trump’s trade actions like an academic economist. He’s a successful businessman strategically deploying trade policy to bargain for America’s advantage over other countries.”With respect, you and Trump suppose that global commerce is a zero-sum activity; you think that one country gains wealth only by tricking or forcing other countries into losing wealth.
The Fetish for Manufacturing Is Foolish

Jan 10, 2025 | cafehayek.com | Don Boudreaux

Here’s a letter to Yahoo!Finance:Editor:Uncritically reporting on Michael Pettis’s recent plea for higher tariffs, Jason Ma quotes Pettis’s assertion that America today is “suffering from … a declining manufacturing share of GDP” (“It’s different now: Tariffs can boost U.S. jobs, wages, and the economy, finance professor says,” January 6). Pettis is mistaken. For starters, there’s been no significant decline in manufacturing output as a share of U.S. GDP.
Kuttner's Cluelessness Continues - Cafe Hayek

Dec 8, 2024 | cafehayek.com | Don Boudreaux

Constant repetition of fallacies don’t turn them into facts. Editor, New York Review of BooksEditor:Robert Kuttner’s favorable review of three pro-protectionist books contains several errors (“The Import of Exports,” Dec. 19). Not the least of these mistakes is his presumption that free(r) trade has – as he quotes Rana Foroohar – “hollowed out” American industry. Yet the only evidence in support of this claim is its incessant repetition by opponents of free trade.
There Is Nothing Left to Oren Cass's Protectionist Argument...

Dec 4, 2024 | cafehayek.com | Don Boudreaux

Modern globalization is also about a lot more than just trade in goods. As I explain in the book’s new introduction, services trade has exploded in recent years—especially online (hence, our new video on the gaming economy)—and it powers some of the biggest and most important companies in the world, many of which are American (and which fuel the United States’ trade surplus in services, if you’re into that kind of thing).
Yet Another Open Letter to Oren Cass

Dec 3, 2024 | cafehayek.com | Don Boudreaux

Oren CassAmerican CompassOren: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.
Quotation of the Day...

Dec 1, 2024 | cafehayek.com | Don Boudreaux

… is from page 126 of C. Donald Johnson’s 2018 book, The Wealth of a Nation: A History of Trade Politics in America:Whatever the cause [of the Panic of 1893], a significant new Treasury deficit arose from the profligate spending by the “Billion Dollar Congress” and the loss in revenues resulting from the McKinley Tariff’s prohibitive rates.
Don't Abandon the Consumer-Welfare Standard

Nov 25, 2024 | cafehayek.com | Don Boudreaux

The 1945 Alcoa case is one of many economically perverse antitrust rulings from the era before the embrace of the consumer-welfare standard. Editor, Wall Street Journal1211 6th Ave. New York, NY 10036Editor:You correctly describe the DOJ’s new antitrust assault on Google as punishing that company for its success at pleasing consumers (“Punishing Google for Its Search Success,” Nov. 25). Alas, such perverse use of antitrust is nothing new. Before WWII the government sued to break-up Alcoa.
Full Text of Gramm & Boudreaux on 19th-century American Tariffs

Nov 21, 2024 | cafehayek.com | Phil Gramm |Donald Boudreaux |Don Boudreaux

Now that more than a month has passed since the October 16th publication in the Wall Street Journal of Phil Gramm’s and my piece on 19th-century U.S. tariffs and economic growth, I can share the piece in full here. It is available, free of charge, beneath the fold. No, Tariffs Don’t Fuel GrowthRates were high in the 19th century, but the economy boomed most when the rates were at their lowest. By Phil Gramm and Donald J. BoudreauxOct.
Quotation of the Day...

Nov 18, 2024 | cafehayek.com | Don Boudreaux

Quotation of the Day… by Don Boudreaux on November 18, 2024 … is from page 81 of Thomas Sowell’s 1999 book, Barbarians Inside the Gates:Once we face up to the plain fact that Social Security is welfare for the elderly, then we need to ask ourselves why affluent people of any age should be a burden on others. They should not be.