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Clark Packard’s and Scott Lincicome’s letter in today’s Wall Street Journal – a letter written in response to U.S trade representative Jamieson Greer’s hostility to the World Trade Organization – is superb:

Jamieson Greer’s frustration with the World Trade Organization is understandable, but his op-ed ignores how the U.S. unwisely accelerated the organization’s decline (“Another Fish Story From the WTO,” April 8).

The American middle class has prospered in the era of open trade, and U.S. manufacturing job declines—driven mainly by productivity gains—long predate China’s WTO accession. The U.S. was the WTO’s chief architect and reaped significant economic and geopolitical value from the system. Its retreat, which began before the administration, ignored these realities and instead prioritized U.S. farm subsidies and trade remedies, often resisting the disciplines Washington demanded of others.

Fealty to these and other insular political issues stymied multilateral negotiations and motivated four separate U.S. administrations to neuter the WTO dispute settlement by blocking Appellate Body appointments. Washington’s participation in disputes has also ground to a halt. You can’t complain about the rules of the game after you stop playing and strangle the referee.

Worst of all, the U.S. has been a bad-faith abuser of the rules it helped write, blowing through tariff bindings and invoking narrow WTO exceptions for national security and balance-of-payments crises to maintain President Trump’s global tariff wall.

Mr. Greer is right to decry the WTO’s consensus problem and the abuse of certain rules by other WTO members. The institution does need reform. But members’ continued participation shows the institution isn’t dead. And reform can’t happen if the U.S. keeps pretending it didn’t help cripple the institution it’s now eulogizing.

“The White House ballroom’s imported steel shows how tariffs encourage cronyism” – so reports Reason‘s Eric Boehm.

My Mercatus Center colleague Alden Abbott applauds Shanker Singham’s method of assessing anticompetitive market distortions (ACMDs). A slice:

The domestic-competition pillar asks a basic question: do firms compete on the merits, or do governments tilt the field through favoritism, incumbent protection, or directed allocation of capital and demand?

The international-competition pillar asks whether foreign firms can compete on reasonably equal terms. Localization rules, discriminatory standards, procurement preferences, and similar measures often push them to the sidelines.

The property-rights pillar asks whether firms can rely on secure legal protection for intellectual property, data, contracts, and investment-backed expectations.

This framework helps distinguish ordinary trade frictions from true market-rigging. A tariff can impose costs without reshaping the competitive order. By contrast, rules that channel procurement to politically favored firms, force technology transfer, or grant regulatory privileges to state-owned enterprises operate differently. They decide winners before competition even begins.

George Will explains that the U.S. president’s “’power to grant reprieves and pardons’ has become another source of political brutishness.” Here’s his conclusion:

So, the remedy for tawdry pardoning is not this or that institutional gambit. The only feasible solution is the election of presidents who are not louts. This, however, becomes less likely as voters are made ever more cynical by loutish pardons.

Phil Magness justly criticizes J.D. Vance’s support for Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán. Two slices:

How did the vice president of the United States end up doing campaign work for a Hungarian strongman five days before an election? The answer runs through the most dangerous intellectual movement in American (and world) politics: postliberalism.

In Part 1 of this series, I documented how a visceral disdain for capitalism and economic modernity in general spawned the postliberal movement amid the failed apocalyptic predictions of “Peak Oil Theory” in the mid-2000s. In Part 2, I documented how postliberalism enlists the overtly fascist legal theories of Carl Schmitt to wage an attack on the Madisonian constitutional system of checks and balances and the classical liberal philosophical ideas that animated the American founding.

In this installment, I turn my attention to the postliberal movement’s search for a patron. The fundamental unpopularity of this movement’s ideas has sent them searching — to both the Catholic Church and Viktor Orban’s Hungary — for a top-down authority willing to override public opinion.

…..

Scholars from across the political spectrum have documented how the left-leaning identity politics of elite academia spilled out of the faculty lounge and into mass media, K-12 education, and even the corporate board room. Sociologist Musa al-Gharbi dubbed this the “Great Awokening” and dated it to the early 2010s. In my own work, I’ve documented how faculty political opinions underwent a hard left turn in this same period and flooded mainstream dialogue with previously obscure jargon from the Critical Race Theory academic literature.

Although the leftward cultural shift is real, [Gladden] Pappin’s diagnosis of its causes misses the mark. Rather than investigating its sources in the classroom, he defaulted to the ideological anti-capitalism and disdain for economics that undergirds the postliberal movement.

[Patrick] Deneen made a similar move in his own cultural diagnosis. In a 2023 interview, he attributed wokeness to a hypothesized merger between the 1960s sexual revolution and a “neoliberal capitalist ethos” in which everything is commodified to maximize consumption and material comfort.

Financial Times columnist Harvey Nriapia takes a look at the latest research on minimum-wage legislation. (HT Richard Ebeling) A slice:

The majority of this research shows that a minimum wage rise lowers employment, especially among younger and less-educated workers. While the evidence is not unambiguous, it certainly points in one direction.

The logic is quite straightforward: as the price of low-skilled work rises, employers demand less of it. This is especially true for the young, who might be less productive and more error-prone when starting out.

There are many potential mechanisms explored in the literature. It could be that in response to a minimum wage uplift, companies cut jobs and invest in more labour-saving technologies, such as self-service checkouts. Or perhaps, when thinking about business needs for the next fiscal year, they opt for one older, more experienced hire rather than two young workers. Of course, some unproductive companies also buckle under the weight of the new statutory pay demand, which could leave entire teams without jobs.

[David] Neumark’s research suggests the evidence is often at odds with how the body of research is summarised. “One can always say that a lot of studies are wrong, and some small set are right — and that could lead one to the conclusion that higher minimum wages don’t reduce employment in the US,” he told me. “But simply saying “studies show” that is highly inaccurate and continues to be since this paper.”

As for why the research and the communication about the research differ so markedly, Neumark posits three reasons. First, very few economists tabulate all the literature, so they don’t know what the majority of it says. Second, a few of the prominent studies that show no negative or even positive employment effects get disproportionate press, such as the Card and Krueger 1994 paper, which is a cornerstone of economics undergraduate courses.

The third is more concerning: “I have no doubt that there are some researchers . . . who are advocates for higher minimum wages,” he told me. “I’ve seen this reflected in so many ways. I think they amplify the claim that ‘most minimum wage studies show’ no effects, even though it’s inconsistent with the data.”

Ian Vásquez shares a report – one presented last month at a meeting of economists and policy-makers (that I, too, attended) – on impressive progress in Argentina of reducing economically stifling regulations.

At a meeting I attended last month with a small group of economists, Argentina’s Minister of Deregulation, Federico Sturzenegger, presented the graph above. It shows how satellite internet use exploded once the government lifted its ban, which had, until then, benefited a politically powerful local internet provider.

In a recent paper, Sturzenegger describes how Argentines and businesses that were previously isolated or harmed by the high cost of the internet benefited from the deregulation.

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… is from David Hume’s essay “Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion” (here from page 5 of the 1985 Liberty Fund collection of some of Hume’s essays, edited by the late Eugene Miller, Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary):

The good or ill accidents of life are very little at our disposal; but we are pretty much masters what books we shall read, what diversions we shall partake of, and what company we shall keep.

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Here’s a letter to National Review.

Editor:

Flaws aplenty infect Michael Brendan Dougherty’s criticisms of the many studies that show high and rising living standards for America’s middle class (“How the Upper Middle Class Was Made,” April 10). Distilled to their essence, however, Mr. Dougherty’s criticisms are nothing but revelations of his ignorance of the facts mixed with his distaste for the choices freely made by his fellow Americans.

Although it’s true that, over the past half-century, women’s inflation-adjusted earnings rose faster than those of men – hardly surprising given that women decades ago were generally less skilled than men in the workforce – the fact, as documented by Scott Winship, is that men’s inflation-adjusted earnings have also risen. Contrary to Mr. Dougherty’s presumption, therefore, it’s more affordable today than in the past for a family to have only the male in the workforce. It follows that today’s greater participation of women in the workforce isn’t an economic necessity imposed upon families by the heartless market but, rather, a choice voluntarily made by most families. (See also this important post by Jeremy Horpedahl.)

Mr. Dougherty’s factual errors are too numerous to mention, but two deserve the spotlight. First, it’s untrue, as Marian Tupy points out, that Americans today work more hours than in the past. In the 1950s, each American worker, on average, worked 2,024 hours annually. Since 2000, each American worker, on average, works only 1,808 hours annually – or 11 percent fewer hours than during that alleged golden decade of the 1950s.

Second, manufacturing employment today is more secure than in the past. From 1958 through 1980, the average monthly manufacturing-job layoff rate was 1.6 percent. Today the rate of layoffs and discharges is lower. From December 2000 through February 2026 – years including both the Great Recession and the covid hysteria – that rate is down to 1.1 percent.

No one argues that the economy is perfect, whatever such a standard might mean. But Mr. Dougherty should both better familiarize himself with the facts and quit presuming that his personal preferences are, or ought to be, those of his fellow Americans.

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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David Henderson shares economists’ amicus brief in the lawsuit against Trump’s section 122 tariffs punitive taxes on Americans’ purchases of imports.

GMU Econ alum Caleb Petitt deconstructs ships. A slice:

Although Americans have to pay more for ships and shipping, proponents of the Jones Act often justify it as necessary for national security. Importing foreign ships, they argue, could make the United States reliant on foreign shipbuilders and unprepared for disasters and wars. If the United States were to get involved in a war and were cut off from foreign shipbuilders, America would have no shipbuilding industry to fall back on. Essentially, the Jones Act aims to insulate America from reliance on foreign markets.

But this rests on an illusion. The supply chain for domestically built ships extends well outside the U.S. market. This means that the United States is still reliant on foreign markets for producing ships. Americans pay higher shipping costs without gaining the purported benefits of insulation from foreign markets. In reality, Jones Act ships are not U.S.-built; they are U.S.-assembled.

The dataset below substantiates the claim that America relies on foreign producers for components used in the construction of commercial ships. As of April 2025, no Jones Act ship with an American-made engine has been built since 2000, nor one with an American propeller since 2010, nor one with an American anchor since 1998, and there are no ships in the Jones Act fleet with American-built generators. Given this evidence, it is safe to say that modern Jones Act ships rely on components produced abroad, and that the Jones Act has not removed American shipbuilders’ reliance on foreign manufacturers.

Stephen Davies makes clear that “from trade to migration to personal freedom, the conservatives of the global New Right hold a philosophy incompatible with individualism.” Two slices:

This national political economy is not socialist or egalitarian but also not a free market. The best label for it is national collectivism or neo-mercantilism. This means support for protectionism and for a national industrial policy in which governments direct investment. It also means opposition to the trade agreements—regulatory harmonization deals that took a great deal of regulatory discretion away from national governments—that were popular after 1990, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement. There is a particular emphasis on manufacturing and farming, as opposed to globally traded services. There is skepticism or outright hostility toward finance.

Two things should be noted here. Firstly, this vision is not compatible with the form capitalism has taken since the 1970s and the kind of international rule-governed order created since then. Nor is it compatible with the classical liberal ideal of a global market and trading system in which individuals and companies trade with each other in a way that makes national borders as irrelevant as possible. Both of those require global rules, however generated, and a removal of economic decisions from national governments in the case of actually existing global capitalism, and from politics altogether in the second case.

…..

In the New Right version of identity politics, there are “real” or “natural” identities that are derived from things that cannot be chosen. These include such things as the place of one’s birth, the parents and siblings you have, the people you grow up among, the language you speak, in many places your religion, but also your genetic inheritance, your physical sex, your biological nature as an embodied being. This is a prescriptive and determined identity, not a chosen one.

Related to this but distinct is a concern for the household and a feeling that current policy, cultural forms, and economic life all work to undermine it. The family is important in the nationalist right because it is the main channel by which the ideas, beliefs, practices, and narratives of national identity are passed on. One feature of this is a valorization of traditional gender roles. Another is a concern about the birth rate and support for pronatalist policies.

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy, describes Trump’s proposed budget as an unserious one that we should nevertheless take seriously. A slice:

Republicans must choose. They cannot implement endless tax cuts, raise defense spending by 42 percent, and also refuse to reform Social Security and Medicare. Something has to give. Cutting foreign aid, trimming waste, or reducing immigration-related expenses won’t begin to close the gap in any meaningful way.

Democrats face the same reckoning. They cannot be the party of expanded entitlements, climate spending coupled with degrowth demands, student debt relief, and the preservation of every program without pushing America further toward a fiscal disaster. Increasing taxes on the wealthy is not a fiscal plan. The arithmetic does not come close to closing a gap of this magnitude even under the most optimistic assumptions.

Speaking of the “budgets” of the fiscally incontinent U.S. government, Rich Vedder asks: “Why does Congress keep kicking the fiscal can?”

Paul Mueller talks with GMU Econ’s emeritus Nobel laureate Vernon Smith.

GMU Econ alum Michael Peterson explains “why Keynes would have reared AI — and why we shouldn’t.”

Also writing insightfully about AI is my GMU Econ colleague Alex Tabarrok:

Imagine I told you that AI was going to create a 40% unemployment rate. Sounds bad, right? Catastrophic even. Now imagine I told you that AI was going to create a 3-day working week. Sounds great, right? Wonderful even. Yet to a first approximation these are the same thing. 60% of people employed and 40% unemployed is the same number of working hours as 100% employed at 60% of the hours.

So even if you think AI is going to have a tremendous effect on work, the difference between catastrophe and wonderland boils down to distribution. It’s not impossible that AI renders some people unemployable, but that proposition is harder to defend than the idea that AI will be broadly productive. AI is a very general purpose technology, one likely to make many people more productive, including many people with fewer skills. Moreover, we have more policy control over the distribution of work than over the pure AI effect on work. Declare an AI dividend and create some more holidays, for example.

Nor is this argument purely theoretical. Between 1870 and today, hours of work in the United States fell by about 40% — from nearly 3,000 hours per year to about 1,800. Hours fells but unemployment did not increase. Moreover, not only did work hours fall, but childhood, retirement, and life expectancy all increased. In fact in 1870, about 30% of a person’s entire life was spent working — people worked, slept, and died. Today it’s closer to 10%. Thus in the past 100+ years or so the amount of work in a person’s lifetime has fallen by about 2/3rds and the amount of leisure, including retirement has increased. We have already sustained a massive increase in leisure. There’s no reason we cannot do it again.

National Review‘s Jim Geraghty isn’t impressed with the economy so far of Trump 2.0.

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… is from page 29 of Ludwig von Mises’s 1952 lecture “Capital Supply and American Prosperity” as reprinted in the 2008 Liberty Fund edition of Mises’s 1952 collection, Planning for Freedom:

What begot modern industrialization and the unprecedented improvement in material conditions that it brought about was neither capital previously accumulated nor previously assembled technological knowledge. In England, as well as in the other Western countries that followed it on the path of capitalism, the early pioneers of capitalism started with scanty capital and scanty technological experience. At the outset of industrialization was the philosophy of private enterprise and initiative, and the practical application of this ideology made the capital swell and the technological know-how advance and ripen.

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