This Is How a Nationalist Raises Your Taxes
Surely allowing millions of American and Chinese businesses and consumers to freely cooperate would have created more wealth than one veteran dealmaker tightening his grip.
READ MORENo, Mr. President, Tariffs Do Not Cause Prosperity
The prospect that the US president would conclude that tariffs cause growth has always been the downside of good economic numbers. Good performance of the macroeconomy only encourages his worst instincts to impose more harmful trade policies.
READ MOREBourbon Exports: Casualty of the Trade War
The carnage of the trade war is everywhere but doesn’t always make the headlines. Consider for example the export markets for American liquor.
READ MOREHow Free Traders Can Improve Their Case
Faced with the current resurgence of protectionist “thinking” prevalent in the United States, we free traders must fight back by more clearly, boldly, and frequently stating the truth about free trade.
READ MOREPut Freedom First
The real “America First” approach would be to just do the most American thing of all: to implement an agenda on individual liberty, personal responsibility, and a (very) limited government.
READ MOREThe Trade War: A One-Year Assessment (Executive Summary)
Anyone who maintains that a $75 billion income tax cut helps the economy must also agree that a tariff hike of $45 billion or more must harm the economy. This study looks back on the unprecedented developments in international trade that happened in 2018.
READ MOREWhat Is Your Coffee Cup’s Country of Origin?
National economic statistics in a global economy are already suspect, even more so when we are talking about products that depend for their very existence on international supply chains. At this point in history, where trading relationships cover every nation and production structures are infinitely complex, such data literally make no sense.
READ MOREThe US Mugging of Huawei Is Truly Dangerous
Translating what is completely mindless, the federal government is ultimately persecuting Huawei for being successful.
READ MOREThe Global Economy Desperately Needs Freedom
We take for granted the miraculous ability technology has now given us to travel to and communicate with virtually any place on the planet in little or no time. Yet we allow governments and their bureaucracies to use their coercive powers to constrain us from having the full freedom to create, produce, trade, and travel to pursue our mutually beneficial purposes and cooperative plans to peacefully and productively make our lives better.
READ MOREThe Fallacy of Us, We, and Our
Talk of “our” balance of trade is talk of something that doesn’t really exist; it’s merely a figment of the imagination made to appear real by an accounting convention that has the name “trade balance.” Nevertheless, this fictitious creature is daily demagogued by those seeking to clear the way for protectionist interventions.
READ MOREBastiat: Storyteller and Theorist
I submit that Bastiat ranks, at the very least, among the greatest of all applied economic theorists. His work should be more widely known; it deserves much greater professional respect.
READ MOREAgainst Government Coercion? Not So Much
Either the president still doesn’t understand that American consumers pay a large chunk of these tariffs (and that these tariffs are bad for the overall U.S. economy) or he is truly proud to penalize Americans who buy foreign goods that he doesn’t approve of.
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