Trumps claims that America has lost high paying manufacturing jobs to China because the communist country promotes its exports through subsidies, tax advantages and currency manipulations. The reality is that we should not care what China does. The more China subsidizes its industries, the more its trading partners gain in the abundance of cheap goods and services and, contrary to what Trump believes, in the creation of high-paying jobs. In an exchange economy, there is a natural antagonism between producers and consumers. Producers benefit from scarcity, consumers from abundance.

In Frank W. Taussig’s The Tariff History of the United States, he describes the mass of unprecedented financial legislation that took place, which likely would not have occurred absent the context of the war,

As a history teacher and an economist, it never ceases to amaze me at the success of certain historical myths (in this case, defined as verifiably untrue beliefs) have come to dominate popular understanding. Often it seems that no presentation of facts to the contrary of such myths are sufficient to dislodge them.

The Trump-Musk assassination troops going through the federal bureaucracy will eventually arrive at an oddball entity called the Federal Reserve. It is and isn’t many things, which if confusion is your sport, is part of its charm.

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds is an early study of crowd psychology by Scottish journalist Charles Mackay, first published in 1841 under the title Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions. The book was published in three volumes: “National Delusions”, “Peculiar Follies,” and “Philosophical Delusions.”

The first three chapters address economic events to include:

In a recent column, Paul Craig Roberts wrote that tariffs not only made international trade possible, but that they were merely a tax on consumption and were neutral elsewhere—and should be much-preferred to income taxes. He wrote: