[Excerpted from Murray Rothbard, The Progressive Era, Patrick Newman, ed. (Auburn, Al.: Mises Institute, 2016), chap. 11.]

Andy Duncan of Mises UK interviews Ryan McMaken on tariffs, income taxes, and the importance of free trade [20 minutes]:

President Trump declared last week that the law enforcement should “take the guns first, go through due process second.” But the history of federal firearms enforcement shows that due process is often a mirage when federal bureaucrats drop their hammer. Before enacting sweeping new gun prohibitions, we should remember the collateral damage and constitutional absurdities from previous federal crackdowns.

There is an old lawyering adage that says “If the law is on your side, pound the law. If the facts are on your side, pound the facts. If neither is on your side, pound the table.” It also has an alternate ending which says, “When neither is on your side, pound your opponent.”

As we’ve already discussed in detail, here and here, police agencies are not under any general legal obligation to protect the taxpaying public from criminal behavior. The motto “to protect and serve” is an advertising slogan. 

Moreover, police agencies are also protected by immunity laws from lawsuits in regards to police abuse or lack of action. 

The US Department of Education should have been abolished years ago. Once upon a time, GOP candidates pledged to do just that. But now the Party is happy to use the Department to provide photo ops for the politicians appointed as the Sec. of Education. 

Earlier today, US Sec. of Education Betsy DeVos visited Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, the site of last month’s shooting. 

President Donald Trump’s announcement that he plans to impose tariffs of 25% on steel imports and 10% on imported aluminum is the first major economic policy error of his presidency.

What is the president’s motive? I firmly believe that Mr. Trump’s primary goal as president is to help American workers. Both his tax cut and his regulatory rollback were done for that reason, and workers are benefiting. By contrast, tariffs would not help workers but would cause other problems.

As things stand, China holds around 20 percent, or $ 1.2 trillion, of outstanding US credit market debt. This is the result of decades of “symbiotic interaction”, if one follows the hidden message that is embedded in the neologism “Chinamerica”: Americans consume more goods from China than they export to China, and the Chinese are willingly financing the US trade deficit with their “over-savings” by holding dollars and US dollar-denominated debt. In 2017 alone, it amounted to $ 375 billion.

A movement is taking over America’s colleges and universities that rejects classical norms of reason, logic, and scholarship. This anti-intellectual trend is a road to totalitarianism.

What now passes for erudition in many liberal arts departments would not qualify as good scholarship using the proven tests of critical thinking. Worse, dissent is being shouted down, not debated. And many administrators support this trend making it, in effect, de facto campus policy.

This trend has all the hallmarks of societies that have gone totalitarian.

You can help the Mises Institute publish an exciting new book this spring from one of our Senior Fellows, and it couldn’t be more timely.

Dr. Mark Thornton’s text — titled The Skyscraper Curse — is his definitive work on booms and busts, and it explains why only Austrian economists really understand them. It makes business cycle theory accessible to a whole new 21st-century audience.

And they need it, especially those under 40. Many of the brilliant quants working on Wall Street and at the Fed barely remember the Crash of 2008, much less understand it.