In a recent video discussing WNBA players’ wage protests—some of whom wore shirts reading “Pay us what you owe us”—Ben Shapiro addressed the controversy. I anticipated at least a competent lay explanation of how wages are valued by firms and capitalist-entrepreneurs. Instead, what followed was an incomplete explanation. He stated:
Donald Trump announced on Sunday that his administration had reached a trade deal with the European Union, which would place a 15 percent tariff on all goods Americans buy from Europe and require the EU to purchase a certain amount of oil and weapons from some US firms.
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the party of laissez-faire and free markets—known today as “classical liberals”—often pushed a political program that included the adoption of written constitutions. The old liberals—such as the American revolutionaries and French bourgeois reformers—thought that written constitutions would offer a substantial barrier to abuses of state power.
