This semester—through the generosity of the Dean and Cam Williams Foundation to the Ludwig von Mises Institute for its book club program—the University of Mount Olive has been hosting a Book Club where we have been reading the collected works of Frédéric Bastiat.

Imagine a firm that sells a product—production costs are 2 ounces (oz.) of gold—only to the US, which has a 10 percent tariff on the import. The firm correctly estimates the aggregate demand schedule for its product as follows:

One of the statues that was taken down in the 2020 purge of the Southern statues was that of the great American statesman from South Carolina, John. C. Calhoun.

In recent days, we have read numerous articles about a possible agreement between the US administration and its main trading partners to devalue the US dollar. It has been named “The Mar-A-Lago Accord”, a concept inspired by the Plaza Accord of 1985, which aimed to devalue the US dollar to address trade imbalances. That plan failed.

On February 18, 2025 President Trump issued an executive order titled, “Ensuring Accountability for all Agencies,” in which he says,

…previous administrations have allowed so-called “independent regulatory agencies” to operate with minimal Presidential supervision. These regulatory agencies currently exercise substantial executive authority without sufficient accountability to the President, and through him, to the American people.

The ideas of economists—whether they are right or wrong—are often more powerful than commonly understood. Consider President Trump’s statements about the magical powers of tariffs or Mexico’s Sheinbaum’s discourse on import substitution industrialization. Our leaders—even when they believe themselves to be smart and independent thinkers—are often slaves to the ideas of past economists.

Adam Smith believed that the economic arrangements he prescribed would achieve the greatest amount of prosperity distributed to the widest population. He did not anticipate the periodic “boom-and-bust business cycles” that historically accompanied capitalist “progress” and eventually sparked heated, progressive calls for active government intervention. Prolonged economic crises struck the United States in 1792, 1819, 1837, 1857, 1873, 1893, 1907, and—worst of all—the Great Depression of the 1930s.