On Wednesday, April 2, 2025, the US President Trump announced that he will apply at least a 10 percent tariff on all exporters to the US, with even higher duties on some 60 nations, to counter large trade imbalances with the US. That includes some of the country’s biggest trading partners, such as China—which now faces a tariff of well above 50 percent on many goods—as well as the European Union, Japan and Vietnam.

At the conclusion of the recent filing season for 2024 tax returns, the Trump administration announced that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) will end its free Direct File (DF) program that taxpayers have used on the IRS website to file their own tax returns. The decision was based on fact-finding by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) that DF duplicated Free File (FF)—a public-private free offering that has been available since 2003.

The issue of sovereignty had been a hotly-debated topic among the Revolutionary-era colonists.

Cinephiles are mourning the death of Val Kilmer. Kilmer was most famous for Batman Forever, Tombstone, the Top Gun movies, and his portrayal of Jim Morrison in The Doors. However, I remember him most for a movie from 1985 which is an anti-war classic, Real Genius.

In his book, Intellectuals and Race, the great economist Thomas Sowell excoriates intellectuals for their role in promoting statist social engineering schemes. Sowell defined “intellectuals” as “a particular occupation—namely, people whose work begins and ends with ideas.

As public discourse on tariffs recedes, it is crucial to address an aspect of free trade and tariff policy that received less attention during recent debates: the moral implications of imposing tariffs. While economic theories often dominate discussions, how tariff policy conflicts with the United States founding values are equally significant. Milton Friedman famously stated: “The right course of action for the United States would be unilaterally to get rid of its restrictions and say to the world, come and sell your goods here. We are delighted to sell to you.” 

Robert P. Murphy and Mark Spitznagel co-author this examination of how to look at the trade deficit. (paywalled)

Are rising egg prices a result of monopoly power? As of late, egg prices are taking a central role in the economic narrative with focus groups, and economists decreeing monopolistic “greed” as the prime cause of a sudden upturn in prices. Yet, this must be insufficient to establish why producers’ have—all of a sudden—become immensely greedier, or why they were less greedy in previous years.