The standard economic argument against tariffs is that, by eliminating foreign competition, they simply raise prices for consumers. While true, this argument barely scratches the surface of the problem and overlooks a critical reality: tariffs and protectionist policies do far more than just raise prices—they block the entrepreneurial discovery process that is essential for progress.
In late January, the Trump administration issued a series of executive orders that paused Treasury payments to a variety of federal contractors and grantees. These orders also often cancelled contracts with NGOS and other contractors altogether. Soon afterward, we began to see countless media stories about job losses at private NGOs and for-profit federal contractors. Many were so heavily reliant on revenue from taxpayer cash that they immediately began laying off employees.
At the end of Q4 2024, commercial real estate continued to exhibit severe weakness, with commercial real estate bonds hitting record distress levels, surpassing the previous records reached in Q3 2024. Commercial real estate bonds are just commercial real estate loans packaged into securities and sold to investors. One category of bonds, commercial mortgage-backed securities (“CMBS”), saw their distress rate increase to 10.6 percent, a fourth consecutive monthly record.
The Decoupling America’s Artificial Intelligence Capabilities from China Act—introduced by Senator Josh Hawley, R-Mo.—is another attempt to stifle free speech, the free market, infringe on personal freedoms, and damage market processes.
During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump said he would be turning things upside down, and he has kept his promises. All one has to do is to read the latest edition of the New York Times to see how the progressive wing of the Democratic Party is responding: rage, rage, and more rage, as the following editorial declares:
“An inhabitant of Berlin, who in 1914 would have been jubilant upon receiving an unexpected legacy of 1,000 marks, did not think an amount of 1,000,000,000 marks worth his attention in the fall of 1923.“— Ludwig von Mises, Interventionism, An Economic Analysis
Last Sunday, 60 Minutes featured tyrannical German prosecutors boasting about persecuting private citizens who made comments that officialdom disapproved. Three prosecutors explained how the government was entitled to launch pre-dawn raids and lock up individuals who criticized politicians, complained about immigrant crime waves, or otherwise crossed the latest revised boundary lines of acceptable thoughts.
In his Tuesday article on Trump’s bizarre and immoral Palestine plan, Tom DiLorenzo connects the plan to President Lincoln’s obsession with deporting the black population of the United States to a “colony” in Africa or Central America.
There is an interesting postscript to all this in the form of the Grant administration’s attempt to annex Santo Domingo, what is today known as the Dominican Republic.
Renowned Keynesian polymath, Woody Brock, in a presentation given at the ADC Forum in 2012, advocated for government investment in profitable private sector infrastructure projects in order to generate income with which to combat rising deficits. Basing his arguments on Arrow and Kurz’s Public Investment, the Rate of Return, and Optimal Fiscal Policy (1970), he argued the following:
