Tweet My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy, identifies some ominous parallels between Smoot-Hawley and Trump. Two slices: History may not perfectly repeat itself, but it often rhymes. Two protectionist episodes — the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 and the Trump-era tariffs of today — offer a striking example. Both emerged from economic nostalgia and fear of change. Both were politically attractive. And both were costly, backward-looking mistakes that undermined the economies they were meant to […]
Due process is really having a moment, and the Founders are rolling in their graves. The basic legal principle—that people have the right to challenge the evidence against them before the government takes away their liberty—is central to the Constitution. And yet, it has come under fire recently, after President Donald Trump’s administration deported hundreds of immigrants it alleges are gang members to a prison in El Salvador. It appears that many people are now eager to dispense […]
This Easter, we’ve hidden a dozen colorful, egg-centric stories across Reason.com. Hop around the site to find them—or click here to see them all in one basket. This Easter, while children will be dying eggs and searching for hidden treats, the president’s sycophants will be tirelessly rationalizing Donald Trump’s rhetorical and political inconsistency. It’s a full-time job defending someone whose positions flip faster than a spatula at a diner brunch. The following are just some of the positions […]
SERÁS Siempre serás mi recuerdo favorito. Aquello que tuve un ratito de mi vida y adoré cada instante. Aquello que me quitaba el sueño por las noches y me dejaba una sonrisa inigualable. Aquello que no volveré a tener, pero siempre te voy a recordar Por y para siempre… LLya
An American-brokered peace deal between Ukraine and Russia is becoming more unlikely by the day. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and President Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff bailed on a major meeting Wednesday in London set up to bring about peace in Eastern Europe. This happened after Ukraine had just rejected a U.S. proposal for a deal that recognizes Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea. “Ukraine will not legally recognize the occupation of Crimea,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Tuesday. […]
One of my favorite sections of Ludwig von Mises’s majestic treatise Human Action (1949) is a rather short one titled “The Fight Against Error.” Its main theme is to show how mankind’s problems come down to errors arising from flawed economic ideologies. He writes: “The main objective of…economics is to substitute consistent correct ideologies for the contradictory tenets of popular eclecticism.” In some ways, civilization can be seen as a sort of bridge which must be engineered and understood using the […]
“If it is known that authorities have power to coerce, few people will wait for actual coercion,” economist Friedrich Hayek wrote in the 1956 foreword to his 1944 classic, The Road to Serfdom. Hayek’s insight could be the Rosetta Stone for understanding the Trump administration’s censorship zealotry. On March 25, six masked federal agents seized a Turkish graduate student on the streets of Somerville, Massachusetts. Rumeysa Ozturk—who was wearing a hijab—was a Fulbright scholar working on a doctorate at […]