Some Links
Eric Boehm is correct: “There is no ‘royal we’ in the marketplace.” A slice:
Every day, thousands of transactions take place in which Americans and Canadians consent to exchange currency for goods.
[Commerce] Secretary Howard Lutnick thinks there is someone they forgot to ask.
“We don’t want to buy 60 percent of our aluminum from Canada,” Lutnick explained during an interview with Fox News on Thursday. “We want to bring [aluminum production] to America.”
Lutnick’s phrasing there is pretty telling. There is no “royal we” n the marketplace—that Canadian aluminum is not being bought by the federal government, but by private American businesses, which are making deals with private companies on the other side of the border.
There is, indeed, no reason to think about those transactions in a nationalist way at all. The economy is not a World Cup match. When Canadian companies exchange their aluminum for American companies’ money, both sides win.
About 60 percent of the aluminum used by American companies to make all manner of products comes from Canada. That should be none of Lutnick’s business. In fact, no one should have to give a flying fuck what the commerce secretary—a position that really shouldn’t even exist—thinks about where American businesses source their aluminum (or any other product). What happened to the days when Republicans believed businesses should be free from interference from Washington?
What Lutnick is talking about is central planning, plain and simple. It’s also just silly. How much of America’s aluminum supply should come from Canada if not 60 percent? Is 50 percent the right amount? Is it 17.54 percent? Lutnick doesn’t know—because no one does—because that’s a question without an answer.
“Trump Pledged To Support Tesla. His Trade Policies Will Do the Opposite.”
Juliette Sellgren talks with Rachel Ferguson about civil society.
George Will points out that “NPR and PBS have outlived whatever usefulness they might have had.” Two slices:
If there are any actual, as distinct from merely rhetorical, fiscal hawks in Washington, they should be calling attention to the dismal fact that the government added $838 billion to the national debt in just the first four months of fiscal 2025 (October through January). The lowest of the low-hanging fruit for budget-cutters is the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, an ornamental entity, decorative but inessential.
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An axiom has it: The meek shall inherit the earth, but the affluent shall retain the mineral rights. They also will retain government entitlements for the comfortable, including CPB’s economically and intellectually upscale audiences.
Actually, CPB is like the human appendix — vestigial, purposeless and susceptible to unhealthy episodes. In 2025, it is a cultural redundancy whose remaining rationale is, amusingly, that government should subsidize its programing because so few want it. Commercial broadcasters cater to the vulgar multitude, so the refined few are left out, orphans with nothing to do but pout and reread Proust.
Government funding of CPB’s narrowcasting for its largely affluent constituency resembles agriculture subsidies for agribusiness. And as a critic has said — a defender of government-supported broadcasting — the “N” in NPR stands not for “National” but for “Niche.”
While governments around the globe spent exorbitant sums of money on the pandemic problem, few were as irresponsible as our representatives in the United States. Within the span of a year, Congress, two successive administrations, and the Federal Reserve responded with an unprecedented fiscal and monetary expansion, injecting trillions of dollars into the economy to pay for, among other things, the mass unemployment and business failures they themselves had created. While these interventions were framed as necessary emergency measures, they created long-term distortions that fueled inflation, undermined economic recovery, and exacerbated labor shortages.
The result was the highest US inflation in 40 years, a labor market riddled with perverse incentives, and government dependency that outlasted the crisis. The inflation surge was not an inevitable consequence of the pandemic but rather the predictable outcome of excessive demand fueled by unchecked government spending.
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At the height of the pandemic, 43 state governors imposed stay at home orders, effectively shutting down businesses they deemed “non-essential.” As a result, millions of workers were forcibly idled—a scenario unimaginable before 2020. Empirical evidence to justify these policies on public-health grounds was weak. As economist David Henderson points out, decisions were often driven by worst-case projections rather than by solid data. The economic fallout was catastrophic: by April 2020, unemployment had surged to nearly 15 percent, and GDP contracted by approximately 20 percent during 2020. Studies indicate that more than half of job losses and economic contractions were due to government-imposed restrictions, not the virus itself.
Equally alarming was the arbitrary nature of essential vs. non-essential designations. Large corporate retailers, certain manufacturers, and liquor stores remained open, while small businesses, restaurants, gyms, and independent retailers were forced to close. Many entrepreneurs saw their livelihoods destroyed overnight. The notion that bureaucrats could decide whose job and business mattered and whose did not was a profound and counterproductive violation of economic liberty.
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This bailout culture sets a dangerous precedent. Rather than building cash reserves for downturns, and instead of encouraging cash-strapped companies to restructure through Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the government intervened, reinforcing the expectation that taxpayers will rescue mismanaged firms in future crises. As the head of Delta, Ed Bastian, told his shareholders, the main pandemic lesson was that the government had the airlines’ backs—meaning that the government will compel taxpayers to relieve airlines and other politically influential industries of the need to prudently prepare for, and to deal with, hard times.
A better approach would have let airlines and other large corporations adapt or fail on their own terms, rather than artificially propping them up with public money. Government intervention only postpones the inevitable, while adding to the national debt.
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While the pandemic’s impact on economic freedom was global, the US’s setbacks were particularly stark. Unfortunately, economist Robert Higgs’s “ratchet effect” describes how crises lead to permanent increases in government authority. The Great Depression, World War II, and the post-9/11 era all saw new emergency measures that permanently diminished economic and individual freedom. I fear the Covid Pandemic emergency will be no different.
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