Now available: “Adam Smith Against the Cronies,” a new IWP Podcast episode with Dr. @anne_r_bradley and @DrSamuelGregg.
Watch here: https://t.co/wDXMemBlmI
Wherein I take to the pages of @amspectator to underscore the importance of the American Founding #America250 for the West as a whole. 🧵1/2 (article link in 🧵2/2)
With all due respect, @USTradeRep, since Adam Smith’s time, good theory has helped us understand what happens to the real economy when it is impacted by the type of mercantilist policies that the #Trump administration is pursuing: massive opportunity costs, severe misallocation of #capital, #cronyism on stilts, and declining competitiveness. The costs of all this are borne by consumers - ie 335 million Americans.🇺🇸
If you want to do something concrete about #affordability for #businesses and #consumers, may I suggest that you
1) reverse the present trajectory of US #tradepolicy and stop penalizing Americans from trading with whom they want, and cease the kowtowing to lobbyists seeking privileges for special interests as well as trade lawyers whose very existence (and incomes) depends upon a complicated and difficult-to-navigate tariff schedule.
2) discontinue the use of #industrialpolicy that is just as susceptible to cronyism and pours taxpayer dollars into sectors where there is little to no demand but where there are plenty of rent seekers anxious to persuade everyone that their particular line of business is somehow a vital national security concern.
As for your call for richer empirical tools in @IMFNews, the tools we have for studying trade are quite good, and, thanks to them, we have a very solid grasp of how free trade progressively enriches the United States and discourages Americans and American businesses from becoming uncompetitive and thinking that the world somehow owes us a living.
Certainly, good economic theory, sound empirical inquiry, and the tools with which they furnish us, are always in a state of development. They should be open to critique because that is one way we grow in our understanding of how the real economy works.
But we don’t change the tools because they give us results that some may not like. Indeed, part of the job of economists is to tell us what we may not want to hear: that trade offs are real; that interfering with the price system blinds us to the realities of supply and demand; that undermining property rights damages the general welfare; that #tariffs undermine our competitiveness, etc.
Ignoring these truths serves neither sound inquiry nor the formulation of good policy. And in no world is that good for the #UnitedStates 🇺🇸
Today’s defenders of liberalism are the true revolutionaries, and we must do our part to advance the ideals of the American founding. https://t.co/H5a47JXTjq
@rclu My parents were anti-sleepover in late 90s and 2000s.
However our kids do a lot of sleepovers now. We do limit it to church friends where we know the parents very well. My older kids have way more sleepovers than I ever had.
It’s no secret that the strong commitments to free markets that, at least rhetorically, marked many conservative parties from the 1980s until 2015, are no longer so robust.
Full-throated support for free trade, for example, is hard to find in Donald Trump’s Republican Party.
Other Western centre-right parties have proved more resistant to protectionist sentiment.
Yet influential voices across the Right in Britain are now insisting that we should take a fresh look at another form of interventionism: industrial policy.
This is classically defined as government interventions into specific economic sectors to produce outcomes different to those that would otherwise have been delivered by markets.
Some commentators have even suggested that Communist China provides us with a contemporary case study of industrial policy’s effectiveness.
✍️@DrSamuelGregg
https://t.co/otNzohxaoW
In @CivitasOutlook I argue that one of the greatest achievements of the 2006 #Nobel economist, Edmund Phelps, who died on May 15, was his ground-breaking work on the connection between #economicgrowth, #dynamism, and #values. (link in reply)🧵1/2
Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together. In Jesus Christ, this humanity in its grandeur becomes the Way, the Truth and the Life, opening the path for each of us to grow toward fullness. #MagnificaHumanitas
https://t.co/6i9MWs6LJl
We must, then, avoid the “Babel syndrome,” namely the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak, a uniformity that neutralizes differences, and the pretense that a single language — even a digital one — can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data and performance. This is the risk of dehumanization: building a future that excludes God and reduces the other to a means.
"Independence was as much about the freedom to trade with the world as it was about political self-governance," @DrSamuelGregg argues.
Read his essay for The Civitas Collection 250: https://t.co/rNiyyZ22qX
@jennfrey When I was a kid only the stars were invited to *tryout* for the travel team. Now everyone is on a travel team.
The fun is just in playing ball as a kid.