Pun Salad

But that's exactly what greeted my bleary eyes this morn. Specifically: Stocks, Dollar Nosedive As Trump Flogs Fed.

Ah, well.

Bryan Caplan posts a long and relevant excerpt from his book The Myth of the Rational Voter, dealing with The Political Economy of Faith. (I've left his references intact.)

I read The Myth of the Rational Voter back in 2007; might be time for a reread.

Also of note:

• 

  "Who is more foolish? The fool or the fool who follows him?" Norbert Michel and Jerome Famularo argue that Trying to “Bring Back” Manufacturing Jobs Is a Fool’s Errand. There are graphs at the link, from Norbert's new book, Amazon link at your right.

  The Trump administration’s trade policy has taken a serious beating during the past few weeks, with good reason. Okay, for many good reasons, some of which we’ll expand on in this post.

  But what’s encouraging is that more and more polls suggest Americans understand these trade policies are harmful. And one explanation could be that most Americans recognize that service jobs are good.

  In other words, even though the Trump administration seems bent on “bringing back” manufacturing jobs to the United States, most Americans recognize that service sector jobs have already made America great.

  I realize that Norbert's "encouraging" news pales somewhat in the face of Bryan Caplan's discouraging words about voters.

• Perhaps remedial classes at the local community college would help? Tal Fortgang's LTE in yesterday's WSJ manages to capture my own thoughts precisely: Neither Harvard Nor Trump Gets a Good Grade (gifted link).

  Your editorial “Donald Trump Tries to Run Harvard” (April 16) offers an excellent analysis of the administration’s overreach in bringing Harvard to heel. Federal funding comes with civil-rights strings attached, not viewpoint-diversity strings. Yet no one in Cambridge, Mass., or Washington is handling this affair especially well. Both parties are lumping discrete issues together.

  The government has the better of at least one argument: It can and should use funding as leverage to force Harvard to confront its national-origin-discrimination problem. Harvard admits that it has had severe issues with anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli harassment, and though it settled with one group of Jewish plaintiffs, it remains locked in litigation with others. It is likewise under Education Department investigation for failing to handle discrimination adequately. The school can’t simply claim it is trying its best and expect the feds to go away. It certainly can’t do so without attempting to identify and expel students who harassed Jews and Israelis, or those who led groups that did the same. It is absurd to suggest that federal civil-rights enforcement is a violation of academic freedom. That’s an argument against civil-rights law, not heroic defiance of an overweening government.

  But the Trump administration does itself a disservice when it lumps in related but not fully congruent gripes about how Harvard conducts its academic affairs. The lack of viewpoint diversity may contribute to discrimination—e.g., biasing students against Zionism—but combined with tangential demands about DEI and administrative bloat, it looks as if it’s bullying for the sake of a larger anti-Harvard campaign. If the administration is going to freeze funding due to discrimination, it needs to ensure that it connects its means and ends logically and then follows the proper procedures so it doesn’t lose its progress in court.

  Well said, Tal. Although "connecting means and ends logically" doesn't seem to be Team Orange's strong point.

• In other good news… John Yoo and Robert J. Delahunty think Trump Could Have a Strong Case to Revoke Harvard’s Tax-Exempt Status (gifted link). We've previously alluded to the precedent to which John and Robert refer:

  Thanks to a 1983 Supreme Court opinion widely hailed by progressives at the time, the Trump administration may have stronger grounds than at first appears to reconsider Harvard’s tax status. Harvard is a tax-exempt organization as an educational institution under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. Section 501(c)(3) exempts organizations “operated exclusively for religious, charitable, scientific, testing for public safety, literary, or educational purposes.” Tax-exempt status carries great advantages, because it frees Harvard from federal income tax and its donors can make tax-deductible contributions. Loss of the exemption would cost Harvard an estimated $500 million annually.

  But the IRS can remove 501(c)(3) designation if the organization engages in conduct that violates “established public policy.” The Supreme Court recognized this public policy doctrine in Bob Jones University v. United States (1983). Bob Jones was a private Christian university that prohibited interracial dating and marriage based on its understanding of biblical teachings. The IRS concluded that Bob Jones’s rule violated fundamental national policy. Agreeing with the IRS, the Supreme Court found that the institution’s purpose “must not be so at odds with the common community conscience as to undermine any public benefit that might otherwise be conferred.” It concluded, “it would be wholly incompatible with the concepts underlying tax exemption to grant the benefit of tax-exempt status to racially discriminatory educational entities.”

  John and Robert also note the points on which "e the Trump administration has gone too far in its efforts to reshape Harvard." Which is a shame.

• I'm skeptical of Trump's negotiation talents. But let's see what Stanley Kurtz recommends anyway: Donald Trump vs. Harvard: A Negotiated Education Reform. He recommends this One Weird Trick:

  The solution is suggested by model legislation called General Education Act (GEA), a limited version of which just became law in Utah, and which is likely to be considered by other states in 2026. (I am a co-author of the model GEA.)

  The GEA works by establishing an independent School of General Education, where the governing dean and the newly recruited faculty are committed to a traditional “great books” approach. No doubt such a faculty would proportionately include more conservatives than are typical in academia, yet by no means will the scholars be of a single political stripe. There are still plenty of old-fashioned liberals who believe in a great books approach.

  The distinctive feature of this plan is that the new School of General Education is put in charge of teaching a set of great books and Western Civ–focused courses required of every student at the university in question. This magnifies the reach of a relatively limited number of new academic appointments, because every student has to take at least a few classic-style courses taught by teachers committed to traditionalist methods. Also, the independence of the School of General Education means that its hiring and governance cannot be hampered by hostile faculty or departments.

  Sounds crazy, but it just might work.

JD Vance to Pope Francis a day before the Pope's death:

“It is good to see you in better health.” pic.twitter.com/7va6fMTtVs

— Clash Report (@clashreport) April 21, 2025

And on my dead-trees copy of the WSJ this Easter Monday:

Requiescat in pace, Jorge.

Also of note:

• It's Point/Counterpoint Monday here at Pun Salad. Taking the pro-Harvard point is Angel Eduardo, writing at UnHerd: Harvard's resistance to Trump is a model for US universities.

  They say that where Harvard goes, others follow. For the first time in a while, supporters of free expression on American campuses should hope that’s true.

  Late last week, the Ivy League university received a letter from the federal government demanding changes to its governance, leadership structure, hiring practices, and admissions processes, as well as a “discontinuation of DEI” and reform of “programs with egregious records of antisemitism or other bias”. If it failed to carry out these changes, Harvard would risk losing its government investment. In other words, “Nice school you’ve got there. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.”

  Thankfully, Harvard pushed back. Yesterday the university’s president Alan Garber published a response, firmly committing to the preservation of academic freedom and institutional independence on campus. The government’s mandates, Garber wrote, “[threaten] our values as a private institution devoted to the pursuit, production, and dissemination of knowledge. No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.”

  Fine. I'm a fan of free expression on American campuses too.

  I will only point out that it's been 14 years since a similar ("Dear Colleague") letter went out to all universities demanding significant changes handling alleged sex-related misbehavior, significantly eroding due-process protections for the accused. There was pushback on that, but not much significant resistance came from university administration or faculty.

  In fact, one University Near Here scheduled a big ceremony celebrating that announcement.

  So go figure.

• Jonathan Turley's counterpoint does not lead off with "Angel, you ignorant slut." His headline at the Hill: Crimson chide: Harvard makes the case against itself

  Harvard faculty members are finally upset about free speech and viewpoint intolerance. Hundreds of professors signed a letter of outrage over what they called an attack on the “rights of free expression, association, and inquiry” in higher education.

  The cause for this outcry is the threat to end the university’s tax exempt status, freezing federal grants, and other punitive measures. Some of those measures raise serious concerns over academic freedom and free speech.

  The problem is that Harvard faculty members have spent decades denying those rights to teachers and students alike.

  There is an almost comical lack of self-awareness among Harvard faculty members who express concern about protecting viewpoint diversity and academic integrity. The letter gives off that same queasy feeling as when CBS morning host Gayle King insisted she is an astronaut, just like Alan Shepard, due to her 10-minute jaunt in space on the Blue Origin. One is just left speechless, looking awkwardly at one’s shoes.

  Many of these signatories have been entirely silent for years as departments purged their ranks of conservatives to create one of the most perfectly sealed-off echo chambers in all of higher education. Harvard ranks dead last for free speech, awarded a 0 out of 100 score last year by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. There has been no outcry about this from most of these professors.

  I have to give gold stars to both Angel and Jonathan. "Both make good points."

• Tired of all the "winning". Karl Rove takes the pulse of the electorate and diagnoses: America Gets Trump Fatigue (gifted link). .

  We aren’t 100 days into Donald Trump’s second term and many Americans are already exhausted. They’ve had way too much thrown at them.

  Voters made crystal clear what they sought during the 2024 election. They wanted prices to come down and the economy revved up. The Southern border had to be closed, our military strengthened and a strong leader installed in the Oval Office.

  Some of that we’re getting, especially regarding the border. Other things—the rebuilding of the military—appear to be in the works.

  But on the key issue of the economy, Americans aren’t happy. Mr. Trump’s campaign promise to break inflation has been replaced by a fixation on raising tariffs, which nearly three-quarters of Americans expect to hike prices. We’re also confused: Is the goal getting trading partners to lower their tariffs on U.S. goods and services? Or replacing our income tax with high tariffs on foreign goods?

  Rove represents Conventional Republican Wisdom, which is out of favor these days. Sad!

• Written before he killed the Pope. Andrew C. McCarthy reminds us that the Veep should, and almost certainly does, know better, but JD Vance Pretends Due Process Is Beside the Point (gifted link).

  JD Vance is a smart fellow. That’s why he’s often infuriating — too smart not to know that the nonsense he spouts is nonsense. Well-framed nonsense, to be sure. Demagoguery, to be effective, has to be well framed: A grandiloquent rationalization for shredding the Constitution has to be pitched as a defense of constitutional principle if, as the speaker intends, the former is to be taken by the listener as the latter. All the while, though, the speaker knows exactly what he’s doing.

  Vice President Vance issued one of his claptrap-laden diatribes on social media Wednesday, slamming “the media and the far left” who are “weeping over the lack of due process” in the Trump administration’s illegal deportations of people it alleges — probably correctly in most instances — are members of criminal gangs. Vance spotlights Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the illegal alien and Salvadoran national whom — the Trump Justice Department itself has confessed to the Supreme Court — the administration unlawfully deported to El Salvador.

  It is natural for Vance to dwell on Abrego Garcia. It’s topical, after all, with the administration cruising toward being held in contempt by a federal judge (I should say, yet another federal judge) because it is stonewalling about its flouting of an order, endorsed by the Supreme Court, that it facilitate his return to the United States. It’s an order with which the administration could easily comply but it has decided to ignore. The best explanation is the simplest: Trump intends to illustrate that he has amassed uncheckable power. That is, having extirpated what made the Republican Party conservative and constitutionalist, and with Congress thus no obstacle (at least for the next 21 months), the president wants it known that such constitutional constraints on executive power as courts and due process are no longer operative.

  If you want to hit Andy with arguments involving hypocrisy and whataboutism, feel free. You won't be wrong. But that doesn't make him wrong.

At Reason, Jack Nicastro, not a Trump fan, looks at three issues which "are just some of the positions that the commander in chief's supporters must walk on eggshells while discussing to avoid looking overly scrambled." And the article is amusingly headlined: The yolk’s on you!

On tariffs:

This is Pun Salad, and readers have to expect vile punning now and then. And (by the way) there's a secular eggy theme at Reason on this Holy Weekend, and links to the relevant articles are provided here.

Also of note:

• Just keep the cash coming, Uncle Stupid. Paul Mueller looks at the current imbroglio between the Trump Administration and Higher Ed, and waxes indignant: Hands Off the University, Indeed.

  Administrators are right to chant, “hand off my university!” We should want the federal government’s hands off universities. We can start by removing its tentacles from student loan financing. No more FAFSAs. No more Pell grants. This, by the way, would save taxpayers nearly $30 billion annually.

  Then, we can remove government research grants, whether for the arts and humanities or for science and medicine. The $40 billion to $50 billion of federal tax dollars spent annually at research universities could be used to pay down national debt (or at least to reduce the deficit).

  In 2018, colleges and universities received roughly $150 billion in federal money through a variety of programs. That’s a lot of government “hands” on the higher education system. If universities want those hands off, they should refuse the money.

  This laissez-faire attitude works both ways, y'know.

• But as entertaining as educrat-baiting can be… The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) says this as if it were a bad thing: Revoking Harvard’s tax-exempt status will threaten all nonprofits. They (correctly) note that such threats should not be used to suppress dissenting political viewpoints in curricula, admissions, or hiring. So let's skip down to:

  Many who support Trump set aside the president’s ideological justifications for removing Harvard’s tax-exempt status. They instead argue the targeting is justified because of the college’s alleged acts of discrimination, both with regard to allegations of anti-Semitism on its campus and the Supreme Court’s 2023 finding in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard that its admissions program was racially discriminatory. They point to the Court’s 1983 decision in Bob Jones University v. United States, in which it upheld the IRS’s decision to strip that university’s tax exemption because of its rules banning interracial dating and marriage.

  However, the Court emphasized in that case that revoking tax-exempt status is a “sensitive” decision that should be made only when there is “no doubt” that an organization violates fundamental and longstanding federal policy, emphasizing policy agreement among all branches of government. Federal attention to Bob Jones University’s tax-exempt status spanned four different presidential administrations and left the public no reason to think the grounds for revocation were pretextual. Today, by contrast, the president is explicitly targeting a university specifically for its expression and ideological reasons.

  FIRE's arguments are not totally convincing to me, as they seem to reduce to "this is different" hand-waving. Still, see what you think.

• See if you can guess what they are. Kat Rosenfield relays: Mel Robbins Has Two Words for America’s Control Freaks.

  If you, like me, have absolutely no idea who Mel is, Kat will fill you in. Instead we will skip down to the spoiler:

  

  … [W]while [Mel's] strategy for content creation is enviable, her real gift is being deeply attuned to what troubles the psyches of her mostly female, digital native audience—and her new book is a direct challenge to our era of collective control freakiness, in the form of a two-word mantra that provides part of the title:

  Let Them.

  The book is “a step-by-step guide on how to stop letting other people's opinions, drama, and judgment impact your life.” Like Robbins’s other published works, this one began with a viral moment on social media: “I just heard about this thing called the “Let Them Theory” and holy crap… I absolutely LOVE this!!!!” she posted on Instagram in 2023. “Stop wasting energy on trying to get other people to meet YOUR expectations. Just LET THEM show you who they truly are.” That reel garnered almost 1.5 million likes, while a similar post on Robbins’s TikTok collected more than 20 million.

  Amazon link at your right, and if you click over, you'll note how woefully out of the zeitgeist I am: "#1 New York Times Bestseller; #1 Sunday Times Bestseller; #1 Amazon Bestseller; #1 Audible Bestseller". Sheesh. As confessed above, I really had no idea.

• Least surprising news of 2024? Gotta be close, anyway. Tevi Troy looks at some now-it-can-be-told revelations from last year: Even Hollywood Couldn’t Save Biden (Gifted Link).

  Joe Biden received advice from Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg before his June debate against Donald Trump, according to a new book by Chris Whipple. Given that it was probably the worst presidential debate performance in history, it’s no wonder they haven’t bragged about it.

  “Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History” recounts how the Hollywood moguls advised Mr. Biden over Zoom on how to answer questions. Mr. Katzenberg then spent a week at Camp David to work with Mr. Biden on his body language in front of a camera.

  There’s a long history of Hollywood types advising Democrats on debates. Every Democratic president since 1960 who has participated in a general-election debate has received debate advice from Tinseltown. It started with the director Arthur Penn, who advised John F. Kennedy before Kennedy’s 1960 debate against Richard Nixon. JFK was smooth and effective on television while Nixon, who sounded fine on radio, looked pasty and sweaty to those watching at home.

  Hollywood big brains couldn't save Snow White. Nobody should have expected them to save Joe.

• Another argument for a Dispatch subscription, if you need one. It's Kevin D. Williamson musing on The Wrong Kind of Abundance. Winning me over is his leadoff quote from Friedrich Hayek's Nobel Prize lecture in 1974:

  “I am … inclined to suggest that you require from your laureates an oath of humility, a sort of Hippocratic oath, never to exceed in public pronouncements the limits of their competence.”

  And KDW continues:

  Forgive me for how precious-sounding this is, but: If you really want to understand COVID politics in the United States, you have to unwind American political history all the way back to 1776—and a bit before, getting to know that character who shouldn’t exist but somehow does: the conservative revolutionary.

  COVID unleashed a lot of different kinds of crazy in the United States, and, on the right, it broke the dam for a special kind of crazy, the kind that leads to the embrace of crackpots such as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Of course, the political group that we now call, broadly speaking, the American right has always been convulsed by irreconcilable contradictions because the American project itself is founded in a paradox: There is, strictly speaking, no such thing as a conservative revolution, but that is approximately what the Founding Fathers carried out. And from the New Deal through to the present, the right has been torn between its conservative tendencies and its revolutionary tendencies. Dwight Eisenhower called himself a “progressive conservative”; William F. Buckley Jr. called himself a ”radical conservative” and insisted that whatever it was his new movement was going to stand for, it was against Eisenhower.

  Among the founders, there were plenty of wild-eyed utopians and radicals, but the revolution ended up being led by relatively conservative figures such as George Washington and John Adams (who had originally opposed separating from England) and others of similar temperament, who made the case that they were not so much overturning a legitimate political order as restoring and securing their ancient rights as Englishmen. The American project is a marriage between the forces of conservatism (property and religion) and the forces of radicalism (majoritarianism, disestablishmentarianism, etc.), and, to the extent that the American right acts as a conservator of the American tradition, it feels those contradictions deeply.

  As we just passed the 250th anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, it might be time to reflect on what we owe to those guys.

Recently on the book blog:

… although, technically, this might not be one:

I think I'm on more solid ground with Daniel Lyons' essay at AEI: Bastiat and What is Not Seen in Tech Policy.

But it's not just trade policy of course; the seen/unseen feature extends to tech policy too, for example:

In tech policy, “what is not seen” often involves stifled innovation—products or services that never emerge due to regulation. Net neutrality offers a clear example. Advocates celebrated its visible effects: bans on blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization preserved existing network management practices, allowing competition among internet-based edge providers. But these rules prevented broadband companies from experimenting with alternative business models. For example, in 2014, Sprint sought to offer a wireless plan with unlimited talk, text, and one social media app of your choice at a lower price than its unlimited broadband plan. But it scrapped the idea when critics complained it violated net neutrality by favoring one service over others. Such plans thrived abroad but remained unseen in US markets, to the detriment of budget-conscious American consumers. In 2024, similar concerns arose that net neutrality could hinder network slicing, a 5G innovation enabling customized network performance but which potentially violated prioritization rules.

And more examples exist at the link. Finally, Tyler Cowen provides a chuckle with his headline: Bastiat's revenge. He points to a San Francisco Chronicle article titled (as I type): San Francisco auto glass shops suffering as car break-ins drop. (Semi-paywalled, archived here.)

I'm sure Hank Wee has already received multiple pointers to Bastiat's essay. No need for us to pile on.

Also of note:

• Fallacies can be addictive. And none more so than Fentanyl Fallacies, amirite? Kevin D. Williamson writes:

  Fentanyl is a wonder drug.

  Not only is it useful for managing severe pain (e.g., for cancer patients and burn victims) but it also provides policy cover for … whatever.

  Donald Trump’s senior economic adviser, Kevin Hassett, knows that Trump’s tariff policy is dumb and destructive, and it is very difficult to make an economic case for it, so he insists that the tariffs are really part of a fentanyl interdiction policy. Trump would like to blame illegal immigrants for everything from heartbreak to psoriasis, and he reliably invokes fentanyl trafficking in his litany of immigration denunciations.

  The problem is that—as so often is the case with Trump and his sycophants—the facts do not quite line up with the story he would like to tell.

  Relevant facts, summed up in KDW's subhed: "Illegal immigrants aren’t the ones bringing it in, and overdose deaths are decreasing."

  But a final fact remains: "there were about 87,000 overdose deaths in the United States in the 12 months ending in September 2024". Attributable in large part to the "war on drugs".

• Like a library book left at the beach last summer… The NR editors say Defunding PBS and NPR Is Long Overdue.

  President Trump is expected to push for ending $1.1 billion in federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the organization that funnels taxpayer money to PBS and NPR.

  Under the move, he would send a memo to Congress asking them to either rescind the funding, or restore it. The rescission process is not subject to the Senate filibuster, so only a majority of both houses need to concur with the president’s request. House and Senate Republicans should seize the opportunity to cut off the broadcasters.

  In principle, there is no reason why the federal government should be in the business of funding news and entertainment programming. It does not serve an essential purpose and could easily be financed privately. But if the government is going to be in the broadcasting business, it should at least not be one-sidedly political.

  Put on your Nikes and Just Do It, Congress.

• So you're saying there's a chance! George Will looks at the odds in favor: The Supreme Court gets a chance to rebuke schools’ bullying wokeism.

  In this centennial year of two memorable events in the fraught history of public K-12 education, Montgomery County, a progressive Washington suburb, has kindled another controversy about government power and parental rights. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear oral argument concerning whether children can be exempted from instruction that their parents consider contrary to their religious beliefs. The parents say this compulsory instruction violates their First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion.

  In November 2022, the county’s board of education mandated for elementary school pupils “LGBTQ-inclusive” storybooks featuring gender transitions, same-sex playground romance, and questioning “cisnormativity” and “power hierarchies.” The picture book “Pride Puppy!” asks students to search a Pride Parade for “underwear,” “leather” and a “lip ring.” Another picture book invites kindergarten through fifth-grade readers to ponder what it means to be “nonbinary” and asks “what pronouns fit you?”

  So those kids in Bethesda, Silver Spring, and Olney may not know how to read, or add, but they'll fer darn tootin' be able to spot lip rings.

  Note this is not a "censorship" case; parents are simply asking to have their kids unexposed to Pride Puppy! and the like.

• Turned out "Liberation Day" was followed pretty quickly by… … people being liberated from wage slavery! As Eric Boehm reports: Trump's tariffs are starting to kill American jobs.

  The Trump administration believes that high tariffs will boost the prospects of American manufacturing, but one iconic truck company is now preparing to lay off hundreds of workers—because of the tariffs.

  For more than a century, the Mack Trucks plant on the outskirts of Allentown, Pennsylvania, has been churning out heavy equipment to haul stuff from place to place. It is one of the largest employers in the region, providing hundreds of the good-paying, blue-collar jobs that President Donald Trump and his allies want to promote in America.

  Some of those jobs are about to disappear. Mack Trucks will lay off between 250 and 350 workers over the next few weeks, the Pennsylvania Capital-Star reports. A company spokesperson told the Capital-Star that the layoffs are due to "market uncertainty about freight rates and demand" and "the impact of tariffs."

  As Peter, Paul and Mary used to sing: Take me for a ride in your Mack Truck… Mac. :

Recently on the book blog:

On this Good (but not Great) Friday, I'm interested in the Trump-Harvard War. Like most things, Trump's doing a mixture of good, iffy, and awful things. One potentially good thing is a righteous weapon, as described by John Hinderaker: Harvard, Meet Bob Jones. Led off by:

People should familiarize themselves with Bob Jones University v. United States, 461 U.S. 574 (1983). https://t.co/Oqt1IFraoq

— Randy Barnett (@RandyEBarnett) April 15, 2025

And John continues:

I am not a lawyer, but if this isn't a slam-dunk for revoking Harvard's 501(c)(3) status, someone will need to explain why it isn't using very small words.

The NR editors don't have a lot of sympathy for Team Crimson: Harvard Discovers What Federal Money Costs. And note that there is adequate precedent for going beyond the 501(c)(3) thing:

I didn't like the Obama/Biden pressure on universities, and I wouldn't like Trump's use of the same tactic. Still, the right time to complain about it was back then.

On that note, as Robby Soave points out: Obama is a huge hypocrite for praising Harvard's anti-Trump stance. Specifically:

Harvard has set an example for other higher-ed institutions – rejecting an unlawful and ham-handed attempt to stifle academic freedom, while taking concrete steps to make sure all students at Harvard can benefit from an environment of intellectual inquiry, rigorous debate and… https://t.co/gAu9UUqgjF

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) April 15, 2025

So I said "good, iffy, and awful" above, so let's go to the "awful". At Cato, Walter Olson points out the unconstitutional overreach: Feds Can't Regulate "Ideological Diversity" at Schools Like Harvard.

So, yeah, Trump shouldn't do that. But (good news) the 501(c)(3) thing all by itself would make universities freak out. Bigly. Stick to that, Team Orange.

Also of note:

• I can't say enough good things about Dominic Pino. He uses his substitute perch doing Geraghty's Morning Jolt newsletter to tell us What’s Really Going On with U.S. Manufacturing. It's long and full of eye-openers. RTWT, but here's a sobering stat:

  A U.S. manufacturing worker in 2010 was twice as productive as a U.S. manufacturing worker in 1990. A U.S. manufacturing worker in 2025 is slightly less productive than a U.S. manufacturing worker in 2010.

  This is an example of why targeting job growth is not a very good economic policy. There are all sorts of ways to create jobs that don’t make people better off. There’s the famous example of Milton Friedman surveying a construction site in China and being told by the authorities that the workers were using shovels instead of machinery so that more people could have jobs. Friedman suggested that if they really wanted to create jobs, they should give them spoons instead of shovels.

  A bookstore in Chelsea, Mich., recently moved to a new location about a block away, and to transport its 9,100 books, a few hundred people stood in a line on the sidewalk and passed each book to one another. This was just a fun publicity stunt, of course, but if creating jobs was your sole economic goal, it would be a good policy to ban trucks and force all goods to be transported this way.

  The problem with U.S. manufacturing, to the extent that there is one, is that it isn’t destroying enough jobs. When all those jobs were being destroyed in the ’90s and ’00s, the workers who were left were becoming much more productive. Output has been rising despite workers becoming slightly less productive over the past 15 years, only because employment has been increasing.

  On a historical note: Hitler decreed that the massive 1936 Olympic Stadium be made by hand as much as possible, even when machines could have done the job quicker. For precisely those "job creation" reasons.

• I'm not a RINO! You're the RINO! I would imagine that's being said a lot behind D.C. closed doors. Kimberly A. Strassel notes Whispers of a ‘Millionaire Tax’ . (gifted link)

  A popular knock on this second Donald Trump term is that the president stocked his administration with nothing but saluting loyalists. Tell that to the staffers scheming to undercut his signature tax reform—by “managing” him into surrendering to the left’s favorite talking point.

  A (delighted) mainstream media several weeks ago started writing stories about a new Republican interest in raising taxes on “the rich”—namely hiking the top individual tax rate from 37% to 40%, higher than even under Barack Obama. These reports all come from anonymous White House officials, and always take care to insinuate Mr. Trump is “open” to this idea—despite his never saying so.

  This is an awful idea. Nikki Haley wouldn't be "open" to it, I betcha.

• Among the many Washington fixtures we don't need… Daniel J. Mitchell says We Don’t Need Two Class-Warfare Political Parties. Looking at the advocacy of Steve Bannon and Henry Olson:

  They make a political argument that the GOP will benefit politically if it embraces class warfare.

  I’m very skeptical. If voters want that approach, they’ll go for Bernie Sanders and AOC. And I’ll observe that the Republican presidents who supported higher tax rates, Richard Nixon and George H.W. Bush, are not exactly role models of political acumen and success.

  Pro-tax increase Republicans also argue that higher burdens on the rich can help finance some of Trump’s goofy tax proposals, such as no tax on tips or overtime. That’s true, at least on paper, but that doesn’t change the fact that more tax loopholes and higher tax rates is exactly the wrong direction for tax policy.

  Dan notes (however) that it's "risky" to rely on Trump's devotion to principle on this, like many other things.

Recently on the book blog:

Making the rounds:

Yes, I'm pretty tired of argument-by-cliché, especially the one that says that Trump's tariffs are meant to "level the playing field". We wouldn't like it if that happened.

Also of note:

• Fingers crossed that Betteridge's Law of Headlines doesn't apply… to Jesse Walker's headline query: Are public broadcasters about to lose their subsidies?

  Will the federal government cut off its subsidies to public broadcasters this year? The New York Post reports that the White House's "rescissions" plan will include a request that Congress withdraw $1.1 billion already appropriated for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). That wouldn't be absolutely everything Washington spends on public media—The New York Times notes that the administration doesn't plan to claw back some money being spent on emergency communications—but it's close.

  If you've been following the politics of public broadcasting for a while, this will sound familiar. There is a long history of Republicans calling for an end to such subsidies, but they have never actually done the deed. They often don't even reduce the money that goes to NPR, PBS, and the rest—and when they do, it's just a short time before the broadcasters' budget is higher than it was before. Instead, the usual effect of these standoffs is for the networks to appease the GOP by hiring some conservatives and/or getting rid of some programming conservatives don't like. That pattern is so well-established that I've come to see those hirings and firings as the point: Republican leaders use the threat of cutting the broadcasters loose as a way to keep them in line. President Donald Trump certainly hasn't been shy about using federal purse strings to bend institutions to his will, so it's not hard to assume that he's doing the same thing here that he's been doing with, say, universities.

  But the dynamics may be different this time. There is a chance—a chance—that this year the CPB's subsidies will actually stop.

  CPB's "Emergency Services" role is described here. Sounds like a decent use of taxpayer cash, but I'm not sure it couldn't be moved elsewhere in the bureaucracy, like Homeland Security.

  If you need it: Betteridge's law of headlines.

• 

  They are supposed to be into education, so why do they never learn? I'm currently reading Abigail Shrier's latest book, Bad Therapy, Amazon link at your right. She argues, pretty convincingly, that schools' increasing focus on their students' mental health is misguided, and making things worse. One feature: intrusive "surveys" of the kiddos asking personal and troubling questions about sex, self-harm, parental abuse, and the like. Which would be bad enough, but Abigail also details the woeful lack of security with which the resulting data is handled.

  So you might think schools might take such criticism to heart, and hasten and chasten to lock down sensitive data. Well, the memo doesn't seem to have reached Seattle, according to Emma Camp: Seattle schools botched privacy on a mental health survey.

  A mental health survey administered to Seattle-area middle and high schoolers is putting their sensitive personal information at risk, according to a February investigation from The Seattle Times and the education-focused outlet The 74. While parents and schools were sold on the survey as a tool to identify struggling
students, a public records request showed just how invasive many survey questions are.

  The survey, called Check Yourself, takes around 12 minutes to complete and asks students about general demographic features, along with questions about their mental health. For example, it asks students, "During the past year, did you ever seriously think about ending your life?" According to The 74, King County, which includes Seattle, has spent more than $21 million on the survey and related mental health supports since 2018.

  With Pun Son and Pun Daughter safely out of school, I guess we dodged that bullet. But Pun Daughter works in a public school, so I'll probably ask her about it.

• Delusion caused by exposure to compost fumes, I assume. John Tierney is an expert on the follies of recycling, so it's only a short hop to his latest exposé: New York City’s Composting Delusion.

  After forcing New Yorkers to spend billions of dollars for the privilege of sorting their garbage into recycling bins, municipal officials have found an even costlier—and grubbier—way for residents to spend their time in the kitchen. They must now separate food waste into compost bins or face new fines imposed by the city’s garbage police, who will be digging through trash looking for verboten coffee grounds and onion peels.

  Composting is the most nonsensical form of municipal recycling: it delivers little, if any, environmental benefit at the highest cost. In addition to wasting people’s time, it attracts rats to compost facilities, puts more fuel-burning trucks on the road, and diverts tax dollars from what was once a core priority of the Department of Sanitation—keeping the streets clean. Whatever its appeal to suburbanites with yards and gardens, composting is absurdly impractical in a city—especially one facing a massive budget deficit.

  I have half-hearted composting piles out back. I haven't taken out any "finished" compost for a long time, though. Might try again this year.

• Appears to be 1A-problematic. Back last September we saw a ham-handed effort by the Bow NH schools to punish parents protesting the inclusion of a biological boy on a team opposing their daughters' on the soccer field. Their crime was wearing pink armbands emblazoned with XX; they were hit with a police-enforced "no trespassing" order.

  The latest act in this drama is covered by NHJournal, which says (yes) we might make a Federal case out of it: AG Bondi Says Feds Are Looking Into Bow High School 'XX' Wristband Case.

  U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi announced Tuesday night her department is looking into the Bow High School free speech case in the wake of Monday’s controversial ruling by a federal judge.

  United States District Court Judge Steven McAuliffe ruled Bow High School has the right to ban parents from wearing pink XX wristbands to girls’ soccer games to show their opposition to allowing biological males to compete against females. The judge said the protests weren’t protected speech, and he accused the parents of “harassing” individual trans-identifying athletes.

  The Trump administration has issued executive orders instructing schools to protect women’s sports and spaces from biological males, and Bondi is clearly not happy with the judge’s decision.

  As previously noted, New Hampshire is fertile ground for First Amendment cases.

• (Blue) Spam in a can. Dave Barry has comments on Blue Origin's latest stunt mission:

  I know I speak for all of us when I say that we will never forget exactly where we were this past Monday at 9:31 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time. It is a memory that we will keep forever, a memory that is imprinted on our brains as indelibly as the guacamole stain on our pillowcase from the time we attempted to eat a Burrito Supreme in bed. That is how unforgettable this memory is.

  In case you've forgotten, I am referring to the launch of the historic Blue Origin space mission, which had us all literally riveted to our TV screens with literal rivets as we watched a historic astronaut crew consisting of Katy Perry, Jeff Bezos's fiancé, Oprah Winfrey's close personal friend Gayle King and several other historic women embark on a historic journey that lasted for nearly 11 historic minutes, during which they traveled, via space, from west Texas to a slightly different part of west Texas.

  Blue Origin will happily accept your application for a future flight, and even more happily will accept an accompanying $150,000 deposit.

  I think that even with Disney's insane pricing, a bunch of rides on Space Mountain would be less than that.

  "Spam in a can" is how Chuck Yeager described the Mercury program astronauts, who didn't have much control over their capsules, other than firing attitude thrusters and retrorockets.

But they are aptly illustrated by Mr. Ramirez:

And Dominic Pino has his own small example, expressed as a question: What Is It With Protectionists and Tomatoes? (gifted link) Under the current plan, tomatoes coming in from Mexico will be taxed at 20.91% starting July 14.

As Dominic goes on to point out: it's the classic story of public choice: large benefits flow to the politically-connected, the diffused costs are imposed on everyone else.

Let me just tag on Don Boudreaux's commentary to a anti-protectionist passage from an 1883 book by William Graham Sumner:

Duh. As the kids say.

Also of note:

• A tempting target, I admit. The WSJ editorialists note the horse in the hospital: Donald Trump Tries to Run Harvard. (gifted unlocked article)

  The Trump Administration on Monday froze $2.2 billion in funds to Harvard after the university refused to surrender to its sweeping demands. Few Americans will shed tears for the Cambridge crowd, but there are good reasons to oppose this unprecedented attempt by government to micromanage a private university.

  Stipulate that the feds have a duty to enforce civil-rights laws, and Harvard failed to protect Jewish students during anti-Israel protests. But the university agreed to strengthen protections for Jewish students in a legal settlement with Students Against Antisemitism, which praised it for “implementing effective long-term changes.”

  The Trump Administration nonetheless demanded last week that Harvard accede to what is effectively a federal receivership under threat of losing $9 billion. Some of the demands are within the government’s civil-rights purview, such as requiring Harvard to discipline students who violate its discrimination policies. It also wants Harvard to “shutter all diversity, equity and inclusion” programs, under “whatever name,” that violate federal law.

  Reader, can you guess the next word? Here it comes:

  But the Administration runs off the legal rails by ordering Harvard to reduce “governance bloat, duplication, or decentralization.” It also orders the school to review “all existing and prospective faculty . . . for plagiarism” and ensure “viewpoint diversity” in “each department, field, or teaching unit.”

  Yeah, that's not good.

  ("Horse in the hospital" reference explained here.)

• And then there's the "C" problem. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) cheers Strange New Respect for Constitutional protections: Harvard stands firm, rejects Trump administration’s unconstitutional demands.

  Last Friday, three federal agencies sent a demand letter to Harvard University laying out conditions for the university to continue receiving federal funds. The letter is unprecedented in its scope. It would essentially render Harvard a vassal institution, subjecting much of its corporate and academic governance to federal directives.

  If Harvard acceded to these demands, faculty hiring, student admissions, student and faculty disciplinary procedures, university programming decisions, student group recognition processes, and much more would be transformed to align with the government's ideological preferences.

  FIRE goes into detail on the demands, and (like Harvard) finds them intrusive, arbitrary, vague, discriminatory, and (once again) unconstitutional.

• The Federalist shakes its pom-poms. Let's look at the quality of Eddie Scarry's advocacy, although you can get a feel for it from the headline: Harvard: Hating Trump Is More Important Than Helping People.

  But as we’ve seen before, it’s often more important to Democrats and institutions like Harvard to pick a losing fight, so long as it puts them at odds with the president. They claim to oppose government waste and then devote every fiber of their being to ensuring not one dollar is cut from the federal bureaucracy. They pretend to support sensible immigration enforcement and then spend what has now been a month demanding foreign nationals with deportation orders be brought back to the U.S. Now Harvard says it will forego money supposedly crucial to its academic research and global advancement, and Democrats applaud it as an act of brave defiance.

  Whatever you say, sweaty!

  If it’s a win for Harvard to reject billions in taxpayer dollars, here’s to more wins all around.

  I can't help but wonder if Eddie meant to say "sweetie" instead of "sweaty" there. Cheerleaders are not known for their careful spelling.

• A balanced take. And it's from Charles Lane at the Free Press: Harvard Had It Coming. That Doesn’t Mean Trump Is Right.

  There was no way, consistent with academic freedom, for Harvard to accept the administration’s demand to “audit the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity, such that each department, field, or teaching unit must be individually viewpoint diverse.” Actually, it’s not immediately clear how such a provision could be precisely defined, let alone consistently enforced.

  And this was one of several such proposed conditions that Harvard’s interim president, Alan Garber, correctly described as an attempt “to control teaching and learning at Harvard and to dictate how we operate.”

  If the administration were sincerely interested in the very real problems of antisemitism and intellectual diversity on campus, the university plausibly argues, it might have given Harvard credit for positive steps it has taken since coming under pressure, both internal and external, 15 months ago over its feckless response to anti-Israel campus protests and antisemitic incidents on campus.

  And yet any sympathy for Harvard has to be tempered by the knowledge that the school—and others like it—brought much of their current predicament on themselves.

  The expression “they’re framing a guilty man” comes to mind. This is the university that once penalized a law professor, Ronald Sullivan, for serving as legal counsel for Harvey Weinstein, widely reviled as an accused rapist, but constitutionally entitled to a defense. Harvard subsequently promoted another dean to president, Claudine Gay, who gave key verbal support to student protests against Sullivan.

  Another expression coming to mind: "Pass the popcorn."

• Also making good points is… Christopher F. Rufo, also at the Free Press: The Right Is Winning the Battle over Higher Education. Get 'em, Chris:

  In 2020, the author Christopher Caldwell changed the conversation with his book The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties. The book argued that the civil-rights regime established in the 1960s marked a fundamental departure from America’s constitutional tradition. Though launched with the noble intention of stopping racial discrimination, Caldwell argued, the Civil Rights Act—and the bureaucracy it spawned—gradually consumed core American freedoms and became a vehicle for entrenching left-wing racialist ideology throughout American institutions.

  In the decades that followed, the right’s response was marked by ambivalence. Some libertarians called for repealing the Civil Rights Act, but—like many libertarian proposals—this was never a political possibility, given the Act’s broad public support. The establishment right, meanwhile, largely suppressed its private misgivings. Republicans repeatedly voted to expand the civil-rights regime, further embedding dubious concepts like disparate impact theory (the idea that discrimination can occur even inadvertently) into law.

  Now, all of this has changed. After mounting a successful fight against DEI, the political right has come to accept that if there must be a civil-rights regime, it should be one of its own making. Rather than continue to defer to left-wing interpretations of civil-rights law, the right can now advance a framework grounded in color-blind equality, not racialist ideology.

  Better still: a color-blind interpretation of the CRA is a much more natural fit than "disparate impact".

  If only the Trump Administration had stuck to that, instead of overreaching…

Nevertheless, Andrew Heaton provided some solid laughs too:

In the meantime, as Liberty Unyielding describes: Congress votes to increase budget deficits by $2 trillion over the next decade.

We've always muddled through this sort of fiscal mess before, but this could be different, in a very bad way.

Also of note:

• A contrarian take. And it's from Tyler Cowen at his new Free Press gig: The Conventional Wisdom Is That China Is Beating Us. Nonsense.

  Even before Trump’s “Liberation Day” and the market volatility it ushered in, a deep pessimism had already set in among the pointy-headed class of which I am a reluctant member.

  At nearly every conference, in nearly every WhatsApp group, and in most mainstream media commentary, the conventional wisdom has been clear: China is ascendant. A combination of their discipline and their manufacturing expertise—coupled with our decadence and profound vulnerability with high-quality semiconductor chips made in Taiwan—has made the Chinese century inevitable. The only question is how we are going to manage our own decline.

  I am not convinced.

  These people are right that the world is on the verge of some major geopolitical changes that will fundamentally reshape the world, particularly the relationship between America and China. But they are changes that are far more radical than whatever the tariff rate will wind up being—and changes that I believe will largely favor the United States and disfavor China.

  Tyler's interesting take: AI is going to revolutionize everything, and AI "will not just be Western but likely even American in their intellectual and ideological orientations for some while to come."

• How to be as nice as possible to Trump, while pointing out that his policies are awful. At City Journal, Allison Schrager manages to impressively thread that needle: Trump Is Right About Unfair Trade, but Tariffs Aren’t the Right Fix.

  With most of President Donald Trump’s policies—even the seemingly more outlandish ones—there’s often an important underlying truth. On tariffs, a long-standing priority of his, he raises valid concerns. American exporters frequently face disadvantages: other countries impose tariff and non-tariff barriers, while the U.S. has traditionally kept its markets more open.

  Where Trump goes wrong is in overlooking a counterintuitive reality about international trade: retaliation usually harms the retaliator most. Tariff costs are typically borne by domestic consumers and businesses. This is partly why the U.S. economy, despite foreign trade barriers, often grows faster and proves more productive than other advanced economies.

  Sure: American producers would prefer to easily sell stuff overseas. It would be nice if other countries lowered tariffs and dropped their non-tariff trade barriers to allow that to happen. But (as Allison says) those tariffs and barriers primarily hurt those countries' consumers and businesses.

  As I'm sure has been said by wiser people than I: just because other countries shooot themselves in the foot doesn't mean we should shoot ourselves too.

• Muh meds! What about muh meds! Jeffrey A. Singer makes a point you would think to be obvious: Making Medicine Cost More Won’t Make America Healthy Again.

  Last week, President Donald Trump told a National Republican Congressional Committee audience that he intends to impose tariffs on pharmaceutical products entering the United States soon. Finished pharmaceutical products and active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) are not subject to the tariffs imposed last week. He hopes to “re-shore” pharmaceutical manufacturing. American patients, already facing declining health care access and rising health care costs, should brace for even greater challenges.

  Not that it matters, but I'm on five medications currently saving my life. And they are dead cheap. Can't wait until Trump fixes that.

• The feelgood label does not inspire confidence. But Paul McDonnold has something else in mind: The Problem With Wellbeing Economics.

  This May in Reykjavik, Iceland, the elegantly modern Harpa Concert Hall and Conference Center will host a meeting of academics, policy makers, business leaders, and politicians known as The Wellbeing Economy Forum . Aligned with sustainable development goals promulgated by the United Nations, the stated purposes include “reshaping our economic systems to operate within environmental limits and prioritize the wellbeing of all generations.” The evening program looks promising, with a singalong and dancing the first night. Daytime sessions will feature more serious fare, such as “Current economic paradigms and the need to rethink them for shared prosperity.”

  There is practically a global circuit of gatherings such as these, and their combination of paternalistic rhetoric with vast attendee power often sets conspiracy theorists’ keyboards to clacking. But what is the subject of the Reykjavik meeting—wellbeing economics—really about?

  I hear Reykjavik is nice in May, but it sounds like I'd need a lot of Brennevin (aka "Black Death") to deal with all the singalongs and dancing.

  But (seriously) the who-could-be-against-that "wellbeing" label is the latest cover for central planning. And:

  Unfortunately, sometimes one person’s wellbeing is another person’s nightmare. The problem with constructing a God equation to judge our economic theories by is that the kind of people one finds at the Reykjavik meeting, or any meeting anywhere, are simply not up to the task. This is the same egotism that once led monarchs to base their accumulation of power on the belief that it was for the benefit of the ruled, who were too simple-minded to be trusted with directing their own lives.

  People keep trying to claim they've found a solution to Hayek's knowledge problem. It's a safe bet they haven't.

• If you tell me I'm too tense one more time, I'm gonna scream! John C. Goodman looks Inside the Liberal Mind: The Tensions of Modern Political Thought. He distinguishes between ideology (a set of ideas that "fit together in a logical and predictable way") and a sociology ("a set of ideas that mainly reflects likes and dislikes of people with similar world views"). His illustrative example of "conservative" and "liberal" sociologies:

  Have you ever heard someone express outrage over the fact that “the US spends more on health care than any other country, but our health outcomes are very mediocre.” What about outrage over the fact that “the US spends more on public education per pupil than any other country in the world, but we rank dead last among developed countries in outcomes”?

  It’s not obvious that the first problem is any better or worse than the second. But the former concern is likely to be expressed by a liberal, and the latter by a conservative. Rarely do you find someone equally concerned about both problems. People who are equally concerned about both problems are being logically consistent, but they are probably neither conservative nor liberal.

  I get it, but it's a distinction that's going to be lost on people unless you start carrying around copies of John's essay to show them.

And it's from Arlene Quaratiello, a fellow Granite Stater: The Sky Is Not Falling!. A former librarian, she gets how the DC Shuffle works:

There are a lot of reasons to defund IMLS, some common to all Federal agencies operating outside Constitutional bounds, some IMLS-specific. (It's very wedded to woke ideology, unsurprisingly.)

Past Punsalad takes on IMLS here and here.

Also of note:

• Significantly less amusing than your usual clown show. Kevin D. Williamson gives hints on Understanding the Trump Show.

  One way of understanding Donald Trump’s erratic presidency is to assume that he is trying to generate chaos. But that is not quite it.

  What he is trying to generate is storylines.

  And he knows which direction plots move: forward.

  Donald Trump was never much of an executive, a fact attested to by his many high-profile failures (the casinos, the Plaza, etc.) and his scams (Trump University, the accounting shenanigans, etc.). He likes to present himself as the ultimate deal-maker, but he is not much of a negotiator, as Vladimir Putin knows. He likes to play at being a tough guy, but he is easily backed down by opponents ranging from Canadian politicians to the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and his weak character makes him vulnerable to flattery. His gift isn’t for business or hardball politics or the Machiavellian exercise of hard power—his gift is for storytelling.

  Narrative is one of the most powerful mental forces in human life. Trump’s career has involved a lot of raw spectacle, but even the most primitive kind of spectacle requires a narrative context. As I have noted from time to time, the great political champion of American evangelicals was, among other things, a cameo performer in a series of pornographic films—and even in pornography, the most elemental form of spectacle, storylines are part of the package. In addition to his career in pornography, Trump was a recurring character in the world of professional wrestling, in which the homoerotic spectacle is largely subordinate to the sprawling soap-opera plot. Add a storyline to a beauty pageant and you get reality television, which is where Trump made his money and built the foundation of his political career.

  As usual, I try to reproduce the links when I excerpt an article, but I can't recommend you click on that last one, unless you want to hear Joe Rogan say the f-word a lot.

• After yesterday's tariff vacation… … we're back to covering the clown car, this one's swerve covered by Jim Geraghty: Life and the Markets Come at You Fast. It's from last Friday, but this observation is timeless:

  By the way, a hard lesson for the Twitter/X left and assorted progressive Democrats during the Biden years was that when you mock or deny other people’s economic pain, you lose. Every time someone complained about inflation and the cost of living during the Biden years, some snot-nosed punk on X would argue the problem was that the person was shopping at expensive places. These days, it’s not that hard to find some random person on X scoffing, “I don’t have a 401(k), so I don’t care.” Well, congressional Republicans don’t have the option of not caring, because a whole lot of their constituents do have such accounts. About 62 percent of U.S. adults have money invested in the stock market, including individual stocks, a stock mutual fund, or a retirement savings account.

  I’ve seen a few people who think of themselves as conservatives echoing Bernie Sanders’s arguments that the top 10 percent of Americans own 93 percent of all U.S. stocks. Well, when a guy watches his 401(k) shrink by 15 percent in three months, knowing that the millionaire on the other side of town lost even more is cold comfort. Some other guy losing a chunk of his wealth doesn’t mean you get any more wealth. Rooting for financial pain for someone wealthier than you is a bitter loser’s mentality. Every day, the net worth of the world’s richest billionaires goes up and down by vast fortunes, sometimes billions of dollars in one day. Does that make you any richer or poorer? Does the incline or decline in their fortunes change your income, your savings, your net worth? If not, why worry about it?

  (You can also find Trump supporters — in some cases, self-described Marxists — arguing, “President Trump screwed over Wall Street to bail out Main Street.” Hey, where do you think Main Street businesses get loans from? Where do you think they keep their money? About 4 million American small businesses run their finances through Bank of America. When a big bank like Bank of America or PNC makes a loan to mom and pop’s restaurant or a downtown boutique, is that Wall Street at work or Main Street at work? They’re interconnected and symbiotic.)

  A note for pundits, pols, and the rest of the public: if you find it clever to make the "Wall Street/Main Street" dichotomy, you've pretty much thrown away any chance that I will take you seriously in what follows.

• Called it. Only four days ago, I wondered "How noisy will Tim Cook's smooch on Trump's posterior need to be to snag that [tariff] exemption?" Not the hardest prediction to make, and I guess it worked, as noted by the WSJ editorialists: On Tariffs, It’s Good to Be Tim Cook.

  Tariffs are advertised in the name of helping American workers, but what do you know? They turn out to favor the powerful and politically connected. That’s the main message of President Trump’s decision to exempt smartphones and assorted electronic goods from his most onerous tariffs.

  Customs and Border Protection (CBP) late Friday issued a notice listing products that will be exempt from Mr. Trump’s so-called reciprocal tariffs that can run as high as 145% on goods from China. The exclusions apply to smartphones, laptop computers, hard drives, computer processors, servers, memory chips, semiconductor manufacturing equipment, and other electronics.

  And, OK: notwithstanding the point I tried to make in the above item, there is a useful dichotomy (as the WSJ notes) between manufacturers who can afford a "K Street lobbyist" and those who can't.

• Kaboom! Rich Lowry is also shaking his head: Trump Blows a Hole in His Own Tariff Regime. (Slightly reformatted)

  The Trump administration has exempted a swath of electronics from most, if not all, of his tariffs in a big victory for the likes of Apple and Dell. A couple of points [four, actually — PS]:

  • If tariffs weren’t harmful to American business and consumers, Trump wouldn’t need to hand out exemptions.
  • This process is inherently unfair insofar as companies that can get Trump on the phone are likelier to get relief than smaller companies no one has heard of.
  • It makes no sense to exempt finished goods largely manufactured in China, while continuing to put maximum tariffs on inputs that U.S. manufacturers need to make things here.
  • Obviously, this entire process is arbitrary and poorly thought out.

  I see DJIA is on a roller coaster again today. I sometimes wonder if Trump is getting jollies from watching it gyrate.

• The grand conspiracy to take over government and leave you alone. My eyeballs were grabbed by this Concord Monitor op-ed from Weare NH resident William Politt: The Free Stater threat.

  Threat?!

  Well, after a number of autobiographical paragraphs…

  Curiously, there are a number of mostly recent arrivals who manage to slip under the Granite State’s xenophobia radar. I refer to the Free State Project, a loosely (dis?)organized group of extremists who chose to relocate to New Hampshire with the express purpose of taking over the state’s institutions and remaking them into an everyone-for-themselves libertarian paradise.

  Ominous! There's a Wikipedia page for the FSP, that notes it was founded in 2001. (For the record: I've been living here since 1981, not really a "recent arrival" myself.) And there's a website. They've had a mission statement since 2005:

  The Free State Project is an agreement among 20,000 pro-liberty activists to move to New Hampshire, where they will exert the fullest practical effort toward the creation of a society in which the maximum role of government is the protection of life, liberty, and property. The success of the Project would likely entail reductions in taxation and regulation, reforms at all levels of government to expand individual rights and free markets, and a restoration of constitutional federalism, demonstrating the benefits of liberty to the rest of the nation and the world

  Sound threatening to you?

  Politt has scare stories, and lots of loaded language (E.g., "Free-Staters seldom reveal their affiliations…" Like Commies!) Nowhere does he manage to actually deal with FSP's libertarian goals. Sad!

Our Eye Candy du Jour is a season-appropriate chart from Cato, one of five: It’s Tax Season—Five Charts on Who Pays and What’s at Risk. Text:

The pols who demand high-earners pay some imagined "fair share" need to be shown Figure 3 and asked what those numbers and bars should look like instead. In order to be "fair".

(I realize this only shows Federal income tax data, and doesn't include payroll taxes.)

For more "fairness" discussion, let's go to a reliable source, Vero de Rugy, who explains: How simplifying our tax code would level the playing field. She does a fine job of summarizing the "arbitrary, distortionary, and unfair" system currently in place. Skipping down to her proposal:

It's been a while since Hall and Rabushka wrote on their proposal, and a lot of the links have decayed. Sad! But Googling gives you some information, and you can read an article from Alvin Rabushka here.

Also of note:

• Speaking of "fairness"… … albeit in a much different contect, Jeffrey Miron and Karthi Gottipati look at (yet another) constitutional threat from Team Orange: When “Fairness” Becomes Censorship.

  In the name of “political fairness,” some U.S. officials advocate unprecedented government regulation of social media. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr claims platforms are “discriminat[ing] against viewpoints” and pose “the greatest threat [to free speech] we have seen.”

  Senator Josh Hawley champions government oversight of social media, introducing the “Ending Support for Internet Censorship Act” to deny Section 230 protections unless platforms prove their moderation practices are “politically neutral.” Under Hawley’s proposal, federal regulators would periodically certify the political neutrality of platforms, opening the floodgates to litigation and bureaucratic control.

  This amounts to a revival of the Fairness Doctrine—a policy conservatives once denounced as chilling speech. Ironically, these same conservatives now advocate a “new fairness doctrine” that would force online platforms to justify content moderation to federal bureaucrats. Such state intervention inevitably invites partisan abuse. Today, it may empower Republicans demanding reinstatement of far-right accounts; tomorrow, Democrats could require suppression of conservative voices under the guise of combating “misinformation.”

  Fun Fact: Just a few short years ago, then-Democrat Tulsi Gabbard proposed the Restore the Fairness Doctrine Act of 2019. And now she's a Republican, and Trump's Director of National Intelligence.

• Yes. Do that. Michael Chapman and (apparently also) President Trump get on the hobbyhorse I've been riding for a long time: End All Taxpayer Funding of CPB, NPR, PBS.

  President Donald Trump is not a libertarian, but some of his policies for downsizing the federal government certainly fall in the libertarian column. This is true, for instance, of the administration’s drive to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which helps to fund PBS and NPR. Scholars at the Cato Institute have called on Congress for decades to stop subsidizing the CPB. With enough political momentum behind them, perhaps Congress can get it done this time.

  “Republicans must defund and totally disassociate themselves from NPR & PBS,” said Trump on Truth Social on April 1. In late March, he told reporters that he “would love to” defund PBS and NPR. “It’s been very biased. The whole group … and it’s a waste of money especially,” he said.

  It's nice to have something good to say about Trump, for a change. Chapman notes what the late David Boaz had to say:

  “We wouldn’t want the federal government to publish a national newspaper,” Cato’s David Boaz testified before Congress in 2005. “Neither should we have a government television network and a government radio network.” Congress should “terminate the funding for CPB,” he added.

  Boaz, author of The Libertarian Mind and former Distinguished Senior Fellow at Cato, further testified, “If anything should be kept separate from government and politics, it’s the news and public affairs programming that informs Americans about government and its policies. When government brings us the news—with all the inevitable bias and spin—the government is putting its thumb on the scales of democracy. Journalists should not work for the government. Taxpayers should not be forced to subsidize news and public affairs programming.”

  Fun fact: we actually did have a "national newspaper" back in the previous century. Like many bad ideas, it was the brainchild of Woodrow Wilson, fortunately a short-lived one.

• Why is the USA more socialist than those other guys? That's the question I'm asking based on Chris Edwards' review of Postal Reforms Abroad.

  With a bloated cost structure and falling demand for its products, the US Postal Service (USPS) is in trouble. I contend that privatizing the agency is the best way forward, and President Trump seems open to the idea. Currently, the president’s DOGE team is digging into USPS operations to find cost savings.

  A recent report on foreign postal systems provides reform ideas for the president and Congress to consider. The USPS Inspector General (IG) compared the postal systems of the United States and 25 other countries. Let’s look at some report highlights.

  Privatization may sound radical to US policymakers, but the IG found that of the foreign postal systems, “15 have the status of a private corporation and 10 are state-owned enterprises.” Among the former, three were fully privatized and twelve were partly privatized or structured as private corporations.

  More at the link. And, yes, the report "shows that the United States is on the socialist end of international postal structures."

• Just a reminder. And it's from the relentlessly entertaining Andrew Heaton: Your tribalism is dumb. He notes that it's probably hardwired into us, a inherited "gift" from our Serengeti ancestors.

  Tribalism compels us to belong to a team—to love it, affirm our loyalty to it, help it, and subordinate our own interests to its greater good. We gain a desperately needed sense of almost transcendent belonging when we lose ourselves to these tribal identities.

  Here's the problem: We don't just crave being on a team; we also crave a rival. We want to be in a club and we want a nemesis to motivate us. We desire an external entity to rally against. In American history, particularly when we have a disconcerting nemesis like the Nazis, the Soviets, or a minotaur, we shift our competitive drive to the external threat and get surprisingly chummy with each other. Absent a compelling bad guy to unite against, partisans glance around and say, "Well, I guess I hate you!"

  The urge to spar with a competing team is foundational, not circumstantial. That is to say, we are not blissfully lacking in team spirit or the inclination to coalitional rivalry until confronted by an external menace, at which point we suddenly group up and compete in response. Rather, the urge to oppose an outside foe precedes the foe itself.

  Andrew's article (from print Reason) manages to be both funny and insightful.