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:

I find that I'm reading a disproportionate amount of non-fiction books by woman authors with the initials A. S.: Amity Shlaes, Allison Schrager, and now here's Abigail Shrier. Funny coincidence, or a bug in the simulation?

Also: Shrier's first book, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, was the target of a cancellation campaign back in 2020. One of the lead cancellation advocates was an ACLU lawyer! (Is that ironic?)

And I note that, while I found this book at the Portsmouth (NH) Public Library, they do not carry Irreversible Damage. Which means it probably will not show up in their prominent "Banned Books Week" display this year, or any other year. (I'm pretty sure that's ironic.)

Anyway, this book: Shrier's subject is the psychological damage to children caused by mental health professionals, semi-professionals, and (yes) even some parents. This isn't a new phenomenon; one of my wise-cracking middle school teachers back in the 1960s occasionally smirkingly remarked that he "didn't want to give us a complex" after expressing even an innocuous opinion.

But Shrier argues that it's gotten worse, and she backs up her argument with plenty of evidence of "iatrogenic" harm to the kiddos. The incentives involved in the mental health industry are all wrong, she (convincingly) says; quirks are magnified into neuroses, everyday disappointments blow up into major trauma, "surveys" are performed that normalize destructive behavior, and more.

My take: A good book for parents to read. And maybe teachers too. But Shrier was pushing on an open door in my case; some of the negative Amazon reviews accuse her of cherry-picking data, misinterpreting/misrepresenting the sources she cites, and so on. Since my kids are in their 30s, and I haven't been in a classroom for a couple decades, I'm not motivated enough to judge.

… 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:

This is Don Winslow's (allegedly) penultimate book, and the middle volume of his "Danny Ryan" trilogy. It is a generic page-turning crime thriller, but with pretensions. I read elsewhere that Winslow got some plot inspiration from the Aeneid, which explains some of the unlikely events here.

At the end of the previous book, City on Fire, Danny was one of the few survivors of a Providence, Rhode Island gang war. Disgusted, dispirited, mourning his late wife, he, his infant son, senile dad, and his ragtag crew need to get out of town and go into hiding, avoiding both the law and surviving still-hostile mobsters.

So: off to sunny Southern California. And (speaking of unlikeliness) Danny and his crew get involved with a big-budget movie based on that Providence gang war. And Danny gets, um, involved with the glamorous leading lady, looking to reboot her career after tabloid-fodder history of booze, drugs, and scandal. Spoiler: It turns out poorly.

There's lots of sex, violence, and bad language. And soap operatics. Consumer note: If you tackle the trilogy, you might not want to spend as many months as I did between reading volumes. I found ("at my age") that it was unclear why characters were (variously) killing, betraying, and bonking each other. Oh well, just turn the pages, Paul.

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:

About eight years ago, I started a "reread Heinlein" reading project. This winds it up. I wisely left his last few books for the end. This one was ©1987; RAH passed away in May 1988.

And (humph) apparently it's out of print! Amazon doesn't sell new copies anyway. I was unaware, and somewhat surprised, that could possibly happen.

And (as far as I know) this is the only one of his books to have a racy Boris Vallejo cover of a nekkid lady (with strategically flowing hair).

That's Maureen Johnson, and this is mostly her autobiography, told in the first person. It's interspersed with her "current" predicament, where she wakes up (naked, of course) next to a dead man and a live cat named Pixel. This puts her in a bit of legal peril, and escaping from that simply seems to land her in illegal peril, and…

But it's mostly her autobiography, and she leads an interesting life, as one of the early participants in the "Howard Foundation" effort to breed long-lived people. Which is spectacularly successful in her case, as she's the mother of Lazarus Long. The story is full of what I think of as Heinleinian dialog and monologue, and if you've read many of his books you will know what I mean by that. The book is also very risqué, bawdy, ribald, racy, and a bunch of other synonyms. Maureen is very fond of having good clean fun in, and out of, the sack.

And it's also iconoclastic, because there's a lot, a lot, of taboo-breaking, mostly involving every possible kind of incest.

So (consumer note) you might want to read a number of Heinlein's books before you tackle this one, as characters from them show up here. To find out which, skip to the back of the book where "Associated Stories" are listed, and use your judgment. Or, if you don't mind spoilers, see the Wikipedia page.

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.

I'd offer a slight correction: the first casualty of a trade war are investors that were foolish enough to assume a healthy future for the American ecomomy.

But surely America gained something from Trump's latest tariff stunt? Au contraire, mes amis. Or so says Eric Boehm: America gained nothing from Trump's latest tariff stunt.

A cheap, but accurate shot. At least Trump didn't go full Indiana Jones: "I don't know. I'm making this up as I go."

Also of note:

• The Federalist: increasingly worthless? I manage to avoid the Trump sycophants, who gleefully shake their pom-poms at whatever Trump said or did yesterday. Even if it contradicts or undoes what he did the day before yesterday.

  But sometimes I hit an article like this one from Beth Brelje: Look At Beef To Understand Why U.S. Trade Needs A Makeover. I like to look at beef, so…

  Things do not start well:

  he international trade landscape is quickly shifting as President Donald Trump makes one bold tariff move after another in his effort to forge more favorable trade agreements for the United States.

  We aren't looking at panic and chaos. It's "one bold tariff move after another".

  Look no further than the global beef trade to understand why Trump wants to steer U.S. trade in a new direction. The imbalance within this industry illustrates the broader trade issues that leave the U.S. at a disadvantage.

  Beth thinks "imbalance" is prima facie evidence that America is at a "disadvantage". Apparently ignoring arguments that trade deficits don't matter.

  But let's look at Beth's beef with the beef trade. She states (I assume accurately) that the US exported $10.45 billion worth of beef last year. This is out of a total $3191.6 billion export market. Which works out to be a little shy of 0.33%.

  Similarly, beef imports were $11.73 billion out of a total $4110 billion, a share of about 0.29%.

  We aren't talking about big deals in the grand scheme of things, in other words.

  But let's make a couple obvious points before we go on:

  1. American beef producers would like to sell more beef to people in other countries.
  2. And they would prefer that Americans would not buy so much imported beef. Ideally, none. Because that's competition.
  3. And they have a considerable amount of political clout.

  Back to Beth's article, which looks at beef trade with three countries: Australia, China, and Brazil. Concentrating on Australia:

  The U.S. has had a free trade agreement with Australia for 20 years. In that time, Australia has sold $28.7 billion of beef to U.S. consumers, but fresh U.S. beef has been banned for sale there.

  U.S. beef producers can only sell Australia cooked beef. Over 20 years, Australia has imported $31 million of precooked U.S. beef, creating a deficit. It could get bigger; Australia wants to expand sales in the U.S.

  Australian Wagyu beef now has an estimated 48 percent of the U.S. market, leaving a minority, 41 percent market share for U.S.-produced Wagyu beef.

  OK. For the record, the Australian Agriculture department denies that American beef is banned there. They (apparently) demand proof that it originates in the US, not Canada or Mexico.

  But the bottom-line reason that they don't buy American beef: it's really expensive compared to their local beef.

  Further fun fact. Austrailia's human population is slightly under 28 million. Its beef cattle population is estimated at … about the same. (If you add in dairy cattle, yes, the cattle outnumber the humans.

  (In comparison, US people number about 340 million, US cattle about 87 million.)

  And, finally: overall America had a $17.9 billion trade surplus in 2024 with Australia last year. But (see above), like trade deficits, trade surpluses don't matter either.

  There's no way to jiggle these numbers to come up with a proper "balance" of trade, in beef or anything else. Despite Beth's cherry-picked stats, there's nothing to see here.

• And so it is unsurprising that… as George Will says: This is 10-thumbed, fumbling, overconfident governmental progressivism. (gifted link)

  Trump might be the most progressive president since, early in the 20th century, progressivism defined itself with three core tenets:

  First, only an energetic executive can make modern government “wieldy” — Woodrow Wilson’s word. (“The president,” said Wilson, “is at liberty, both in law and conscience, to be as big a man as he can.”) Second, the separation of powers is a premodern mistake that permits Congress to meddle in government and allows the judiciary to inhibit the executive.

  Third, conservatives see modern society’s complexities as reasons to avoid attempting dramatic social engineering, lest unintended consequences overwhelm intended ones. Progressives think conservatives are worrywarts too timid about wielding government.

  GFW is blessed/cursed with a long memory, recalling previous presidential economy screwups. And this might dwarf them all.

• Or maybe just tired of tariffs. Robert F. Graboyes thinks we may be getting Tired of Winning, Apparently.

  Ancient societies believed solar eclipses caused plagues, deaths of kings, crop failures, etc. To stave off the anger of gods or God, they beat drums, flung arrows, slaughtered livestock, and sacrificed children. This madness subsided as science demonstrated that eclipses were predictable and benign.

  Antique societies similarly feared trade deficits. Their religion—“mercantilism”—taught that trade deficits impoverish a nation, benefit the wealthy, and result from other countries’ malice. Mercantilists viewed tariffs the way their ancestors viewed drums, arrows, cattle-slaughter, and child-sacrifice. Their beliefs were demolished by David Hume (1752), Adam Smith (1776), David Ricardo (1817), and centuries of theory and data. Unfortunately, economists haven’t been as successful as astronomers at dispelling superstition.

  I strive to respect viewpoints contrary to my own. I believe Biden’s stimulus spending was futile and destructive, that the Fed should focus on inflation and not real growth, and that socialism is ruinous. But intelligent people feel otherwise, and I respect that; theory and data are hazy, and different people have different priorities. Tariffs are different. No one who understands trade seriously believes tariffs spur economic growth. A talented economist can postulate theoretical conditions under which that might happen, just as a talented physicist can specify conditions under which spacecraft can travel faster than light. Nice intellectual exercises with limited practical value. Let’s examine the superstitions.

  The nine superstitions examined: Tariffs aren’t taxes; Tariffs are taxes on foreigners; Tariffs increase national prosperity; More foreign investment can spur lower trade deficits; Trade deficits indicate weakness; Lower overseas wages are unfair to American workers; Trade has destroyed American manufacturing; Trade deficits can’t go on forever; Bilateral deficits indicate weakness and perfidy. If you hold any of them, see if Robert can disabuse you.

  And he has more too, some of it quite funny. Check it out.

• I am a sucker for a Bastiat reference. And Jonah Goldberg provides: That Which Is Unseen. Looking at Frederic's broken window tale, click over if you're unfamiliar, but here's the important meta-lesson Jonah draws:

  Free market economics are not nearly so intuitive as people who grow up in free market cultures often think. Not all intuitions are innate, some are learned. Soldiers are trained to have different intuitions in the face of enemy fire than normal people have. Bear trainers learn to have different intuitions than the rest of us when confronting a grizzly. It is a pretty natural human intuition to steal if you think you can get away with it. But parents and society try to teach people not to give into it. I honestly would have thought that washing your hands after doing gross stuff was a natural human intuition given how instinctively it comes to me. But, apparently not.

  Read the whole thing, if you can.

People will die! Or so say Deborah Fuller and Patrick Mitchell at TechDirt: The White House’s Cuts To Scientific Research Will Cut Short American Lives.

Executive Summary: welcome to today's episode of…

Remy's classic video is from 2017.

The TechDirt article is reproduced from The Conversation, which discloses, unsurprisingly, that both Deborah and Patrick receive funding from NIH.

The pleading is abject. One section of the article is labeled "A cure for cancer", strongly intimating that NIH funding is just this far away from that goal. But alas: "Without sustained federal support for cancer research, progress toward curing cancer and reducing its death rate will stall."

Yup, keep the cash coming, taxpayers, or people will die!

Meanwhile in other NIH news, from Ana Hathaway at the College Fix: Professor gets another $200K for ‘transgender voice training’ app.

It would be nice if advocates like Deborah and Patrick acknowledged that NIH funding includes a lot of low-priority stuff like this. Not just "curing cancer".

But as long as we're looking at special-interest pleading, here's something from an unexpected source, Brian T. Allen at National Review: Libraries Hit in Latest White House Order. (Gifted Link)

Anyway, it's a bemused take on the efforts to "gut" IMLS (which I've written about before). See our Eye Candy du Jour above, and the word "Constitutional" therein. Does the Constitution say that one of the functions of the Federal Government is sending money to libraries? No? Sorry, gut away.

Brian notes that the "feds support nonprofit culture to the tune of billions each year in tax expenditures." True, sure, but at base that reflects private people and corporations voluntarily spending their own money. The Feds extracting involuntarily-extracted funds on local libraries? Nah.

Still, a good article. Not whiny at all. Check it out.

Also of note:

• But speaking of defunding stuff not mentioned in the Constitution… Jonathan Turley provides yet another reason to defund "public broadcasting": NPR Repeats False Claim That the Court Rejected Claims of Government Involvement in Censorship Efforts. And Jonathan recounts his own involvement with NPR interviewer Leila Fadel:

  Leila Fadel and National Public Radio recently interviewed me on free speech. While the program ominously warned that “what you’re about to hear is hate speech” in playing extreme voices on the right, it did interview me and former Columbia University president Lee Bollinger from the free speech community. I wanted to address a statement made about the program that is not accurate but has been repeated like a mantra by many seeking to dismiss the censorship system under the Biden Administration. The claim is that the Supreme Court rejected the claim of coordination between the government and social media companies. That is entirely untrue, but you do not have to take my word for it. The Supreme Court expressly stated that it was not doing so last year.

  I appreciate the opportunity afforded by NPR to present the views of many in the free speech community. In all fairness to Fadel, it is also important to acknowledge that NPR was quoting a widely repeated claim by law professors. However, it is important to set this record straight on the matter.

  During the program, Fadel quotes me: “You had a level of cooperation, coordination between the government and these other entities, that the effect was that thousands were censored.”

  Fadel immediately rebuts the claim:

  FADEL: It’s a charge often made by Republicans and Trump allies. Last year, the Supreme Court rejected the claim that social media companies were pressured to take down posts about COVID-19 and the 2020 election.

  Nope. It's true that SCOTUS dismissed the lawsuit in question (Murthy v. Missouri). But the dismissal was on grounds of "standing", and the censorship issues were not considered, let alone "rejected".

• And now back to tariffs. Mark Helperin writes on Trump’s Provocation Principle. (Gifted Link)

  With commendable exceptions such as restoring the border, supporting Israel, and campaigns against DEI, sexual madness, the Houthis, Randi Weingarten, and, perhaps, Iran’s nuclear potential, the infant Trump administration appears to have put things off balance merely for the love of it. Though the chaos seems to defy analysis, one element is frightfully common to current domestic, economic, and foreign policies: the consistent overestimation of powers necessary to accomplish aims. At home and abroad, President Trump has pitted his objectives against allies, enemies, rivals, and friends, not as a matter of miscalculation but, in the glaring absence of calculation, amid a tsunami of haphazard impulses.

  In his attempt to break the excesses of the administrative state, Mr. Trump’s every action can be countermanded. More consequentially, given that the seat and beneficiary of the administrative state is the executive, once the wheel turns and a Democratic administration effortlessly reverses his flurry of executive orders, augmented executive power insulated from judicial restraint will resurrect and supercharge the permanent bureaucracy. Thus, unbeknownst to him, Mr. Trump is building, as he might say, an “incredibly beautiful” fortress—across the battlements of which Elizabeth Warren may someday stride.

  Or, as Kevin D. Williamson might say: "Trump is lazy, narcissistic, and stupid."

• And, specifically… as Noah Smith points out: All the arguments for Trump's tariffs are wrong and bad.

  Well, after a stock market crash, a bond market crash, and a blizzard of recession predictions, Donald Trump has paused some of his massive “Liberation Day” tariffs. But the reprieve is only partial and temporary. The very high tariff on China is still in place (and in fact has been increased). The 10% tariffs on all imports are still in effect. “Sectoral” tariffs on autos and other specific products are still there, and the tariffs that Trump had previously placed on Canada and Mexico are still there (though whether they’re cumulative with the new tariffs is still in question).

  And on top of all that, the very high tariffs on other U.S. trading partners may return in three months’ time. Remember that Trump initially paused his tariffs on Canada and Mexico after the stock market fell, but eventually did implement them. So “Liberation Day” may simply return in July. So we’re still very much in the Big Tariff Era.

  Noah has a list of arguments, knocking down every "wrong and bad" one.

• But maybe Jim Geraghty has a good one? Despite his apostasy noted a couple days ago, he tries to resurrect a silver lining in all the chaos: Now You See the Maximalist Trade War, Now You Don’t.

  I was going to write that Americans completely get why we would impose tariffs on China; I’m generally a free trader, but I’m also a China hawk. And as we saw during the crackdown on Hong Kong, our extensive ties with China have brought Chinese values to American society rather than American values to Chinese society. (This is how we ended up with “Google Uighurs” signs being seized and removed at NBA games.) Beijing’s intentions are hostile, and it seeks to expand Chinese power and influence and minimize our power and influence in the Pacific.

  When it comes to China, I think we need an economic “conscious uncoupling,” as Gwyneth Paltrow would put it. Xi Jinping, you need to understand that we’re opening up our relationship to other exporters — Vietnam, in particular. We’ve decided to see other Asian communists.

  I think that's a pretty good argument, but maybe I'm just too amused with his "We’ve decided to see other Asian communists" line.

  Anyway, go back to Noah's article above and read his refutation about China. I may be confused but you need not be.

Number One:

It’s not 4D chess.
It’s Calvinball. pic.twitter.com/kVB1nCfCUm

— Suderman (@petersuderman) April 9, 2025

And number two:

You lost 15 percent of your wealth to pay for Trump to have his ego stroked on phone calls. That's the trade off: your wealth for his ego. https://t.co/aN7Dam55J8

— Conor Friedersdorf (@conor64) April 9, 2025

And (via Slashdot) just the headline of this MacRumors article sets my blood a-boilin': Trump: Apple Building in China is 'Unsustainable,' Could Exempt Some Companies From Tariffs.

How noisy will Tim Cook's smooch on Trump's posterior need to be to snag that exemption?

Don't think Elizabeth Warren isn't taking lessons from this, awaiting her 2029 chance at making up the Calvinball rules.

Also of note:

• I'm not a Democrat, obviously. But Jeff Maurer is, so translate his headline accordingly: Should Democrats Take the Free Win We've Been Gifted, or Hop Aboard a Death Ship? (And my answer is: Gee, I hope the latter.)

  Suppose it’s May 7, 1937, the day after the Hindenburg disaster. People are shocked by the gruesome horror captured on camera, and remember: These are 1930s people, who are used to seeing folks get crushed in bizarre industrial accidents and kicked through the side of a barn by a horse — their threshold for being horrified is high. Would you come out that day and issue this statement?

  The Luftschiffbau Zeppelin company’s rigid airship design has been chaotic and inconsistent, but slow-moving, cloth-covered aircraft filled with flammable gas are still a great way to travel. I reject the consensus by so-called “experts” that Zeppelins aren’t safe; rigid airships are the future, and we should invest in better, more passenger-friendly designs so that you and your family can float slowly in a giant condom filled with gaseous death for decades to come.

  You might issue that statement if you were the head of a rigid airship company. Of course, you also might not — you might have divested from your company and hopped on a flight to Aruba in a fixed wing aircraft before the last flaming corpse even hit the ground — but maybe you’d issue that statement. What you would absolutely not do is issue that statement if you ran an airplane company. But, if for some inexplicable reason, you did issue that statement, what would obviously, unmistakably, categorically never, ever happen is for your words to be amplified by the Alliance of Fixed-Wing Aircraft Manufacturers. That would be such an astounding fuckup that everyone involved in the decision should have to explain themselves, with any explanation that doesn’t start with “I was extremely high” leading to immediate termination.

  Jeff posts video from Democrat Representative Chris Deluzio, it's at the link, and the Hindenberg analogy is pretty apt.

• Musk is unfair to that sack of bricks. Eric Boehm points out some dissension in the ranks: Elon Musk says Peter Navarro is 'dumber than a sack of bricks'

  Imagine an alternate reality where President Donald Trump's top trade adviser was a bulging Hefty trash bag stuffed with discarded bricks.

  No, really. Picture it. When Trump gathers his cabinet together for an important meeting, inexplicably, there is a large bag sitting in the corner of the room. Its black polyethylene sides stretch at awkward angles as it tries to contain the sharp edges of what appear to be dozens of bricks piled within. Some red clay dust that has escaped from the drawstring top lingers on the floor. A White House intern struggles to move it from place to place. The bag doesn't speak or communicate in any way. It has no thoughts. It does not opine on the meaning of trade deficits or invent false data to tell misleading stories about the state of America's economy.

  And then ask yourself: Would the country be better off if Trump was seeking counsel from that literal sack of bricks rather than from Peter Navarro?

  Eric makes the ultimate Reason slam against Navarro:

  Navarro might be part of the MAGA tribe now, but he's still a socialist at heart. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he waxed poetic about how "beautiful" it was to see "the power of the federal government merging with the power of private enterprise." His vision for America's trade policy is the sort of autarky that would make Vladimir Lenin proud.

  It's nice to fantasize Trump warming up that Apprentice line: "Yer fired."

• This is the blog too busy to hate. But David R. Henderson makes a valid language point when asking: What Is a Hater?

  When I grew up, we used the word “hater” to describe someone who hates. Seems obvious, right?

  But now the meaning has evolved. At first, it seemed to mean someone who was angry at someone. I’m often angry at people; I rarely hate those same people.

  Now it seems to have evolved further to mean someone who is critical of someone or even critical of just the person’s ideas or actions. I saw an instance of this in an X by Utah Senator Mike Lee recently. He wrote:

  What will Trump’s haters do if his tariff play brings country after country to the negotiating table, resulting in bilateral trade agreements that make U.S. trade more free than ever?

  Maybe Lee was referring to Trump’s actual haters, of whom there are millions. Who knows what they would do? They would probably keep hating.

  Somehow, though, I have the uncomfortable feeling that Senator Lee would include me among the haters, simply because I’m strongly critical of Trump’s unilateral imposition of tariffs. By the way, if Trump’s policies worked the way Lee’s conditional states, I would be happy. I would still be upset that Trump violated treaties to impose those tariffs. Not only the ends, but also the means to those ends, matter. But I would still be happy with the outcome, assuming that Trump didn’t change his mind later. (Remember what he did after renegotiating NAFTA and getting USMCA. Although he thought he had achieved “a colossal victory,” he has now abrogated the treaty.)

  I'm probably guilty of ascribing Bad Psychology as a primary cause of peoples' acts and words I disagree with. My April 10 resolution: criticize actions, not imagined mental states.

  (Arguably, I broke that resolution already in quoting that Conor Friedersdorf tweet. Oops.)

From the good folks at Reason: Milton Friedman's warning to DOGE.

That "Iron Triangle" has labeled corners: Politicians, Beneficiaries, and Bureaucrats. They work together in symbiosis to stymie even small reductions in Uncle Stupid's spending.

But the Iron Triangle gets plenty of aid and comfort from spending-friendly media.

Example 1 today is Slashdot which picks up a WaPo report with a dire warning: America's NIH Scientists Have a Cancer Breakthrough. Layoffs are Delaying It..

Yup, the brave NIH researchers were FINALLY ABOUT TO WIN the 54-year old War on Cancer. But now we'll JUST HAVE TO WAIT, thanks to DOGE!

Remarkably convenient timing for that breakthrough, wasn't it?

But Example 2 is even more painful, because it comes from Indispensible Jim Geraghty; at his WaPo perch, he opines: Trump’s policies on learning and speaking English are incomprehensible.

I would have not expected Jim to churn out a boilerplate plea for funding some federal bureaucracy he likes, one indistinguishable in form from dozens, if not hundreds, appearing over the past few months.

I would not have expected his apparent assumption that taxpayer money going into a federal office will axiomatically cause lots more English-speaking students walking out of school doors across our fair land.

I mean, this is the guy who wrote The Weed Agency.

And now, more on tariffs, sorry:

• But Kevin, you say that as if it were a bad thing. Oh, wait. It is. Kevin D. Williamson observes: Our Treasury Secretary Is an Economic Illiterate.

  The number on your paycheck, in an economic vacuum, doesn’t mean anything at all. Wages are meaningful only in relation to prices—it is not the number on the check that matters but what you can get with it. If a beachfront property in Malibu cost $50 and a Rolls Royce cost $10, then the guy who makes $14,000 a year is fabulously rich. But a “six-figure income” is less something to boast about when the median house sold costs more than $400,000. A seven- or eight- or nine-figure income was basically nothing in Germany in the 1920s, when the price of a loaf of bread hit 200 billion Reichsmarks.

  You’d think that this would not need explaining to a man such as Scott Bessent, the hedge-fund guy who currently serves as Donald Trump’s treasury secretary—because, of course, Mr. “Real America” hires his help from Soros Fund Management. But during a speech to the Economic Club of New York—whose members somehow did not laugh themselves into aneurysms—Bessent declared: “Access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream. … The American Dream is rooted in the concept that any citizen can achieve prosperity, upward mobility, and economic security.”

  “Upward mobility” is another way of saying “higher real wages,” “real” in this context meaning “inflation-adjusted,” i.e., higher wages relative to overall prices. “Cheap goods” is another way of saying “goods with relatively low real prices,” meaning goods with low prices relative to wages. It surely was not lost on the members of the Economic Club of New York, sniggering discreetly into their pinstriped lapels, that lower real prices and higher real wages are, in the technical terminology of academic economics, the same goddamned thing. I don’t mean that one is as good as the other or that one is a useful substitute for the other—they are the same thing in the same way that 3+2 is the same thing as 2+3.

  Well, sure. I don't think Bessent is as dumb as he sounds. (He's a Yale grad, albeit not in economics.) The best explanation is hinted at in KDW's bottom line: he's fallen in with a bad crowd:

  Is a more affordable mortgage or insurance premium “the American dream” in full? Of course not.

  But, then again, neither is being bossed around by a semi-literate, porn-star-diddling game-show host and his dopey hedge-fund henchmen, who all seem to think what Americans really need is higher prices at Walmart.

• And that crowd is having some coherence problems. As described by Joe Lancaster: Trump advisors struggle to defend, or even explain, his tariff strategy. (Bessent makes another appearance.)

  As Trump's advisors took to the Sunday morning talk shows to defend their boss' plan, one thing became clear: There was no plan.

  "Are these tariffs permanent? Or are they a negotiating tactic?" Kristen Welker asked Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Meet the Press. "Some administration officials have said they're permanent. President Trump himself has said he's open to negotiating."

  […]

  But that wasn't the message every advisor was offering.

  "This is not a negotiation," White House trade advisor Peter Navarro told Fox News. "This is a national emergency based on a trade deficit that's gotten out of control because of cheating."

  "There is no postponing" the tariffs, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told CBS. "They are definitely going to stay in place for days and weeks." When asked about the other advisors' claims that 50 countries had offered to negotiate, Lutnick replied, "The tariffs are coming. He announced it, and he wasn't kidding."

  And, as the ancients foretold, the fish rots from the head.

  Amid mixed messaging from top White House officials, President Donald Trump was asked directly on Monday whether his sweeping tariffs are negotiable or here to stay.

  "They can both be true," Trump responded. "There can be permanent tariffs and there can also be negotiations because there are things that we need beyond tariffs."

  Just what jittery investors need to hear, Don.

• That pesky Constitution. Damon Root whines: Trump's tariffs violate the constitutional separation of powers.

  President Donald Trump has unilaterally imposed tariffs on much of the world. Yet the authority to impose tariffs is nowhere to be found in Article II of the Constitution, which is where the limited powers of the president are enumerated. Rather, the authority "to lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises," as well as the authority "to regulate Commerce with Foreign nations," is to be found exclusively in Article I, which is where the powers of Congress are spelled out.

  Trump's trade war thus usurps the constitutional authority of Congress in violation of the separation of powers.

  The U.S. Supreme Court has confronted this sort of executive malfeasance before and struck it down with appropriate vigor in a number of notable cases. In Biden v. Nebraska (2023), for example, the Court declared President Joe Biden's student debt cancellation plan to be unlawful because it was an example of "the Executive seizing the power of the Legislature."

  Boy, there's something else thing we needed: another Constitutional crisis.

• Like Indy shaking off the evil spell in Temple of Doom. Virginia Postrel is Waiting for the Fever to Break.

  As Donald Trump disrupts international trade, sends suspected gangsters to indeterminate imprisonment in a Salvadoran hellhole without due process, wages war on the right to counsel, abandons American allies, and throws Ukraine under the bus—as Donald Trump does, in other words, pretty much what he promised—I haven’t written anything about this mess beyond retweeting the work of more energetic writers. Trump wants to make the United States a Peronist nation and a whole lot of people voted enthusiastically to go along with his mad ideas. Having watched friends and former allies enthusiastically embrace Trumpism, I feel like the loved ones of a smallpox victim after vaccination but before effective treatment. Yes, the illness might have been prevented. But now that it’s here, all we can do is let it run its course and hope the patient survives without too many scars.

  I’m both comforted and disheartened by historical perspective. Human history is as much a story of folly, ignorance, and cruelty as of genius, perseverance, and generosity. In particular my recent reading of Christopher Cox’s Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn is both encouraging and frightening. Someone—Jonah Goldberg maybe?—called Trump the worst human being to occupy the White House since Woodrow Wilson and, notwithstanding some notable villains, that seems about right. Cox makes the case that Wilson was awful on about every dimension imaginable. As president, he sought tyrannical powers with frightening success. But the nation survived him.

  I reported on Cox's bio of Wilson here. Fun fact: Both Wilson and Trump were enthusiastic users of John Adams' Alien Enemies Act, the only living legal remnant of the Alien and Sedition Acts.

Protect our infant industry from those sneaky Chinese!

But in other news…

And as Eric Boehm points out: It's not just the stock market that's in trouble.

"Other than that, though, it's fine!"

Also of note (but also about tariffs):

• It's good for what ails ya? Nick Catoggio examines a Trumpian analogy: Take Your ‘Medicine’.

  When the president is right, he’s right. On Sunday evening, en route to Washington following a very successful weekend of playing golf, Donald Trump told the press on Air Force One that crashing markets won’t cause him to abandon his trade policy. “I don’t want anything to go down,” he said, “but sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something.”

  He’s right. Conservatives understand better than anyone that long-term solutions may require near-term disruption. If you want to balance the budget and reduce the national debt, the only way to do it is by reforming entitlements. That won’t be painless. But sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something.

  Some Trump supporters have even analogized his new tariffs to specific types of medicine, like chemotherapy. But here’s the thing about chemo: There’s a plausible, measurable goal that it’s supposed to achieve.

  Nick links to a relevant tweet from Jessica Reidl pointing to some "plausible, measurable" issues. Lightly edited:

  Trump and and his team have failed to answer the two most fundamental tariff questions:

  1. *What Does Success Look Like?*

     What's the specific goal and the metric to be accountable to? Is it:

     • No trade deficit with any country (impossible)?
     • Other countries cut their tariffs (they offered to!)?
     • Is there a manufacturing jobs target?
     • Onshored industries like garments?
     • An economic growth or investment target?
     • A tax revenue target?
     • Ego-driven intimidation of U.S. corporations?
     • Or just to end intl trade?

  2. *What Does Failure Look Like?*

     What can finally prove to you that this did not work?

     • A market collapse? (check)
     • Global retaliation? (check)
     • Rising prices? Slower economic growth? (coming)
     • A failure to produce a burst or manufacturing jobs or business investment? (very likely)
     • Continued trade deficits with some nations? (guaranteed)
     • Any remaining imports? (guaranteed)
     • No notable budget savings? (very likely)

  If there is no measurable metric of success or failure, then the tariffs are not economic policy - they are an economic suicide pact in service of some philosophical aversion to trading with and being interdependent with foreigners. And we're all just the collateral damage.

  A great deal of social engineering from the left and right could be ameliorated if we just demanded answers to the kind of questions Nick and Jessica are asking.

• Still indispensible. Not only are Jessica's simple questions being ignored, the justifications/explanations we're getting from Team Trump are, um, confused. Jim Geraghty tweeted:

  In short, the Trump administration officials are so gung-ho on the tariffs because they are not a negotiation and also are a negotiation, because they are permanent and also temporary, because they will be a lasting source of new revenue for the government and also a declining source of new revenue for the government, because they’re mirroring the other country’s tariffs and because they’re not mirroring the other country’s tariffs, and because they’ll have the U.S. start making medicines again, make ships again, and make semiconductors again, notwithstanding the fact that the U.S. is already making medicines, ships, and semiconductors.

  I hope this helps explain why Trump and some of his advisers are so enthusiastic about the tariffs.

  That's a plug for his Morning Jolt newsletter for yesterday. Further information about that "permanent/temporary" thing:

  White House senior counselor on trade and manufacturing Peter Navarro is gung-ho about the tariffs because they are a permanent (or, at minimum, a long-term change) in policy designed to overcome longstanding trade deficits and are not up for negotiation.

  “This is not a negotiation. This is a national emergency based on a trade deficit that’s gotten out of control because of cheating,” Navarro said on Maria Bartiromo’s Sunday Morning Futures.

  Meanwhile, our old friend White House National Economic Council director Kevin Hassett is gung-ho about the tariffs because they are a temporary tactic for leverage in negotiations, and they can be repealed in exchange for the right offers from trade partners.

  “So, the fact is, the countries are angry and retaliating and, by the way, coming to the table. I got a report from the [U.S. Trade Representative] last night that more than 50 countries have reached out to the president to begin a negotiation. But they’re doing that because they understand that they bear a lot of the tariff,” Hassett told ABC News’s This Week anchor George Stephanopoulos.

  I'd like to think that Hassett's take is closer to reality, but the fact is: I dunno. And probably the only answer is found between Trump's ears, how the dice in there arbitrarily rock and roll.

  So in other words…

• It's a Schrödinger economic policy. Or as Tyler Cowen puts it, we have A Contagion of Uncertainty.

  The latest rumor, when I started drafting this column, was that President Trump will suspend the tariffs for a 90-day period, with the exception of those on China. Markets started going back up again.

  But “the very latest information” doesn’t stay current for long these days. The new report—but don’t count on it—is that the 90-day pause is not real after all. That revision came out before this draft was finished. And markets again whipsawed.

  The Trump administration has created a new monster—one of unpredictability and erratic behavior. We simply cannot predict with any degree of accuracy what will happen next. By the time you are reading this article, there will probably be some newer report about the tariffs or threat of tariffs, and then another report after that.

  Even if the White House winds up instituting a pause on the proposed tariffs—or ultimately adopts much better economic policies—this seesawing may plunge the American and perhaps also the global economy into recession.

  Coulda had Nikki Haley. That's all I'm sayin'.

John Shea is superintendent of the Somersworth (NH) School District, and also, for the current academic year, superintendent of the Rollinsford (NH) school. He's contributing op-eds to my awful local newspaper, and his third one is headlined: Schools face choice of federal funding or doing the right thing.

And yes, John says, this Hobson's Choice is being forced on schools by Team Orange.

If you're not seeing the problem yet… well, neither am I. ED says "obey the law", John says "we are." Ah, but:

Well, judge for yourself: the press release emitted by the Ed Dept is here: ED Requires K-12 School Districts to Certify Compliance with Title VI and Students v. Harvard as a Condition of Receiving Federal Financial Assistance; the 4-page PDF to which John refers is here. The press release also points to a FAQ document, which is here.

The memo doesn't simply fling out the DEI acronym. Specifically:

Given the text of Title VI and the assurances you have already given, any violation of Title VI—including the use of Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion (“DEI”) programs to advantage one’s race over another—is impermissible. The use of certain DEI practices can violate federal law.

That should clarify a little, right? Or, from the FAQ's Question 8:

I'd say things are pretty clear here, John: don't extend advantages or disadvantages to students based on their race. Don't racially stereotype. Don't create or encourage racial hostility.

But (back to John's op-ed):

The "murders" comment is weird. Relevance? Also legally iffy: only one of those killings (George Floyd) resulted in a murder conviction. The others did not even go to trial.

I would bet, however, that there's disparate treatment in the Somersworth schools, with heavy mention of Garner, Brown, Rice, and Floyd. With zero mentions of (say) Laken Riley, Jocelyn Nungaray, Jamiel Shaw II, Kate Steinle, or… I'm just guessing, though.

Things get pretty sappy, and also wordy. John shows that he can rattle off a lot of races, ethnicities, religions, sexual classes, and more:

In the Somersworth School District, what these three letters/words represent is pretty straightforward — and fundamental to who we are and how we strive to live. For starters, diversity is not a program, practice, or policy, it is who we are as a community. You can’t outlaw it; it is us. Black, white, Asian, native American, and Latino. Of Indonesian, French, Irish, Mexican, Canadian, and countless other national origins. Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, agnostic, atheist, and more. Straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender. Rich, poor, and everything in-between. Native English speakers and English language learners. Independents, Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, and so on. Toddlers, kids, teenagers, and adults of all ages. Blue collar, white collar, unemployed, retired. Individuals with disabilities, challenges, and learning differences of all sorts, minor and significant. We are immensely proud of who we are here in Somersworth. You can embrace your community’s diversity or despise it — but you can’t legislate it away. I guess you could deport everyone that fell into the categories you didn’t like —but that would never happen here in the United States. (Would it?) In Somersworth, we choose to cherish our diversity.

Disingenuity, thy name is John. He takes a similar tack with "equity" and "inclusion". They only mean good things! Not bad! And certainly they don't have anything to do with what the Ed. Dept.'s memo is talking about.

So when John bemoans that he might have to choose between "doing the right thing" and getting that cool cash from Uncle Stupid, his readers are left wondering what the heck he's talking about. He hasn't named a single "right thing" that might run afoul of the Ed. Dept.'s memo.

Ah, well. He's shown us what he really wants to show us. See my headline.

(My previous takes on John's columns here, here, and here.)

Also of note:

• Fun while it lasted. Niall Ferguson writes on Trump’s Tariffs and the End of American Empire. Subtitle: "The president stands as much chance of reindustrializing the U.S. as you do of getting your frozen laptop to work by smashing the motherboard with a Minecraft hammer."

  Depending on your worldview, you probably think Trump’s tariff blitz is one of two things. Either a committed protectionist is trying to Make America Great Again by killing “globalism,” ending “forever wars,” and bringing manufacturing jobs back to the United States. Let’s call this Project Minecraft. Alternatively, an unhinged demagogue is crashing both the world economy and the liberal international order, mainly to the advantage of authoritarian regimes. Call this Project Moscow.

  But here is what is actually happening: The American empire that came into existence after the failed autarky and isolationism of the 1930s is being broken up after 80 years. Despite Trump’s imperial impulses—wanting to annex Greenland, calling for Canada to become the 51st state—he is engaged right now in a kind of wild decolonization project.
  
  Like the post-1945 British Labour governments, he wants to shelter domestic manufacturing and the working class behind tariffs while reducing overseas commitments. But the net result will be both economically damaging and geopolitically weakening. Americans will come to miss globalism and policing the world. They will belatedly realize that there is no portal through which the United States can return to the 1950s, much less the 1900s. And the principal beneficiary of Project Minecraft will not be Russia, but China. Call it Project Manchuria.

  Niall admits he got some insight from his 7-year-old son, who went to see A Minecraft Movie. Probably not the worst place to obtain inspiration.

• Other than that, though, it's fine. At AEI, Kevin Corinth and Stan Veuger look at that formula full of Greek letters that the administration tried to snow us with:

  And find: President Trump’s Tariff Formula Makes No Economic Sense. It’s Also Based on an Error.

  The formula for the tariffs, originally credited to the Council of Economic Advisers and published by the Office of the United States Trade Representative, does not make economic sense. The trade deficit with a given country is not determined only by tariffs and non-tariff trade barriers, but also by international capital flows, supply chains, comparative advantage, geography, etc.  

  But even if one were to take the Trump Administration’s tariff formula seriously, it makes an error that inflates the tariffs assumed to be levied by foreign countries four-fold. As a result, the “reciprocal” tariffs imposed by President Trump are highly inflated as well.

  As Teen Talk Barbie didn't quite say: "Math is hard!"

• Someday we'll look back on this and wonder what evil spell we were under. Jay Nordlinger on Seeing Putin Clear.

  Putin’s Russia is a terror-state. Day after day, year after year, it kills and maims innocent people in Ukraine. “Children among 18 killed in Russian attack on Zelensky’s home city,” reads a headline from the BBC. (The article is here.) That city is Kryvyi Rih. Half the dead were children and teenagers, ages 3 to 17.

  We ought to know their names and faces. Otherwise, the dead are mere statistics, or abstractions. In a post, Vladimir Kara-Murza named their names, gave their ages, and showed their pictures.

  Kara-Murza, as you know, is a Russian democracy leader and a former political prisoner. He is a Russian patriot who believes in human rights for all — wherever they live.

  • In the Free West, leaders ought to decry atrocities such as the massacre in Kryvyi Rih. I hear no such sounds out of our government here in America. Who will now lead the West?

  Not Trump, I guess.

• But lest we forget… Becket Adams looks at The Opportunistic End of the Biden Cover-Up.

  The people who told you there was nothing wrong with former President Biden are excited to discuss all the ways in which there was absolutely something wrong with former President Biden.

  If these people had any capacity for shame, they’d be feeling it about now.

  On MSNBC’s Morning Joe last week, where host Joe Scarborough boasted not long before Biden’s disastrous June 2024 presidential debate performance that “this version of Biden — intellectually, analytically — is the best Biden ever,” NBC News’s Jonathan Allen and The Hill’s Amie Parnes discussed their new book, which details the lengths to which the former president’s inner circle reportedly went to keep his deterioration a secret from voters.

  Scarborough and his chirpy co-host, Mika Brzezinski, nodded along during the segment, as if they were mere spectators to the effort to hide the president’s condition and not themselves active participants.

  But of course, they were active participants. Becket, as they say, has the receipts. As his subhed says: "Now that book deals can be made, the story can be told."

  You'd think there'd be more outrage about this. At least, among people who like to get outraged.

• And then there's Hunter. Speaking of "now it can be told", Jonathan Turley describes why Joe pardoned his son Hunter for activities going back to 2014: Oh, That Influence Peddling: Times Finds Evidence Suggesting Hunter Acted as Foreign Agent.

  For years, some of us have written about the Biden family’s multimillion-dollar influence-peddling operation and the Justice Department’s refusal to charge Hunter Biden with being an unregistered foreign agent. Now, years later, the New York Times has found evidence suggesting that Hunter Biden was acting as a foreign agent as early as the Obama Administration, when his Dad was Vice President.

  It was completely obvious that Hunter had no marketable skills other than to be able to pronounce his last name. Jonathan notes the different treatment afforded to Hunter compared to Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos, etc.

… as Reason reporter Christian Britschgi says, Trump is giving everyone what they want in the dumbest way possible.

You can probably provide plenty of evidence of that from memory; click over to see how many you've missed or forgotten already.

Also of note:

• OK, now I'm starting to think I'll read it. Despite Kevin D. Williamson's dismissal, George Will likes it better: Progressivism explains much of what the new book ‘Abundance’ deplores.

  Many years ago, after reconstruction of Manhattan’s West Side Highway took 35 years, Daniel Patrick Moynihan noted that the more challenging construction of the George Washington Bridge took just 39 months. Moynihan, New York’s four-term Democratic senator, lamented that whereas Americans once celebrated people who built things, “in the 1970s, civic reputation began to be acquired by people who prevented things from happening.”

  Many decades later, two center-left journalists, Ezra Klein (the New York Times) and Derek Thompson (the Atlantic), know that this problem has worsened, and that solving it is a prerequisite for reviving the Democratic Party. In their book “Abundance,” they properly applaud what Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania did when, in 2023, a tanker-truck explosion collapsed a bridge in Philadelphia’s section of Interstate 95, a crucial artery for East Coast commerce.

  If all the environmental, diversity, equity, inclusion of minority-owned firms, and other laws, rules, and procedural fetishes had been adhered to, just issuing the construction contract would have consumed 12 to 24 months. Because Shapiro shredded laws and red tape, I-95 was reopened in 12 days.

  I should point out that not all "progressives" are happy with Ezra and Derek. One of my reads, TechDirt, is pretty good on civil liberties issues. But they've gone all-in on Trump-hatred, which means they shower abuse on anyone who suggests that Trump might find some worthy targets for cuts in the drunken-sailor spending of the Biden Administration. Aid and comfort to the Orange-haired Enemy! So, according to their recent headline: Jon Stewart And Ezra Klein Help GOP Paint Infrastructure Bill Broadband Grants As A Useless Boondoggle. After making excuses, Karl Bode laments:

  Apparently thinking he was helping matters, NY Times columnist Ezra Klein recently went on Jon Stewart’s podcast to jump into this complicated policy issue and complain about the infrastructure bill. Unfortunately, when he gets to BEAD, his complaints lacked context and only help paint the entire program as an irredeemable waste:

  “This is, I want to say something because it’s very important I say this, this is the Biden administration’s process for its own bill. They wanted this to happen. This is how liberal government works now.”

  At the end of the interview Stewart is shocked to “learn” that a whole BEAD subsidy program was a complete and abject failure simply because Democrats really like bureaucracy and shot themselves in the foot for their own amusement (which isn’t true):

  “I’m speechless, honestly. It’s far worse than I could have imagined. But the fact that they amputated their own legs on this is what’s so stunning.”

  Klein and Stewart’s inference that BEAD is entirely a useless boondoggle were then picked up by numerous right wing pseudo-news outlets who further advertised the BEAD program to millions of Americans as a supposed pointless waste.

  Karl simply takes the bureaucratic skim-off of massive amounts of taxpayer dollars as a given. Need I say: read both sides, make up your own mind.

• Just a TechDirty aside. I recently read The Technological Republic, co-written by billionaire NH resident Alexander Carp, CEO of defense contractor Palantir. (Click on the image below for my report.)

  Now, Carp has self-described himself as a socialist, and he voted for both Hillary and Kamala over Trump. But he also is a patriot who wants America to be safer from bad guys who wish us ill. Which made me wonder how the TechDirt crowd felt about him. Well, Tim Cushing didn't like him at all: Palantir CEO Sure Seems Pleased His Tech Is Capable Of Getting People Killed.

  As if things weren’t terrible enough, the techbros of the world have decided the one-two punch of Donald Trump and Elon Musk will make them even richer than they already are, even if it means making the world a worse place to live… or suddenly die.

  Palantir has been on the leading edge of surveillance tech for years, making the world worse by inflicting cities with “predictive policing” and similar “advancements.” Taxpayers are stuck paying the tab for AI-assisted crunching of tainted cop data, ensuring the same old shitty, racist policing will just cost more than it did the last time around.

  I think it's fair to say Tim's mind was previously made up on this issue.

• Compare and contrast. Specifically, compare and contrast this NH Journal story with (see above) Josh Shapiro's 12-day reopening of I-95 after the Philadelphia bridge collapse: After 1,200 Days and Billions of Dollars, Biden's NH Bridge Still Needs Repairs.

  On an icy morning in November 2021, then-President Joe Biden picked a tied-arch bridge with a rusty steel-grid deck spanning the Pemigewasset River in Woodstock to tout the trillion-dollar Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act he’d just signed.

  The 86-year-old iron relic, which funnels traffic in and out of North Woodstock, had been on New Hampshire’s red list of structurally unsafe bridges since 2014 — when Biden was serving as vice president.

  Surrounded by the four Democrats in the state’s federal delegation, Biden stood at the foot of the bridge and pledged, “America is moving again, and your life is going to change for the better.”

  And now, 1,234 days later, Biden’s gone, billions of dollars have been spent, and the bridge in Woodstock is still red-listed.

  By the way, the "86-year-old iron relic" refers to the bridge, not Biden. Joe is only 82, and is not made of iron.

• Wordplay is appreciated at Pun Salad. Walter Donway looks at NIH: The $47-Billion Sacred Cow Is Scared.

  Tocsins are ringing over the Trump administration’s initial attempts to rein in the National Institutes of Health (NIH) $47 billion annual budget. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced a 25 percent reduction in staff, amounting to 20,000 job cuts across the NIH, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). Some 28 divisions will be consolidated into 15 to centralize functions related to addiction, mental health, and safety. Predicted annual savings are $1.8 billion. The administration has directed the NIH to terminate hundreds of research awards (out of some 50,000 a year), including over 100 ongoing clinical trials. Cuts have led to the suspension of programs like the NIH postbaccalaureate program.

  A March 17 New Yorker piece, “Health Hazard,” assailed potential reductions as an attack on science itself leading to the deaths of children. The protests to all appearances are universal; not one article to the contrary. We have lost the ability even to imagine an alternative. “Creative destruction,” however it might apply here, is literally inconceivable. We cry out with one voice “to arms, to arms, we are attacked”!

  The response, here, is the same as to the Administration’s broader assault on “big government”: the NIH system has become an automatic funding machine that directs tens of billions of taxpayer dollars each year to mostly the same major institutions, leading laboratories, and, in many cases, the same scientists. One happy family.

  Walter says: slash away. You remember what Einstein didn't say about insanity, right?

Recently on the book blog:

Last month, I noticed George Will's praise of this book by Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska. Half-thinking that I might cause some fretting at Portsmouth (NH) Public LIbrary, I submitted it to them as a suggested purchase. They bought it, I borrowed it, and here we are.

I probably didn't need to suggest it. Amazon notes that it is (as I type) their "#1 Best Seller" in the "Government & Business" genre. And it was, at some point, a "INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER". In addition to GFW's two-thumbs-up, the WSJ review was also positive.

Author Karp is CEO of Palantir, a high-tech defense contractor; Co-author Zamiska is Palantir's head of corporate affairs and legal counsel. Palantir is noted for (among many other things) taking over Project Maven, the Defense Department's effort to incorporate AI into its tactics, after Google dropped out, thanks to "activist" employee protests.

So you would think Karp might be a Trump cheerleader, like his friend (and Palantir co-founder) Peter Thiel. Nope. He has described himself as a socialist and a progressive, voted for both Hillary (2016) and Kamala (2024). And (by the way) he lives in Grafton County, NH; at least that's the location of one of his "10 cross-country ski huts".

The big part of the book is its forthright advocacy of high-tech American patriotism, and its warnings that the US must not be caught with its AI pants down by (for example) China. Silicon Valley companies should not be averse to contracting with the US military. Unfortunately, high-tech employees have largely been indoctrinated in higher-ed's woke view of the world, leading to a different concentrations, typically involving consumer eyeball-catching. As they put it: "A significant subset of Silicon Valley today undoubtedly scorns the masses for their attachment to guns and religion, but that subset clings to something else—a thin and meager secular ideology that masquerades as thought." Ouch!

Other parts of the book are more business-oriented, discussing the nature of startups, founders, venture capitalists, As you might guess from the above, a number of the book's observations are idiosyncratic and unpredictable. (Some odious to me, like the suggestion that the US needs to reinstate the military draft.)

So, bottom line: interesting, and likely to both anger and elate its readers.

Onetime reporter Garry Rayno wonders: What Has Become of Laissez Faire New Hampshire? He bemoans the Good Old Days, when (he alleges) "people were reluctant to delve too deeply into their neighbors’ activities unless the cows broke out too many times and trampled the vegetable garden."

Ah, but now things have changed and it's all the fault of … libertarians!

Sneaky!

Garry rambles on disparate topics, never spending too much time on any one of them: he's in favor of "local control" (as long as the local controllers are doing things he likes). But he meanders over abortion, transgenderism, Education Freedom Accounts, minimum wage laws, zoning, and more. Never spending much time on one topic, and never seriously considering the "libertarian" arguments. That would be work!

By the end, he's worked himself up into high dudgeon, making wild and ominous charges in a semi-incoherent rant:

Bet you didn't notice all the tyranny and authoritarianism, did you?

I couldn't help but recall Joe McCarthy's famous assertion: "I have here in my hand a list of 205—a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department."

Well, Garry's got a somewhat less specific (80 to 90) list. Comprising "Republican libertarian lawmakers". And they are "bankrolled by oligarchs"!

Leaving me to wonder: how do I get oligarch-bankrolled? Is it those clickbait ads I see on those other websites?

Also of note:

• Speaking of slanderous evidence-lacking rants… Diane Ravitch had one in a recent issue of The New York Review of Books: Selling Out Our Public Schools. At National Review, Matthew Lau rebuts: Correcting a Faulty History of School Choice and Racism.

  In an essay for The New York Review of Books, Diane Ravitch denounces school choice for its “racist origins” and assails Milton Friedman for allegedly exploiting white supremacy to privatize education. For many decades, she writes, the term “school choice” was “widely and rightly dismissed as racist.” According to Ravitch, whose essay reviews Josh Cowen’s The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers, school-choice programs have harmed poor students and enabled “publicly funded discrimination.”

  Ravitch’s essay and her accusations of racism make for interesting reading, but they are hard to defend. And while she is correct that racism was present in the early years of school-choice activism in the Jim Crow era, how relevant is that in understanding school-choice programs today?

  (It is worth, if only briefly, juxtaposing the emphasis that Ravitch places on racism and school choice over half a century ago with her strong support of a higher minimum wage, despite the fact that the original federal minimum wage law, the 1931 Davis-Bacon Act, was envisaged by some of its supporters as a way of pricing black non-union workers out of construction jobs.)

  I'm old enough to remember when Diane Ravitch was a critic of lousy public schools. That was a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.

• When will there be good news? George Will certainly doesn't have any: Even without the tariffs, Trump’s economic agenda is a disaster.

  In the five minutes required to read this column at a leisurely pace, pausing to sip coffee, the nation will pay $11 million (about $38,000 a second) toward servicing the national debt. Today, Congress is debating how many trillions to increase the debt.

  The debate concerns extending or revising portions of, or perhaps extending all of, the first Trump administration’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Since then, the 75 percent increase in federal spending has far exceeded the 58 percent increase in revenue. Such an imbalance is an accelerating consequence of the changed relationship between the citizenry and the federal government that began 90 years ago.

  Government actions always have a certain degree of plunder, but we've really kicked it up a notch in those 90 years.

• An obvious observation made by Veronique de Rugy: 'Liberation day' tariffs will liberate people—from their income. (And also, as I check my investment portfolio, it also liberated me from a significant fraction of my wealth.)

  We're told that "Liberation Day" tariffs on imports from around the world will raise $6 trillion in federal revenue over the next decade, plus another trillion from automobile tariffs. But the only true "liberation" will be us Americans—consumers and taxpayers—being liberated from even more of our hard-earned income. So hold on to your wallet.

  If you don't believe that Liberation Day is bad news for the overwhelming majority of us, first remember that U.S. consumers are, as always, the ones who pay U.S. tariffs. Whatever the Trump team collects from foreign imports will be shifted back to us in the form of higher prices.

  Then there is the fact that the administration is already preparing for economic damage control with emergency aid for U.S. farmers. The need for such aid is a tacit admission that the president's trade policy—marketed as a tool to strengthen America—will trigger retaliations from our trading partners that will hurt many American producers, including farmers who export this country's agricultural bounty to help feed the world.

  Need I point out that Nikki Haley would not have done this?

• But let's finish up on a positive note. Michael F. Cannon finds something to praise in the Trump Administration: Downsizing HHS Is the Right Thing to Do.

  Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has announced and begun implementing the elimination of 10,000 positions at the Department of Health and Human Services. He is also reorganizing the department. He estimates savings of $1.8 billion per year. A further 10,000 HHS employees have taken buyout offers or retired early since President Trump resumed office. Altogether, these moves will reduce HHS staffing levels by some 24 percent.

  To the extent Congress authorizes the secretary to do so, reducing HHS staffing levels is the right thing to do. Congress should go further by eliminating the regulations and spending programs those HHS employees implemented. Doing so would prevent the risk that cutting some HHS jobs could paradoxically increase the size of government.

  Fine, but given Congress's demonstrable fiscal irresponsibility, starting any sentence with "Congress should…" is just hoping for the unlikely.

Recently on the book blog:

This book had been sitting on my shelf for a long time, so long that I've completely forgotten how, when, or why I got it. But it eventually worked its way to the top of the non-fiction pile of my book-picking system. The main text is a hefty 651 pages, which factors nicely into a 21-day reading schedule of 31 pages/day.

It's really pretty good. As you might expect, given that it won the Pulitzer back in 2002. The author, David McCullough, performed a massive amount of scholarship, digging through primary documents of the era, and bringing everything to life with his evocative prose.

It's a welcome correction to what I (dimly) remembered from high school US History: Adams was a Bad President who made a direct assault on the Constitution's First Amendment with the Alien and Sedition Acts, but fortunately Thomas Jefferson got in and saved the country.

Not quite. The Acts were four in number, three were simply allowed to expire. Remaining was the "Alien Enemies Act", which did not expire, and was not repealed. And was used in the War of 1812 (against Brits), WWI (against nationals of the "Central Powers"), and WWII (against Germans, Italians, and (mostly) Japanese). And now Trump is using it (so far) to deport Venezuelans.

Anyway: in addition to straight biography, there's a lot of accompanying history that provides the context to Adams' life. He was a tireless advocate for American independence from Britain, at a time when that was far from a sure thing. During the Revolutionary War, he played an important role in getting the French to keep the Brits off balance.

Overall, McCullough lends some balance to the characters of the era. Adams comes off very well, although with persistent flaws of vanity and temper. Current idols Jefferson, Franklin, and Hamilton are taken down a notch or two.

There are a lot of great anecdotes. One of my favorites was a story Ben Franklin told Thomas Jefferson, who was dismayed by the surgery the Continental Congress was performing on his draft of the Declaration of Independence.

[Franklin] had once known a hatter who wished to have a sign made saying John Thompson, Hatter, Makes and Sells hats for ready money, this to be accompanied by a picture of a hat.But the man had chosen first to ask the opinion of friends, with the result that one word after another was removed as superfluous or redundant, until at last the sign was reduced to Thompson's name and the picture of the hat.

Well, I chuckled.

Along the way, I discovered that Adams was not a fan of New Hampshire's John Sullivan (born in Somersworth, just a couple miles up the road from Pun Salad Manor); he was suspected of Loyalist sympathies. (That turned out not to be the case.)

Just one more: in his long and (mostly) happy post-presidential retirement, Adams was a voracious reader. He especially liked this, from a famous Cicero essay:

For as I like a young man in whom there is something of the old […], so I like an old man in whom there is something of the young; and he who follows this maxim, in body will possibly be an old man but he will never be an old man in mind.

And, as an old man myself, I find that to be excellent advice.

Fun Fact: the publisher, Minotaur Books, misspelled blurber Alafair Burke's first name on the front cover of Portsmouth (NH) Public Library's copy of this book as "Alfair". Pretty noticeable error for someone who reads a lot of her dad's Dave Robicheaux novels. It seems to have been fixed in later printings.

I came to read this thanks to a glowing review of White King by the same author, Juan Gómez-Jurado. Which (it turns out) is the third entry in a trilogy. Better start with the first one, I said.

It is a translation from the original Spanish. Apparently there's a certain amount of humor in the author's prose, and at least some of that survives in the English version; I smiled in a number of spots. And it's a definite page-turner.

The overall premise of the trilogy is that the extraordinarily intelligent Antonia Scott has been recruited by a shadowy organization to solve crimes that have the normal Spanish police force stumped. She has serious psychological problems, and a family life marked by violence and dysfunction. She is teamed up with Jon Gutiiérrez, a gay police detective "who doesn't play by the rules". Specifically, he's about to face criminal charges for planting phony evidence in an unsuccessful attempt to bring down a drug dealer.

Their first case together involves the body of a young boy, drained of blood, head anointed with oil, straight out of Psalm 23. That's followed closely by the kidnapping of a wealthy heiress. Antonia and Jon are resented by the normal police, Jon's targeted by an egotistic journalist, and the heiress's father is obviously hiding something important. And the perp seems to have outsmarted/outviollenced them at every turn. Has a faster car, too.

My only gripe: seems more than a bit contrived. I can suspend disbelief as well as the next person, but at a certain point… Example: Without spoiling anything, the big "shocking plot twist" is the revelation of a ruse that (as near as I can tell) makes no particular sense to the story; it seems planted to just boggle the mind of readers.

The April 2 "Liberation Day" announcement caused a lot of commentary yesterday. But it wasn't the only piece of bad economic news. According to Cato's Romina Boccia and Dominik Lettm The Senate’s Latest Budget Resolution is a Fiscal Train Wreck.

There's a pic of a literal train wreck at the top of their article, but this one is pretty close to literal:

As I type, the Google saith that gold futures are up 36.34% over the past year. My investment portfolio… is not.

Also of note:

• How does Social Security differ from a Ponzi Scheme? David "@iowahawkblog" Burge and Mary Katherine ("@mkhammer") Ham explore the similarities and one big difference, in an effort to educate Janice (@leftcoastbabe") Hough:

  One of the many things the government does and celebrates itself for doing that would be illegal if a private entity did it, and then they act aghast if you point this out.

  — Mary Katharine Ham (@mkhammer) March 30, 2025

  That's right: Charles Ponzi went to prison; that hasn't happened to any of the Social Security hucksters.

• Note to self: don't try to tell authors what their books are about. J.K. Rowling takes a critic to school:

  You appear to have skipped the bits where a narcissistic villain and his acolytes, all of whom had an innate advantage over those they were persecuting, tried to create a totalitarian state with themselves as leaders, all while claiming they were the truly oppressed ones. pic.twitter.com/8zTReneEr7

  — J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) April 4, 2025

  You need some background? A recent article: J.K. Rowling will not be arrested for comments about transgender women, police say.

  However, if you are some random Scot, you may not be so fortunate, so watch your mouths, lads and lassies.

• OK, as promised/threatened: Gee, there's a lot of commentary about the tariffs, isn't there? A sampling follows, first up is Jim Geraghty: Trump’s Totally Arbitrary Tariff Regime.

  There are two main takeaways from [Wednesday]’s “liberation day” announcements. The new tariffs are economically illiterate, self-destructive, top-to-bottom nonsense, imposed with no sense of rhyme or reason, assembled by White House staffers who do not know which territories have serious trade relationships with the U.S. and which ones are inhabited entirely by penguins. Also, the White House continues to avoid almost any decision that could possibly antagonize Vladimir Putin, while inflicting as much pain as possible on longtime allies and vulnerable friends like Israel and Taiwan.

  For America’s enemies, Wednesday was the best day in a long time.

  That's mild compared to Kevin D. Williamson's take: Donald Trump's Malevolent Laziness.

  What a bunch of buffoons.

  If men could actually die of shame, then Donald Trump’s economic team would be toast—instead, it is only their reputations that have been buried.

  As I have been writing for some time, Donald Trump’s most fundamental character flaw—his laziness—has been his country’s saving grace, at least at times. Trump is an aspiring caudillo whose political models are Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, and a would-be tyrant who attempted to stage a coup d’état after losing the 2020 election to a barely sentient Joe Biden—but, as bad as he was and is, he could have been and could be a great deal worse if not for the fact that he is unbelievably lazy, a Fox News-watching, social-media-addicted couch potato of a chief executive who might have wielded the levers of power to greater malevolent effect if he had bothered to work at his craft a little bit.

  And Jeff Maurer is having a coulda/woulda/shoulda moment: We Should Have Taken Trump Literally, Not Seriously. He provides a sampling of appalled economist tweets. My favorite:

  Liberation Day pic.twitter.com/zgXK863BrD

  — James Pethokoukis ⏩️⤴️ (@JimPethokoukis) April 2, 2025

  But overall:

  The proximate cause of the entire economics profession wondering “should we just Jonestown ourselves?” isn’t just Trump’s idiotic tariffs; it’s the stupidity with which his idiotic tariffs have been implemented dumbly. Because the less-completely-retarded rationale for tariffs is that they’re a tit-for-tat measure that punishes countries who put up trade barriers; in theory, a brief trade war could push countries to lower barriers and level the playing field. But Trump didn’t slap higher tariffs on countries that have higher barriers; he slapped tariffs on countries that happen to have a trade surplus with the US, no matter what their policies are. Notoriously closed-off economies like Iran and Saudi Arabia got off relatively easy (10 percent tariffs on each), while trading partners who have been playing by the rules like the European Union and Japan got hit hard (20 and 24 percent tariffs, respectively). Also: We put tariffs on a remote island chain in the Indian Ocean inhabited only by penguins. It is now the official policy of the United States that we will restore trade balance by keeping rockhopper penguins from poaching our manufacturing jobs.

  And it gets even dumber…

  Click over to see just how dumb it gets.

But of course, we have words to accompany Mr. Ramirez's Eye Candy du Jour. Starting with Tyler Cowen, who thinks ‘Liberation Day’ Was Even Worse Than Expected. Tyler quotes Scott Lincicome's tweet about the so-called "reciprocal" tariffs, which will:

As I type this (pre-market opening), stock market futures are looking pretty grim. Essentially they're saying, "Gee, this is worse than even I expected."

The President's Executive Order on this is full of fallacies. And (thanks, control-F) it contains the words "manufacturing" 30 times, "manufacturers" thrice, and "manufacture" (also) thrice.

Which brings us to Jeff Maurer's query: Why Do We Fetishize Manufacturing Jobs?.

Apologies in … what's the opposite of advance? Anyway, sorry for the porno lingo there.

Jeff provides a telling graph from YiLi Chien and Paul Morris of the St. Louis Fed:

As they say: that's one way to look at it. Here's another, also from the St. Louis Fed:

Same data, but this is one of those things in Darrell Huff's classic How to Lie With Statistics: you can make things look more, or less, dire by choosing the range of your graph axes appropriately.

Also of note:

• Irony, thy name is Nina. Robby Soave looks at a recent appearance in a congressional subcommittee hearing: Nina Jankowicz's Defense of Government Censors Is Based on Misinformation.

  Nina Jankowicz is the former director of the Department of Homeland Security's Disinformation Governance Board, an entity that purported to advise the Biden administration on how best to counter online misinformation but was shuttered after drawing the ire of conservatives and libertarians. Like so many other purported disinfo experts, Jankowicz's record of identifying actual lies is decidedly mixed: She had dutifully joined the intelligence community and much of the mainstream media, for instance, in wrongly asserting that the New York Post's Hunter Biden laptop story was disinformation peddled by Russia. She personally expressed the view that the straightforward explanation—Hunter Biden left his laptop at a repair shop—was a "fairy tale." Oops.

  But like so many other former government intelligence officials who were fundamentally wrong about pivotal issues pertaining to their area of expertise, Jankowicz is fated to fail upward. She is now the president of the Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting transparency, though the group does not disclose its sources of funding.

  Robby writes at Reason, and (as he notes) the magazine was slammed back in the day by the "Global Disinformation Index" as one of the 10 "riskiest online news outlets". Because it dared take seriously the lab leak explanation for Covid.

• Yes, "we" did. Well, not me. Kevin D. Williamson takes issue with people objecting to Trumpian policies by saying, “This isn’t what Americans voted for.” Oh, yeah? KDW objects: Americans Did Vote for This. It's pretty brutal:

  Trump was not elected to help people—economic growth during the first Trump administration was exactly the same as it was in the Obama years (please apply the usual caveats about presidents and economic performance) and less than during the Biden, George W. Bush, or Clinton administrations. American farmers were even reduced to taking supplementary federal handouts because Trump’s idiotic trade wars wrecked their export markets. That isn’t what help looks like.

  Trump was elected to hurt people.

  The creed of cruelty is nearly universal among Trump loyalists. Of course, they don’t put it that way, but ask them and they will tell you the truth in spite of themselves: Trump was elected by people who resent this or that group for its status, its wealth, its influence, its political power, its class condescension, etc., and electing Trump—again—was a way to get back at “them,” “the media,” “elites,” etc. Nobody voted for Trump for policy reasons, because he has no policies, only tantrums. Nobody voted for Trump for philosophical reasons, because he has no philosophy beyond, “I am your retribution.” The excitable ladies and gentlemen over at The Daily Wire sell “Leftist Tears” mugs, and there’s a reason for that. The tears—of our fellow Americans, wrongheaded though they may be in their politics—are what this is all about. Forget policy—those tears are the deliverable, the only one that really matters.

  Which brings to mind Bryan Caplan's observation from 2021: Politics is Cruelty. Illustrated with:

  

  You don't want to see that face in a mirror, do you?

• Going faster than a rollercoaster. Perhaps to the tune of that old Buddy Holly song, "Everyday", Noah Rothman sings: The Case for Defunding NPR Keeps Getting Stronger.

  National Public Radio CEO Katherine Maher has regrets. She should be grateful to the House Republicans who compelled her to express them during a subcommittee hearing last week on the thoughtless left-wing biases that flourished under her leadership.

  During that hearing, Maher confessed that her outlet was “mistaken in failing to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story more aggressively and sooner.” That makes it sound as if NPR merely failed to give the story its due. Rather, NPR refused to cover the story at all so as to not “waste our time on stories that are not really stories,” as former NPR managing editor Terence Samuel put it. In addition, Maher admitted that her news-gathering institution lacked the requisite curiosity to explore the prospect that Covid originated in a Chinese lab — that is, until enough Democrats in good standing were willing to admit as much.

  It was a damning performance, and Maher’s Democratic allies failed to muster a coherent response to it. In lieu of cogency, Democrats retreated to old talking points about how Republicans are blinded by their irrational hate for America’s partially taxpayer-funded public news outlets, NPR and PBS, because they just cannot tolerate the existence of family-friendly educational products.

  Noah has links to National Review's coverage of NPR over the years. It's unpaywalled, and includes a pitch for contributions to NR. Which, unlike taxpayer support for NPR/PBS/CPB, is voluntary.

Specifically, our Eye Candy du Jour, first appearing here in 2019:

But we have words too, and Eric Boehm's are from the May 2025 Reason: America Is Losing Trump's Trade War to Itself.

'Twas chaos! And I guess it's still on.

Also of note:

• Just three? Confession: I worked at NIH for a while. It was a turning point in my professional career, in that I decided life as a biophysics researcher was not for me. The people were nice though. Never met Fauci.

  But I pay special attention to NIH in the news, and Zachary R. Caverley has had it with The 3 myths supporting NIH funding.

  The Trump administration's proposal to cut National Institutes of Health (NIH) indirect funds has been widely attacked, with heated claims it will annihilate biomedical scientific research in the United States. Leading with a picture of a 12-year-old child with muscular dystrophy, Shetal Shah, a neonatology professor, argued in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser that the cuts would "hobble" vital medical research, and a Time magazine interviewee went as far as to call it the "apocalypse" of U.S. science writ large. While the funding cut has been blocked by federal judges for now, the future fiscal status of the NIH, and the university researchers that depend on it, remains uncertain.

  It recalls the bad old days of the "sequester"—remember them? Let me resurrect an old CBS News story I linked to back in 2013:

  Professor Laura Niedernhofer at the Scripps Research Institute in Florida believes her team of 40 scientists can find a drug to diminish the impact of old age. The drug won't keep you young, she says, it would make the old less frail. "My hypotheses would be that there would actually be drugs that would simultaneously dampen osteoporosis, dementia, maybe some fatigue and muscle wasting all at the same time," she said.

  Alas, her funding was sequestered! My snarky comment at the time:

  OH MY GOD. Professor Laura was RIGHT ON THE VERGE of discovering a MIRACLE DRUG that would SAVE US GEEZERS from ALL SORTS OF INFIRMITIES. And all she needed was A BIT MORE GOVERNMENT MONEY, and it would have pushed her RIGHT OVER THE GOAL LINE and SAVED US ALL.

  But now that MIRACLE DRUG will be LOST FOREVER. It's HOPELESS, thanks to the SEQUESTER.

  There is nothing new under the sun, except you can substitute DOGE for SEQUESTER.

• Something I didn't learn in my high school US history class. For some reason I'm reading David McCullough's biography of John Adams, because pretty much all I remembered from that class was John Adams was a Bad Guy because of the Alien and Sedition Acts, from which Thomas Jefferson saved us!

  Well, not exactly. the Acts were four in number; three had expiration dates, and they were simply allowed to die.

  But the fourth, the Alien Enemies Act, did not expire. And was not repealed. And, yes, President Trump has been using it as legal cover for deporting folks.

  Legally? Well, Damon Root differs: Trump's use of the Alien Enemies Act violates Madison's view of presidential power.

  President Donald Trump claims that the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 grants him the power to deport certain Venezuelan-born aliens without due process based on the mere allegation of membership in a criminal street gang.

  But the text of the Alien Enemies Act does not allow the president to do anything of the sort. "Whenever there shall be a declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government, or any invasion or predatory incursion shall be perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States, by any foreign nation or government," the act states, the president may direct the "removal" of "all natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects of the hostile nation or government, being males of the age of fourteen years and upwards, who shall be within the United States, and not actually naturalized."

  I'm no fan of Venezuelan-born aliens who are in street gangs. But how hard could it be to prove that?

• Moving at the speed of sludge. Universities all over the country are backing off from DEI-related policies, like requiring ideological litmus tests "diversity statements" in employment applications. So the University Near Here … has nothing to report in that area, as reported by Damien Fisher: Facing Millions in Budget Cuts, UNH Still Spending on DEI.

  The University of New Hampshire may be facing tens of millions of dollars in cuts in state funding, but it’s still spending money on controversial Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs and employees. Not only are DEI policies unpopular with Republicans in the New Hampshire House, but President Donald Trump has also signed an executive order seeking to end government support for them.

  An appeals court upheld the Trump administration’s ability to execute the order while legal challenges work their way through the court.

  On Tuesday, the House Finance Committee passed an amendment to the state budget banning government contracts with DEI mandates.

  But if UNH is shying away from the race-based DEI policies in question, it isn’t showing. The school has made no announcements about shutting down any of its many DEI operations, and has previously indicated it does not see any changes coming.

  I assume there's a lot of panic-fueled discussion going on in Thompson Hall, but nothing public.

That's via Daniel J. Mitchell's article: The Protectionism Edition of Economics Humor. More at the link, but I warn you that I found only one more of his examples actually amusing. (The one with the dragons.) The rest: true, just not funny.

But elsewhere on the web, there's more serious analysis of the tariffs, for example from the WSJ editorialists: A $6 Trillion Trump Tax Increase?.

Also commenting on Navarro's Orwellian ramblings is Eric Boehm: Peter Navarro says tariffs will be $6 trillion tax increase but also tax cut.

"Forward-looking guidance?" Hassett is to be complimented on finding a new way to say, "We have no idea what's going to happen because of this."

Jeff Maurer is suitably wondering: Where’s This Shadowy Cabal of Business Elites I Keep Hearing About?.

Yeah, I've been there. It's mostly nice, but the smell of whiskey and cigars is overpowering.

That's the Denver airport, though. At the White House, it's just the Underpants Gnomes.

Roger Pielke Jr. has a very good summary article on Economics and Politics of Tariffs. As befits an ex-prof:

Those are very non-Gnomish questions. I've (sometimes) advocated that proposed policy changes, regulations, or laws be accompanied by "suicide clauses":

"Here are the benefits this new policy (regulation, law) will provide:" Followed by a list of objective measures, for example the DJIA, unemployment rate, inflation, pollution levels, etc.

"And if these things don't come to pass, this policy (regulation, law) will immediately be repealed."

If you're unwilling to bet on the outcome of your policy, why should anyone take you seriously?

Also of note:

• Credit where due. Jonathan Turley notes a probably unintentional result of a recent appearance by Katherine Maher before a Congressional committee: NPR’s CEO Just Made the Best Case Yet for Defunding NPR. Since we have kind of an Orwellian theme today, it's notable that Maher tried to memory-hole her past positions:

  When asked about her past public statements that Trump is a “deranged, racist sociopath,” she said that she would not post such views today. She similarly brushed off her statements that America is “addicted to White supremacy” and her view that the use of the words “boy and girl” constitute “erasing language” for non-binary people.

  When asked about her past assertion that the U.S. was founded on “black plunder and white democracy,” Maher said she no longer believed what she had said.

  When asked about her support for the book “The Case for Reparations,” Maher denied any memory of ever having read the book. She was then read back her own public statements about how she took a day to read the book in a virtue-signaling post.

  She then denied calling for reparations, but was read back her own declaration: “Yes, the North, yes all of us, yes America. Yes, our original collective sin and unpaid debt. Yes, reparations. Yes, on this day.” She then bizarrely claimed she had not meant giving Black people actual money, or “fiscal reparations.”

  And more. Big Sister is watching you!