For parents who rely on baby formula—whether by choice or due to medical necessity—the nationwide baby formula shortage has become increasingly difficult to ignore. According to the Wall Street Journal, Walgreens, Target, CVS, and Kroger have all begun rationing supplies of formula. Covid lockdowns, combined with a product recall by formula manufacturer Abbott Nutrition has created a very real shortage in a product that is key for proper nutrition in many children. With the shortage has come the usual half-baked bromides about "evil corporations" and how baby formula companies are...
protectionism
How We Incentivize Peace in the World
If you are reading this, there’s a good chance you are one of the people in the world that wants to see all foreign militaries go home and for governments to focus on their own issues rather than intervening in other countries. Maybe you post news stories on Facebook or other social media outlets to try to raise awareness to the cause. I’m going to tell you that even if the tide turns in our favor and we pressure our government to bring the troops home, or a bankruptcy forces this to happen, unless a plan is put in place to ever-incentivize it to stay that way, eventually the forces of...
TGIF: Double-Rigging of the Auto Market
U.S. government interference with our lives often resembles a Russian matryoshka doll: regulation is nested in more regulation. Take the provision of Biden's pending Build Back Better bill that would create a big tax credit for people who buy U.S.-built electric vehicles (EV). Not only would the government distort the domestic auto market by rigging it in favor of electric vehicles over conventional ones, but it also would rig the EV market, Trump-style, in favor of U.S.-made products. This implies that "foreign" EVs are so attractive to American buyers that the domestic offerings need...
Protectionism: Morally and Economically Dumb
Protectionism is reviving in Washington on both sides of the political aisle. Democrats are cheering proposals to restrict trade to benefit labor unions and save the environment while some Republicans are reviving Smoot-Hawley style salvation schemes. Protectionist advocates routinely seize the moral high ground—at least as it is scored in Washington—by promising that restricting imports will magically produce fair trade. Thirty years ago, in my book The Fair Trade Fraud (St. Martin’s Press), I sought to drive a wooden stake into both the intellectual and moral pretenses of American...
Down With Fraudulent ‘Fair’ Trade
The Biden administration is embracing the same flawed “fair trade” mantra that previous administrations used to sanctify protectionist policies. Biden’s team has “largely dispensed with the idea of free trade as a goal in and of itself,” the New York Times reported. U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai recently touted the Biden administration’s plans to “shape the rules for fair trade in the 21st century.” What could possibly go wrong from such a lofty aspiration? Thirty years ago, my book The Fair Trade Fraud was published by St. Martin’s Press. That book was translated into Japanese...
That Time I Swiped the U.S. Tariff Code
"Nothing so diminishes democracy as secrecy,” as Attorney General Ramsey Clark warned in 1967. As a journalist, I have battled federal agencies for decades to try to discover the sordid details of how Americans’ rights and liberties are being shafted. Most government cover-ups succeed because the game is rigged in Washington to blindfold citizens to most federal abuses and boondoggles. But sometimes I found ways to penetrate bureaucratic iron curtains. A few decades ago, trade policy was one of the hottest issues in Washington. Pat Buchanan was revving up his presidential campaign and...
How Shipping Interests Have Rigged the Economic Game for a Century
There’s a 101-year-old law most Americans have never heard of, one that shaves tens of billions of dollars out of the U.S. economy every year for the narrow benefit of politically-influential shipbuilders, shipyard unions and shipping lines. The Jones Act does that by essentially barring foreign vessels from transporting freight or people between two U.S. ports. Among many other ill effects, the elimination of competition drives shipping prices far above what a free market would dictate. Only 46 countries have such laws, and, according to the World Economic Forum, the United States...
TGIF: What the State Really Is
To better understand the nature of government, one can think of it as an agency that sells or, more precisely, rents power to others. The greater the power and the wider its scope, the more opportunities the state's agents will have to sell access to it in return for favors. Of course the demand for that power will also be greater. This stands to reason. If the government is allowed to make many important decisions about private activity, people will want to influence or control that decision-making--and they'll be willing to pay for that influence as long as the price is less than the...
Our Tower of Economic Lies
In a recent issue, Time Magazine boldly declared, “The Free Market Is Dead,” and then added: “What Will Replace It?” Of course, one always can expect Time to be disingenuous at best and dishonest at worst, and as an academic economist, I have come to realize that after reading Time off and on for more than five decades, this is a publication that rarely gets it right when it comes to economic analysis. Yet, we also are dealing with a publication that effectively reflects whatever the current spirit might be. In the mid-1980s, Time gave its readers the infamous cover condemning the...
Challenging George Mason University’s Cadre of Patent Enthusiasts
I’ve previously criticized George Mason economist Alex Tabarrok’s views on patents.1 For example, as noted in Patent Policy on the Back of a Napkin, Tabarrok makes a Laffer-curve style argument that patent rights are currently “too strong.” Of course, he is correct that patent rights are too strong. However, he assumes that we should reduce patent strength, since it’s “too strong” now, but not abolish it, since zero protection is too weak. Instead, there is an optimal amount of patent strength, somewhere between zero and infinity, and we should try to adjust the patent system to optimize...