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Mises Wire James Bovard 04/19/2024 Joe Biden is seeking to boost his reelection campaign by torpedoing Chinese imports. In an April 17 speech in Pittsburgh, the symbolic heart of the steel industry, Biden announced that he asked his US trade representative to triple tariffs on Chinese steel and aluminum imports. The tariffs are currently roughly 7.5 percent. A White House press release proclaimed, “President Biden knows that steel is the backbone of the American economy, and a bedrock of our national security.” Biden’s edict is fresh proof that on trade policy, American politicians have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Did Biden vow to leave no boneheaded policy behind? Remember Donald Trump’s knuckleheaded 2018 assertion that “trade wars are good, and easy to win”? When Trump imposed a 25 percent tariff on steel imports in 2018, he was widely criticized for subverting the health of American manufacturing to cater to a single lagging industry. But Biden perpetuated that Trump boondoggle. The Washington Post noted in 2021, “One of Trump’s most controversial trade initiatives, which angered U.S. allies and drew scorn from many economists, has become a plank in Biden’s ‘worker-centered’ trade policy.” There are 135,000 steel workers in the United States compared to more than six million workers in steel-using industries. Politicians and bureaucrats pretend that the latter number doesn’t exist. The Post observed that “the Biden administration is determined to retain support from the United Steelworkers, a force in key states in the industrial Midwest.” The tariffs became increasingly destructive. The price of hot-rolled steel rose more than 300 percent, and manufacturers complained of material shortages, rising prices, and delivery delays.

By Mike Whitney The Unz Review April 23, 2024 America last. America last. That’s all this is. America last, every single day. – Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene The man who is most responsible for the $95 billion giveaway to Ukraine and Israel, is the same guy who pretends to oppose America’s “wasteful” foreign wars. Donald Trump. It was Trump who consulted with Speaker Mike Johnson about the contents of the Ukraine aid package, just as it was Trump who concocted the idea of issuing loans instead of dispersing the standard welfare handout. It was also Trump who said: “I stand with the Speaker, (Mike Johnson)” after which he added that Johnson is doing “a very good job”.

Mises Wire Ryan McMaken 04/18/2024 During the 2016 and 2020 campaigns, Trump's opponents in the Democratic party (and elsewhere) often pointed out that Trump's protectionism hobbles private markets and the economy overall. Yet, the allegedly anti-protectionist Biden administration has done virtually nothing to end Trump's protectionists policies put in place from 2017 to 2020. The motivation is unclear, but it is possible that the Biden administration realized that protectionism is a useful political tool. These policies offer a way of punishing opponents, rewarding allies, and pandering to voters. Now that it's election season, the pandering side of the equation is in full swing. Biden this week called for "sharply higher U.S. tariffs on Chinese metal products." Appropriately, Biden included this new spate of protectionism in what Reuters calls "a package of policies aimed at pleasing steelworkers in the swing state of Pennsylvania." Biden's pandering will likely bear some fruit, politically speaking. Protectionism remains popular. But, as Henry Hazlitt put it, voter support for raising tariffs is "the result of looking only at the immediate effects of a single tariff rate on one group of producers, and forgetting the long-run effects both on consumers as a whole and on all other producers." Those who are incapable or unwilling to examine policies beyond their most short-term effects are easy targets for protectionist rhetoric.

By Jonathan Newman Mises.org April 20, 2024 Ludwig von Mises’s Economic Policy: Thoughts for Today and Tomorrow has become quite popular recently. The Mises Book Store has sold out of its physical copies, and the PDF, which is available online for free, has seen over 50,000 downloads in the past few days. This surge in interest in Mises’s ideas was started by UFC fighter Renato Moicano, who declared in a short post-fight victory speech, “I love America, I love the Constitution…I want to carry…guns. I love private property. Let me tell you something. If you care about your…country, read Ludwig von Mises and the six lessons of the Austrian economic school.” The “six lessons” he is referring to is Mises’s book, Economic Policy: Thoughts for Today and Tomorrow, which was republished by our friends in Brazil under the title “As Seis Lições” (“The Six Lessons”).