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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”).

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