Whenever a legal challenge to a given policy is decided, a discussion tends to arise as if the court is making a statement on the desirability of the policy itself.  For example, after the US Court of International Trade struck down Trump’s tariffs enacted under the International Economic Policy Act (IEEPA) of 1977 (VOS Selections, Inc. v. Trump), supporters of the tariffs took to social media to decry the court’s ruling as a “judicial coup” against a vital policy.  The Trump Administration said: It is not for unelected judges to decide how to properly address a national emergency. President Trump pledged to put America First, and the Administration is committed to using every lever of executive power to address this crisis and restore American Greatness. On the Left, after the US Supreme Court overruled Roe v Wade in Dobbs, many decried the ruling as supporting bad policy (abortion restrictions).  The argument they were making was that Dobbs wasn’t wrongly decided because the law was wrong, but because legal abortion is a desirable policy. But here’s the thing: courts do not exist to judge policy.  Courts interpret the law and ensure that actions conform to the law.  If courts were to uphold an action just because it is desirable (or, consequently, strike down an action because it is undesirable), that would be a judicial coup.  That would be the courts making policy, ironically, the very thing the dissenters object to.   Take VOS Selections.  The question before the court was not “Are tariffs a good tool to affect trade deficits?”  Nor was it “Should tariffs be used in trade negotiations?”  The question before the court was, “whether the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (“IEEPA”) delegates these powers to the President in the form of authority to impose unlimited tariffs on goods from nearly every country in the world.”  Whether tariffs are a good or bad policy is irrelevant to whether the President has the authority under the statute he invoked to impose them. Courts are not in a position to judge good from bad policy.  That is a question limited exclusively to Congress (not the President).  Congress must “speak clearly” when delegating authority to the executive branch for big questions; for the Court to endorse (or strike down) policy just because it is good or bad would be to seize power from the proper branch (see Biden v Nebraska, pgs. 25–26).  Congress is the place to decide what policies should be enacted. In the United States, all government authority derives from the Constitution.  It does not come from winning an election or some other supposed manifestation of the “public will.”  The Constitution is “the supreme Law of the Land.” All government actions must conform to it (see Article VI).  The courts’ job is to ensure that all parties conform to the law, no matter how desirable their actions may be. I applaud the International Trade Court’s decision in VOS Selections on both economic and legal grounds.  But, if the situation were reversed, and Trump were to use the IEEPA to unilaterally revoke all tariffs (a policy outcome I would support), I would still want the courts to strike down such a proclamation.  It is in Congress’s hands, and Congress’s only to set tax policy.  Congress decides what policies are good or bad.  Courts should not.  By striking down tariffs in VOS Selections (or student loan forgiveness in Biden v Nebraska), it is not a statement on the social or political merits of those policies, but rather the legal merits.  To argue tariffs are vital negotiating tools (for example) is wholly irrelevant.  Those are arguments for Congress and the courts have said (as in VOS Selections and Biden v Nebraska) that it is in Congress where those arguments must be made.   (0 COMMENTS)

  I posted last week about my review of Norbert J. Michel’s new book, Crushing Capitalism: How Populist Policies Are Threatening the American Dream. In my review, I stated: Although even low-income people are doing better, one way not to help them is to impose high tariffs. Even before President Donald Trump’s first term in office, Michel notes, “tariffs on imported clothing were nine times as high as the average tariff for all imported goods.” Tariffs on many food items are also high. These high tariffs are regressive. In 2019, he notes, households in the lowest income quintile spent 36 percent of their after-tax income on food and 7 percent on clothing, while households in the highest quintile spent 8 percent of their income on food and only 2 percent on clothing. I accurately quoted that part of Michel’s book. But Norbert has written to inform me that he made a mistake. The data in the paragraph above are not from 2019; they’re from 2015. I have a request in to my editor to make the correction. (0 COMMENTS)

A recent paper from the Center for Immigration Studies suggests that the answer is yes: We preliminarily estimate that the number of illegal immigrants has fallen by one million since the start of the year, perhaps due to their leaving in response to President Trump’s election and stepped-up enforcement efforts. But it is important to note that these findings come with important caveats. Findings: Based on the CPS, published figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that the number of foreign-born individuals in the labor force declined by 601,000 from January to May 2025. Our analysis of the raw data shows the total foreign-born population, both in and out of the labor force, declined 957,000 from January to May 2025. This is one of the largest declines over a 4-month period in the foreign-born in the last three decades, but it is not unprecedented. The decline was entirely among non-citizens. The number of naturalized U.S. citizens in the data did not fall from January to May of this year. Our preliminary estimate is that there are 14.8 million illegal immigrants in the country in May 2025, one million fewer than we estimated in January of this year. But the authors include some important caveats: There are important caveats about all of these numbers: 1) Though the decline in non-citizens is statistically significant, the decline in the total foreign-born is not. 2) Given recent stepped-up enforcement efforts, it is possible that the decline was due, at least in part, to a greater reluctance by immigrants to participate in the survey or to identify as foreign-born rather than an actual falloff in their numbers. 3) Finally, some of the administrative data necessary to estimate illegal immigrants is not yet available, making our estimate for May only preliminary. Even supporters of the administration’s deportation policy seem to acknowledge that these figures could only be explained by self-deportation, as the figures on official deportations are far too low to significantly impact the total stock of illegal immigrants. I looked at a bunch of labor market time series, and saw absolutely no evidence of mass self-deportation.  Indeed, the labor force has grown at an unusually rapid pace of 1.6% over the past year: This monthly survey data is relatively noisy, so I also looked at the monthly payroll employment data, which is considered more reliable.  Job growth during 2025 continues at a rate of more than 100,000/month, which is consistent with a strong economy.  If a million illegals had self-deported, you would expect a sharp decline in total employment. I suppose it is theoretically possible that a million unemployed domestic workers rushed in replace farmworkers and maids that self-deported, but the unemployment rate actually edged up from 4.0% to 4.2% between January and May 2025. The most plausible explanation for the survey results is that illegal immigrants are becoming ever more wary of responding to government surveys.  I can’t blame them, as there have been cases of immigrants coming in for what they assumed was a routine immigration hearing, only to find themselves being deported unexpectedly: Phoenix immigration attorney Nera Shefer said some of her clients came to court and were prepared to celebrate when federal lawyers dropped the case against them. Instead, they left the courthouse in handcuffs. “It used to be getting your case dismissed was a celebration,” she said. “Not anymore. The government is given the opportunity to reprocess you under the new rules. That’s what it means.”   (0 COMMENTS)

Former Obama staffer Rahm Emanuel famously said, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not before.” There is a corollary here: never overlook an opportunity to invent a crisis. Perhaps it would be better said, “never pass up an opportunity to turn a blessing into a curse.” Hence we have periodic dustups about “excessive packaging.” Last year, the Public Interest Research Group took Amazon to task for “excessive” plastic packaging. Canada’s Institute for Research on Public Policy wants the Canadian government to take inspiration from the EU and China when it comes to “excessive” packaging for grocery items. The Public Interest Research Group of Illinois has an online petition urging Costco CEO Ron Vachris “to stop using excessive, supersized packaging for Costco products.” The word “excessive” is doing a lot of work here, and it’s not clear exactly what it means. Why would a money-hungry corporation waste money on tape, bubble wrap, and corrugated cardboard when it could have had higher profits instead? I doubt shareholders would put up with it, and while regulations have made leveraged buyouts more difficult, boards of directors and CEOs still have to be wary of shareholders noticing that they could be squeezing even more profit out of the resources at their disposal if they just cut back on packaging. Furthermore, what looks “excessive” and “wasteful” to one person might make perfect sense when you consider an organization’s goals. Theft prevention is one reason for big, bulky packaging. A thief can easily slip a loose Funko Pop toy or action figure into a pocket. A packaged Funko Pop or action figure in a plastic bubble attached to a cardboard card won’t fit. The “excessive,” “wasteful” packaging makes items harder to steal and substitutes for more security cameras or for keeping items like these under lock and key. Market tests show that “excessive” packaging persists because people are willing to pay for convenient self-service shopping. Second, packaging is advertising. Consider cereal boxes: big, brightly-colored cereal boxes are eye-catching, and a few minutes with Google will send you along the fascinating history of the struggles between grocers and cereal manufacturers over box size and shelf space. It’s wise to think that if a company is doing something that doesn’t make sense to you, there’s probably a reason that will make sense if we think about it for a while. I’ve recently taken up a collecting hobby again, and I’ve noticed an emphasis on “box art” in toy hunt vlogs. For collectors, the “excessive” packaging is part of the product. Funko Pops are attractively packaged. Recent Star Wars action figures are on cards that resemble the cards the original Star Wars toys were on in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The Honda Ohnaka, Greef Karga, and Bo-Katan Kryze figures displayed in my office are still in their original packaging because the packaging is cool. Finally, my dip into eBay sales has made me doubt the “excessive packaging” claims even more. Boxes, mailers, tape, bubble wrap, labels, and printer ink cost money and take up space, and anything that makes a package bulkier or heavier might make it more expensive to ship. It’s not a big deal if I use a little too much tape because I’m shipping a few things a week out of my garage as a substitute for watching TV. It is a big deal for companies like Costco and Amazon that are shipping a few things a second out of large warehouses and distribution centers. Amazon ships 3.5 million packages a day. Saving a penny a package would add almost $13 million a year to Amazon’s bottom line. That’s a very tiny fraction of Amazon’s 2023 net income of $30.4 billion, but it’s enough that it’s worth Amazon’s while to pay someone to pay attention to it. Are companies like Amazon and Costco wasting resources on superfluous packaging? I doubt it, and I doubt they need much encouragement from environmentalists and activists to do something they have an overwhelming financial incentive to do regardless, and it might not be wise for environmentalists and activists to spend precious political and moral capital giving companies credit for doing what they were going to do anyway.   Art Carden is Professor of Economics & Medical Properties Trust Fellow at Samford University. (0 COMMENTS)

Humans have a tendency to obey political authorities even when it may not seem in each individual’s self-interest to do so. Nationalism is a modern manifestation of this phenomenon. After the US government’s strike on nuclear facilities of the Iranian government, there is little doubt that nationalism or tribalism will lead a large number of Americans and Iranians to rally behind their supreme leaders more blindly. (I agree that, thankfully, the American one is not yet as supreme as the Iranian one.) In his book On Power (Du Pouvoir), Bertrand de Jouvenel wrote that “the essential reason for obedience is that it has become a habit of the species” (“On obéit essentiellement parce que c’est une habitude de l’espèce”). There may be evolutionary roots to this submissiveness. Because of the problem of collective action (in the Olsonian sense of “coordinated group action,” not in the sense of decisions imposed by political authorities), an individual often has an interest to play dove before a ruler or ruling group committed to play hawk (see my short explanation of the Hawk-Dove game). Nationalist propaganda adds more motivation for citizens to obey, as does ignorance of basic economics. Classical liberals and libertarians are the only ones to share James Buchanan’s “faith” in a society where all can be equally free. This hope finds rational foundations in theories of spontaneous order. What happened on June 21 was not literally “a US strike on Iran” or “America’s strike on Iran,” as everybody repeats, but a strike of the US government on the assets of the Iranian government—including possibly on its claimed human assets, what is called collateral damage. Tragically, I fear, we can go a bit further: it was more a strike of Donald Trump and his minions on the claimed assets of Ali Khamenei and his minions. Linguistic shortcuts and the need or habit of economizing on words (in newspaper headlines, for example) should not blind us to the reality that social and political phenomena result from the preferences and actions of individuals. Whatever one thinks of war events and developments, one must beware of synecdoche and other linguistic shortcuts that, reinforced by government propaganda, easily lead to confusing individuals with the groups they “belong” to and the latter’s rulers. The function of political hyperbole is typically to promote the subjects’ obedience, not to limit the rulers’ power. One day after his attacks in Iran, President Trump declared that “our country is hot as a pistol” (don’t laugh). Certainly, many Americans are, especially in the nascent summer, cool as a cold beer. But the obedience-building function would not be served by saying instead that “part of the 49.8% of American voters who voted for me were hot as a pistol.” The general issue of the limits of government power is, of course, a complex question. I have regularly discussed it on this blog, notably with reference to the economic and philosophical theories of James Buchanan and Anthony de Jasay. The particular problem of nuclear weapons is that their victims are essentially indiscriminate. They give monstrous blackmail power to their possessors. “If you don’t submit, I’ll hurt your subjects (even if the fallouts could hurt mine too).” In my view, the principle of preventing a thug from having nuclear weapons is defendable. A case can also be made that neither the possessor nor the preventer should be an autocrat or an autocrat-to-be. (The reader may enjoy, and agree or disagree with, my fourth-millennium libertarian tale about defense.) ****************************** Attackers of Iran? (0 COMMENTS)

Humans have a tendency to obey political authorities even when it may not seem in each individual’s self-interest to do so. Nationalism is a modern manifestation of this phenomenon. After the US government’s strike on nuclear facilities of the Iranian government, there is little doubt that nationalism or tribalism will lead a large number of Americans and Iranians to rally behind their supreme leaders more blindly. In his book On Power (Du Pouvoir), Bertrand de Jouvenel wrote that “the essential reason for obedience is that it has become a habit of the species” (“On obéit essentiellement parce que c’est une habitude de l’espèce”). There may be evolutionary roots to this submissiveness. Because of the problem of collective action (in the Olsonian sense of “coordinated group action,” not in the sense of decisions imposed by political authorities), an individual often has an interest to play dove before a ruler or ruling group committed to play hawk (see my short explanation of the Hawk-Dove game). Nationalist propaganda adds more motivation for citizens to obey, as does ignorance of basic economics. Classical liberals and libertarians are the only ones to share James Buchanan’s “faith” in a society where all can be equally free. This hope finds rational foundations in theories of spontaneous order. What happened on June 21 was not literally “a US strike on Iran” or “America’s strike on Iran,” as everybody repeats, but a strike of the US government on the assets of the Iranian government—including possibly on its claimed human assets, what is called collateral damage. Linguistic shortcuts and the need or habit of economizing on words (in newspaper headlines, for example) should not blind us to the reality that social and political phenomena result from the preferences and actions of individuals. Whatever one thinks of war events and developments, one must beware of synecdoche and other linguistic shortcuts that, reinforced by government propaganda, easily lead to confusing individuals with the groups they “belong” to and the latter’s rulers. The function of political hyperbole is typically to promote the subjects’ obedience, not to limit the rulers’ power. The general issue of the limits of government power is, of course, a complex question. I have regularly discussed it on this blog, notably with reference to the economic and philosophical theories of James Buchanan and Anthony de Jasay. The particular problem of nuclear weapons is that their victims are essentially indiscriminate. They give monstrous blackmail power to their possessors. “If you don’t submit, I’ll hurt your subjects (even if the fallout could hurt mine too).” In my view, the principle of preventing bad actors from having nuclear weapons is defendable. (1 COMMENTS)

What if we could delay–or even prevent–Alzheimer’s, cancer, and heart disease? What if much of what you know about aging is wrong? Listen as cardiologist and author Eric Topol of the Scripps Research Institute talks about his new book Super Agers with EconTalk’s Russ Roberts. They discuss why your genes matter less than you think, […] The post How to Be a Super Ager (with Eric Topol) appeared first on Econlib.

  Foreign Students Help Make America Great by Michael Crow, Wall Street Journal, June 20, 2025 (electronic version) Excerpts: The administration’s actions this spring to terminate visas of international students for minor legal infractions such as traffic violations and its scrutiny of students’ social-media accounts have sent a message that foreign students aren’t wanted here. And: Joaquin Duato, CEO of Johnson & Johnson, and Ramon Laguarta, CEO of PepsiCo, were student immigrants—both graduates of ASU’s Thunderbird School of Global Management. Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Sergey Brin (a Google co-founder), Satya Nadella (Microsoft CEO), and Indra Nooyi (a former CEO of PepsiCo) are among the thousands of U.S. CEOs and founders who were immigrants. These talent acquisitions add to U.S. economic success and innovation. More than 50% of all U.S. startups with more than $1 billion in valuation have at least one immigrant founder, many of whom came in as students. The return for the U.S. is in the trillions of dollars. This Court Case Could Normalize Vibes-Based Regulation by Veronique de Rugy, Reason, June 19, 2025. Excerpts: Emotion-based regulation is a destructive way to regulate the complex and dynamic U.S. economy—unless you happen to favor the lesser freedom and dynamism found on the European continent. In the case of this U.S. rule, the government admits that it has no actual evidence that two-person crews are safer than one-person crews. Instead, the agency has asked the court to defer to what it calls a “common-sense product of reasoned decision-making.” And: The government’s own data don’t support the notion that mandating two-person crews would improve safety. My former colleague Patrick McLaughlin showed that there is no reliable, conclusive data to document that one-person crews have worse safety records than two-person crews. Many smaller U.S. railroads have long operated safely with single-person crews, as do the Amtrak trains that haul Washington’s elite up and down the East Coast. We also have a wealth of data from Europe and other nations where single crew members operate.   ICE Insists That Congress Needs Its Permission To Conduct Oversight by Joe Lancaster, Reason, June 19, 2025.   Excerpts: This week, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) released new guidance on “facility visit and engagement protocol for Members of Congress and staff.” “ICE detention locations and Field Offices are secure facilities. As such, all visitors are required to comply with [identity] verification and security screening requirements prior to entry,” it specified. “When planning to visit an ICE facility, ICE asks requests to be submitted at least 72 hours in advance.” Incidentally, it’s perfectly legal for members of Congress to visit ICE detention facilities, even unannounced. And ICE’s attempt to circumvent that requirement threatens the constitutional system of checks and balances. And: This isn’t uncharacteristic of the agency: Earlier this year, ICE agents denied Reason‘s C.J. Ciaramella access to an immigration court at a federal detention facility in Miami, in defiance of both federal law and guidance listed on the agency’s own website. (ICE later admitted the facility was “open daily to the public.”)   Strategies for Libertarians by David Friedman, David Friedman’s Substack, June 21, 2025. Excerpt: McArdle’s talk was a defense of the strategy of which this was an example, in her view a successful one, the strategy of trading libertarian support for small wins, that being the most that libertarians could expect to get in exchange. It is a defensible strategy but it occurred to me that there were two costs neither of which she mentioned. The first is to the reputation of the libertarian movement. The Libertarian Party has long labeled itself “The Party of Principle;” part of the attraction of the libertarian movement is the appearance of consistent support of liberty across a wide variety of issues, from drug laws to professional licensing to immigration, of being motivated by a consistent philosophy of freedom. If the party is seen as visibly supporting Trump, as it will be by anyone who listened to McArdle’s webbed talk, it will be seen as sharing the responsibility for all of his actions, some of them far from libertarian. That will make it harder to recruit or retain as members, of the movement as well as the party, anyone opposed to Trump’s policies. Since Trump is not a libertarian that is likely to include not only anyone left of center but also anyone seriously committed to libertarianism. The second cost is the effect of alliance with Trump, or with any other non-libertarian movement, on libertarian doctrine. Libertarians who are Trump allies will feel pressure to minimize the conflict between his beliefs and theirs, to create libertarian defenses for unlibertarian policies in order not to feel obliged to attack their allies. That effect will be reinforced by the change in the personnel of the movement as Trump supporters join, libertarians hostile to Trump’s policies leave. In enough time the result is likely to be a “libertarian” party, possibly a “libertarian” movement, that is no longer libertarian.   (0 COMMENTS)

I’ve seen progressives derisively refer to a “libertarian paradise” in Somalia, where the government is largely absent.  While it’s true that Somalia is a good example of the importance of having enough “state capacity” to protect property rights, even Somali anarchy has some unexpected benefits.  Here is The Economist: Thirty years ago, making a phone call from Somalia meant crossing the border into better-connected Kenya or Ethiopia. Yet by 2004 the lawless nation had more telephone connections per capita than any other east African country. Today, the Somali state is still fragile: insecurity is rife and government services are poor. But mobile data in Somalia is cheaper than in Britain, Finland or Japan—and the signal is good, too. . . .   How has dysfunctional Somalia managed to develop such an outstanding telecoms network? The answer lies in the state’s very weakness. Three decades of chaos and conflict have forced hundreds of thousands of Somalis to flee their country. Those who have stayed depend on them: the diaspora sends home around $2bn a year, roughly double the government’s budget. An extensive phone network was needed to handle those vast remittance flows. In Somalia’s radical free market, the invisible hand did the rest. The upside of a lack of government is that there is no need to pay for licences or to bribe corrupt officials to get the job done. The article cites some other advantages as well: Social media is filling in for the failing state in other ways, too. WhatsApp groups serve as virtual courts, for instance, where clan elders, rather than corrupt or distant judges, resolve disputes. These online groups have revenue-raising powers; members are required to make monthly contributions, which are then used to offer payments if someone is short of money, or as a kind of health insurance to pay if they or a family member are ill. In areas such as protecting property rights, state capacity is very useful.  In other areas, the best thing the state can do is to get out of the way. If you are willing to devote 41 minutes to a very interesting Youtube video, you will see a good explanation of my version of libertarianism.  The video shows how Hong Kong’s government delegated responsibility for the construction and operation of a subway system to the private sector: Is the hero of the story a highly competent government?  Or is it the private firm that built and runs the system so effectively?  As long as it works, who cares? (1 COMMENTS)

In my review of Norbert J. Michel’s Crushing Capitalism, which I quoted from yesterday, I didn’t have room to highlight 2 other striking parts. First, in a section on why technological improvements in productivity have not caused net job loss, he has a discussion of ATMs. He writes: ATMs automated some of the basic tasks that bank tellers performed and lowered the cost of running a bank branch, which allowed banks to open more branches. Thus, ATMs displaced some bank tellers and other bank employees. From 1990 to 2010, the number of ATMs installed in the United States went from 100,000 to more than 400,000, and the number of bank tellers employed rose from about 500,000 to almost 600,000. Michel also argues, as do Phil Gramm, Robert Ekelund, and John Early in their excellent book, The Myth of American Inequality: How Government Biases Policy Debate, that the welfare state has sapped the incentives of many people to make more income. He writes: An example from a Pennsylvania Department of Welfare study puts these disincentives in very stark terms: “The single mom is better off earning gross income of $29,000 with $57,327 in net income and benefits than to earn gross income of $69,000 with net income and benefits of $57,045.”   (0 COMMENTS)