The Great Enrichment Is Real

From about 1800 to the present the world's economy did something good, which looks to be permanent and looks to be justified. If contrary to the evidence we cling to our prejudices about economic history—our view that the Industrial Revolution was improverishng, or that the Grteat Enrichment was an irremediable environmental disaster, or that Europe is rich only because of poverty in the Third World, or that the new rich are always getting relatively richer, or that after all any enrichment is vulgar—we will mistake how we got here and will give mistaken advice on how to move forward. We will betray the remaining poor of the world.

—Deirdre Nansen McCloskey, Bourgeois Equality

TGIF: Trump Fibbed about Favoring Free Speech

Trump fibbed when he signed his first executive order in January, the one that promised never to repeat the Biden-era barriers to free speech. Everyone knows this by now. FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) summed it up well, yet only scratched the surface: "We cannot be a country where late night talk show hosts serve at the pleasure of the president."

The Maestro dislikes being criticized, and he regularly displays his willingness to use government power to get revenge. We see this with his string of lawsuits against newspapers and networks for being "unfair" and defamatory (Trump apparently hasn't been informed that in 1964 the Supreme Court, in New York Times v. Sullivan, raised the defamation bar for public figures extremely high). It's also clear in his expressed interest in yanking licenses from broadcasters. There is little need to rehearse FCC Chairman Brendan Carr's Don Corleone impression aimed at ABC and affiliates over late-night host Jimmy Kimmel. Carr offended even Sen. Ted Cruz, who's on the red team. Trump has other television talk shows in his sights.

More broadly, Attorney General Pam Bondi, ignorant of the First Amendment and its underlying philosophy, distinguished protected free speech from presumably unprotected "hate speech." The non-rookie made an embarrassing rookie error (U.S. law makes no such distinction), and Trump applauded. She later said (after having it explained to her?) that she meant speech that incites violence. Conservatives ought to tread lightly here. Some Americans think it's hateful and inciteful to say (correctly) that for human beings, sex is binary and unchangeable or that people should be judged according to their talent and not their skin tone, ethnicity, or gonads. Red and blue hypocrisy has been thick throughout this whole controversy. The blue team cheered when Biden violated freedom of speech over social media during the pandemic. Now it's red's turn. Who supports cancel culture now?

Re Kimmel, the pro-Trump narrative is that the preemption by ABC and its affiliates (since partly reversed) was a business response not to government threats, but to upset viewers. Unlikely. Nevertheless, Trump and Carr muddied the waters with the threats. Had they kept quiet, we might have been able to see how bottom-up the preemptions were.

But even then, we couldn't be sure because the government holds life-and-death licensing power over traditional broadcasters, who surely did not need reminding. (Trump has renewed his threats against ABC, which owns some stations, and its affiliates that reinstated Kimmel's show.) Broadcasters are not free in the land of the free to thumb their noses at the FCC or at a president who expects the FCC to do its bidding. Furthermore, the FCC and other regulatory agencies have the power to cast thumbs up or down for company mergers and acquisitions, which means businesses that displease the administration could have their plans destroyed by frowning bureaucrats. That's not capitalism, i.e., free private enterprise.

Traditional television and radio stations are privately owned companies, but they do not own the frequencies over which they broadcast. In contrast, factories and stores sit on private land. We would not regard an economy as capitalist if the government owned all the land and licensed it to businesses in return for promises to serve the public interest as defined by government officials.

But that is precisely how it works with broadcasters. The airwaves are not treated like private resources that were homesteaded by pioneering entrepreneurs who grasped the potential of radio and television. That could have been the case except that one man, about a century ago, kept it from being so: Herbert Hoover, the Republican secretary of commerce before he was elected president in 1928. Hoover gave us the regime under which the government "permits" companies to use "the public's airwaves" in return for the promise to serve the public. Of course, a government commission decides what's in the public interest. Mere consumers acting in the market can't be trusted with such a grave mission. (A former FCC chairman once said that the public interest is not necessarily what interests the public.) The public-ownership theory was always inane. How could the collective that didn't even know the airwaves existed have an equal ownership claim to individuals who saw the potential and did something about it?

That Hoover nationalized the broadcasters' key means of production should be a tip-off that he was not the crusty laissez-faire president the teachers make him out to be. Far from it. He was a "progressive" statist who derailed the common-law, private-property evolution of the airwaves that was underway in the 1920s with court recognition. (On Hoover's "progressive" presidential conduct after the stock market crashed in 1929, see Murray Rothbard's America's Great Depression.)

Here's a question: how does government licensing power square with the First Amendment, which guarantees that "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press"? The circle cannot be squared.

A great myth of American history is that nationalizing the airwaves was the only answer to the chaos that was said to be occurring at the dawn of radio. That's false. Economist and historian Thomas W. Hazlett, a long-standing authority on this matter, debunked that myth most recently in "Abolish the FCC," published by Reason last year.

In 1927, mass-market electronic communications had already arisen under the common law rule of "first come, first served" and did not need federal micromanagement. What the new Federal Radio Commission later deemed "five years of orderly development" (1921–26) was disrupted by strategic regulatory dancing that preempted enforcement of such property rights. Sen. Clarence Dill (D–Wash.), author of the 1927 Radio Act, explained that the purpose "from the beginning … was to prevent private ownership of wave lengths or vested rights of any kind in the use of radio transmitting apparatus." [Emphasis added.]

Predictably, the regulatory apparatus did not serve any authentic public interest; that was a fig leaf. Instead, the bureaucrats, among other insults, impeded new technologies as a favor to incumbent interests, to the detriment of consumers and upstart, innovative producers. Hazlett writes:

FM radio, invented in the 1930s, was stymied for decades; cellular telephone networks, designed during World War II, were sandbagged by the spectrum allocation process until the 1980s. Countless other wireless innovations died stillborn.

Besides stifling technology, the FCC has long been used by presidents for political purposes. What would you expect? (On the slippery notion of the public interest, see this.)

Markets serve the public (consumers), and governments don't. As Hazliett puts it, "It's taken too long to grasp the marvel of spectrum markets. Another century for the brainchild of Herbert Hoover seems needlessly inert. Let the invisible hand regulate the invisible resource."

The old media are declining because consumers prefer all of the alternatives that use new technologies. The irony is that while critics of capitalism exploit those alternatives with gusto, they have yet to acknowledge that capitalism is what has made those cheap or free alternatives possible.

Privatizing the airwaves wouldn't stop Trump from interfering with free expression, but it would be a worthwhile first step.

TGIF: Social Peace through Government Retrenchment

For at least 200 years, classical liberals (aka libertarians) have warned that the more power the government wields, the greater the lengths people will go to get their hands on it before their ideological opponents do.

This is not rocket science, yet resistance to the implications endures. If politicians and bureaucrats can readily confiscate wealth from its producers and distribute it to others, or if they can grant privileges to those they favor and impose restrictions on those they don't, you can bet that individuals and groups will work overtime for access to that power. That's a recipe for civil strife; it leads to what Ayn Rand called an institutionalized civil war.

Imagine what our society would look like if there were no liberty-robbing political power to vie for. People would have to mind their own business and set up the communities they deem suitable. They could engage in persuasion, but they couldn't tap the taxpayer to pay for coercive crusades against others. (I leave aside the heretofore unsolved problem of limiting government strictly to the protection of life and property, as well as the question of whether market-ordered individualist anarchism is the only promising approach.)

All attempts to turn the government into something other than a due-process-bound peacekeeper must incite conflict. The early classical liberals in France identified the state and its power to legally plunder—that is, to tax—as the source of "class conflict." The state (the great fiction by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else—Bastiat) necessarily divides society into tax producers (the industrious, whether employer, employee, or independent) and tax consumers (who prefer the fruits of plunder to work). Most people do not fall neatly into one or the other category, so the term net applies. Classes—or better, castes—were not a natural outcome of society; they were political constructs, imposed by state force. In the free market, open-border classes will exist, but not castes.

The state does more than take money from A and give it to B. At A's request (or not), the government may impose requirements or prohibitions on B. He usually objects. Such may be done for A's financial gain, but it may also be done in the sincere belief that B and everyone else would be better off morally if they were forced to live this way or that. Sometimes the motives coexist. Examples have included forced abstention from various alleged sins, such as alcohol, drugs, and racial color blindness.

In a virtually unlimited democracy, one can immediately see the danger this poses to social peace. Any meddlesome group that manages to amass a majority of voters has the potential to impose values on the rest. It helps to have a leader with something like charisma. That potential will attract those who have a taste for lording it over others, but it will also attract those whose motive is only defensive: "If I don't have the power, my opponents will." Those are different motives, but the consequences are the same. Someone imposes; others are imposed on. A third motive might be retribution for past wrongs, real or imagined.

The high-stakes quest for power promotes the demonization of adversaries, increasing the social temperature and danger. Every election becomes the most important in our lifetime or even perhaps the last. The Other must be stopped because civilization depends on it. This is a time bomb whose source is the omnipotent state. Someone needs to write a book titled (without apologies to Christopher Hitchens) Government Is Not Great: How Politics Poisons Everything.

Classical liberalism seems to be the only approach that rejects this framework. Or to put it another way, any approach—whatever you call it—that rejects aggressive force qualifies as classical liberal. The only thing that gets "imposed" is the nonaggression obligation. Not to put too fine a point on it, in a fully liberal society, the law (in Hayek's bottom-up sense) is similar to the rules of the road: it doesn't tell you where to go, but only how to get where you want to go. Distinguishing between aggression and defense may occasionally be difficult, but that's why we have courts, which would exist as well under market-ordered anarchism. Violence is costly, peaceful bargaining much less so. (See David Friedman's The Machinery of Freedom, among others, for details.)

Another way to put this is that we should avoid utopianism. The utopian has a vision of the ideal society down to the smallest detail and harbors the temptation not only to impose his vision, but to punish those who see things differently. Utopianism rejects the liberal insight, as the late historian Ralph Raico said many times, that "society runs itself." The welfare-enhancing market order is produced by individuals who peacefully pursue their chosen ends, freely trusting, coordinating, cooperating, and trading with others, often strangers. But for this to happen, the institutions and mores must be right, among them respect for persons, property, and contract. There are no guarantees, but those can be best protected by small government (if not market-based rights protection), small jurisdictions, and the freedom of exit.

Original pro-market liberalism is not so much a set of answers as a moral-legal-political framework in which individuals search for answers by relying on persuasion and consent, never aggressive force. Worthy causes are left to voluntary organizations, such as mutual-aid societies and charities. Social power replaces state power, to use individualist Albert Jay Nock's exhaustive alternatives.

Why would anyone who favors peace accept anything else?

(For more, see my "Disagreement without Conflict.")

Mass Production Equals Mass Consumption

[R]elative shares in national income have remained substantially constant over the last hundred years. This, however, is true only if we measure them in money. Measured in real terms, relative shares have substantially changed in favor of the lower income groups. This follows from the fact that the capitalist engine is first and last an engine of mass production which unavoidably means also production for the masses....

Electric lighting is no great boon to anyone who has money enough to buy a sufficient number of candles and to pay servants to attend to them. It is the cheap cloth, the cheap cotton and rayon fabric, boots, motorcars and so on that are the typical achievements of capitalist production, and not as a rule improvements that would mean much to the rich man. Queen Elizabeth [I] owned silk stockings. The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within the reach of factory girls in return for steadily decreasing amounts of effort.

--Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, 1942

Murder

Why would anyone think that condemning a murder must imply any particular judgment about the victim?

TGIF: Hurray for the Industrial Revolution!

Unbelievably, in 2025, walking among us are people, many of them young and college-educated, who believe the Industrial Revolution (spawned by the liberal Enlightenment) was a disaster for most of mankind. They yearn for what they imagine was the tranquil, plentiful, and happy communalism of the Middle Ages. I'm not referring only to people on the fringes. Glenn Greenwald, the cosmopolitan journalist who has done important reporting on civil liberties and foreign policy, recently lamented the loss of medieval life in a paean to the anti-industrial manifesto (but not the murderous actions) of Ted Kaczinski. He was the Unabomber.

What's shocking is that the data showing what a blessing industrial capitalism has been are readily available. It's a big literature, and it may seem difficult to know where to start. So thanks (again) to Phil Gramm and Donald Boudreaux for presenting the facts in a succinct but detailed chapter in their important book, The Triumph of Economic Liberty: Debunking the Seven Great Myths of American Capitalism. The first chapter is "The Genesis Myth: The Industrial Revolution Impoverished Workers."

No, it did not, the authors demonstrate. It enriched them.

The propagators of the myth begin with a distorted picture of what preceded the Industrial Revolution. As Gramm and Boudreau correct the record:

In the communal world of the Middle Ages, the worker owed fealty to the crown, church, guild, and village. Those “stakeholders,” as they would be called today, extracted large shares of the output produced by the sweat of workers’ brows and the fruits of their thrift. Rewards for effort and saving were thus leeched away. Unsurprisingly, the economic output was so sparse and economic growth so slow that they were noticeable only across the span of centuries.

Life was not solitary (privacy was nonexistent), but it was certainly poor, nasty, brutish, and short, wracked with violence, disease. Serfdom, anyone? Who could lament the end of that era? Fortunately, it did end. Had it not ended, hardly anyone alive today would have been born, much less be flourishing. Gramm and Boudreaux write:

This dreary reality suddenly (in historical terms) changed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Starting in northwestern Europe, the Enlightenment of the era gave birth to liberalism, which—true to its name—liberated mind, soul, and property. Individuals were freed and empowered to think their own thoughts and, ultimately, have a voice in their government. Men and women secured the right to worship as they chose, as well as to own the fruits of their labor, thrift, risk-taking, and entrepreneurial creativity.

Even Karl Marx, the infamous resentful nihilist, had to acknowledge capitalism's astounding record of production for the masses. Before the liberal, capitalist industrial era, mass production was not even a figment of the imagination.

In this newly enlightened and liberated world, individuals were empowered to pursue their own private interests instead of being conscripted by law or tradition into assisting the elite in pursuing their private interests. The economist W. H. Hutt described the change succinctly: “One of the main social results of the factory regime seems to have been the evolution of the idea of a wage contract, replacing the former idea of servitude.”

To some people, that was barely progress. Noam Chomsky thinks that chattel slavery is only slightly worse than wage employment. He rejects the proposition that "renting" someone is much different from buying him. Contract labor, chattel slavery: it's pretty much the same. The wage earners would have disagreed.

Gramm and Boudreaux explain that endless Victorian poetic and fictional depictions of how bad life was in the industrial cities were in fact a sign of capitalism's progress in enriching the masses. When everyone but the nobility was poor, no one noticed it; that's just how things were. But once life began to improve, thanks to capitalism and industry, those who did not experience progress as quickly as others stood out. The authors quote F. A. Hayek: "Economic suffering both became more conspicuous and seemed less justified, because general wealth was increasing faster than ever before.”

"Remarkably," Gramm and Boudreaux write, "these historical and romantic critiques were written about a period that, by every available economic measure, was the beginning of a golden age of material well-being—especially for workers."  The claim of impoverishment, they add,

is refuted by every major measure of material well-being. In a single century, from 1800 to 1900, wages, life span, and literacy expanded at rates never before experienced. The Industrial Revolution, beginning in Britain and then spreading to continental Europe, the United States, and eventually, most of the globe, ushered in a golden age for workers that continues to this day.

When they say every "major measure," they mean not only material wealth, but infant and child mortality, survival in childbirth, literacy, nutrition, and much more. The graph makes a hockey stick: no progress for thousands of years, and then around 1800—Zoom!—all signs of progress skyrocket.

As Gramm and Boudreaux suggest, it is absurd to judge those early years of growth by today's standards. Poverty is the natural state. Wealth is artificial (manmade). The proper comparison, then, is with what went before the industrial era, feudalism and mercantilism. Once human freedom and ingenuity were liberated, progress took time. Even so, set against all of human history, progress was swift. And recall that this was the beginning of mass production, which must precede mass consumption.

Gramm and Boudreaux turn to the economic historian Deirdre McCloskey for more evidence. I've been reading McCloskey's eye-opening work (Bourgeois Virtues, Bourgeois Dignity, and Bourgeois Equality; also, with Art Carden, Leave Me Alone and I'll Make You Rich). I can attest to its power. McCloskey, write Gramm and Boudreaux,

estimates that since the Industrial Revolution—what she calls the “Great Enrichment”—began just over two hundred years ago, living standards in countries such as Britain, the United States, Japan, and Finland have risen by at least 3,000 percent and perhaps—if improvements in product quality are more fully taken into account—by as much as 10,000 percent!"

Let that sink in. Per capita wealth has increased 3,000 to 10,000 percent since 1800.

You need more evidence? Citing economic historian Gregory Clark, Gramm and Boudreaux write,

At the dawn of the nineteenth century, real wages were no higher than they had been at the dawn of the thirteenth.... [A] revolution in economic production accelerated around the start of the 1800s, and the quality of life in Britain underwent more rapid improvement than had ever occurred in recorded human history. Wages that had largely stagnated for thirty generations began to rise rapidly.... During the Victorian era, from 1840 to 1900, the real wages of skilled builder craftsmen increased by 113 percent, and the real wages of unskilled builder helpers rose by 124 percent.

Explain that one, you lovers of the Middle Ages. Or this: compared to life as a "downstairs" servant on an aristocrat's estate, "The factories," write Gramm and Boudreaux, "offered higher pay, shorter hours, better working conditions, and even more fresh air."

Okay, but what about child labor? That will always come up. Gramm and Boudreaux quote economic historians Carolyn Tuttle and Simone Wegge: “Child labor did not begin during the Industrial Revolution of Great Britain but had existed for centuries across Europe." Remember, it took time and ingenuity for per-worker productivity to increase to where an adult could support a family. That wasn't the fault of capitalism. Little boys were chimney sweeps before the industrial era. At any rate, Gramm and Boudreaux say that "most young working children did not toil in factories or mines. Agriculture, services, trades, and clerical duties together employed far more children than did factories and mines....

"Furthermore, the economist Clark Nardinelli of the University of Virginia found that the employment of children in factories was declining before the Factory Acts were passed.... The Factory Acts codified the market process that was already underway. In closing the ugly ten-millennial chapter of child labor by the end of 1900, the Industrial Revolution had ushered in a new chapter of more intense childhood nurturing and learning."

What did the workers think about industrialization? Gramm and Boudreaux note that historian Emma Griffin, who read 350 writings of regular workers, reported, "It is time to think the unthinkable: that these writers viewed themselves not as downtrodden losers, but as men and women in control of their destiny; that the industrial revolution heralded the advent not of a yet 'darker period', but of the dawn of liberty...."

Gramm and Boudreaux sum up: "The best evidence, which can be found both in statistics and in the written testimony of workers who lived during the Industrial Revolution, strongly suggests that the initial spark of the lavish material prosperity that we enjoy today was not struck at the expense of the first few generations of workers who toiled in Britain’s water- and steam-powered factories. They, too, benefited, as the Great Enrichment made even those workers and their families richer, freer, and happier."

The same is true for America. In the second half of the 1800s, Americans "experienced unprecedented and broad-based economic growth. Between 1865 and 1900, inflation-adjusted GDP nearly tripled, expanding by an extraordinary 297 percent. Nothing
like this had ever happened in American history."

Thus, "The Gilded Age, in short, was an era of unparalleled improvement in living standards for almost all Americans."

Read this book.

Enclosure Revision

More than a decade ago, I ventured into the subject of English agricultural land enclosure as the Industrial Revolution was coming on. I regret that I did so before doing adequate research. It's a complicated subject. To somewhat rectify my offense, I refer readers to Donald Boudreaux's recent Cafe Hayek post on the subject.

Boudreaux points out that economic historian Deirdre McCloskey, in Bourgeois Dignity (p. 54), notes that Karl Marx:

instanced enclosure in England during the sixteenth century (which has been overturned by historical findings that such enclosure was economically minor) and in the eighteenth century (which has been overturned by findings that the labor driven off the land by enclosure was a tiny source of the industrial proletariat, and enclosure happened then mainly in the south and east where in fact little of the new sort of industrialization was going on, and where agricultural employment in newly enclosed villages in fact increased).

Then McCloskey writes (172-3):

By now, though, several generations of agricultural historians have argued (contrary to the Fabian theme first articulated in 1911, which followed Marx) that eighteenth-century enclosures were in many ways equitable and did not drive people out of the villages…. Contrary to the pastoralism of [Oliver Goldsmith’s 1770] poem – which as usual reflects aristocratic traditions in poetry back to Horace and Theocritus more than evidence from the English countryside – the commons was usually purchased rather than stolen from the goose. One can point with sympathy to the damaging of numerous poor holders of traditional rights without also believing what appears to be false – that industrialization depended in any important way on the taking of rights from cottagers to gather firewood on the commons. Industrialization, after all, occurred first in regions to the north and west, mainly enclosed long before, such as Lancashire or Warwickshire, and especially (as Eric Jones pointed out) in areas bad for agriculture, not in the fertile East Midlands or East Anglia or the South – the places where the parliamentary acts of the eighteenth century did transform many villages, though non “deserted.” In such freshly enclosed areas, I repeat, the local populations increased after enclosure.

TGIF: Trump and the Separation of Powers

The U.S. Court of Appeals' rejection last week of the Trump administration's global "emergency" tariff program was a welcome affirmation of the separation-of-powers doctrine. Next stop: the U.S. Supreme Court. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for a 9-0 ruling that Trump grossly exceeded his constitutional powers. One can hope.

Liberty is never secure. However, if we must have a state, the separation of powers may provide some measure of security. The framers, drawing on Montesquieu, understood this. Unfortunately, politicians have weakened the doctrine over the centuries. Most egregiously, presidents have waged war without congressional authorization, as the U.S. Constitution requires.

The first U.S. constitution, the Articles of Confederation, was better than its successor because, among other things, it lacked the powers to tax and regulate trade. (Hard to believe.) The replacement, alas, did assign Congress those powers in Article I, Section 8. Too bad, but at least it did not give them to the executive under Article II. Autocracy is always a danger. (See my America's Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited.)

Trump's minions apparently hadn't informed him that he lacks these powers, but now the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has told him. He is not happy. He condemned the "Highly Partisan Appeals Court" for its "incorrect" decision.

In V.O.S. Selections, Inc. v. Donald Trump, the court, by a 7-4 vote, held that Trump exceeded his power under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) when, through five executive orders, he imposed tariffs virtually across the board and on virtually all countries after declaring national emergencies ostensibly related to trade reciprocity and drug trafficking.

No, you don't, Mr. President, said the court. In so saying, the judges upheld a ruling by the U.S. Court of International Trade (CIT). The government was "permanently enjoined from imposing the tariffs, but was allowed to continue them until October 14. The administration appealed to the Supreme Court.

All that is at issue in the case is the separation of powers. The administration claimed that the IEEPA authorizes the president to "regulate," with "importation" mentioned as a factor that might trigger the finding of an emergency. Hence, Trump's people said, the president can impose tariffs.

The majority of judges felt it necessary to give Trump a history lesson:

The Constitution grants Congress the power to “lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises” and to “regulate Commerce with foreign Nations." ... Tariffs are a tax, and the Framers of the Constitution expressly contemplated the exclusive grant of taxing power to the legislative branch; when Patrick Henry expressed concern that the President “may easily become king,” ... James Madison replied that this would not occur because “[t]he purse is in the hands of the representatives of the people.”

Tariffs are a tax. Right.

The judges went on to point out that "at the time of the Founding, and for most of the early history of the United States, tariffs were the primary source of revenue for the federal government.... Setting tariff policy was thus considered a core Congressional function."

Since the late 1800s, the Court stated, Congress has delegated "limited authority to 'activate or suspend' tariff rates through international agreements." But those acts were express delegations of tariff authority and bound by "substantive limitations." As the Court put it:

Taken together, these other statutes indicate that whenever Congress intends to delegate to the President the authority to impose tariffs, it does so explicitly, either by using unequivocal terms like tariff and duty, or via an overall structure which makes clear that Congress is referring to tariffs. This is no surprise, as the core Congressional power to impose taxes such as tariffs is vested exclusively in the legislative branch by the Constitution; when Congress delegates this power in the first instance, it does so clearly and unambiguously.

The IEEPA says nothing about tariffs. It only allows the president to:

investigate, block during the pendency of an investigation, regulate, direct and compel, nullify, void, prevent or prohibit, any acquisition, holding, withholding, use, transfer, withdrawal, transportation, importation or exportation of, or dealing in, or exercising any right, power, or privilege with respect to, or transactions involving, any property in which any foreign country or a national thereof has any interest by any person, or with respect to any property, subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.

"Notably," wrote the Court, "IEEPA does not use the words 'tariffs' or 'duties,' nor any similar terms like 'customs,' 'taxes,' or 'imposts.' IEEPA also does not have a residual clause granting the President powers beyond those which are explicitly listed."

How have other presidents used the IEPPA?

Since IEEPA was promulgated almost fifty years ago, past presidents have invoked IEEPA frequently. But not once before has a President asserted his authority under EEPA to impose tariffs on imports or adjust the rates thereof. Rather, presidents have typically invoked IEEPA to restrict financial transactions with specific countries or entities that the President has determined pose an acute threat to the country’s interests.

Finally, the Court made it clear that "we are not addressing whether the President’s actions should have been taken as a matter of policy. Nor are we deciding whether IEEPA authorizes any tariffs at all. Rather, the only issue we resolve on appeal is whether the Trafficking Tariffs and Reciprocal Tariffs imposed by the Challenged Executive Orders are authorized by IEEPA. We conclude they are not."

Trump has predicted calamity if his tariffs are erased. He has bragged that the Treasury has collected more than $200 billion in duties and warns that refunding that money would sink the economy. Earlier his lawyers argued against a preliminary injunction on the grounds that the money could easily be paid back. Now he seems to have forgotten that when the government takes, private individuals are taken from. Thus the Treasury's loss would be the people's gain. That would be good for "the economy" (that is us). On the other hand, the government runs a $2 trillion deficit, so the money must be gone, and the government would have to sell more bonds—monetized by the Fed—to pay it back. We lose no matter what.

Trump has faced judicial setbacks on tariffs, deportations, and his National Guard deployment in Los Angeles. What's next? How will he react if the Supreme Court affirms the decisions? Buckle your seatbelts.

Capitalism Civilizes

"Participation in capitalist markets and bourgeois virtues has civilized the world. It has 'civilized' the world in more than one of the word's root senses, that is, making it 'citified,' from the mere increase in a rich population. It has too, I claim, as many eighteenth-century European writers also claimed, made it courteous, that is, 'civil.' 'The terrestrial paradise,' said Voltaire, 'is Paris.'"

—Deirdre N. McCloskey, Bourgeois Virtues