Source: US News & World Report
by David J Bier & Ilya Somin
“During his campaign for president, Donald Trump said he’d only be a dictator on ‘Day One,’ when he would ‘close the border’ to nearly all immigrants. True to his word, when Trump entered office, he signed executive orders that sought to rewrite the Constitution and explicitly override the law to restrict immigration. But those executive orders didn’t expire on Day Two. The president is still exercising dictatorial powers on immigration, and it isn’t yet clear that anyone will stop him. Several court decisions have sought to rein him in, and the Supreme Court should also intervene, if necessary. Whatever one thinks of immigration, any limits must be imposed lawfully.” [editor’s note: Absent a constitutional amendment, all such limits are unlawful – TLK] (03/14/25)
“The Trump administration’s tariffs are a disaster for both the Canadian and U.S. economies. As of writing this, the administration has flipped-flopped on implementing them. However, the outcome is nearly as detrimental as imposing tariffs due to the uncertainty that has emerged in our long-standing alliance with America’s neighbor. Canadian businesses have pulled American products off their shelves en masse and American businesses are unable to plan for the long term if they don’t know which inputs they’re able to buy abroad. The silver lining, however, is that this may be the push Canada needs to make long-awaited reforms on internal trade barriers. Discussions of removing internal trade barriers have surged in the last few months since Trump won the election and subsequently took office. Former Prime Minister Trudeau recently announced that Canada’s Premiers have agreed to further remove internal trade barriers by June 1, 2025. ” (03/14/25)
“Mises’s opposition to totalitarian socialism of the right (Naziism) and totalitarian socialism of the left (communism) was so complete that he ended up being the subject of a 1998 issue of The Batman Chronicles titled ‘The Berlin Batman.’ It features a short story asking, ‘What if Bruce Wayne had actually been a Jewish artist named ‘Baruch Wane’ in 1930s Berlin?’ When Baruch Wane heard that the Nazi Kommisar had to meet a train because they had seized the books and library of Ludwig von Mises, he worked to stop them (perhaps he delayed them and did not stop them). Still, it correctly explained that Mises was anti-Nazi and correctly portrayed Mises’s Human Action as a volume that repudiated totalitarian doctrines and embraced liberty.” (03/15/25)
“Collectively, they spent 155 years in prison. Now they counsel other people facing their own long sentences. A conversation with five ‘peer advocates’ at the New Orleans public defender’s office.” (03/15/25)
“Recently, a video circulated of former Vice President Kamala Harris engaging in her trademark word salad during an appearance at an AI conference in Las Vegas. Harris was saying something about nacho cheese Doritos, but beyond that, the point was not clear. The most striking effect of the video was to see and hear Harris again after her virtual disappearance from the public scene in the last 4 1/2 months. During the presidential campaign, we saw and heard her every day, and these days … mostly nothing. But we will soon learn a bit more about the Harris candidacy from book-length accounts of the 2024 campaign. One that is coming on April 1 is called FIGHT: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House, by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, two reporters who have often focused on Democrats.” (03/13/25)
“Every noncitizen in the US now has to watch what they say about foreign policy — or else. You may have just arrived from Putin’s Russia, and are now being told by Trump: don’t think you now have free speech just because you’re in America. The US government is monitoring your every word and can deport you if you say the wrong thing. You have to wait until you’re a citizen to be free. If the law seems McCarthyite, that’s because it was passed in 1952 and aimed specifically at Holocaust survivors from Eastern Europe suspected of communist sympathies.” (03/14/25)
“After multiple territorial wars over more than 35 years, Armenia and Azerbaijan, two small countries ringed by big powers, announced March 13 that they had agreed on a draft peace agreement. That alone prompted praise across a conflict-riddled Eurasian continent. Yet a portion of praise went to only Armenia, population 3 million, for something else. Following the country’s latest military defeat in 2023, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan not only offered concessions to Azerbaijan but also launched a campaign at home to lift the national identity beyond ethnicity, a trait that exudes exclusivity and lies at the heart of many wars. The ‘Real Armenia,’ he said in a February speech, resides in all citizens living within the country’s recognized borders – ethnic minorities included – as ‘the source of the legal order,’ along with spiritual values that bring harmony and happiness.” (03/14/25)
“At the moment, everyone worried about what the Trump administration is doing to America is focused on constraining executive power. This is absolutely the right emphasis now: Trump is an authoritarian who aspires to be a king who can run the United States through executive orders. Our checks and balances need to be preserved and strengthened. But there is a good chance that the Trump project will ultimately fail, and opportunities to rebuild the American government will emerge. Indeed, the only way that Trumpism can be displaced is for his opponents to offer something better.” (03/14/25)
“I’ve spent my career as a center-left thinker and writer, working with people like former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio to help promote school integration and Keith Ellison and the late John Lewis to strengthen organized labor. So why did I agree to join a conservative group, Students for Fair Admissions, in its lawsuits against Harvard and the University of North Carolina in cases that enabled the Supreme Court to bring an end to racial preferences in 2023? As I outline in my new book, Class Matters: The Fight to Get Beyond Race Preferences, Reduce Inequality, and Build Real Diversity at America’s Colleges, I testified as an expert witness that racial and economic diversity benefits students, but there is a much better way to accomplish these goals than through racial preferences.” (03/15/25)
