1984 was not supposed to be a to-do list.

The Federal Reserve caused the great depression by pumping unbacked dollars into the economy, destroying price signals for capital allocators and manufacturing an economic boom built on speculation, not real demand. Then, after the shit hit the fan, more and more government intervention followed. As if the depression wasn't great enough... US Congress passed Smoot-Hawley in June 1930, jacking average U.S. tariffs to 45 percent. Sixty countries retaliated immediately. Canada hit American goods. Britain abandoned free trade for the first time in nearly a century, passing the Import Duties Act in 1932. Germany, France, and a dozen smaller nations stacked their own walls on top. Global trade collapsed 66 percent between 1929 and 1934. A demolition, not merely a slowdown. Every country's politicians told the same lie: protecting domestic producers would save jobs. What they actually did was destroy the division of labor that made industrial civilization possible. Mises and Hayek had already mapped out the mechanism. Prices coordinate production across borders, signaling where resources flow most productively. Tariffs corrupt those signals and you get misallocated capital, idle factories, and rising unemployment, inside every country that plays the game. Who the culprit was, is blatantly obvious: nationalist politicians who decided they could manage prosperity by punishing foreign competition. They couldn't. World trade in manufactured goods shrank from $2.9 billion in 1929 to below $1 billion by 1933, measured in constant dollars. Every retaliating government believed it acted defensively. Every one of them added another layer to the catastrophe. The mechanism requires no conspiracy, only legislators answering to producers instead of consumers, everywhere, simultaneously.

Flat taxes work. Colorado was the first state to convert its graduated system to a flat tax, and a decade later, its per capita income was about 5% higher than comparable states that kept graduated rates. Learn more in a new report from Cato’s @adamnmichel. ow.ly/8GWS50ZO0Yt

Why is Mississippi so awesome? I loved speaking in Arkansas about some of the free market reforms changing the south for the better! @OppArkansas

We’ve spent decades counting regulations while largely ignoring the regulatory dark matter surrounding them: guidance, memos, FAQs, letters, interpretations and more. It’s time to start counting, & that’s what the GOOD Act would do. @ceidotorg wsj.com/opinion/federal-gove…

THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION EXPLAINS WHY EXPORT BANS MAKE BAD POLICY, PARTICULARLY ONE ON U.S. DIESEL OIL

John Try to avoid repeating yourself when you speak Gtover

"The whole gospel of Karl Marx can be summed up in a single sentence: Hate the man who is better off than you are." — Henry Hazlitt

The New York Times told its readers in 1936 that Stalin's Moscow show trials were legitimate legal proceedings. Walter Duranty had already spent years laundering Soviet atrocities through the paper's pages, and the pattern held: the Times reported the confessions of Zinoviev, Kamenev, and fourteen other defendants as genuine admissions of guilt. Every single defendant had been tortured. NKVD interrogators used sleep deprivation, beatings, and threats against family members to extract confessions to crimes that never happened. Zinoviev and Kamenev were shot in August 1936 within days of their sentencing. Stalin bears responsibility. But so does a press institution that chose ideological sympathy over basic skepticism, and paid no price for that choice. The Times won a Pulitzer in 1932 partly on Duranty's work. It never returned that prize. This is what state power without accountability produces: mass murder dressed up in courtroom procedure, and credentialed journalists applauding the costume. You are living with the downstream consequences of a media culture that learned it could cover for state violence and face no professional reckoning. The incentive was set then, and it has never fully reversed.

Trump's own ag economists are warning against diesel export ban: "USDA Chief Economist Justin Benavidez told Ag Outlook Forum attendees export bans can be difficult to enforce, and fuel producers could eventually reduce output if they can no longer profit from exports." brownfieldagnews.com/news/ag…

I consider myself very much a populist. But the way to be a populist is not to get into the Bernie Sanders game of giving away free stuff. The way to be a populist is to fight for the jobs of working men and women. Fight for small businesses. Fight for policies that actually create opportunity. There are misguided voices on the Right saying we should embrace “socialism lite.” We should not become Democrats with a slightly less generous Santa Claus.

"No matter how worthy the cause, it is robbery, theft, and injustice to confiscate the property of one person and give it to another to whom it does not belong." — Walter E. Williams

There are two answers to “right-wing socialism”: no, and hell no. There are a handful of online influencers trying to push socialism to young people. And young people historically have been susceptible to those arguments. Every older person has been young. No young person has ever been older. They don’t have the historical experience to know that socialism doesn’t work. Everywhere it has been implemented, socialism has been a train wreck. I know something about this firsthand. As a teenager in Cuba, my father fought alongside Fidel Castro, who came promising free things and promising to overthrow a tyrant. As my father put it, the people fighting in the Cuban Revolution were 14- and 15-year-old boys who didn’t know any better. They discovered what socialism meant when Castro took power, began executing dissidents, and seized people’s land.

Senator Ted Cruz is correct As usual

Listen to @SecretaryBurgum: An export ban would hurt Americans. U.S. refiners make ~5.3M barrels a day. Americans use ~3.6M. If we ban exports, refiners won't stockpile the surplus, they’ll just cut production. Lower supply means higher prices. atr.org/burgum-is-right-dies…

I keep waiting for a blue state to reduce taxes or reduce fraud. The D politicians seem unable to learn from Reagan’s growth and that of Florida and Texas

In 2032, the new census will move another 10 congressional seats and electoral votes from Blue to Red States. in 2042 (16 years from now) another 10 congressional seats and electoral votes move from Blue to Red States. So, whatever happens this November.... In 15 years add twenty congressmen to the Republican side and remove 20 congressmen from the Democrat tally. (ditto with electoral college) it will be increasingly difficult for Democrats to win the House and the presidency. Lower taxes, flat and zero income tax states, school choice, home schooling, right to work labor laws and tort reform will drive more and more voters to buttress the Red majority in the House and the Presidential Electoral college. This has driven the Democrats to their present irrational state.

Overachiever: tax collector category

Stupid and destructive ideas never die. They hibernate and lunge at our throats when our natural immune systems are weakened by panic, cries of "emergency" and a forgetfullness of past failures. Now another (Not) new bad idea arises.... Just say No.