Mises Institute, October 27, 2021 Protectionism Is Immoral, Unjust, and Corrupt by James Bovard Protectionism is reviving in Washington on both sides of the political aisle. Democrats are cheering proposals to restrict trade to benefit labor unions and save the environment while some Republicans are reviving Smoot-Hawley style salvation schemes. Protectionist advocates routinely seize the […]
American Institute for Economic Research, October 20, 2021 Fair Trade Is Still a Fraud James Bovard The Biden administration is embracing the same flawed “fair trade” mantra that previous administrations used to sanctify protectionist policies. Biden’s team has “largely dispensed with the idea of free trade as a goal in and of itself,” the New […]
American Institute for Economic Research, October 4, 2021 The Secret Tariff Code Heist James Bovard Nothing so diminishes democracy as secrecy,” as Attorney General Ramsey Clark warned in 1967. As a journalist, I have battled federal agencies for decades to try to discover the sordid details of how Americans’ rights and liberties are being shafted. […]
When I was researching The Fair Trade Fraud, I ran into a stone wall of secrecy surrounding the U.S. tariff code. There was no reason to treat the tariff on tobacco stems like confidential national security data. Here’s the story of how I solved those tariff code mysteries during a 1990 visit to the headquarters […]
American Institute for Economic Research, April 22, 2021 Steel Follies and the Perils of Politically-Controlled Trade James Bovard The Biden administration appears determined to perpetrate all of Trump’s economic follies while adding fresh blunders of its own. Trump was notorious for saying incorrect things on trade, such as his assertion that “trade wars are good, […]
Here’s my tribute to one of the best and least appreciated classics of American political thought. Here is a link to a free version of the original printing from 1822. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Tyranny_Unmasked/HhHVAAAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover 200th Anniversary of a Great American Demolition of Tyranny by James Bovard This is the 200th anniversary of the publication of one of the […]
“Why is Mr. Bovard considered so out of it in other words?” PBS Newshour host Jim Lehrer asked the other panelists as a 1990 brawl on farm subsidies wrapped up. Shocked, shocked that PBS considered me a radical…. Jim Lehrer passed away today. He was a legend of Washington broadcast journalism – a gracious host […]
