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(Don Boudreaux)

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Jeffrey Tucker is rightly impressed with Boris Johnson’s full-throated celebration of free trade, and of Johnson’s justified pride of the role that Great Britain played both in developing the theory of free trade and in pioneering its practice.

Also rightly impressed with Boris Johnson’s support of free trade is my intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy – who also rightly laments the utter failure of Trump to understand the truths that are so well understood by Johnson.

In my latest column for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review I join with the chorus of voices that encourage “Progressives” to draw a lesson of humility from this past Monday’s app-debacle in Iowa. A slice:

Today’s Democratic ranks swell with people armed with plans and blueprints for using government to overhaul or re-engineer large swaths of the economy. These plans, all born of hubris, are fun to discuss, and the blueprints are exciting to ponder. Yet this sort of policy innovation is not tested by market competition. Government imposes these schemes on citizens, and no politician or bureaucrat — unlike a private entrepreneur — has a personal financial stake in getting things right.

If a President Sanders’ plan for making college more affordable fails, his personal wealth won’t decline. Indeed, he’ll still likely receive plaudits for his good intentions. Ditto for a President Buttigieg’s blueprint for increasing the affordability of health care. The people who will bear the costs of these interventions if they fail are ordinary Americans.

Rationality from my brilliant GMU Econ colleague Bryan Caplan.

Katherine Mangu-Ward accurately sees ominous signs in the renewed war on (people who peacefully perform and watch) porn. A slice:

The proposed crackdown fits nicely with the nationalist agenda, which is focused—as nationalists tend to be—on purity.

Antony Davies and James Harrigan write about the terrible, almost Orwellian, 1942 U.S. Supreme Court decision Wickard v. Filburn.