State governments are not powerless either. If Massachusetts, California, and New York want to ensure that Planned Parenthood’s doors stay open, they are free to allocate state taxpayer dollars to make that happen. And if some rural communities want to fund a women’s health clinic offering the full range of reproductive services, nothing in federal law stops them from raising money locally to do so.
But instead of holding those debates at the state or local level, we immediately rush to the courts and insist that the funding must come from Washington, D.C.
This reflex is part of a deeper problem: a political culture in which every program, every priority, and every budget line item must be nationalized. If something is valuable, we assume that it must be federally funded. If the federal government steps away, we act as though the service will vanish forever. That’s incorrect. Unfortunately, this way of thinking has been behind much of the federal government’s expansion over the last 100 years and our inability to scale it back.
Wall Street Journal columnist Matthew Hennessey applauds the denial of federal funding to Planned Parenthood. [DBx: One can applaud removal of these subsidies even if one is not opposed to abortion. As Vero notes in what’s linked above, there’s no good case for federal-government subsidies of these clinics.]
Pierre Lemieux warns against the (strange) allure of industrial policy.
Eric Boehm files a report from the front lines of the trade war. A slice:
One of the supposed goals of the Trump administration’s trade policies is to protect and promote American-made products.
Greg Shugar, who owns a business that does make things right here in America, has a hard time seeing it that way.
“I’m charging more and I’m making less,” says Shugar, owner of Beau Ties of Vermont, which manufactures neckties, socks, pocket squares, and other fashion accoutrements.
While the vast majority of American clothes and accessories are imported these days, Shugar’s company, which employs 18 people, is one of the few that are cutting and sewing those products here in the United States. He told Reason last week that the tariffs have not been a boost for his business. Quite the opposite, in fact, since his products depend on silk jacquard and other materials that are imported from overseas—mostly from China but also from Italy.
Bjorn Lomborg is correct: “Ignoring free trade benefits is absurd.”
GMU Econ alum Dave Hebert asks: “What is the Jones Act – and can it be fixed?” Two slices:
Counter to the goals of the Jones Act, raising the cost of domestic sea-shipping to such a degree has encouraged domestic producers to find alternative means of transporting their wares. In an extreme case, cows from Hawaii are frequently shipped by air because it is cheaper than shipping them by water. By reducing demand, high shipping costs actually reduce the number of domestically produced ships, the domestic shipbuilding facilities, jobs in the shipbuilding industry, and the number of qualified mariners available to crew Jones-Act-compliant ships.
Rather than nurturing an abundance of ships and mariners standing ready to bolster naval operations, the Jones Act has produced the opposite: shortages of both. In 2017, the Maritime Workforce Working Group reporteda deficit of 1,839 mariners for a “sustained sealift,” meaning “sustained wartime efforts.” Even this estimate assumes that all currently “actively sailing and qualified mariners with unlimited credentials available to crew… [were] available and willing to sail.” At a 2023 hearing before the Department of Transportation, Ann Phillips, then the Maritime Administrator, noted that since the 2017 study, “globally standardized credentialing requirements” and “the COVID-19 pandemic” have both “negatively impacted mariner retention.” While she did not provide new figures for the deficit, one can only surmise that the situation has gotten worse, not better.
The sobering unintended consequences of the Jones Act go further. At a 2013 hearing before the House Subcommittee on Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation, the Subcommittee’s staff reported as “Background” that between 1983 and 2013, at least 300 shipyards closed, leaving just four remaining open today.
The result of all of this has been a massive decline in the capacities of the US shipbuilding industry.
…..
Estimated savings from repealing the Jones Act would be enormous. In 2019, the OECD projected that “an abolishment of the Act will result in net economic gains for the US, in particular for US industries dependent on water transportation services for intra-US sales, and the shipbuilding industry itself” (emphasis added).
Nathan McGrath explains “how labor unions feed campus antisemitism.” A slice:
Although Mr. Lax wanted nothing to do with his union, he had no choice. In most unionized public-sector workplaces, even nonmembers must accept a union’s “exclusive representation,” meaning Jewish CUNY professors have to allow the PSC to represent them in contract matters even though the union prohibits nonmembers from voting on contracts. The Supreme Court opted not to review the practice after a legal challenge by Mr. Lax and others represented by the Fairness Center. Exclusive representation was upheld by lower courts, leaving Jews’ terms and conditions of employment in the hands of union officials responsible for effectively purging them from their membership rolls.
Damon Root reports on Arizona Supreme Court justice Clint Bolick warning that the Trump administration is further battering the rule of law. (Bolick, it’s worth pointing out, is co-founder of the Institute for Justice and a personal friend of Clarence Thomas.) A slice:
In a sane political climate, Bolick’s words of warning would be big news in conservative media. After all, he is a highly respected Republican-appointed jurist with a lengthy track record as a textualist. His resume and accomplishments should earn him a fair hearing from “his side” of the political aisle.
Yet as the Arizona Republic reports, the conservative response so far to Bolick’s speech has been a barely veiled political threat. “Justice Clint Bolick should stay out of the political arena,” declared Mike Davis, the head of the pro-Trump Article III Project. “When judges take off their judicial robes, climb into the political arena, and throw political punches, they should expect political counterpunches,” Davis told the Arizona Republic.
The fact that Bolick delivered this speech at this time suggests that he is ready for the fisticuffs. “Standing up for the rule of law and the independent judiciary, no matter who is attacking it, is an absolute priority,” Bolick declared, before adding, “count me in.”
Bolick is a principled legal thinker and one of the genuine good guys in American law. If he is worried about the health of our constitutional order, we should all pay heed.
