ArcaMax

The case for protectionism revolves around a host of doom-and-gloom myths that we should not accept.

"We don't make anything anymore!"

I don't know how many times I've heard defenders of President Donald Trump's new tariff regime bleakly note that the U.S. economy is a mere husk of its glorious old self.

Is our manufacturing base perfect? No,...Read more

We don't grow much coffee within the United States. Only Hawaii and Puerto Rico are really capable of it and even if we started up tomorrow, American consumers demand so much that we would still need to import it.

Tariffs will cause the price of coffee to go up. Profit margins are so low in the coffee business, most of the 10% tariff will go ...Read more

Journalists are terrible at hiding their desire to run our democracy, using their platforms to direct history to the "right side." That badly disguised lust for power creates an audience problem, where the people resent the media's imperious lectures about which side they are supposed to favor -- and if they don't, they are uneducated, racist ...Read more

It has been hard this past week, of tariffs applied worldwide on April 2 to tariffs suspended except for China on April 9, to avoid reflecting on how much trouble could have been avoided if economists, instead of talking about countries' trade surpluses and trade deficits, had devised different words -- say, "buyer-dominant" countries and "...Read more

President Trump likes big round numbers, and he's endorsed one -- $1 trillion -- for the U.S. defense budget.

This is the right idea, and we'll need even more soon enough.

It is the president's wont to declare national emergencies, whether a given situation warrants it or not, but the state of our defenses is a true crisis. While the Pentagon ...Read more

WASHINGTON -- "A nuclear Iran isn't just a threat, it's the threat," Mark Dubowitz of The Foundation for Defense of Democracies warned in the new podcast, "The Iran Breakdown."

Ahead of arms talks Saturday in Oman, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian claimed Wednesday that his country is "not after a nuclear bomb."

Who believes that? ...Read more

SAN DIEGO -- The Trump administration sees a golden opportunity to play the race card against California.

The Department of Justice plans to investigate whether four California universities -- Stanford, UC Berkeley, UCLA and UC Irvine -- are complying with the Supreme Court's 2023 decision prohibiting schools from considering race and ...Read more

"No doctrine involving more pernicious consequences was ever invented by the wit of man than that any of [the Constitution's] provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government."

-- Ex Parte Milligan, Supreme Court of the United States, 1866.

President Donald Trump has recently imposed a national sales tax on ...Read more

Millions of Americans know the frustration of dealing with the Social Security Administration -- endless hold music on the phone, months of waiting for a simple benefit decision, and confusing paperwork. Even before the latest reforms, the SSA's customer service -- in an agency delivering checks to 70 million Americans -- was a mess. The ...Read more

Republicans claim they are slashing government, but they're about to explode the budget deficit to extend President Donald Trump's tax cuts -- which would balloon interest payments on the national debt, already one of the largest expenses in the federal budget. That's no way to slash the size of government.

They could offset the lost revenue ...Read more

In cities big and small all over the country last week, people opposed to the policies of the Trump administration decided to participate in nationally coordinated, so-called Hands Off protests. Wielding signs with slogans like "Stop destroying America," "Hands off our Social Security," "Resist Fascism," "Tariffs are taxes" and "Honk if you ...Read more

The best time to fight a war is when you can win it.

Believing America is still economically innovative and its domestic market the world's biggest, the Trump administration has declared war on Big Debt (U.S. national debt). It is simultaneously pushing for the rapid revival and "reshoring" of the nation's withered, spotty and dangerously ...Read more

President Donald Trump did what he had to do.

Last week, Trump dropped an economic neutron bomb by declaring tariffs on virtually every country on the planet -- tariffs based not on reciprocal tariff rates, but on trade deficits. After an initial stock dump of approximately 10% and then days of the markets bouncing up and down like a ...Read more

As I watch the turmoil unfolding resulting from the president's new trade and tariff policy, I wonder how, as a commentator, I can avoid writing about this.

But what do I say? What side do I take? Yes, per President Donald Trump, the tariffs are the hard medicine we need to swallow to counter many years of unfair policies of our trading ...Read more

Convicted cop killers should never walk free. But New York's soft-on-crime parole board is poised to release its 44th cop killer since 2017.

For this injustice, you can blame mayoral wannabee Andrew Cuomo and his criminal-coddling successor, Gov. Kathy Hochul.

Also to blame is a network of George Soros-funded pro-crime advocacy groups -- ...Read more

Did you bet on March Madness? I did, and many of you did, too. Americans bet billions on NCAA tournaments. We also "spent $60 billion at casinos last year (and) about $12 billion on online sports betting," notes economist Jason Sorens in my new video. Sorens published a state-by-state ranking of gambling freedom across America. Nevada lets ...Read more

When Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) was in the midst of his record 25-plus hours of speaking on the Senate floor on April 1, he yielded to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, who wanted to ask him a couple of questions.

One was on the tariffs that President Donald Trump was set to announce the next day.

"And all of America is paying...Read more

On April 7, Facebook pulled the plug on the censorship of "independent fact-checkers," replacing it with a "Community Notes" approach, like Elon Musk's X uses. No one was more upset than the censorious left-wing "fact" police.

Angie Holan, the leader of the Poynter Institute's International Fact-Checking Network, marked "International Fact-...Read more