by Don Boudreaux on February 1, 2026

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C. Jarrett Dieterle reports on a reality that “Trump’s tariff war is crushing American alcohol makers.” A slice:

Despite the crippling pain being borne by the industry, Trump has shown few signs of reconsidering. In response to news that French President Emmanuel Macron would not join Trump’s newly minted “Board of Peace” to resolve the ongoing Gaza conflict, Trump told reporters: “I’ll put a 200 percent tariff on his wines and Champagnes, and he’ll join, but he doesn’t have to join.”

In response to arch-protectionist Peter Navarro’s recent boast that “American steel production just surpassed Japan for the first time since 1999,” Eric Boehm tweets this apt image: (HT Scott Lincicome)(And Eric’s point is valid.)

The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board urges states to expand education savings accounts in order to increase parents’ ability to rescue their children from the K-12 ‘education’ system run by governments. A slice:

The best case for school choice is that parents are free to take it or leave it—and they’re taking it in droves. Some 1.5 million students are using private choice programs in the 2025-26 school year, up from 1.2 million last year, according to the nonprofit EdChoice. But not all parents who want private options can get them, and state lawmakers can still do more to help.

The great news is that some 19 states now have universal choice programs, meaning any student is eligible. Iowa this school year opened K-12 education savings accounts (ESAs) to all, and 41,044 students are using them, about 13,000 more than last year. So did Arkansas, which awarded more than 46,000 ESAs this fall, up from about 14,000 last year.

New Hampshire’s ESA enrollment jumped to 10,000 students this year from 5,800 with the removal of an income eligibility cap. In Arizona, where ESAs have been available to all students since 2022, more than 100,000 are using them, up from 85,000 last spring.

Jack Nicastro documents the efforts of Virginia’s Democrats to restrict Virginians’ freedoms.

GMU Econ alum Matthew Mitchell and Vance Ginn ask: “How does your state rank on this Economic Freedom Index?”

David Henderson applauds “the wealth of individualism.” Two slices:

While it is true that the economy runs on self-interest, the dog-eat-dog metaphor is inaccurate. In a free market, we get what we want precisely because people are self-interested. Moreover, there’s a wider view of individualism that includes helping others out of generosity and fellow feeling.

…..

One of the great things about individualism is that we get to decide how and in what ways we serve our fellow humans. Some of us might focus almost entirely on building a business. And in a free market, the surest way to build a business is not to cheat customers but to provide something they are willing to pay for and don’t, after the fact, regret having bought. We often hear the famous P.T. Barnum quote that apparently drove his circus business: “There’s a sucker born every minute.” The problem is that he didn’t say that. Indeed, as Charles L. Hooper and I point out in our book, Making Great Decisions in Business and Life*, *Barnum made a statement that contradicts the “sucker” quote. He stated that “no man can be dishonest without soon being found out and when his lack of principle is discovered, nearly every avenue to success is closed against him forever.”

A simple example of a good exchange is the sale to me, in 2015, of a new Toyota Camry. I still drive it and love it. The executives at Toyota don’t know me and, if they met me, might not even like me, hard as that is to believe. But in producing that car and selling it to me, they cared about me.

George Will ponders the U.S. Supreme Court’s upcoming ruling on the power of the president of the executive branch of the U.S. government to remove executive-branch agencies’ principal officers. A slice:

The unitary executive theory charges that “independent” agencies are insulated from accountability. But voters can hold both Congress and the president accountable for the administrative state’s behavior. And [UVA Law professor Caleb] Nelson, a self-described constitutional “originalist,” adds:

“If most of what the federal government currently does on a daily basis is ‘executive,’ and if the President must have full control over each and every exercise of ‘executive’ power by the federal government (including an unlimitable ability to remove all or almost all executive officers for reasons good or bad), then the President has an enormous amount of power — more power, I think, than any sensible person should want anyone to have.”

If the court gives its imprimatur to a strong version of the unitary executive theory, presidential power will become even more formidable and less circumscribable than current events reveal it to be. This is a recipe for enhanced presidentialism — more government by executive fiats, more president-centric politics, more congressional anemia.

As Nelson says, the Constitution’s provisions concerning presidential power “are far more equivocal than the current Court has been suggesting … I hope the Justices will not act as if their hands are tied and they cannot consider any consequences of the interpretations that they choose.”

Yes. When considering the logic of our constitutional structure, the justices should not disregard their conclusions’ likely consequences for the nation’s political practices and civic culture. Quoting a member of Congress in 1789, the year the Constitution was adopted, Nelson warns against “interpretations of the Constitution that ‘legaliz[e] the full exertion of a tyrannical disposition.’”