Remember, Wall Street and the Banks employ millions of people; it was much less than 1% of these people who blew the economic world up.

In short, the pain will mainly be felt by poorer American consumers and US manufacturers. Wealthier Americans? Not so much. And yet it’s the politicians who claim to “care” most about America’s poor and the US manufacturing sector - and who demonize America’s “rich” - that have for years now been demanding more expensive Chinese imports. Maybe they’re not telling us the whole story, huh?

In several of his landmark decisions delineating the reach of the national government, Chief Justice John Marshall argued that the abuse of a power is not an argument against its existence.

We are rapidly reaching the point where a large majority of Americans are free riders. Whether democracy can survive under that condition is a wide-open question.

As Professor Roberts noted, “buy local” is a strategy for stagnation and poverty. It is not a valid method of “saving jobs” or creating prosperity. And it’s foolish to indulge such ignorance as anything other than the economic equivalent of witchcraft.

The graph shows that the bottom 5% of Brazilians are among the poorest people in the world but the top 5% are among the richest. Thus the vertical range of the curve tells us about within-country inequality. Comparing between countries we see that the poorest 5% of Americans are among the richest people in the world (richer than nearly 70% of other people in the world). The poorest 5% of Americans, for example, are richer than the richest 5% of Indians.

The whole point of politics is to resolve issues about which people disagree. It would be absurd for Republicans and Democrats to share a “common agenda.”