The Self-Harm of Economic Populism

Democrats want to punish the rich with taxes, and Republicans want to punish China with tariffs. The two are analytically equivalent, and both bring to mind H.L. Mencken’s chestnut, “There is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.” Maybe six weeks into an Economics 101 course, one encounters the “incidence of taxation” and learns why tax-the-rich and tariff-the-Chinese are fallacious and self-harming strategies. For the past 250 years or so, political leaders have gone through an endless cycle of learning this logic and then forgetting it.

https://graboyes.substack.com/p/the-self-harm-of-economic-populism