The Great Depression was not caused by a fundamental flaw of capitalism (greed, speculation, underconsumption) but by two things: the Federal Reserve's failure to do its job as lender of last resort and allow the money supply to contract by 30% from 1930-1933, and the Smoot-Hawley tariff which contracted trade.

George Mason University also has many Chinese national students, some of whom have written dissertations under Bauer, some remain in the U.S., and some returned to China, but Bauer does not believe any were spies, illustrating that the security risk argument for blanket restrictions is overstated.

Governments fear financial crises because they dramatically reduce the re-election prospects of the sitting officials, so their incentive is to solve problems now by throwing cash at them, which makes near-term conditions better but creates worse long-term incentives.

If Trump forces Apple to manufacture iPhones in the U.S. via tariffs, the products will become more expensive, Americans will replace them less frequently, quality may fall, and resources moved into U.S.-based factories will have to come from other U.S. industries, causing output and prices to rise elsewhere in the economy, resulting in lower American living standards.

Future taxpayers will bear the burden of the current $2.5 trillion budget deficit either through higher explicit taxes, fewer government services, or monetary expansion that creates inflation; there is no way around this burden except through default, which would harm debt holders.

The 2008 financial crisis resulted partly from government housing policies starting in the early 1990s that pressured Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy increasingly higher percentages of subprime mortgages, incentivizing banks to extend mortgages to unqualified borrowers who would later default.

Trade deficits are not an emergency and are actually a blessing for America because they represent an inflow of capital into the country, not a loss of economic capacity.

Trump exceeded his constitutional and statutory authority in implementing the April 2nd Liberation Day tariffs under a 1977 statute, and these tariffs will likely be struck down by appeals courts or the Supreme Court as not actually delegated to the president by Congress.

U.S. unemployment is very low at an average of 4.2% over the past 10 years (excluding COVID), contradicting the claim that China has stolen American jobs.

America's industrial capacity and manufacturing output are at all-time highs, contradicting claims that manufacturing has been hollowed out or moved offshore.

The share of the U.S. workforce in manufacturing has declined steadily since 1954 from approximately 30% to 8%, but this decline is caused by mechanization and innovation, not by trade with China or other countries, and the rate of decline has slowed over the past 15 years rather than accelerating despite NAFTA and China joining the WTO.

Companies like Apple already have strong incentives to become more efficient and innovate in their manufacturing processes, so the government does not need to force them to do so through tariffs or mandates; any efficiency gains forced by government action would be less efficient than market-driven solutions.

It is unprecedented for a sitting U.S. president in peacetime to threaten a private company that is doing nothing wrong with tariffs to force it to manufacture domestically.

The New Deal did not contribute much to recovery from the Great Depression and probably extended it by creating uncertainty, and the Depression did not truly end until after World War II when private investment and business confidence returned.

The relationship between taxes and economic growth is that more taxation results in less of the taxed activity, and broad-based low marginal rate taxes are the best way for government to raise revenue, while high discretionary rates targeting particular activities amount to economic engineering that picks winners and losers.

Any semblance of fiscal sanity in America is now gone and it is a bipartisan loss of fiscal sanity, with both Democrats and Republicans spending future taxpayers' money like drunken sailors.

As federal debt rises to a certain level as a proportion of GDP, countries begin to suffer economically, and there is no evidence that the United States is immune to this pattern.

If the government credibly commits that it will no longer bail out large financial institutions (eliminating the 'too big to fail' doctrine), financial institutions would immediately become more prudent in their lending and risk-taking behavior.

The U.S. has made a mistake over several decades by artificially pushing people into college when they should have pursued skilled trades like HVAC, auto mechanics, and construction, which provide good jobs and income.

Things done with one's hands (skilled trades) are less likely to be negatively affected by AI, and AI might even improve instruction in these fields, making them relatively stable career paths.