Pun Salad

But they are aptly illustrated by Mr. Ramirez:

And Dominic Pino has his own small example, expressed as a question: What Is It With Protectionists and Tomatoes? (gifted link) Under the current plan, tomatoes coming in from Mexico will be taxed at 20.91% starting July 14.

As Dominic goes on to point out: it's the classic story of public choice: large benefits flow to the politically-connected, the diffused costs are imposed on everyone else.

Let me just tag on Don Boudreaux's commentary to a anti-protectionist passage from an 1883 book by William Graham Sumner:

Duh. As the kids say.

Also of note:

• A tempting target, I admit. The WSJ editorialists note the horse in the hospital: Donald Trump Tries to Run Harvard. (gifted unlocked article)

  The Trump Administration on Monday froze $2.2 billion in funds to Harvard after the university refused to surrender to its sweeping demands. Few Americans will shed tears for the Cambridge crowd, but there are good reasons to oppose this unprecedented attempt by government to micromanage a private university.

  Stipulate that the feds have a duty to enforce civil-rights laws, and Harvard failed to protect Jewish students during anti-Israel protests. But the university agreed to strengthen protections for Jewish students in a legal settlement with Students Against Antisemitism, which praised it for “implementing effective long-term changes.”

  The Trump Administration nonetheless demanded last week that Harvard accede to what is effectively a federal receivership under threat of losing $9 billion. Some of the demands are within the government’s civil-rights purview, such as requiring Harvard to discipline students who violate its discrimination policies. It also wants Harvard to “shutter all diversity, equity and inclusion” programs, under “whatever name,” that violate federal law.

  Reader, can you guess the next word? Here it comes:

  But the Administration runs off the legal rails by ordering Harvard to reduce “governance bloat, duplication, or decentralization.” It also orders the school to review “all existing and prospective faculty . . . for plagiarism” and ensure “viewpoint diversity” in “each department, field, or teaching unit.”

  Yeah, that's not good.

  ("Horse in the hospital" reference explained here.)

• And then there's the "C" problem. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) cheers Strange New Respect for Constitutional protections: Harvard stands firm, rejects Trump administration’s unconstitutional demands.

  Last Friday, three federal agencies sent a demand letter to Harvard University laying out conditions for the university to continue receiving federal funds. The letter is unprecedented in its scope. It would essentially render Harvard a vassal institution, subjecting much of its corporate and academic governance to federal directives.

  If Harvard acceded to these demands, faculty hiring, student admissions, student and faculty disciplinary procedures, university programming decisions, student group recognition processes, and much more would be transformed to align with the government's ideological preferences.

  FIRE goes into detail on the demands, and (like Harvard) finds them intrusive, arbitrary, vague, discriminatory, and (once again) unconstitutional.

• The Federalist shakes its pom-poms. Let's look at the quality of Eddie Scarry's advocacy, although you can get a feel for it from the headline: Harvard: Hating Trump Is More Important Than Helping People.

  But as we’ve seen before, it’s often more important to Democrats and institutions like Harvard to pick a losing fight, so long as it puts them at odds with the president. They claim to oppose government waste and then devote every fiber of their being to ensuring not one dollar is cut from the federal bureaucracy. They pretend to support sensible immigration enforcement and then spend what has now been a month demanding foreign nationals with deportation orders be brought back to the U.S. Now Harvard says it will forego money supposedly crucial to its academic research and global advancement, and Democrats applaud it as an act of brave defiance.

  Whatever you say, sweaty!

  If it’s a win for Harvard to reject billions in taxpayer dollars, here’s to more wins all around.

  I can't help but wonder if Eddie meant to say "sweetie" instead of "sweaty" there. Cheerleaders are not known for their careful spelling.

• A balanced take. And it's from Charles Lane at the Free Press: Harvard Had It Coming. That Doesn’t Mean Trump Is Right.

  There was no way, consistent with academic freedom, for Harvard to accept the administration’s demand to “audit the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity, such that each department, field, or teaching unit must be individually viewpoint diverse.” Actually, it’s not immediately clear how such a provision could be precisely defined, let alone consistently enforced.

  And this was one of several such proposed conditions that Harvard’s interim president, Alan Garber, correctly described as an attempt “to control teaching and learning at Harvard and to dictate how we operate.”

  If the administration were sincerely interested in the very real problems of antisemitism and intellectual diversity on campus, the university plausibly argues, it might have given Harvard credit for positive steps it has taken since coming under pressure, both internal and external, 15 months ago over its feckless response to anti-Israel campus protests and antisemitic incidents on campus.

  And yet any sympathy for Harvard has to be tempered by the knowledge that the school—and others like it—brought much of their current predicament on themselves.

  The expression “they’re framing a guilty man” comes to mind. This is the university that once penalized a law professor, Ronald Sullivan, for serving as legal counsel for Harvey Weinstein, widely reviled as an accused rapist, but constitutionally entitled to a defense. Harvard subsequently promoted another dean to president, Claudine Gay, who gave key verbal support to student protests against Sullivan.

  Another expression coming to mind: "Pass the popcorn."

• Also making good points is… Christopher F. Rufo, also at the Free Press: The Right Is Winning the Battle over Higher Education. Get 'em, Chris:

  In 2020, the author Christopher Caldwell changed the conversation with his book The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties. The book argued that the civil-rights regime established in the 1960s marked a fundamental departure from America’s constitutional tradition. Though launched with the noble intention of stopping racial discrimination, Caldwell argued, the Civil Rights Act—and the bureaucracy it spawned—gradually consumed core American freedoms and became a vehicle for entrenching left-wing racialist ideology throughout American institutions.

  In the decades that followed, the right’s response was marked by ambivalence. Some libertarians called for repealing the Civil Rights Act, but—like many libertarian proposals—this was never a political possibility, given the Act’s broad public support. The establishment right, meanwhile, largely suppressed its private misgivings. Republicans repeatedly voted to expand the civil-rights regime, further embedding dubious concepts like disparate impact theory (the idea that discrimination can occur even inadvertently) into law.

  Now, all of this has changed. After mounting a successful fight against DEI, the political right has come to accept that if there must be a civil-rights regime, it should be one of its own making. Rather than continue to defer to left-wing interpretations of civil-rights law, the right can now advance a framework grounded in color-blind equality, not racialist ideology.

  Better still: a color-blind interpretation of the CRA is a much more natural fit than "disparate impact".

  If only the Trump Administration had stuck to that, instead of overreaching…