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Donald Trump is an avowed enemy of free trade. “We must protect our borders from the ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies, and destroying our jobs,” Trump declared in his 2017 inaugural address. “Protection will lead to great prosperity and strength.”

Most economists disagree with that assessment. As they will tell you, free (or even just freer) trade benefits all parties involved. Protectionism, by contrast, hurts consumers and businesses alike.

Unfortunately, Trump is not alone in his economic ignorance. Socialist Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders (I) also dislikes free trade, denouncing it as “part of a global race to the bottom to boost the profits of large corporations.”

Perhaps Trump and Sanders should each spend a little time studying Karl Marx. Yes, that Karl Marx. Although the fact is often forgotten today, Marx had a number of positive things to say about what we now call globalization. As the left-wing economist Meghnad Desai documented in his enlightening 2002 book, Marx’s Revenge: The Resurgence of Capitalism and the Death of Statist Socialism, Marx “was a champion of free trade, and no friend of tariff barriers.” Indeed, Marx saw global capitalism as a revolutionary force that, in the words of The Communist Manifesto, “rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life.” What is more, the Manifesto continued:

The bourgeoise, during its rule of scarcely one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground—what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor?

To be sure, Marx welcomed these revolutionary capitalist forces because he saw them as the means to an end. Namely, he believed that they would shape and form a self-aware proletariat class, which, in turn, would then lead the world into a glorious communist future (the details are hazy about how that part was supposed to happen). But in the meantime, Marx absolutely wanted free trade to thrive so that capitalism could work its magic. This is the same process, incidentally, that the economist Joseph Schumpeter famously likened to a “gale of creative destruction,”

Alas, if only Trump and Sanders could be as smart about free trade as Marx and Schumpeter.

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Michael Pollan, who last year published a fascinating book about psilocybin and other psychedelics that includes vivid and detailed descriptions of his own experiences with them, argues that voters should not be trusted to decide the legal status of these substances. “As much as the supporters of legal psilocybin hope to follow the political playbook that has rapidly changed the status of cannabis in recent years, they need to bear in mind that psilocybin is a very different drug, and it is not for everyone,” he writes in The New York Times, responding to the psilocybin ballot initiative that Denver voters approved this week. “I look forward to the day when psychedelic medicines like psilocybin, having proven their safety and efficacy in F.D.A.-approved trials, will take their legal place in society, not only in mental health care but in the lives of people dealing with garden-variety unhappiness or interested in spiritual exploration and personal growth. My worry is that ballot initiatives may not be the smartest way to get there.”

FDA approval of psilocybin as a prescription medicine may seem like a smarter way to Pollan, but it will not lead to the destination he says he wants to reach. Even allowing for off-label use of a drug approved for a specific indication (depression, in this case), doctors will not be prescribing psilocybin for “spiritual exploration and personal growth.” Anyone who wants to obtain psilocybin for those purposes will have to persuade a doctor that he qualifies for a recognized psychiatric diagnosis. And while that sort of thing might happen from time to time, it is a fundamentally dishonest approach that reinforces the pseudoscientific medicalization of the human condition.

The pressing problem right now is what should happen to people who defy the government’s arbitrary ban on psychoactive mushrooms. “No one should ever be arrested or go to jail for the possession or cultivation of any kind of mushroom,” Pollan writes. “It would be disingenuous for me to say otherwise, since I have possessed, used and grown psilocybin myself.”

Pollan therefore should have no objection to the Denver initiative, which makes arrests for possession of psilocybin mushrooms the city’s “lowest law enforcement priority” and prohibits the use of “any city funds or resources” for that purpose. Even if Denver police make only 17 or so psilocybin arrests a year, that is 17 too many.

Since the Denver initiative applies to “propagation of psilocybin mushrooms by an adult for personal use,” it protects people like Pollan from the prison sentences they might otherwise face. If he had grown his mushrooms in Colorado, he would be eligible for a prison sentence of two to four or four to eight years, depending on how much the mushrooms weighed.

An initiative that could appear on the 2020 ballot in Oregon, which Pollan mentions, would go further than the Denver measure, authorizing state-licensed producers and suppliers of psilocybin mushrooms. “Under the proposed measure,” its backers say, “any individual over 21 years of age, upon attaining medical clearance from a physician, could participate in a sequence of sessions, provided on-site at an independently licensed psilocybin service facility. A client would not need to be diagnosed with a qualifying medical condition to access these services.” Production, distribution, and possession of psilocybin outside of this system would remain illegal.

The rules described in the Oregon initiative, which require that clients have medical clearance and take psilocybin only under the supervision of trained “facilitators” in licensed locations, would seem to address Pollan’s concern that psychedelics should be treated with appropriate care and respect. Yet he is holding out for FDA approval of psilocybin as a prescription drug, use of which would require “a qualifying medical condition.” The approach he prefers would prevent people from using the drug for “spiritual exploration and personal growth” unless they were willing to accept a psychiatric label and could find a doctor willing to apply it.

Pollan also mentions an initiative that California activists are working on. The 2018 version, which failed to qualify for the ballot, would simply have eliminated criminal penalties for “possession, sale, transport and cultivation” of psilocybin by adults 21 or older. While that is closer to the policy I’d like to see, I assume Pollan would prefer the more restrictive approach described in the Oregon initiative.

Either way, state legislators are not about to pass anything like either of these initiatives, and the FDA does not have the power to do so. Expecting FDA approval of psilocybin as a medicine to address the unjust treatment of people who use the drug for “spiritual exploration and personal growth” (or just for fun!) is like expecting FDA approval of Marinol, Epidiolex, or Sativex to address the unjust treatment of cannabis consumers.

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In a move that escaped much journalistic attention last week, the Republican National Committee (RNC) voted unanimously to disband its debate committee, an explicit signal that the traditionally impartial body is not interested in officiating a primary challenge against President Donald Trump. Incumbent presidents will continue their unbroken string of avoiding primary debates.

Over the past five months, as former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld threw his hat into the ring and Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan played footsie with a run, the RNC has merged with Trump’s re-election campaign, passed a resolution pledging “undivided support” for the president, and taunted any potential competitors.

In an interview Wednesday with the Daily Mail, Trump campaign spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany was blunt about Weld’s Quixotic fight to dislodge a president who polls consistently at 90 percent approval among Republican voters.

“There is no Republican primary, as the RNC has made clear,” McEnany said. “That’s the highest own-party approval rating for a president, with one exception—and it’s [George W.] Bush during 9/11….President Trump got more votes in the history of our party than any Republican nominee. So the notion that there is a Republican primary is a false one.”

As for Weld? “The fake news can try to create a primary but it doesn’t exist because our voters stand with the president,” she said.

Polls even in their home states have been brutal for Trump’s real and would-be challengers. An April 29–May 4 Gonzales Maryland survey of 203 likely Republican voters showed Gov. Hogan trailing the president, 68 percent to 24 percent. Weld in an April 4–7 Emerson College poll of 183 likely Massachusetts voters got thrashed, 82 percent to 18 percent. The Trump machine is basically taking a bazooka to a thumb-wrestling match.

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This morning it became official: The trade war between the United States and China has escalated.

High-level trade negotiations that ran into the final hours of Thursday night proved fruitless, and at midnight the United States began the process of raising tariffs on about $200 billion of Chinese imports from 10 percent to 25 percent. New tariffs of 25 percent on an additional $325 billion of Chinese-made goods are also being implemented. In an early morning tweetstorm, President Donald Trump said that talks with China would continue and defended the decision to impose new and higher tariffs; he avoided noting that they’re really a tax on American importers, businesses, and consumers. China has vowed to retaliate, but it has not given any specifics so far.

Clearly, the trade war that was supposed to be “good and easy to win” has now entered a more dangerous and destructive phase. After nearly a year of trying to use tariffs to force China to negotiate a trade deal without success, the president seems to believe the only solution is more tariffs.

Time will tell if he’s right about how China will respond. But in the meantime, those new tariffs can do serious damage to the American economy. More than 2.1 million American jobs could be lost and the average family of four will face about $2,200 in higher annual costs, according to a study from The Trade Partnership.

“We want to see meaningful changes in China’s trade practices, but it makes no sense to punish Americans as a negotiating tactic,” said David French, a vice president at the National Retail Foundation, in a statement. “If the administration wants to put more pressure on China, it should form a multinational coalition with our allies who share our concerns.”

That was one of the biggest missed opportunities of the Trump administration’s trade policy. If you’re looking for the moment that brought America to this latest escalation of the trade war, you have to look back before the Sunday morning Trump tweets that rattled markets and set off a week of uncertainty. Before the Chinese reportedly reneged on key details of the nascent trade deal. Before the start of the trade war last summer. Before the threats of tariffs on steel and aluminum and washing machines and the rest. Even before Trump was president.

You have to go all the way back to April 2015, two months before Trump declared his candidacy. That was when the future president first lashed out, on Twitter of course, at the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a multilateral trade agreement the Obama administration was negotiating with about a dozen other countries. China was not part of the TPP. The proposed pact was seen as a way to counterbalance China’s growing influence over the region.

“If confronting China and getting it to do a better job of abiding by the international trade rules is the objective, we blew the two best opportunities to make that happen,” says Dan Ikenson, director of the Center for Trade Studies at the Cato Institute. The United States should have not have withdrawn from the TPP, argues Ikenson. Failing that, Americans should have confronted China through the World Trade Organization, bringing complaints that could have been backed by the European Union, Japan, Korea, and others.

“There is power in numbers in these circumstances, but the Trump administration has insisted on going it alone,” Ikenson tells Reason. “Inevitably, we Americans will bear the costs of those calamitous decisions.”

That swaggering, go-it-alone mentality has defined much of this administration’s policy toward the rest of the world. The president believes he can strike better deals in one-on-one settings than as part of an international community. But so far, he has precious little to show for it. After hitting steel and aluminum imports with tariffs last year, the Trump administration promised to remove those trade barriers as soon as other nations worked out unilateral trade deals with America. A couple deals materialized, but not many.

Trump clearly relished the chance to pick a fight with China. But he went into it without allies, and he may have given China leverage in several important ways. As The Wall Street Journal reported this week, China was encouraged to play hardball because it saw Trump’s constant hectoring of the Federal Reserve board to lower rates as a signal that the U.S. economy was slowing. Dragging out negotiations into the 2020 president election also gives China more power, as Trump could be politically weakened if he does not deliver the promised deal—and as tariffs take their inevitable toll on the economy, the strength of which is central to Trump’s political messaging.

He could also face a congressional revolt from within his own party. “There’s a lot of feeling in farm country we’re being used as pawns in this whole business,” Sen. Pat Roberts (R–Kansas) tells The Washington Post. The new round of tariffs could give Congress a greater incentive to claw back some of the trade powers handed to the presidency over the past decades.

If the United States had pursued a different strategy from the outset of the Trump administration, it might now be in a position to counter China’s hardball tactics with alternatives that don’t include higher taxes on American businesses and consumers. As it stands, the options are limited—and Trump does not seem ready to walk away.

“Economic sanctions rarely work to compel governments to do things they don’t want to do,” says Ikenson. “Trying to force a large country with a large, diversified economy and an historical chip on its shoulder to behave as we wish by levying massive tariffs unilaterally—imposing higher costs on ourselves—is a fool’s errand.”

As for the decision to bail on the TPP, it may be a little unfair to lay that entirely at Trump’s feet. Give the voters a share too. Trump was the loudest anti-TPP voice in the 2016 Republican primaries, and his success—along with the impact of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), another anti-TPP protectionist—in running against the trade deal was enough to convince Hillary Clinton to turn against the TPP during the 2016 campaign.

Shrewd politics can lay the groundwork for bad policy. Whether following his own instincts or following the will of the people, Trump yanked the U.S. out of the TPP negotiations shortly after taking office. It’s a decision that looks especially myopic in retrospect—one that effectively sidelined useful allies and made the future trade war a one-on-one fight.

But it was a myopia tinged with ignorance. After all, Trump seemingly believed he was striking a blow against China. During one Republican primary debate, in December 2015, Trump went on an extended rant about how the TPP would benefit China. Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) then leaned in to remind his rival candidate that China wasn’t actually part of the proposed pact.

Trump is a master of creating his own political reality. But the real reality is coming back to bite him—and the rest of us.

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Certified Florida Man Shane Dillon’s choice of bumper sticker has produced a unique victory in the fight for free speech.

The 23-year-old Lake City resident was driving along U.S. Highway 90 last Sunday when a deputy from the Columbia County Sheriff’s Office noticed his “I eat ass” bumper sticker. The sticker, the deputy concluded, violated the state’s obscenity law. After Dillon refused to remove part of the sticker to censor the word “ass,” citing his First Amendment right to free speech, the deputy arrested him and charged him with “obscene writing on vehicles and resisting an officer without violence.”

On Thursday, the State Attorney’s Office said that it would not prosecute Dillon for either charge. Any prosecution, the office determined, could be met with a valid First Amendment defense.

Earlier this week, The Volokh Conspiracy‘s Eugene Volokh analyzed both Dillon’s arrest and the obscenity law cited by the arresting officer. Volokh concluded that Fla. Stat. § 847.011(2), the law in question, is “unconstitutionally overbroad and thus invalid.” The sorts of offenses listed in this legislation have been deemed constitutionally protected ever since Stanley v. Georgia (1969). Volokh also notes that the simple statement on the bumper sticker does not arouse the same intentional “sexual responses” as, say, pornography. So Dillon’s sticker does not fit the Supreme Court–accepted definition of obscene material.

Volokh also observes that Dillon’s refusal to remove a single letter from his bumper sticker does not match the definition of resisting arrest.

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