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How To Win a Trade War: An Optimistic Guide to an Anxious Global Economy, by Soumaya Keynes and Chad Bown, Simon & Schuster, 288 pages, $30

The ancient Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu advised that “he who wishes to fight must first count the cost.” Joshua, the brilliant (for its time) computer in the 1983 film WarGames, did the counting and concluded that “the only winning move is not to play.”

Both lines find their way into How To Win a Trade War. This is no arid academic analysis, and it does not read like one. Instead, Soumaya Keynes, a journalist at the Financial Times, and Chad Bown, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, have crafted a witty, fast-paced analysis of how the global trading system has unraveled in the aftermath of COVID, Brexit, and (most importantly) President Donald Trump’s electoral successes.

The book’s greatest strength is its accessibility. Trade policy can be difficult to explain and boring to read. How To Win a Trade War is neither difficult nor boring, as Keynes and Bown use a plethora of analogies both to guide the reader and to insert their perspective. Trade is like dancing, trade deficits are like video game consoles, and tariffs are like marijuana. OK, libertarians might object to that last one, but their point is that even when tariffs feel good, they inevitably obscure reality, cost money, and make you (or your economy, at least) more lethargic.

Or take the populist obsession with the idea that global trade has hollowed out America’s economy. “When a country has an unemployment rate of only 4 percent,” as the U.S. does, complaining that trade is responsible for a massive economic displacement is “a bit like a toddler screaming that he wants an apple when he quite clearly already has one in his hand.” That’s not the only time the authors analogize Trump’s behavior to that of Keynes’ young children.

The book’s most useful analogy may be the recurring motif that imagines the major players in the global trade wars as vessels making their way across the oceans. America used to be a naval ship, offering security and stability for the global order. It’s now being sailed by pirates—untrustworthy, potentially dangerous to friend and foe alike, and guided solely by short-term self-interest. China, meanwhile, is a warship eagerly brandishing its big guns. Europe is a cobbled-together merchant ship with little muscle, trying its best to keep the pirates and warriors happy at a distance. India is a boat built from an old car. (That last one makes more sense in context.)

Despite all the talk of pirates and toddlers, Keynes and Bown have more sympathy for America’s role in the trade wars than you might expect. While many observers have written off Trump’s obsession with America’s trade deficit as just a character flaw or evidence of his economic illiteracy, the authors argue that the U.S.-China relationship has become dangerously unbalanced.

That’s partially because America’s government has borrowed too heavily. But Keynes and Bown largely blame China.

China’s authoritarian regime has broken many of the price signals that should regulate markets, they argue in the book’s most compelling chapter. Normally, overproduction of industrial goods would cause prices to fall, harming profits and driving less efficient producers out of business. “But in China’s case, this mechanism can malfunction. When demand weakens, its system is bad at letting businesses fail” because local and national officials have a strong incentive to prop up underperforming companies. That willingness to burn cash in order to overpower price signals, along with China’s increasing desire to dictate trading terms to its partners (see the warship analogy), have created the conditions for the current mess. America’s response has been haphazard and often confuses friends for foes, but China, they say, is still ultimately to blame.

In examining the tactics and strategies of a trade war, Keynes and Bown evaluate subsidies, tariffs, and stockpiles (including a lengthy analogy drawn from the lessons of doomsday preppers on Reddit), while weighing the pros and cons of each. 

They are skeptical of sweeping conclusions, and they encourage prospective trade warriors to think carefully about the long-term and possibly unintended consequences of any major interventions, as well as to focus their energies on industries that truly matter for national security. “You might be able to control how an economic weapon is deployed, but certainly not how the target responds,” they warn. In the same vein, governments cannot always control how domestic businesses will react. Hence, “these economic tools can be unwieldy, blunt, and prone to abuse.”

That approach occasionally comes across as working too hard to balance differing viewpoints. For a book that promises a “how to,” this offers few definitive conclusions. The authors do promise that the book is not meant to be “an ideological defense of free trade,” and they are right to advise policymakers to have more humility about what can be accomplished with various blunt instruments. Even so, I would have preferred a more pointed take on how various economic interventions often harm the people they are meant to help.

The one verdict that Keynes and Bown do deliver, repeatedly, is that there will be no return to the world of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, when a (mostly) stable set of rules guided the global trading system. The two authors may wish that Trump and other world leaders were more willing to take Joshua’s advice about not starting wars, but they are resigned to the fact that “trade wars are the new normal.”

“We worry,” they write, “that China’s system is so different from those of its competitors that there isn’t space for a common rules-based system” in the model of the World Trade Organization, whose influence has waned considerably. Meanwhile, “another challenge is that to work well, the rules rely on trust,” they write. The unspoken addendum: It is hard to trust pirates or toddlers.

Indeed, the sunny and lighthearted tone of the writing only barely masks the authors’ rather pessimistic view of the current situation. Even when they engage in a few flights of fantasy in the book’s final chapter—which imagines how the global trading system might look in 2050—the options veer between a Chinese-dominated reality and one where the U.S. has integrated “economic and security statecraft.” It’s hardly a vision for freer markets, either way.

Still, the alternative might be worse. “If we manage to avoid World War III, we all deserve a pat on the back,” Keynes and Bown conclude. The “winner” of the trade war might simply be “the team that loses less than a rival, or simply the one most adept at minimizing its own wounds.”

The book captures the anxiety that seems to be the defining mood of the moment. Old assumptions about globalization are no longer secure, but there’s no clarity about what might replace that order. Keynes and Bown want their readers to understand that there is nothing to be gained by wishing for the past to return, and that we should cheerfully (if not eagerly) try to find the best path forward.

How To Win a Trade War is not really about winning at all. It is, per Sun Tzu, about understanding the cost of the fight.

The post <em>How To Win a Trade War</em>? Lose Less Than Your Opponents. appeared first on Reason.com.

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More than $30,000 in cash seized from two Indiana massage parlors is missing.

Police seized the money in November 2023 as part of a joint state and local raid on two northern Indiana massage parlors—Jade Massage in Winfield and Relax Spa in Crown Point—and associated businesses and houses. Authorities began investigating the spas after allegedly receiving anonymous tips that prostitution took place there.

Four penis massages for an undercover detective later, authorities raided the businesses and seized more than $97,000 in cash, along with a car. Spa owners Guan Yu and Wujiao Liu, a married couple, were arrested. Their case is ongoing—and their cash is missing.

State police are now investigating what happened. Maybe there’s an innocent explanation for the missing cash; this could well come down to carelessness, not corruption. Regardless, this case represents yet another instance of police profiting off sex work criminalization.

The Search for the Missing Cash

Robert Byrd, who was sworn in as Winfield’s town marshal in April 2025, “assumed that the money had been placed in a secure account established through the Winfield Clerk-treasurer’s Office or a local bank,” reports the Post-Tribune.

It wasn’t.

Eventually, Byrd tracked some of the seized cash down to a rented storage locker, where bills and coins were stashed in plastic bins.

But Byrd could locate only $63,473.86 of the $97,014.37 that was taken. $33,540.51 was missing.

Lake County prosecutor Bernard A. Carter has now asked Indiana state police “to thoroughly investigate this matter and to make every effort to recover the missing funds.” The state police agreed.

The fact that it took some sleuthing for Byrd to discover where the money was stored is itself incredible. Evidence is supposed to be well-tracked and well-documented. And cash seized during an investigation could eventually need to be returned (remember, no one has yet been convicted in this case).

And if this turns out to be more than just sloppy police work? That wouldn’t exactly be surprising, given the perverse incentives and ample opportunities for corruption that massage parlor prostitution cases present.

The Massage Parlor Raid Racket  

Anonymous tips about sexual services being offered along with massages can be used to justify months of undercover visits from law enforcement agents seeking massages. (Later, they will say the masseuses could be trafficking victims—which, if true, would make their months of visits without intervention especially cruel.) And any offer of sex acts with massages can be used to justify raids.

Asian massage parlors tend to be cash-heavy businesses, so there’s often plenty of cash around to seize—and, unlike when you seize money from bank accounts, no definitive record trail. The workers and owners at these businesses are often immigrants, for whom language barriers and other considerations could make it harder to fight back. And if police throw a “human trafficking” allegation in there, no mater how unsubstantiated, everyone just shrugs at whatever happens to those arrested and pats police on the back for a job well done.

Missing money aside, the Winfield case is a fine indictment of how so many massage parlor raid cases operate.

The Search for Penis Masseuses

Months before the spa raid, Detective Benjamin Moyars, co-chair of the Indiana Protection for Abused and Trafficked Humans Law Enforcement Task Force, went to Jade Massage and got his butt and penis massaged using police funds, according to a probable cause affidavit. (“He did not ejaculate,” it says.) That was on March 3, 2023.

In April, he went back and got a penis massage from two women this time. One of them “appeared to not speak English,” the affidavit says.

In June, Moyars went back twice—once to Jade Massage and once to Relax Massage. Same thing.

Over the course of the four months, Moyars spent $385—and who knows how much in police time and expenses—on proving that three women would massage his genitals along with the rest of his body.

After that, authorities spent several more months surveilling the businesses. Nothing in the probable cause affidavit indicates that they observed signs of forced prostitution, a.k.a. sex trafficking, during this surveillance.

Nonetheless, police raided the businesses and Liu and Yu were charged with not just promoting prostitution but also promotion of human sexual trafficking, in addition to being charged for failing to remit sales tax. Liu was also charged with battery against a public safety official after allegedly spitting at an officer during the course of her arrest.

According to the probable cause affidavit, a sign glimpsed in Relax Massage during the raid stated: “Therapist should stick to the work principle. Don’t practice the therapy as porn or you will have the consequence.”

But—in a fine example of how police often twist language in order to turn ordinary prostitution cases into sex trafficking cases—the affidavit states that “Detective Moyars advised in his experience with human trafficking and prostitution investigations, owners pay the female employees so little that they are effectively forced to perform sexual services in the hopes of cash tips to support themselves.” Voila: Even if the owners did not condone the sex acts, let alone make anyone perform them, they are deemed guilty of “forcing” people into prostitution.

Interviews with four “victims”—two of them the same women who allegedly massaged Moyar’s penis—suggest that these women came to work at Jade and Relax spas voluntarily, were not confined there by the owners, were not subject to violence or threats, and were paid for their work.

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In the News

If Mayday Health and the abortion lobby want to sue us for defending unborn life, bring it on. pic.twitter.com/MTqiDuItGj

— Larry Rhoden (@LarryRhodenSD) May 29, 2026

Abortion advertising ban is unconstitutional, says Mayday Health. A New York–based nonprofit that provides information about accessing abortion pills is suing South Dakota over its ban on abortion-related advertising. Mayday Health “and a Democratic former South Dakota lawmaker, Nancy Turbak Berry, filed the lawsuit Friday in federal court against South Dakota’s Republican governor and attorney general,” South Dakota Searchlight reports:

The new law says no person may knowingly dispense, distribute, sell or advertise an article or thing designed, adapted or intended to produce an abortion. The ban also covers any article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine or thing that is “advertised or described in a manner calculated to lead another to use or apply it for producing an abortion.”

Violations are felonies punishable by up to two years in prison and a $4,000 fine. The law also gives the state attorney general authority to recover civil penalties of $10,000 per violation.

The lawsuit alleges it’s unconstitutional to prohibit advertising that’s protected by the free speech guarantees in the First Amendment.

Mayday was involved in a previous legal tussle with South Dakota (which this newsletter covered in January), after South Dakota Attorney General Marty Jackley went after Mayday over ads that it had taken out at gas stations.

The ads said: “Pregnant? Don’t want to be? Learn more at Mayday.Health.”

Jackley said this constituted deceptive advertising because the ads didn’t point out that abortion is illegal in South Dakota.

Mayday counter-sued Jackley, seeking to prevent him “from punishing Plaintiff Mayday Health for publishing truthful information about reproductive healthcare.”

South Dakota and Mayday ultimately settled those cases. The agreement involved Mayday yanking the gas station ads.

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On Substack

Eminent domain for data centers? Bonnie Kristian reports on Georgia officials using eminent domain power to seize 20 to 30 homes so a private company called Georgia Power can build new power lines. A woman named Ansley Brown has been speaking out about this on TikTok, blaming artificial intelligence. The power lines are not set to serve only data centers, but “a local news story confirms that at least one data center is involved here, and it’s plausible that the data center(s) is the straw that broke the camel’s back, even if there’s a lot more straw,” Kristian writes.

“Now, there’s a sense in which the artificial intelligence piece of this story is a distraction,” she continues:

My point is not that it’s bad for Brown’s mom to lose her house because AI is bad and therefore there should be no data centers.

I’m very skeptical of many proposed uses for AI, but as I’ve argued here before, its utility costs are wholly relative to the value of its output. If AI is doing a lot of good, then probably we do want to use a lot of electricity for it, which may well mean building new data centers and power lines. And as skeptical as I am, I think the good it does is not zero, so I’m not categorically against this kind of construction.

The issue is that Georgia Power is a private company that appears to be using eminent domain to take people’s homes against their will to meet other private companies’ expansion plans.

As Kristian points out, it’s not entirely clear whether the new power lines would be needed even if a new data center wasn’t being constructed. But regardless of what sort of construction is primarily driving the Georgia Power situation, eminent domain issues may become a bigger issue as construction of data centers expands. It seems important for people who are not hyperbolic AI-doomers to be speaking out against this.

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Read This Thread

Hard to express just how utterly divorced the political rhetoric around porn is from the reality. I've worked in the industry for more than 20 years. I see porn all day long. I have never once seen necrophilia or bestiality on an adult site.But that's what's being used to push antiporn laws.

— Mike Stabile (@mikestabile.bsky.social) 2026-05-28T16:10:49.858Z

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More Sex & Tech

• The Department of Homeland Security is ramping up spending on iris scanners.

• “Texas for now can require proof of age to download a smart phone app, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday, unpausing a trial court injunction that halted the law on First Amendment grounds,” Bloomberg Law reports.

• Lizzie Borden, director of the 1986 drama Working Girls, talks about the ways sex work has changed over the past 40 years and the ways it hasn’t. “There’s a lot of argument about whether prostitution be legalised or be the Scandinavian model,” said Borden. “Decriminalisation would be best because that’s the only way nobody gets punished, so sex workers still have customers.”

• “A federal judge had an extramarital affair with a high-ranking police officer—including having sex in the judge’s chambers that was overheard by staff—and initially lied about the actions but remains on the bench after receiving a ‘private reprimand,'” the Associated Press reports.

The post Indiana Police Misplace More Than $30,000 Seized in Massage Parlor Raids appeared first on Reason.com.

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[I am assuming that you all know the basic background of the Slush Fund “Settlement”; my earlier discussions are here and here.]

Things are definitely heating up on the Slush Fund front.

Even for a President for whom courtroom losses are a depressingly regular occurrence[1], and even putting aside the Order from D.D.C. requiring him to take his name off of the Kennedy Center, Friday was a tough day for our President.

First, in Floyd et al v. DOJ, the district court (ED VA, Judge Brinkema) enjoined the DOJ from “taking any further action pursuant to the creation or operation of the Anti-Weaponization Fund, including the transferring of money to the Fund; the consideration of any claims submitted to the Fund; and the disbursing of any funds from the Fund.”[2]

And then a second court (SD FL, Judge Williams), re-opened the Trump v. IRS case (in which Trump had agreed to a voluntary dismissal of his claims), based on …

“… grievous allegations that [Trump] voluntarily dismissed this litigation solely to avoid judicial scrutiny of a lawsuit that was collusive from the start and was only filed to provide the imprimatur of legality for an unlawful settlement.[3]“ The court further ordered Trump to file a response to those allegations by June 12, “detailing his “position on . . . (1) the charges of collusion and whether the Parties are truly adverse; (2) the assertion that the dismissal in this case was premised on deception by the Parties; and (3) the question of whether the case should be reopened because the Court was the victim of a fraud.” (Emphasis added)

Do stay tuned. This is getting very interesting and is, potentially, very important. Coming at a time when our President is already in a weakening political position – an unpopular war, inflation, etc. – this looks like it may generate some push-back from Republicans previously willing to toe the MAGA line. The decision of the Republican Senate leadership not to vote on Trump’s priority immigration budget before adjourning a couple of weeks ago was widely interpreted as a mini-revolt of sorts against the Fund, and Republican Senators have been unusually vocal in their condemnation of the Fund.*

*From Sen. McConnell (“Utterly stupid, morally wrong”) to Sen. Tillis (“stupid on stilts”) to Sen. Cruz (“a galactic blunder”) to Majority Leader Thune (“I’m not a big fan”).

My crystal ball is no clearer than anyone else’s, but here are my predictions:

(1) The Anti-Weaponization Fund will never pay a nickel to anyone.

(2) Todd Blanche’s days as Attorney General are numbered. This was all a pretty clever scheme to set up a Trump-controlled slush fund plus an immunity from any and all claims the IRS might be able to bring against our President and his family.

That immunity is a nice little bonus that was somehow omitted from the original “Settlement Agreement,” an omission Blanche corrected in an “Addendum” dated just one day after the “Settlement Agreement” was executed.  As alert readers may have noticed, the immunity has absolutely nothing to do with the “case” that Trump and the IRS were supposedly “settling”.

And Trump would get all of this without anyone other than Donald Trump and Todd Blanche doing anything!  No silly congressional “authorization” or “appropriation” needed!

It has Blanche’s fingerprints all over it, and it looks like he may have been too clever by half. He has, rather than enriching Donald Trump, gotten him into some pretty hot water, and at the moment, at least, it doesn’t seem as though the money spigot will ever turn on. If Blanche were hoping that this bit of legal legerdemain would help convince our President to remove the “Acting” from his title, I think he will be disappointed.

Memo to Republican senators: This really is a good issue to take a stand on. He’ll primary you anyway, whether you lick his boots or not; just ask John Cornyn. Seems like a good time to stand up for the simple principle that even a President can’t just take tax money for his own personal purposes.

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[1] As I have said many times – because it bears repeating: Trump has lost orders of magnitude more cases in court in a year-and-a-half than any of his predecessors in their complete terms. Indeed, though I doubt that there’s sufficient data to test this hypothesis, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he has already lost a greater number of cases than all of his predecessors combined. Ask your AI agent to list all of his losses if you think I’m exaggerating.

[2] Plaintiffs in this case are “former career Assistant U.S. Attorney and January 6th prosecutor Andrew Floyd, Professor John Caravello, City of New Haven, the National Abortion Federation [and] Common Cause,” according to plaintiffs’ counsel’s website (Democracy Now).  Their claim is that “the creation of the [Anti-Weaponization] Fund violates the U.S. Constitution, exceeds executive authority, unlawfully bypasses Congress’s exclusive authority over federal spending and appropriations, and violates the Administrative Procedure Act.”

One difficult issue in this case, and one that will surely be raised by the DOJ in its responses, is whether plaintiffs have standing to object to the creation of the Fund. I’m no standing expert, but it looks like a tough hill to climb, and I’m curious to see how the plaintiffs frame their argument that they have standing to bring these claims.

Interestingly, Public Citizen has filed a suit containing similar substantive claims in SD CA, on behalf of Allison Gill. Gill, according to the Complaint, was a vocal Trump critic who was targeted by the government and improperly subjected to a criminal investigation in 2019. The Complaint continues:

Plaintiff has been the subject of actions taken by the federal government that could constitute “Lawfare” or “Weaponization” and may be entitled to compensation and an apology from the Fund. Plaintiff thus has an interest in the Fund’s establishment and operation, including an interest in ensuring that the Fund is legally sound, that Lawfare and Weaponization are appropriately defined to cover Plaintiff’s claims, and that the procedures and standards through which claims are considered are fair and equitable.

It’s a nice bit of legal jiu-jitsu – people subject to Trump’s “weaponization” can sue and assert standing based upon their interest in being compensated by Trump’s Fund!

[3] The allegations are contained in a Motion submitted to the court last week by 35 retired federal judges. [See here, and my discussion here]. According to the court’s Order re-opening the case, among the allegations contained therein are

“. . . the fact that the settlement in question includes a ‘three-paragraph addendum’ . . . [that] purports to ‘forever bar and preclude’ the United States from pursuing claims that could have been [otherwise] asserted [against] Plaintiffs,’), and the fact that Defendants did not ‘even try[] to defend against Plaintiffs’ claims’ despite their active opposition to nearly identical claims in other litigation. Finally, the non-party movants assert that Plaintiffs’ claims were “clearly untimely” and therefore untenable.”

 

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