John Tamny on US government threat to business in China

As always, I so badly want Americans (Fox watchers in particular) to visit China.  It would so WIDELY open their eyes.  Oh, the love the Chinese have for all things American.  It sickens me that we're so blithely turning what's beautiful into governmental warring, and perhaps warring of the shooting kind.

~ John Tamny, personal note, April 18, 2025

John Tamny on conservative support for bill to force sale of TikTok

Contra crybaby conservatives, an app could never destroy the greatest country on earth.  On the other hand, the taking of freedom required to ban an app could destroy a country whose greatness is rooted in freedom.

~ John Tamny, tweet, March 14, 2024

John Tamny on economic ties between the U.S. and China

It cannot be stressed enough that to visit China today as an American is to feel like you're a very welcome person.  You feel more at home than the average person because everywhere you look is a McDonalds, Burger King, KFC, Apple store, Nike store.  Everything over there is American.  The Chinese people - say what you will about Xi - are conducting a love affair, and it's a passionate one, with all things American.  Apple sells a fifth of its iPhones there, it's the second largest market for McDonalds, 4,200 Starbucks there on the way to tens of thousands.  It is a massive market for U.S. goods and so I find it just strange: China was a much bigger threat to us when it was a desperately poor communist country than it is now as a country that its people are finally tasting the fruits of economic freedom.  Are they as free as we are?  No, but these are people who love all things American and all you need to do is visit there to see this.

~ John Tamny, "Key Takeaways from the Annual Stansberry Conference," 1:14:55 mark, November 4, 2021

John Tamny on the root cause of supply chain shortages

Look back to Adam Smith.  I think it's fairly basic here: his opening pages are about a pin factory.  A man alone in a pin factory could maybe produce one pin per day, but a man working with several coworkers where everyone was specializing in that same pin factory could produce tens of thousands.  

So you think about something unsophisticated like that and then consider airplanes and computers and toys.  Imagine the global cooperation of billions of workers entering into trillions of different contractual arrangements over the decades on the way to this global supply and then a political class that thought it needed to guide us away from a virus decided to shut down the most sophisticated the world had ever known.  Is anyone surprised that we've got shortages right now?  

The shortages are a statement of the obvious, but what's offensive is when we call it supply chain shortages or inflation.  No, this was central planning.  This was the imposition of command and control where there had been freedom before.  Let's be very clear about what happened: the political class - Republicans and Democrats and everyone in between - caused this when they went for lockdowns as a virus mitigation strategy.

~ John Tamny, "Key Takeaways from the Annual Stansberry Conference," 43:40 mark, November 4, 2021

John Tamny on how the free market would have handled the coronavirus differently than government lockdowns

If there hadn't been any kind of lockdowns, I think it's a safe bet to say that Disney, a big American business, would've shut down its theme parks.  Now why could it have done that?  Because as a good business with a good track record of treating its shareholders well, it could've gone to investors and said, "we are going to step aside briefly to see where this virus is going; we don't want to risk our brand on becoming known as a super-spreader."  Ok, fine. Small businesses, let's assume they have less access to capital.  So they would've probably said, "we can't risk being shut down even for a day; our margins are so razor thin, we've got to be operating at 100% no matter what."  Well, good, you need both.  The small businesses became businesses in the first place by figuring out the needs of customers in some way.  They would've had to evolve.  They would've had to innovate to meet the needs of customers who perhaps had been changed or perhaps fearful, and in doing this they would've created crucial information for the Disneys of the world about how to evolve in a new kind of environment.  So you needed, as always, millions of different businesses trying millions of different things rather than forced one-size-fits-all for everyone simply because it robbed everyone of the information necessary about how to fight this, how to evolve. 

You have the cruise industry, this wildly prosperous industry, that's still trying to get permission to be back in operation.  Don't we want to know what they would've done if they'd been left alone?  The ships would be sailing by now and they would've figured out ways to meet the needs of a different customer base we never even learned.

[...]

Imagine companies that have billion dollar ships that are quite literally amusement parks/hotels/entertainment centers on the water.  They figured out how to grow to meet the customers' needs in staggeringly brilliant ways.  Imagine what they could've done if they'd been free to say, "hey, look, you love your customers; the last thing you want to do is create a scenario where your customers get sick or die.  Do what you have to do to stay in operation."  I wish we could've seen what they came up with, but of course we can't.  They're not allowed to operate to this day.

~ John Tamny, "The Economic Fallout of 2020," The Tom Woods Show, April 8, 2021