Tom DiLorenzo on Donald Trump's "populism"

President Trump’s election is said to be a “populist” victory against the deep state establishment, but there is nothing more anti-populist than protectionist tariff taxes.  Protectionist tariff taxes are nothing more than a price-fixing conspiracy orchestrated by the state that enriches a relatively small group of politically connected corporations (and their unions) by plundering their consumers with higher prices.  After all, if it is possible to use tariffs to force foreigners to pay a county’s taxes, every government on earth would be doing it.  Yet President Trump apparently believes that he has discovered some kind of holy grail of economics that proves you can get something for nothing after all. 

~ Thomas J. DiLorenzo, William McKinley: Prostitute of Protectionism, Mises Wire, January 29, 2025

Glenn Greenwald on the GameStop wealth transfer: "it's like a very effective populist uprising"

Clearly there are a lot of rich investors, a lot of probably big Wall Street people, even institutional investors, who profited along the way and what the ratio is between small Redditers and these bigger actors is unclear, but nonetheless, there is no question that it germinated in Reddit in the subthread, that at least some of these people have become wealthy whereas two weeks ago they were probably struggling or poor. And it really is, if you think about it in those terms, a massive transfer of wealth from hedge fund managers - just billions of dollars - transferred to Reddit users, and that's why it has caused so much fascination because it's like a very effective populist uprising against these hedge funds. And it's also causing an extreme amount of concern and worry for the same reason on the part of Wall Street, their media allies - people saying "this needs to stopped right away, we can't have this." Essentially, as several leftist commentators and right wing commentators have said, the reaction seems to be, "oh, wait, the wrong people are manipulating Wall Street for their own interests."

~ Glenn Greenwald, " 14:00 mark