Note: Parts of this post are new and parts are taken from past EconLog posts that I wrote on April 1 in various years.

I was wrong to think that Donald Trump hated war. I now see that he likes war as long as it goes well and he can claim some kind of short-term victory.

I was also wrong to think that he thinks low prices charged by foreign exporters are bad for us. And that’s why he’s doing what he can to make sure that foreign oil producers charge very high prices. This would seem to contradict his goal of affordability, but my tiny mind was just too limited to understand that Donald Trump is playing four-dimensional chess.

I was also wrong to be skeptical about attempts in California to impose a special tax on the wealth of billionaires. The threat of the tax seems to have driven many billionaires out of California. Given what a burden they are on the rest of us, we will be better off without them. Who needed those huge taxes they paid on their California incomes? Be gone.

What a fraud that Adam Smith was. What the heck did he know, sitting in Scotland and pontificating about the world? Sure, he predicted that the continental congress, sitting in the 13 colonies, would bring forth a new nation that would become the most powerful in the world. And sure, even then, he knew what a fraud much of higher “education” is. But those were just lucky calls. Moreover, Smith was just trying to rationalize people’s desire to look out for themselves. Too bad he never wrote a book about morality. Then he would have figured out the limits of self-interest.

I was fairly harsh in my treatment of Tyler Cowen in 2020 (here, here, here, and here) for what seemed to be his lack of concern for people who suffered from extensive lockdowns. He was very critical of Jay Bhattacharya and of the Great Barrington Declaration that Jay helped write. It came out later that one of the reasons Tyler was critical was that the American Institute of Economic Research (AIER), the place where the GBD was written, employed Jeffrey Tucker at the time. While it’s true that Tucker was neither author nor editor of the GBD, his presence at AIER when the GBD was written makes the GBD suspect. I’ve really come around to the view that guilt by association and, especially, guilt by distant association, is more appropriate than I once believed it to be.

What’s all this nonsense that Bryan Caplan writes about “open borders?” He doesn’t favor opening his house to anyone who comes by. So what’s he doing advocating that people be allowed to come here and buy or rent houses that other people are willing to sell or lease? Doesn’t Bryan know a logical, airtight argument when he sees one?

I was wrong to conclude, back in 2021, that Joe Biden had dementia. I should have gone with the insights of Joe Scarborough on MSNBC, who thought that even in March 2024, Joe was “better than he’s ever been, intellectually, analytically.”

Wow! Glad that I got that off my chest. Time to lie down. But if you want to see more about what’s behind this thinking, go here.