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The escalation of consumer prices stemming from President Trump’s tariffs brings to mind a saying from the French Revolution attributed to Queen Marie Antoinette, who reportedly said, when informed that the common people of France were near starving with no bread to eat, “Let them eat cake.”

Coming at a time when the court of King Louis XVI and his loyalists were living in extravagance as common people suffered – reflecting the social inequality that spurred the revolution — that saying has come to symbolize the arrogance and indifference of the privileged class to the suffering of common people.

In the

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