Russell Roberts's Blog
July 6, 2023
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 105 of Russell Shorto’s 2004 bestseller about the early history of Manhattan, The Island at the Center of the World:
The [Dutch] West India Company ran the place, and the West India Company never succeeded in making it financially viable; ergo, New Amsterdam never really took flight. But that logic overlooks a crucial turn of events. In 1640 the company gave up its monopoly on trade in the region, which had kept the place from developing in any areas except piracy and smuggling, and declared New Netherland a free trading zone. In this new free-market territory, New Amsterdam would be the “staple port,” the hub through which traders’ and merchants’ ships would pass, where they would pay duties and be cleared for travel. The effect was electric. Small-scale entrepreneurs in Amsterdam who were willing to brave the hazards of the ocean voyage now had, in Manhattan, a hub to exploit – a base around which the circle of Atlantic trade could turn….
On Manhattan, meanwhile, that small change would have far-reaching results. It gave rise, within the space of a few years, to an intensively active merchant class – people who wanted to buy, sell, grow, spend.
Who’d a-Thunk It?
Wow! An industrial-policy ‘investment’ by government fails! This Wall Street Journal says it all:
New York State Built Elon Musk a $1 Billion Factory. ‘It Was a Bad Deal.’
New Tesla facility in Buffalo was supposed to house a huge solar-panel operation, but the project hasn’t turned out as planned.
DBx: To be clear, if government were to throw enough subsidies and other special privileges at particular plants, firms, or industries, the results will often be ‘successes’ – ‘successes,’ that is, of the privileged plants, firms, or industries but not of the economy as a whole. The reason the economy-wide results cannot be classified as successful is that the reduced outputs, employment, and wages elsewhere are unseen, and hence unreckoned (except by a handful of retrograde “market fundamentalists” or “neoliberals” who haven’t gotten the memo that Hayek’s ‘knowledge problem’ isn’t really as insurmountable as Hayek’s ‘disciples’ believe it to be – but no serious person pays attention to them).
Yet while in many cases throwing enough special privileges at particular plants, firms, or industries might meet with such ‘successes,’ precisely because politicians and bureaucrats throw money around for political rather than economic reasons, the number of failures – such as the one documented in the above-linked Wall Street Journal report – of industrial-policy projects will nevertheless be substantial and relevant.
Some Links
At stake is the federal government’s use of social-media platforms to censor Americans. Officials kept most of their censorship regime secret through two election cycles. Discovery in Missouri v. Biden, however, revealed extensive evidence of government coercion and encouragement of censorship. It is the most massive assault on free speech in the nation’s history.
Holding that the plaintiffs were likely to succeed in their First Amendment claims, Judge Doughty issued a preliminary injunction against eight federal agencies—including the Justice Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Also enjoined were many officials, including the surgeon general and a host of White House staffers. The judge barred them from (among other things) “threatening, pressuring, or coercing social-media companies in any manner to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce posted content of postings containing protected free speech.”
The plaintiffs include two states, Missouri and Louisiana. Epidemiologists Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff are among the individual plaintiffs represented by the New Civil Liberties Alliance, where I am the CEO. They were co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, which criticized Covid lockdowns. Four days after it was issued, Anthony Fauci and other government officials proposed a “take down” of it.
The government-orchestrated censorship involves monitoring billions of posts and suppressing millions. It targets speech about electoral politics, medical and scientific debates, foreign policy and more.
Judge Doughty observes that “the censorship alleged in this case almost exclusively targeted conservative speech.” That reveals “viewpoint discrimination,” which is distinctively suspect in First Amendment jurisprudence.
Phil Magness and Robert Wright explain “how AIER helped to hobble Fauci’s ‘Ministry of Truth.'” A slice:
Federal courts rarely issue decisions on federal holidays, so it’s likely that Judge Doughty wanted his 155-page ruling understood as a veritable declaration of independence from over two years of Covid censorship, stoked and promoted by bureaucrats such as Fauci and the politicians who enabled him. Citing the products of AIER’s email FOIA request, the ruling meticulously documents how government officials advanced their smear campaign against the GBD, its authors, AIER, and other critics.
Judge Doughty says the case “arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.” If the facts alleged are true (and there is little doubt about that), the government has “blatantly ignored the First Amendment’s right to free speech.” Its actions raise issues that “go beyond party lines” because its suppression threatens to replace “an uninhibited marketplace of ideas in which truth will ultimately prevail” with a “monopolization of the market.”
Here are the thoughts of the Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board on Missouri v. Biden. Two slices:
Big news on big tech and free speech. A federal judge ruled Tuesday that government officials can’t coerce social-media platforms to do what the Constitution forbids the government from doing.
Missouri and Louisiana, joined by scientists and conservatives whose posts were censored, sued to protect their First Amendment rights. The issue in Missouri v. Biden isn’t whether social-media platforms are government actors, but whether government officials can be held responsible for their censorship. Judge Terry Doughty ruled they can and his 155-page opinion describes disturbing coordination between the government and tech firms to suppress unpopular views, especially on Covid-19.
White House officials and public-health agency leaders held biweekly meetings with tech companies over how to curb the spread of misinformation during the pandemic. Former White House director of digital strategy Rob Flaherty and Covid-19 adviser Andy Slavitt were in constant contact with social-media executives, as former press secretary Jen Psaki acknowledged.
…..
The private intimidation was amplified by public threats to use antitrust action and regulation if tech companies didn’t follow orders. Ms. Psaki warned on May 5, 2021, that platforms could face “legal consequences” if they didn’t do more. White House communications director Kate Bedingfield warned on July 21 that the White House was weighing whether social-media companies should be legally liable for misinformation on their platforms and whether to amend Section 230 to ensure platforms “be held accountable.”
The Biden Administration claims government officials were merely making “recommendations,” not demands. But the threats were explicit, and the companies knew they could face government investigations and punishment if they disobeyed.
The government also claims officials’ statements are protected speech. But as the judge notes, “It was not the public statements that were the problem. It was the alleged use of government agencies and employees to coerce and/or significantly encourage social-media platforms to suppress free speech on those platforms.”
Also applauding Judge Doughty’s ruling is Reason‘s Eric Boehm. A slice:
In a statement responding to Tuesday’s injunction, the White House said it had “promoted responsible actions to protect public health, safety, and security when confronted by challenges like a deadly pandemic and foreign attacks on our elections” and added that social media platforms “make independent choices about the information they present.”
But recent reporting—including by Reason‘s Robby Soave—suggests otherwise. Moderators at Facebook and Twitter routinely deferred to officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other government agencies to determine what content would be considered accurate information and what should be suppressed. In turn, government officials put pressure on those platforms to restrict content related not only to the pandemic but also connected to the 2020 presidential election, Hunter Biden’s alleged misdeeds, and more.
Doughty’s ruling is a preliminary injunction that bars federal agencies from engaging in many—though not all—of these behaviors. The outcome has alarmed mainstream outlets like The Washington Post and The New York Times, whose reports included quotations from internet security “experts” fretting about the federal government’s diminished ability to police speech online. Guests on CNN and MSNBC took an even more apocalyptic tone: CNN legal analyst Elie Hoenig assailed the “aggressive, far-reaching” ruling, while NBC News reporter Ryan Reilly described a world free of federal pressure on social media platforms as one that “we wouldn’t want to live in.” Reilly also fundamentally under-appreciated the scope of the pressure campaign, telling MSNBC viewers that “It’s not as though the FBI has been going in & saying, ‘Hey, take down this post.'”
Contrary to Reilly’s claim, the FBI has done precisely that. For instance, the FBI frequently flagged joke tweets about the 2020 election and asked moderators at Twitter to take them down. The White House itself did the very same thing. As Doughty pointed out in his ruling, White House Digital Strategy Director Rob Flaherty personally appealed to Twitter to remove an account that parodied Biden’s granddaughter. “Please remove this account immediately,” wrote Flaherty. Forty-five minutes later, Twitter complied.
If Doughty’s decision prevents the federal employees from engaging in such heavy-handed muzzling, it would be a welcome relief. Unfortunately, there is reason to doubt that the decision will meaningfully constrain the feds. That’s because Doughty drew up a list of actions that are “NOT prohibited by this preliminary injunction,” and this list could reasonably be read to permit the very sort of behavior—jawboning—that has produced the censorship.
The most patriotic fireworks yesterday are from a federal judge whose ruling halting President Biden’s online censorship program will spark debate about Democrats using the cudgel of “disinformation” to stifle free speech. The ruling, in which the judge compared Mr. Biden’s effort to Orwell’s “Ministry of Truth,” notes fears that “the government has used its power to silence the opposition.” It would have outraged the American Framers.
Juliette Sellgren writes insightfully about Frederick Douglass.
David Harsanyi reports that “Americans have never been less threatened by ‘extreme weather.'” A slice:
The Post also warns that 62 million people in the U.S. may be “exposed” to dangerous heat “today.” That’s a lot of people, even considering nearly all of them live in the southernmost spots in the country and it’s summer. The Post counts anyone exposed to heat over 90 degrees Fahrenheit as being in some level of danger. Fortunately, most Americans enjoy the luxury and health benefits of air conditioning, one of the great innovations of the past century.
Please teach Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson some basic arithmetic.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 116 of Rainer Zitelmann’s February 2023 Economic Affairs paper, “There is no capitalist conspiracy and the rich are not all-powerful” (original emphasis):
Anyone who believes that rich lobbyists, in pursuit of their own particular special interests, exert too much influence over politics must surely advocate less and not more government. After all, the more the state intervenes in the economy (through subsidies and overregulation), the greater the influence lobbyists can exert.
DBx: Why this reality is routinely ignored – today by pundits on both the political left and right – remains a deep mystery.
July 5, 2023
On Adam Smith
Last week I talked with my Mercatus Center colleague Ashley Schiller – in a Mercatus Center webinar – about Adam Smith. Here’s a recording of that webinar.
What “Social Dislocation”?
Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal:
Editor:
Daniel Akst’s splendid and positive review of Richard Langlois’s The Corporation and the Twentieth Century is marred only by Mr. Akst faulting Prof. Langlois for taking “little note of the consequent social dislocation” allegedly caused by “low-cost overseas manufacturing” and the corporate raiders of the 1980s (“‘The Corporation and the Twentieth Century’ Review: The Rise and Fall of Managers,” July 1st).
Although mentioned repeatedly in polite conversation as if its reality were indisputable, this “social dislocation” is both nebulous and, when defined with any precision, difficult to discover in carefully considered evidence.
Does “social dislocation” mean greater income inequality? If so, as Phil Gramm, Robert Ekelund, and John Early document, when proper account is taken of income after transfers and taxes, income inequality (measured by the Gini coefficient) did rise a bit in the 1980s, but ever since has trended downward. Today it’s three percent below its 1947 level and about eight percent below its post-war peak in 1987.* Or does it mean stagnant or falling real wages for ordinary workers? Still no ‘dislocation.’ Gramm, Ekelund, and Early report that
Over the last fifty years, real average hourly earnings of those with only a high school diploma rose by a healthy 50 percent….
The growth in American productivity was sufficient to produce real hourly earnings for high school dropouts in 2017 that were higher than those earned by high school graduates with some college or technical training in 1967. High school graduates in 2017 had higher real hourly earnings than college graduates in 1967, and high school graduates with some college in 2017 earned about as much as people with advanced degrees earned in 1967.**
This impressive productivity growth is due in no small measure to American producers’ increased access to the world’s lowest-cost inputs (thank you globalization!) and to refinements in finance that ever-more speedily channel resources to the most promising and productive firms, as well as discipline corporate managers to use those resources as effectively as possible (thank you corporate ‘raiders’!).
That the fruits of economic growth over the past 40 years weren’t spread evenly over all workers or households is true but trivial. Growth’s fruits have never been and never will be so spread. Also true but trivial is the fact that growth necessarily involves creative destruction. But that growth in recent decades has impressively increased the economic opportunities and living standards of almost all Americans – and done so in ways no more disruptive than was growth in most other periods of American history – cannot be denied.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030
* The Myth of American Inequality (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2022), especially page 4 and Figure 4.2, page 48.
** Gramm, Ekelund, and Early, page 72.
Oh That No One Would Ever Have Embarked Upon ‘Balance of Trade’ Accounting
Oftentimes, when pundits or politicians complain about the US trade deficit, they have in mind only trade in goods or merchandise – that is, only trade in tangible items such as soybeans, steel, tires, and textiles. Trade in services is ignored. Indeed, the US Census Bureau regularly reports on the “goods deficit” that America routinely runs each month in its trade with the rest of the world. Whenever, as is almost always the case, we Americans in some month import more goods than we export, this outcome is described as a “negative balance of trade in goods.” Negative. Sounds bad.
But it’s neither bad nor good. It’s meaningless.
Well over three-quarters of US GDP is services, everything from Jack the lawn-care guy mowing your lawn to Jill the neurosurgeon removing your neighbor’s brain tumor. For many decades now, most of us Americans have had comparative advantages at producing outputs classified as “services.” And because to have a comparative advantage is to have many comparative disadvantages, most of us Americans have long had a comparative disadvantage at producing goods. It’s thus no surprise that America is today the world’s largest exporter of services.
It should then also be no surprise that, while we Americans import more goods than we export, we export more services than we import. America regularly runs a so-called “positive balance of trade in services,” with many of these service exports paying for the goods that we import.
So what?
So this: Fretting about the “trade deficit in goods” run by Americans makes no more sense than fretting about the “trade deficit in goods” run by Taylor Swift. Ms. Swift, after all, is like most Americans: she specializes in producing and selling services, and uses some of this service-sector income to buy goods. And just as Ms. Swift would make herself immensely poorer were she to change her work habits in order for her to sell more goods than she buys, our government would make us Americans immensely poorer were it to arrange for us to export more goods than we import.
Because services have economic value no less than do goods, it’s ludicrous to isolate any one of these forms of valued outputs – namely, goods – and then to measure and report a country’s purchases and sales of that one form of output.
Such measuring and reporting is just as pointless as would be the measuring and reporting of exports and imports according to color. The US government could, for example, record the aggregate value of all the maize, pencils, lemons, and other yellow things that we export, and record also the aggregate value of all the sunflowers, honey, butter, and other yellow things that we import, then compare the value of our yellow exports to our yellow imports and issue every month a report on America’s balance of yellow-things trade. This exercise could be carried out for all of the other colors of exports and imports. America would be found to have a “negative trade balance” in some colors and a “positive trade balance” in other colors, but what would be the point of such an exercise (except, perhaps, to better arm American corn farmers to lobby for more subsidies)? Common sense correctly tells us that exports’ and imports’ colors are economically meaningless. It follows, obviously, that a report that America last month ran a “negative balance of trade in yellow things” would be no cause for concern (and no credible justification for more subsidies to corn farmers), just as a report that America last month ran a “positive balance of trade in blue things” would be no cause for celebration. Both reports would be economically meaningless.
The classification of outputs bought and sold on international markets according to whether these outputs are tangible or intangible is no more economically justified than would be the classification of these outputs according to their colors. Yet unlike the latter classification, the former classification is routinely performed and written about – and pontificated on – as if it’s laden with economic meaning. This fact alone is powerful evidence that officialdom’s understanding of international trade is seriously defective. Anyone who finds meaning in a “balance of trade in goods” is someone whose thinking about the economics of trade is so incompetent that anything he or she says about trade deserves no serious attention.
Matters improve only somewhat when what is meant by the so-called “trade deficit” is an excess of imports of goods and services over exports of goods and services. Measuring the combined values of goods and services traded internationally at least avoids the pitfall of supposing that the production and consumption of some kinds of economic outputs (for example, tangible things) is inherently better or worse than is the production and consumption of some other kinds of economic outputs (for example, intangible things). But even when the value of traded goods is combined with the value of traded services, any resulting finding of a “trade deficit” or “trade surplus” is highly misleading.
If this month we Americans import more goods and services than we export – that is, if we run a so-called “trade deficit” – one conclusion commonly drawn by people who are poorly informed about international commerce is that the difference between the value of what we export and the value of what we import must be “financed” either by foreigners extending credit to Americans or by Americans disgorging assets to foreigners. If this common conclusion were correct, then US trade deficits would indeed reduce the net worth of Americans as a group. With every month of trade deficits we Americans would either go further into debt to non-Americans or the value of the assets that we own would fall. Either way, our net worth would decline.
Fortunately, this common conclusion is spectacularly incorrect. America started in 1976 what will be at the end of 2023 an uninterrupted 48-year run of annual trade deficits. 1976 is the year that I graduated from high school, and 2023 is the year that I reach the traditional retirement age of 65. So for my entire, long adult life America has run trade deficits. If US trade deficits really do reduce Americans’ net worth, we would by now be a nation of paupers. Yet we aren’t. Not remotely.
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 351 of Liberty Fund’s 2017 expanded English-language edition, brilliantly edited by David Hart, of Frédéric Bastiat’s indispensable work Economic Sophisms and “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen”; specifically, it’s from Bastiat’s previously unpublished 1847 essay “A Little Manual for Consumers; In Other Words, for Everyone” (“Le Petit manuel du consommateur ou de tout le monde”) (original emphasis):
Consume – Consumer – Consumption; these are ugly words that represent people as so many barflies, constantly with a coffee cup or a wine glass in front of them.
But political economy is obliged to use them. (I am referring to the three words, not the wine glass.) It does not dare to invent others, as it has found these ready-made.
Let us nevertheless set out what they mean. The aim of work, both cerebral and manual, is to satisfy one of our needs or desires. There are therefore two terms in economic evolution: effort and reward. Reward is the product of effort. It takes effort to produce; enjoying the reward is to consume.
DBx: Not a week passes that I don’t encounter at least one person criticizing market-oriented economists (or libertarians, or “market fundamentalists,” or “neoliberals”) for naively supposing that human beings are motivated exclusively, or at least overwhelmingly, by base material desires. “Oh, you free-market economists stupidly suppose that real people are gluttonous consumption machines. You don’t understand that real people value, in addition to goods and services for consumption, many ‘non-economic’ things and experiences, such as family, community, and a sense of purpose.”
Ugh. This accusation is simply incorrect.
Those who oppose free markets must discredit arguments offered in support of free markets. And one convenient and cheap source of discredit is to accuse supporters of free markets of believing that the typical person is or ought to be narrowly materialistic, or even money-grubbing. Because every reasonable person understands that only sociopaths are single-mindedly greedy – that only Hollywood cartoon villains care exclusively about maximizing the quantities of consumer goods or currencies in their grasps – if proponents of free markets are portrayed as believing either that the typical person is a sociopath or should be one, this portrayal enables opponents of free markets easily to dismiss the case for free markets, being – as that case is thought to be – rooted in lunacy. No need to engage any further or more deeply the case for free markets; just behold the “market fundamentalists'” laughably unrealistic belief that real-world people care only about stuffing their houses – preferably McMansions – with as many frivolous consumption goods as possible.
So frustrating.
The word “consumption” (and its variants), as used by economists, means nothing more than “satisfaction of ends.” Every human action is aimed at using means to achieve some end or ends. And “satisfaction of ends” is what – and all that – economists mean by “consumption.” The economic way of thinking is as applicable to understanding the pursuit and provision of job security and unchanging communities as it is to the pursuit and provision of patio furniture and Tahitian vacations.
But by accusing market-oriented economists of having something to say only about the pursuit and provision of the likes of patio furniture and Tahitian vacations, opponents of free markets attempt to shield their proposed interventions from the criticisms of economists. Yet because job security and unchanging communities are indeed valued but also are, no less than are patio furniture and Tahitian vacations, scarce, economics speaks important truths about the pursuit and provision of the likes of job security and unchanging communities.
And among the truths spoken is this: If government forces Smith to pay for all or even part of Jones’s increased job security or community stability, government forces Smith to forego some ends that Smith values no less – and likely more – than Jones values his increased job security or community stability. I write “and likely more” because if Jones really valued, say, his increased job security by more than Smith values what she is forced to sacrifice to enable Jones to enjoy increased job security, Jones would himself voluntarily pay the cost of this increased job security (say, by offering to work at a lower wage). The fact that government forces Smith to give up pursuit of some of her ends in order to enable Jones to better pursue some of his ends – that is, the fact that government arranges for Jones to free-ride on Smith – at best gives us no reason to believe that the additional benefits enjoyed by Jones are as high as are the additional burdens suffered by Smith.
Market-oriented economists reasonably ask: What’s the justification for enabling Jones to achieve more of his ends at the expense of forcing Smith to achieve fewer of her ends? Why is Jones more important than Smith? The ethical obligation to answer these questions cannot legitimately be escaped by the cheap tactic of proclaiming that the economic way of thinking that generates these questions is inapplicable to Jones’s desires.
Some Links
George Will explains the reality and value of the Major Questions Doctrine. Two slices:
Biden claimed to find authority for [student-loan] forgiveness in a post-9/11 law passed to help members of the military by authorizing the executive branch to “waive or modify” terms of student financial assistance “in connection with a war or other military operation or national emergency.” As Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. noted, calling loan forgiveness for 43 million Americans “modifying” the terms of assistance is akin to saying the French Revolution “modified” the French nobility.
Roberts relied on the law’s text more than the MQD. But during February’s oral arguments about loan forgiveness, Roberts said if so much money is to be spent, affecting the obligations of so many Americans, “that’s something for Congress to act on.”
(Congress did act — by rejecting forgiveness. Between 2020 and 2022, Congress passed $5 trillion in pandemic relief bills, one of which suspended student loan payments, but none authorized forgiveness. So, Congress had spoken clearly by not delegating forgiveness authority.)
…..
The constitutional structure is, she [Justice Amy Coney Barrett] noted, “part of the legal context framing any delegation.” The document vests “all” legislative power in Congress, so “a reasonable interpreter would expect it to make the big-time policy calls itself, rather than pawning them off to another branch.”
Progressivism encourages pawning off. But because, as Barrett wrote, “the Constitution gives Congress the reins,” a reasonable textualist interpreting statutes should generally be skeptical of executive claims to extravagant statutory powers.
The MQD, as explained by Barrett, has emerged organically from judicial reasoning about executive overreaching that is encouraged by Congress underperforming its duty to be clear. MQD’s excellent result is restored constitutional equilibrium.
June 30 marked the third anniversary of Hong Kong’s notorious national-security law, but apparently the city’s government thinks that jailing publisher Jimmy Laiand other locals for years isn’t enough. On Monday Hong Kong issued arrest warrants and offered a bounty of HK$1 million ($127,636) each for eight pro-democracy advocates now living abroad.
The eight are former lawmakers, commentators and union representatives: Nathan Law Kwun-chung, Elmer Yuen Gong-yi, Dennis Kwok Wing-hang, Kevin Yam Kin-fung, Anna Kwok Fung-yee, Mung Siu-tat, Finn Lau Cho-dik, and Ted Hui Chi-fung. The Hong Kong Security Bureau notes that because “the National Security Law has extraterritorial effect, the Police have the responsibility to pursue the liability of those who have allegedly committed offences under the National Security Law outside Hong Kong.”
The eight now live in freedom in the likes of the U.S., Britain and Australia, and the government’s move confirms they were right to flee Hong Kong when they did. Hong Kong knows these countries won’t extradite the dissidents. But it’s a warning for people still in Hong Kong that they can be arrested even for communicating with people abroad.
It’s also a reminder that China recognizes no international boundaries to its police state. In April two men were charged for operating an illegal secret Chinese police station in Manhattan. The station is one of dozens around the world used to monitor and harass Chinese abroad. The eight who are targeted will have to be careful where they travel lest some government seeking to win points in Beijing snatch them and send them to the dungeons of Hong Kong.
The Federal Trade Commission is trying to make it harder for companies to merge by burying them in paperwork. The FTC’s proposed overhaul of a critical part of the U.S. merger review process would increase the average time to prepare a merger filing from 37 hours to 144. According to the agency’s calculations, that’s roughly $350 million in added costs for an estimated 7,100 filings a year, which would be a boon for lawyers but a burden for businesses.
The one-size-fits-all proposal to add dozens of hours of paperwork per deal—regardless of competitive concerns—is an overreach by the FTC and the Justice Department’s antitrust division that will disproportionately chill investments at the lower end of the reporting threshold. While some of the changes are reasonable adjustments to address evolving business and transaction structures, subjecting thousands of competitively neutral transactions to expanded reporting hurdles is hard to justify when only a slim minority of deals raise antitrust concerns.
James Harrigan understandably admires the Declaration of Independence.
David Henderson reacts to Barton Swaim’s misunderstanding of libertarianism. A slice:
Swaim also writes:
A polity, if it’s to function and endure, must offer its members a reason to remain attached, in their loyalties and affections, to the collective. That requires some engagement with ultimate questions—questions about the good life, morality, religious meaning, human purpose and so on. Modern libertarians are allergic to all such topics. Almost the only figures who mention such things in “The Individualists”—Adam Smith, William Lloyd Garrison—lived and died in the 18th or 19th century.
It’s simply false that libertarians have not contended with these issues. We are not allergic to these topics; we often discuss them. But one of the virtues of libertarianism is that we are tolerant of people who come to different views on these topics. Many libertarians are Christians, Jews, or Muslims. A minority of libertarians are atheist or agnostic. But no libertarian I know of–and I know many hundreds–advocates a state religion. That’s one of those many “important political questions” that we don’t argue about. Boaz has a nice treatment of this issue.
Wesley J. Smith criticizes Fauci. A slice:
For their temerity, [Jay] Bhattacharya and his Great Barrington colleagues were slandered in an email to Fauci by NIH head Francis Collins as “fringe” doctors — which was obviously false as Bhattacharya alone had published more than 100 peer-reviewed professional articles. Worse, Collins urged Fauci to actively discredit the declaration with a “devastating takedown” rather than debate or discuss it, which would have been the proper scientific approach.
Fauci appears to have eagerly jumped to that task. He responded to Collins with a link to a story in Wired, in which science editor Matt Reynolds called the controversy over the proper response to Covid “a manufactured scientific debate.” At about the same time, a column in the Washington Post described the three authors as “mavericks.” The New York Times reported that Fauci castigated the GBD “as unscientific, dangerous, and ‘total nonsense,’” the latter charge he repeated on ABC News. More, according to a lawsuit filed by Kulldorff, Bhattacharya, and others against the government and public-health leaders, Fauci “coordinated directly with Facebook and/or other social-media firms to suppress disfavored speakers and content of speech on social media.”
The GBD authors soon found themselves the subject of media scorn, accused of being indifferent to Covid deaths, their reputations badly tarnished in the most public ways. This despite the authors’ motives clearly being “as noble” as Kramer’s during AIDS. (To hear Bhattacharya’s first-person description of that emotionally searing experience, hit this link to our interview on my Humanize podcast.)
The @nytimes has its Missouri v. Biden story exactly backwards. The Biden administration used its censorship apparatus to protect it from outside criticism of the covid misinformation it spread. See my March 2023 congressional testimony for details.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 117 of University of Connecticut economist Richard Langlois’s monumental 2023 study, The Corporation and the Twentieth Century (footnote deleted):
The Priority Division [of the U.S. government’s War Industries Board during WWI] immediately slammed into the hard reality that allocating resources through a priority system is impossible, even in wartime when everything can be measured in principle against a single unified objective. The division could never possess the kind of detailed knowledge necessary to understand the first-order implications let alone the higher-order ramifications of its decisions.
DBx: No economy of more than a few dozen persons can hope to perform adequately if individuals on the spot, each with his or her own unique vantage point about resource availabilities and opportunities (and also, of course, his or her own preferences and goals), is not allowed wide scope to act in whatever peaceful ways he or she sees fit in response to his or her unique knowledge. The dispersed bits of knowledge that are acted upon, as Hayek emphasized, are not given and cannot be given to any single mind or computer – so all talk of A.I. being able to replace markets and market prices is deeply mistaken.
Full-on socialists, democratic socialists, and advocates of industrial policy refuse to accept this reality. All such opponents of the market order think of resource allocation as a relatively simple process. None of these people begin to appreciate just how unfathomably complex is the array of economic arrangements and processes that they propose to re-engineer to better suit their personal preferences, or – with no small measure of presumptuousness – to better suit what they assume are the personal preferences of millions of strangers.
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