Russell Roberts's Blog, page 108

Price Controls Do Not Work

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a letter to “Karl Marx” who says that he’s a student at Binghamton University:

Mr. “Marx”:

Thanks for sending to me the Washington Post op-ed (August 9th) by Princeton historian Meg Jacobs and Isabella Weber – an op-ed in which Jacobs and Weber argue that price controls are a useful tool for controlling inflation. I’m afraid that I don’t share your assessment of their argument as “compelling.”

Economist Ryan Bourne recently – and truly compellingly – revealed that Jacobs’s and Weber’s argument is infected with flaws, some that should be (but apparently aren’t) embarrassing to commit. At the top of this list is Jacobs’s and Weber’s use as a key piece of evidence that price controls were “a total success” at reducing inflation during WWII the fact that officially reported nominal prices were kept low when price controls were in place and then rose when these controls were lifted.

This fact, however, is no more evidence that price controls successfully control inflation than would a reading of 120lbs on a bathroom scale rigged to record no weight greater than 120lbs – and then reading 155lbs when the scale is de-rigged – be evidence that rigging a bathroom scale successfully controls body weight. As Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz wrote about the experience with price controls during WWII,

The jump in the price index on the elimination of price control in 1946 did not involve any corresponding jump in “prices”; rather, it reflected largely the unveiling of price increases that had occurred earlier. Allowance for the defects in the price index as a measure of price change would undoubtedly yield a decidedly higher rate of price rise during the war and a decidedly lower rate after the war.*

Jacobs and Weber also err in asserting that during the war, with price controls in place, “the economy boomed.” The great economic historian Robert Higgs has painstakingly demonstrated that, while American industry did indeed – because of command-and-control – churn out lots of war materiel during WWII, the evidence shows that there was then no genuine economic boom. Higgs estimates that real U.S. GNP fell in 1942 and again in 1943. And although real GNP rose a bit in 1944 (the last full year of the war), it was in that year still 12 percent lower than it was in 1941. Real GNP rose a bit more in 1945, although still not to its level of 1941. But in 1946 real GNP skyrocketed. In that year in which price controls were eased real GNP finally for the first time surpassed its level in 1941.**

A final point bears emphasis. As Ryan Bourne notes in the article linked above – and as many other economists, including Friedman and Schwartz, and Robert Higgs, have observed – price controls cause the quality of goods and services to fall. One result of these declines in quality is rises in real prices, but rises that don’t show up in official statistics.

Jacobs’s and Weber’s apparent ignorance of this reality renders silly their attempt to use as evidence that price controls ‘work’ lower-income Americans’ increased consumption of meat near war’s end. As Bourne writes, “a recent NPR report documents how ‘meatpackers began filling sausages and hot dogs with soybeans, potatoes, or cracker meal,’ sold steaks with extra bone weight, or misrepresented the quality of cuts to circumvent price ceilings.”

I recommend , Mr. Marx, that you put aside works from the likes of Jacobs and Weber and instead study some sound economics. Here are some excellent resources.

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

* Milton Friedman and Anna J. Schwartz, A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), page 558.

** Robert Higgs, Depression, War, and Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), page 69.

Samuel Gregg on America’s Commercial Republic

(Don Boudreaux)

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AIER‘s Samuel Gregg delivered, on July 5th, 2022, this excellent talk at an event, held at George Mason University, sponsored by The Fund for American Studies.

Some Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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North Carolina State University economist Tom Grennes penned this excellent letter to the Wall Street Journal:

In his letter “Making Medicine an ‘Anti-Racist’ Profession” (Aug. 16), Jack Resneck Jr., president of the American Medical Association, claims that “disparities in life expectancy” are evidence of racism. I hope he uses better logic in treating patients. Are all differences in life expectancy attributable to discrimination? In 2020, average life expectancy for U.S. women was more than 5 years greater than the life expectancy for men. Would he interpret this difference as antimale discrimination? Are there no other relevant factors?

Prof. Thomas Grennes
North Carolina State University
Raleigh, N.C.

George Leef reports the truth that affirmative action harms many of those students who this illiberal policy is meant to help.

My GMU Econ colleague Bryan Caplan reports on survey data that show more and more Republican voters actually coming to oppose minimum-wage legislation legislation that artificially obstructs low-skilled workers’ abilities to compete for employment.

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy continues to criticize Republican politicians for their increasingly warm embrace of dirigiste interventions.

The great economist Richard Vedder, writing in the Wall Street Journal, asks: “Can the U.S. Become Exceptional Again?” Two slices:

• A declining sense of fiscal responsibility. In the nation’s first 140 years, the federal government ran 101 annual budget surpluses and only 39 deficits. That changed with the Keynesian revolution of the 1930s, which has only intensified this century. The gross national debt now exceeds yearly gross domestic product—something previously seen only on rare occasions, such as the period immediately following World War II. The last time the U.S. balanced its budget was 21 years ago, in fiscal 2001. Deficits have since risen under Republican and Democratic presidents. Even more ominous are the underfunded liabilities for Social Security and Medicare, which will impose severe burdens on the next generation of Americans. Rather than address this, the Biden administration has added to the fiscal mayhem by pausing or canceling student-loan obligations.

…..

• A decline in respect for free markets and a rising collectivism that erodes investment and entrepreneurship. It’s no accident that the Industrial Revolution and its aftermath occurred because of the ascendance of thinkers such as Adam Smith and John Locke and inventor-entrepreneurs such as James Watt, Thomas Edison and Steve Jobs. Limits imposed by kings and bishops were displaced by market-provided incentives for entrepreneurs. What Deirdre McCloskey aptly termed the “Great Enrichment”—the onset of extraordinary growth in income beginning in the early 1800s—reached its greatest expression in America. Yet today collectivist governmental power and regulation undermine such entrepreneurial initiatives, from fracking to healthcare.

Here’s another post from Pat Lynch on Niall Ferguson’s Doom. A slice:

Now contrast that rather dated chapter with one that has aged better: Chapter 10. In it, Ferguson reviews the economic consequences of the pandemic and lockdowns. He notes that the now widely dismissed and flawed model from the Imperial College London on the possible death rates of the COVID virus also ignored the social, economic, and political realities of human life. He notes that the excess death rates of the US and Sweden looked remarkably similar at the time, a fact that became clearer and clearer as time passed. Lockdowns didn’t seem to be helping control deaths, and they certainly made the collateral social and economic damage of the pandemic far worse. His review of the social unrest during the summer of 2020 is more uneven and now looks ready for a rehash, but his point about the partisan nature of the pandemic and response is dead-on, even if his social overview seems dated.

Telegraph columnist Camilla Tominey rightly argues that “lockdown fanatics can’t escape blame” for the surge in non-covid deaths in Britain. Three slices:

Some time ago, I received a heartbreaking email from a lady called Lisa King, detailing how Peter, her beloved husband of 21 years, had become a tragic casualty of Covid.

The father of two, 62, did not catch coronavirus. He died on October 9, 2020 because he was repeatedly denied a face-to-face GP appointment during the pandemic – only to be told that an urgent operation to remove his gallbladder had been delayed because of spiralling NHS waiting lists.

His sudden death, in agonising pain, was completely avoidable.

As Mrs King told me at the time: “To the decision makers, he is nothing more than ‘collateral damage’, but to me, he is the love of my life.”

When journalists like me heard these stories and warned that the lockdown cure might be worse than the disease, we were accused of being mercenary murderers intent on prioritising the economy ahead of saving lives.

Scientists who dared to question the severity of the restrictions were, as Lord Sumption put it at the time, “persecuted like Galileo”. Falsely branded “Covid deniers” simply for questioning some of the “science” that was slavishly followed, they were subjected to appalling online abuse by a bunch of armchair experts who claimed to know better.

Professor Robert Dingwall faced career “cancellation” for refusing to drink the zero-Covid Kool-Aid, as did the likes of Professor Carl Heneghan, Professor Sunetra Gupta and leading oncologist Professor Karol Sikora.

Yet now we learn that they were right to raise their concerns in the face of pseudo-socialist Sage groupthink.

Official data now suggests that the effects of lockdown may be killing more people than are currently dying of Covid.

…..

The nettle that needs to be grasped is that these figures suggest that the country is facing a growing health crisis that has been caused by our overzealous response to the pandemic – scaremongering policies that kept people indoors, scared them away from hospitals and deprived them of treatment.

These excess deaths may well turn out to be a direct consequence of the decision to lock down the country in order to control a virus that was only ever a serious threat to the old and the vulnerable.

Had a more proportionate approach been taken, akin to Sweden’s, then would we be in this mess right now? Perhaps only a government inquiry will be able definitively to answer that question, but what’s certain now is the debate over the severity of lockdown was never about the economy versus lives – as pro-shutdown fanatics would have it – but over lives versus lives.

…..

The World Health Organisation said at the time that the Great Barrington Declaration “lacked scientific basis”, but nearly three years on from the start of the pandemic there has been precious little analysis of whether the raft of Covid restrictions either served the collective good – or actually saved lives in the round – compared with the lives that are now being lost as a result.

These numbers aren’t just statistics – they are people’s husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, daughters and sons. The appalling truth is that a lot of these people would probably still be here today were it not for the lockdowns; lockdowns which seemingly did little to stop tens of thousands of people dying of Covid in the UK.

Writing at UnHerd, Finn McRedmond explains that Sweden now “reaps the benefits of its no lockdown policy.”

“There was no pandemic mastermind” – so writes the wise Steve Templeton. Two slices:

The problem wasn’t just the messaging on protective immunity. From pushing damaging and unsustainable lockdowns to contriving a false consensus on masks to massively inflating risks of COVID-19 in children and schools, the CDC’s record has been utterly dismal.

After the reality-mugging of the last two and a half years, I’m sure many people in the CDC and other government agencies would like to quietly move on, much as the rest of the world already has.

But that can’t happen just yet. Some very tough and pointed questions need to be asked about the decisions that led to shutdowns and mandates and who made, influenced, and benefited from those decisions. The pandemic exposed a dysfunctional, politicized and risk-averse health bureaucracy with little incentive to act beyond its own naked self-interests. A bright and continuous spotlight on the systemic failures of government agencies is only the first step to meaningful reform. But it has to happen.

…..

The pandemic has shown that government agencies cannot, in fact, do those things very well at all. Even if they could protect people and provide them with absolute certainty, they wouldn’t be incentivized to do so. Instead, in a crisis government agencies will follow the path of least resistance, in this case providing an illusion of safety, security, and control for politicians and the public. All one had to do was believe the illusion. Because of the absolute terror of the unknown and complete ignorance of the risks of severe disease and death, most people were more than willing to take comfort in CDC recommendations and subsequent government mandates without the slightest hint of skepticism or protest. A pervasive safety-at-all costs culture enabled all of it.

By all means, we need to take a very long and hard look at the leaders and bureaucrats that took the easiest, yet most damaging path of lockdowns and mandates. We need to expose all of their corruption, incompetence, and hypocrisy. It’s going to be a huge task that will take a considerable amount of time, and it has to happen.

Yet ultimately, when looking for someone to blame for the disastrous pandemic response, the most important place we need to look is in the mirror.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 136 of my colleague Peter Boettke’s 2019 speech, delivered at a regional meeting in Fort Worth of the Mont Pelerin Society, “The Role of the Economist in a Free Society,” as the text of this speech appears in Pete’s 2021 collection, The Struggle for a Better World (original emphasis):

Simple economics is not simpleminded, and clarity of exposition of the principles of economics is to be valued over quickness of mind and cleverness in presentation.

DBx: Pictured here is Frédéric Bastiat, whose talent at conveying important economic truths to the general public is still unmatched 172 years after his death. Thanks in large part to David Hart, Bastiat’s collected works are in the works.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is this Facebook post from earlier today by Georgetown University philosopher Jason Brennan:

Most principles of justice have narrow exceptions or complications. Most people are unprincipled, and they spend their days rationalizing [and] interpreting those exceptions as broad.

Collective Decisions Differ Fundamentally From Private Decisions

(Don Boudreaux)

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In my latest column for AIER, I write about a fundamental – though too-often ignored – difference between collectively made choices and privately made choices. A slice:

When an individual chooses, he always does so under the constraints and amidst the enormous opportunities created by the choices of countless other people. For example, if I choose to dine out this evening, my choice depends on the myriad choices of other people – their choices to operate and work in restaurants, to grow and deliver food, to ensure that electricity and gas and insurance services are supplied to restaurants; the list of such choices that other people must make in order for me to dine out is practically endless. I get to satisfy my particular preference to dine out this evening only because, and only insofar as, many other people are choosing in ways that make it possible for me to satisfy this particular preference and to do so in a way that’s easy for me to predict.

As an individual, each of my choices is made within the setting of an astonishingly large number of choices made by other people. I simply take these other choices as given. In making choices for me and my family I don’t aim at any large-scale change of society. The healthy liberal tolerance of individual choices is a tolerance of individual, relatively small choices made in such a setting.

It’s therefore a grave error to leap from the proper respect and deference that we have for such individual choices to the conclusion that “the people” as voters – analogized to an individual – should be free to choose in whatever ways they, as a group, wish. Unlike my choosing to dine out this evening at a local restaurant, if a majority of the citizens of a country vote, say, to have the government supply health care, this ‘choice’ doesn’t have the advantage of being made in the context of lots of other people choosing in ways that make fulfillment of this desire very likely and in ways that I can easily envision when I make my choice.

Even the most sincere and intense desire of a majority of, or even all, voters for government-supplied health care is not sufficient to create the institutional details necessary to make such health-care provision a reality. Thus, the collective decision to create government-supplied health care requires a great many other collective decisions regarding the uncountable details of just how government will achieve this goal. Yet there’s no reason to suppose that a majority’s desire for some collective good, such as government-supplied health care, is also a desire for all the many changes that must be made in society in order to make this collective good a reality.

And so while we can and should respect the peaceful choices that individuals make for themselves (because every such choice is made with the confidence that countless other people are choosing in ways that make fulfillment of that choice very likely), it’s a mistake to suppose that we should accord similar respect to the collective choices made by voters. The institutional implications of individuals choosing within markets and other private spheres differ categorically from the institutional implications of individuals voting to make major changes to the economy or society.

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(Don Boudreaux)

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Writing in the Wall Street Journal, John Tierney warns of Anthony Fauci, Rochelle Walensky, mandarins at the WHO, and other so-called ‘public-health officials’ doubling down on using lockdowns and mandates to deal with future pandemics. Three slices:

Lockdowns and mask mandates were the most radical experiment in the history of public health, but Dr. [Rochelle] Walensky isn’t alone in thinking they failed because they didn’t go far enough. Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to the president, recently said there should have been “much, much more stringent restrictions” early in the pandemic. The World Health Organization is revising its official guidance to call for stricter lockdown measures in the next pandemic, and it is even seeking a new treaty that would compel nations to adopt them. The World Economic Forum hails the Covid lockdowns as the model for a “Great Reset” empowering technocrats to dictate policies world-wide.

Yet these oppressive measures were taken against the longstanding advice of public-health experts, who warned that they would lead to catastrophe and were proved right. For all the talk from officials like Dr. Fauci about following “the science,” these leaders ignored decades of research—as well as fresh data from the pandemic—when they set strict Covid regulations. The burden of proof was on them to justify their dangerous experiment, yet they failed to conduct rigorous analyses, preferring to tout badly flawed studies while refusing to confront obvious evidence of the policies’ failure.

U.S. states with more-restrictive policies fared no better, on average, than states with less-restrictive policies.

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No one knows exactly how many of those deaths were caused by lockdowns, but the social disruptions, isolation, inactivity and economic havoc clearly exacted a toll. Medical treatments and screenings were delayed, and there were sharp increases in the rates of depression, anxiety, obesity, diabetes, fatal strokes and heart disease, and fatal abuse of alcohol and drugs.

These were the sorts of calamities foreseen long before 2020 by eminent epidemiologists such as Donald Henderson, who directed the successful international effort to eradicate smallpox. In 2006 he and colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh considered an array of proposed measures to deal with a virus as deadly as the 1918 Spanish flu.

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But those plans were abruptly discarded in March 2020, when computer modelers in England announced that a lockdown like China’s was the only way to avert doomsday. As Henderson had warned, the computer model’s projections—such as 30 Covid patients for every available bed in intensive-care units—proved to be absurdly wrong. Just as the British planners had predicted, it was impossible to halt the virus. A few isolated places managed to keep out the virus with border closures and draconian lockdowns, but the virus spread quickly once they opened up. China’s hopeless fantasy of “Zero Covid” became a humanitarian nightmare.

It was bad enough that Dr. Fauci, the CDC and the WHO ignored the best scientific advice at the start of this pandemic. It’s sociopathic for them to promote a worse catastrophe for future outbreaks. If a drug company behaved this way, ignoring evidence while marketing an ineffective treatment with fatal side effects, its executives would be facing lawsuits, bankruptcy and probably criminal charges. Dr. Fauci and his fellow public officials can’t easily be sued, but they need to be put out of business long before the next pandemic.

Also unimpressed with the CDC’s newly announced plan to ‘reorganize’ is my intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy, here writing at National Review. A slice:

The criticism that the CDC is overly cautious is levelled against it by many people. Overcaution is a real problem, and it would be hard to address in part because the agency was created to focus on disease prevention, thus causing it to discount, or even to ignore altogether, other consequences that likely arise from its single-minded efforts to mitigate disease.

The second problem with the CDC, yet to be mentioned by Walensky, is, in my opinion, even worse. The agency has proven itself to be incurably political, no matter who is in the White House. As all Americans now know, it’s heavily influenced by union representatives. At the extreme, the CDC is even corruptible. It has also been shown to misuse or misrepresent data, and it has turned to junk-science studies to bolster its case for an eviction moratorium, for mask mandates, and for fear in general.

The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board describes Rochelle Walensky’s plan to reorganize the CDC as a “a mea minima culpa for its manifest Covid failures.” A slice:

Politics drives many CDC decisions, including one last spring not to collect information on breakthrough Covid cases lest this show declining vaccine efficacy. Its school reopening guidance was written in part by American Federation of Teachers chief Randi Weingarten.

Most egregious was its eviction moratorium. The eviction ban was first imposed under Donald Trump, but the Biden Administration repeatedly extended it based on dubious science that purported to show it reduced the virus spread. The Supreme Court eventually ruled it illegal. The CDC’s usurpation of Congress and states continued with its illegal mask mandate on public transportation, also based on thin science.

The agency’s public guidance is often confusing. But the larger problem is that its recommendations are seemingly arbitrary and don’t acknowledge scientific uncertainty. The agency has also been slow to adjust its guidance. Last spring it was still advising the unvaccinated to wear masks outdoors.

“Lockdown effects feared to be killing more people than Covid” – so reports the Telegraph‘s science editor Sarah Knapton. A slice:

Over the past two months, the number of excess deaths not from Covid dwarfs the number linked to the virus. It comes amid renewed calls for Covid measures such as compulsory face masks in the winter.

But the figures suggest the country is facing a new silent health crisis linked to the pandemic response rather than to the virus itself.

Telegraph columnist Fraser Nelson explains that “Covid wasn’t a catastrophe for young people’s education. Lockdown was.” Two slices:

I’ve just come back from three weeks in Sweden where there was a pandemic, but no grade inflation. Nor any university mayhem. That’s because there wasn’t a lockdown and not a single day of enforced school closures below sixth form. The phrase “Covid generation” is being applied to the British young as if a virus had infected their life chances, but the contagion here was political. Panic closed the schools, and we’re still coming to terms with the results.

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The “Covid generation” of young people can be found world over. But damage to their life chances depended not on the virus, but on how highly their welfare was prioritised by politicians during the crisis.

This is why it’s so important to get the language right. The pandemic didn’t close schools or cancel exams: lockdown did. This is not a matter of history, or a quest to name the guilty men. Everyone was guessing and huge decisions had to be made quickly on hardly any evidence.

But now, the world is awash with evidence. It has been surveyed in a recent study by the Monash Bioethics Review, which concludes that closing schools was a “moral catastrophe” and that “failing to recognise it as such invites further catastrophe down the road”.

That is the point – and the next crisis may arrive sooner than we think. A nasty flu virus may emerge, a new Covid variant or an entirely new pathogen. There will be calls to lock down again, and teaching unions will likely demand that schools are closed. Such decisions will be taken at a time of panic.

Caleb Hull tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

Never forget: they filled skateparks with sand in the name of “science”

Gary Galles always writes wisely. A slice:

Grace Hopper, a pioneering computer scientist and Navy rear admiral once said, “One accurate measurement is worth a thousand expert opinions,” which extended W. Edward Deming’s “Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion.” But rather than relying on accurate measurements, as Thomas Sowell put it in Discrimination and Disparities, public policy is often hamstrung by “overlooking simple but fundamental questions as to whether the numbers on which…analyses are based are in fact measuring what they seem to be measuring, or claim to be measuring,” requiring “much closer scrutiny at a fundamental level.”

That failure is far from minor. In fact, it is at the root of some truly major policy issues.

“The Inflation Reduction Act Barely Puts a Dent in the Deficit” – so explains Eric Boehm.

Brittney Griner is unjustifiably in hell. But so too is Tameka Drummer. Randy Holcombe explains. A slice:

[L]ook at the case of Tameka Drummer, whose name I found through a quick Google search. She was “sentenced to life in prison without parole as a habitual offender for possessing less than 2 ounces of marijuana.”

If President Biden is concerned about Americans receiving unacceptably long prison sentences for drug convictions, perhaps he should turn his attention to Ms. Drummer and many more Americans imprisoned in the United States because their drugs of choice are illegal rather than focusing on people who are imprisoned in foreign countries.

President Biden could be using his power gain freedom for Ms. Drummer and many others serving long sentences in American prisons on drug charges. Still, instead, his attention is focused on Brittney Griner, whose freedom would require compromises by the US government. Is Ms. Griner’s case more deserving of the president’s sympathy than Ms. Drummer’s?

One big difference is that President Biden could do something now, using his presidential influence, to help people like Ms. Drummer. He has to compromise with a hostile foreign nation to free Ms. Griner.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 136 of Scott Atlas’s important 2021 book, A Plague Upon Our House: My Fight at the Trump White House to Stop COVID From Destroying America:

The first item on the [Trump White House] Task Force agenda was nearly always an update by [Deborah] Birx on the data and on her travels. There was no question that she worked very hard; indeed, every morning by 6:00, Dr. Birx was already sending out her emails of compiled numbers. While she regularly related a few experiences from her visits, she proudly reminded everyone that she “was all about the data.” What was not outwardly acknowledged was that her data was mainly a compilation of automatically generated tabulations of cases, hospitalization, and deaths, as well as some percentages and trend plots. The set of data she distributed always included arbitrary categorizations of the cases, test positivity, or other factors in specified ranges that were assigned certain colors. Convenient to look at, those categories were not of sound scientific basis; nothing formed the limits of the ranges other than arbitrary cutoffs. Yet these categories automatically garnered significance and drove meaningful policy decisions at the state and local levels.

DBx: Covid ‘analysis’ and policy-making have exposed the incompetence of many ‘scientists’ occupying government offices. Unfortunately, ordinary people had to pay the price for the ineptitude of the likes of Deborah Birx and for the megalomania of Anthony Fauci.

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(Don Boudreaux)

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My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy is unimpressed with economics Nobel laureate Michael Spence’s uncritical swallowing of the assertions of some industrial-policy proponents. A slice:

Another week, another reminder that heavy-handed government industrial policy is in fashion. Nobel Prize-winning economist Michael Spence recently endorsed it as embodied in the newly passed “CHIPS+” legislation, an attempt to bolster America’s semiconductor industry. The endorsement, like so many, rests not on evidence or economics, but on blind faith in Congress and the administration.

Spence writes that “the infrastructure bill, the CHIPS Act, and the (Inflation Reduction Act) amount to a stunning increase in long-term investment in America’s growth potential, and in balancing out the various dimensions of its growth pattern, prominently for carbon dioxide emissions reduction and sustainability.”

In other words, these new expenditures — amounting to more than $1 trillion — spent by the same government that can’t deliver the mail efficiently or run trains for a profit are supposed to generate the advertised abundance of goodies. We’re to trust that these monies, disbursed by the same administration that botched the withdrawal from Afghanistan, will achieve only successful results.

Color me unconvinced.

Natalie Dowzicky and Danielle Thompson produced this video explaining the goodness of globalization.

The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board decries “the never-ending opioid lawsuits.” A slice:

Politicians and trial lawyers are sticking up companies across the pharmaceutical supply chain like Bonnie and Clyde. Riding shotgun is federal Judge Dan Aaron Polster, who on Wednesday ordered CVS, Walgreens and Walmart to pay $650 million to two Ohio counties to remedy opioid abuse. Now on to the next raid.

Phil Magness on Facebook:

The most generous thing that can be said about CRT is that it makes naïve and banal misdiagnoses of social problems, some of which are still very real.

Scott Lincicome, Norbert Michel, and Alex Nowrasteh remind us that “once upon a time, all conservatives believed in the free market.” (DBx: Well, many did.) A slice:

This development—a new conservatism rooted in free market skepticism—carries serious risks for American workers. And one need look no further than the American Economic Forum to see those risks.

Take keynote speaker and former U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, who lauded President Trump’s trade policy of “tariffs, threat, negotiations, and industrial policy” and denounced free traders as “materialistic” fools obsessed with consumption. Pushing a “balanced trade” alternative that favored production, he added that “the best way to fix consumerism is to raise prices.”

Leaving aside the spectacle of a multimillionaire lawyer telling inflation‐​wrecked Americans to embrace even higher prices, Lighthizer reveals a deep and dangerous misunderstanding of basic economics. Workers don’t labor for national greatness; they labor to consume goods and services.

A price‐​hiking attack on “consumerism” is, therefore, an attack on all workers.

“Anticonsumer” trade policy also harms workers in other ways, as Lighthizer’s tenure demonstrated. Tariffs on metals and Chinese imports, for example, harmed import‐​consuming manufacturers, subjected exporters to foreign retaliation, deterred investment, and fueled a lobbying boom as thousands of companies begged for exemptions or for their own tariff protection. (Maybe those K Street jobs are what former lobbyist Lighthizer meant by “pro‐​worker” trade policy?)

David Henderson points to a good reason for believing that statistics on the number of covid deaths in the U.S. might be exaggerated.

Alex Gutentag tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

In 2021 Walensky said that vaccinated people “do not carry the virus” and Fauci said they would become “dead ends” for the virus. Don’t let officials pretend they never made these claims. Many people got the vaccine precisely because they believed it would stop the spread.

“Long lockdowns a ‘failure of policy’, says WHO envoy on COVID.”

Yale School of Public Health professor Harvey Risch describes the CDC’s newly announced makeover as “ludicrous.”

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 119 of F.A. Hayek’s 1950 paper “The Meaning of Government Interference,” which appears for the first time in print, as Chapter 8, in the hot-off-the-press Essays on Liberalism and the Economy (2022), which is volume 18 (expertly edited by Paul Lewis), of The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek (footnote deleted):

It is significant that during the last fifty or sixty years this ‘merely formal’ equality before the law has been the subject of constant attack from all people who regarded themselves as ‘progressives’. I believe it was Anatole France who invented the cliché about “the law which, with majestic impartiality, prohibits rich and poor alike to sleep under haystacks or on park benches”. The constant ridicule which has since been poured on this fundamental and indispensable maxim of a free society has done much to undermine belief in the possibility of any impartial law. Yet there can be little doubt that it is precisely this majestic impartiality of the law which applies the same principles irrespective of the different circumstances of different people which constitutes the only barrier against arbitrariness of government action.