Russell Roberts's Blog, page 126

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 545 of the 1988 collection of Lord Acton’s writings and notes to himself (edited by the late J. Rufus Fears), Essays in Religion, Politics, and Morality; specifically, it’s a note drawn from Acton’s extensive papers at Cambridge University:

Declaration of Independence and Wealth of Nations appeared in the same year. Both were theories of liberty, emancipating from history.

DBx: What Acton here means – as is evident from the spirit of his work – is that both documents sought to liberate humanity, not from history, but from the arbitrary power that cursed humanity for most of history.

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Hotter and Longer Perhaps; More Dangerous, Not So Much

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a letter to the Washington Post:

Editor:

A reader encountering your headline “Summer in America is becoming hotter, longer and more dangerous” (July 3) can be forgiven for supposing that more and more Americans are dying from summer heat. This same reader, however, is surprised to find in the report no evidence of any such trend. (Quoting a professor’s claim that “[w]e can start saying people are dying because of climate change” isn’t evidence, especially because this quotation is accompanied neither by a link nor by a reference to data.)

I suspect that the reason your writers offer no evidence that summer heat is increasingly deadly in America is that the evidence shows the opposite. As Reason’s science correspondent Ron Bailey recently reported, “a January 2021 study in Weather, Climate, and Society (WCS), which looked at national heat mortality trends based on data from the 107 largest cities in the U.S., reported that the relative risk of dying from heat exposure has been falling in most regions since 1975.”

Summers might well be getting hotter and longer. But at the same time we humans are growing wealthier. Health care and weather forecasting are improving; building materials provide better insulation; travel to cooler climes is increasingly affordable; and most significantly, air conditioning is more widespread in homes, schools, workplaces, and transportation vehicles. It’s about time for climate reporters to stop assuming that the only possible means of mitigating harm from climate change is to slow or to prevent such change. Evidence shows that we are quite innovative at finding ways to live with climate change – ways that arguably are not only less costly than are grand and often fanciful schemes to reduce carbon emissions, but also quite likely to be more successful than are these schemes at actually saving lives.

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

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(Don Boudreaux)

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Jennifer Mascott and Eli Nachmany – both of whom are at the GMU Antonin Scalia School of Law’s C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State – applaud, in the Washington Post, the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency. A slice:

The broader takeaway is this: If an agency tries to take significant action with national economic and political impact, the agency must identify clear statutory authority for that action to be lawful.

Congress must legislate policy requirements and grant authority through statutes empowering federal agencies to act. For decades, congressional gridlock has hindered significant legislation of this kind in response to modern problems. Instead, our nation’s lawmakers have favored headline-grabbing or less-permanent action through oversight, commissions, investigations or patchwork solutions in appropriations and emergency legislation.

The burdens of the legislative process are ones of design. The Constitution deliberately imposes high hurdles for the passage of legislation. Yet, administrative agencies have tried to sidestep this process by shoehorning preferred policies into attenuated authorities granted under old laws, justifying them with claims of necessity or emergency.

Antony Davies understands politicians. A slice:

New York Governor Kathy Hochul recently announced the creation of a $200 million fund dedicated to investing in New York’s cannabis industry. The generous interpretation of events is that Governor Hochul has a big heart, though her head is nowhere to be found. A cynical interpretation is that, after spending decades generating revenues and expanding the government’s power by waging war on marijuana users, politicians have now found a way to generate revenues and expand the government’s power by making amends to marijuana users.

Through the fund, New York intends to provide financing for 150 marijuana dispensaries throughout the state. Importantly, the fund will focus on dispensaries to be operated by minorities who suffered under New York’s penal system when marijuana was illegal. Says Lieutenant Governor Antonio Delgado, “It is incumbent upon us to create a socially responsible cannabis industry…that ensures jobs and opportunity for minorities who have long been subject to unfair (cannabis) enforcement…”

The sentiment is laudable, but the effort is misguided. If the goal is to compensate people whose lives and families the state destroyed under the former marijuana laws, why provide money to run marijuana dispensaries? Only some of those marijuana law victims are able to run businesses, and only some of those are available to run these particular businesses. A far better solution would be to reimburse marijuana law victims for the time that New York kept them locked up, and let each decide for himself what to do with the money.

But this investment initiative is about “creating jobs,” the Governor says. Creating jobs is easy. Creating jobs that generate more value than they consume is hard. And the latter is not something at which government excels because government is designed to tell people what to do and to take what it wants. Creating jobs that generate more value than they consume requires convincing consumers to voluntarily hand over their money by offering them something in exchange that they like even better. Pulling that off almost always requires keeping government far away from decision makers, not entrenching it in a framework of licensing, oversight boards, and political appointments.

My GMU Econ colleague Dan Klein defends the rule of law against Bryan Caplan’s questioning of it. (DBx: I find here something agreeable in the positions of each of my colleagues. But I believe that the discussion remains unnecessarily confused and confusing. It would be much-improved if both Bryan and Dan incorporated into their analyses the distinction between legislation and law, as described by Bruno Leoni and F.A. Hayek. Calling legislation “law” serves only to make thinking muddled. Even wholly legitimate legislation is not law; legislation is legislation.)

Juliette Sellgren talks with Peter Van Doren about energy independence.

GMU Econ alum Jon Murphy likes Wyzant.

The woke crowd spoofs itself (as reported here by Robby Soave). (DBx: If this real-world occurrence were written up by Babylon Bee no one would laugh because it seems too nuts.)

The Chinese state continues its insane pursuit of zero covid.

UnHerd‘s Freddie Sayers talks with Martin Kulldorff.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is this July 1st, 2022, Facebook post by Georgetown University philosopher Jason Brennan:

If you create jobs where people get paid to check out compliance with various rules, they will have a perverse incentive to expand and complicate the rules, and thus reduce the degree to which the rules serve their intended goal.

Some Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Princeton University historian Allen Guelzo reveals the folly – and notes the irony – of a student at Washington, DC’s, George Washington University taking to the pages of the Washington Post to argue that George Washington, the man, is undeserving to have a major university bear his name. A slice:

So, yes, George Washington owned slaves, and his turn against slavery happened slowly. But this isn’t the only matter to enter into the historical calculus of blame or fame. Washington was fumbling toward the elimination of slavery in an America that was only just emerging from centuries of deeming slavery normal. He was also the indispensable man of a rebellion that began the movement toward ending slavery. Once that government was established, he frankly told Edmund Randolph that if the slaveholding states of the South persisted in wrecking the new republic, “he had made up his mind to remove and be of the Northern” states. Frederick Douglass, in his most famous speech, praised Washington as the man who “could not die till he had broken the chains of his slaves.”

Let his onetime opponent, King George III, have the last word. In 1797, the expatriate painter Benjamin West dined with Rufus King, the American diplomatic envoy to Great Britain. West astounded King with a comment George III made when he learned that Washington had voluntarily surrendered his commission as general-in-chief of the Continental Army at the close of the Revolution, a voluntary submission of military power to civilian rule. “That act,” said the king, placed Washington “in a light the most distinguished of any man living, and that he thought him the greatest character of the age.”

If only on that point, George III got Washington right. And so, I suspect, did the ones who named George Washington University.

In this letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal, Robert Levy defends Clarence Thomas:

Justice Clarence Thomas has been predictably but erroneously pilloried for writing in his Dobbs concurrence that other precedents—including the rights to contraceptives, same-sex marriage and consensual gay sex—ought to be reversed. But that’s not quite what he wrote (“Abortion Goes Back to the People,” Review & Outlook, June 25).

Instead, Justice Thomas noted that those precedents relied on the doctrine of substantive due process, which he and many legal scholars believe to be incoherent. Alternatively, the justice would inquire whether those same rights might be upheld under the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the 14th Amendment, something that libertarians have been advocating for decades.

In other words, Justice Thomas didn’t assert that the rights themselves have no constitutional pedigree, but rather that the underlying cases securing those rights should be revisited because of their faulty legal rationale.

Robert A. Levy
Chairman, Cato Institute
Naples, Fla.

Diana Furchtgott-Roth applauds the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency.

GMU Econ alum Raymond Niles describes some of “the perpetual tragedy of New York’s rent control.” A slice:

The tragedy of rent control goes far beyond just the palpable destruction brought on by high inflation and lagging rent increases, although we may be headed there again.

A quiet tragedy plays out every day in the lives of everyone who suffers from the stunting of the New York housing market caused by rent control. There is the suffering of the landlords, who unjustly have their properties reduced in value and even destroyed economically, when their legal rents can no longer support maintenance of their buildings. This tragedy is exemplified in an anecdote I read years ago at one of the biannual rent increase hearings. At a raucous hearing where dozens of “pro-tenant” activists demanded rent freezes and rent rollbacks, the owner of a small building approached one of the czars who would determine his fate. He said, “You are killing me. I may have to abandon my building and, with it, the savings of my family that bought it to provide retirement income.” The rent regulator-czar turned to him and said, “Look around. For each of you [landlords] there are twenty of them [tenants].”

Matthew Lynn reports that “woke capitalism is busily destroying itself.” A slice:

It hardly seems to matter whether the management of these companies is comfortable with the messages being pumped out on its behalf online. It appears to have abdicated power to a tiny group of activist employees so imbued with Twitter culture that they cannot recognise the difference between social media and the real world.

And it’s part of a broader problem with woke capitalism, caused by companies paying far too much attention to the views of staff, and too little of customers. Disney, for example, has found its tax status in Florida under threat after some of its employees tried to turn the Magic Kingdom into the Woke Kingdom (or Person-dom, come to think of it) by campaigning on LGBT rights. Again and again, companies are finding themselves caught up in the culture wars, often forced into particular positions in an attempt to appease their Left-wing staff.

There are two problems with that. The first is that there is no need for businesses to take a political position. If they can make a decent product at a fair price, and pay their staff and suppliers on time, that is more than enough of a social purpose. Everything else can be argued about elsewhere.

The second is that, by handing control over to junior staff, it means private sector firms are falling for an affliction more commonly seen in the public sector. They are losing the art of customer service, and forgetting that respect for other people’s views, and tolerance of a wide range of political beliefs, is just common courtesy.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali reflects on wokeness in higher education. A slice:

Harvard’s motto is a single word: Veritas. Yale’s is Lux et Veritas. But truth is the first casualty of progressivism. And as for light, there is a great deal more heat generated by the endless identity politics of the modern campus.

Arnold Kling reflects interestingly on a significant change over the years in the kinds of jobs we moderns work.

Mark Perry celebrated, on June 30th, Thomas Sowell’s 92nd birthday.

Life-long Democrat, Pierre Kory, MD, decries Progressives’ hostility to freedom of speech and open scientific debate.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from pages 741-742 of Robert Bradley’s Winter 1990 Cato Journal article, “On the Origins of the Sherman Act“:

The Sherman Act was bad law. It not only preserved the nation’s high tariff policies by diverting attention away from the root restraint of trade; it greased the wheels for another tariff law later the same year. The McKinley Tariff Act of 1890, also called the “Campaign Contributors’ Tariff Bill,” shocked the New York Times into reversing its once ardent support for the Sherman Act. With tariffs and antitrust, the government at best was trying to undo with one hand what it was doing with the other. But at worst, as applications of the law would demonstrate, the Sherman Act discouraged scale economies that promoted lower costs and prices, penalized successful market entrepreneurship, and rewarded the political entrepreneurship of less-efficient business rivals.

DBx: The Sherman Act – signed (as they say) “into law” by President Benjamin Harrison 132 years ago today – is the first national-level antitrust statute enacted in the United States. This legislation is today still commonly presumed to have been intended to protect and promote economic competition that furthers the welfare of consumers. This presumption is terribly mistaken. (Pictured here is Sen. John Sherman [R-OH].)

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 1 of Deirdre McCloskey’s hot-off-the-press 2022 volume, Beyond Positivism, Behaviorism, and Neoinstitutionalism in Economics:

The ethics of liberalism, born in the eighteenth century, should be foundational in a good economic science in all senses of “good.” Liberalism – which is to say the theory of a society of people liberated from hierarchies – is productive in sciences, whether natural or social or humanistic. Free entry (and exit) is foundational in a science or politics or economy. Slaves can’t exit (or enter). Therefore, slaves don’t produce innovation, in art or science or the economy. Look at Nazi painting or Soviet department stores. It’s no accident that art and science have flourished most in the more liberal societies under roughly liberal economic institutions….

The Typical Politician Is Loathsome

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal:

Editor:

You report that “President Biden endorsed making an exception to filibuster rules to pass legislation codifying Roe v. Wade into law” (“Biden Supports Exception to Filibuster to Codify Roe v. Wade Into Law,” July 1).

Is Mr. Biden so unfathomably clueless about how a rule such as the filibuster works that he really believes that it can be switched off and on at his whim and nevertheless remain a rule? Or does the president here cynically reveal that he has absolutely no respect for the native intelligence of the American people? The correct answer is unclear.

One fact, however, is beyond dispute: Mr. Biden is utterly unprincipled.

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

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(Don Boudreaux)

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My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy, writing at National Review, draws a lesson from France about the folly of industrial policy. A slice:

And here the story of the Minitel, even though not a resounding failure, offers a great illustration of one of the problems with industrial policy. When thinking of the Minitel story, we are lucky to have a perfect product to compare it to: The iPhone. As Mercatus Center’s Dan Rothchild reminded me, the iPhone came out 15 years ago, and its evolution offers a sharp contrast with the Minitel. While the iPhone has changed and improved dramatically over the years, thanks to Apple investment and innovation, the Minitel pretty much stagnated. The difference couldn’t be more stark.

George Will applauds yesterday’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling in West Virginia v. EPA. A slice:

Now, [Chief Justice John] Roberts writes, the court is reluctant to find a sweeping power “lurking” in vague Clean Air Act language. There is little reason, Roberts writes, to think Congress, without clearly saying so, tasked the EPA, “and it alone, with balancing the many vital considerations of national policy implicated in deciding how Americans will get their energy.” The majority should have invoked the related doctrine that Congress cannot properly delegate to an executive agency essentially legislative decisions.

By pruning the EPA’s pretensions, the court has signaled a quickened interest in policing the separation of powers. If, as is desirable, the decision presages similar ones, they could, cumulatively, revive Congress by compelling it to resume its proper responsibilities. This would limit the excessive autonomy currently enjoyed by the executive agencies that are the increasingly autonomous, unleashed and unaccountable administrative state.

Also applauding the Court’s restriction on what they correctly call “Biden’s EPA power grab” are Mario Loyola and Eric Groten. A slice:

In a 6-3 decision by Chief Justice John Roberts, the court held that the Clean Air Act doesn’t authorize the Clean Power Plan, or CPP, through which the Obama administration sought to force America’s electricity sector to switch to renewable sources. The plan would limit each state’s total allowable greenhouse gas-emissions under the banner of “performance standards” for power plants. That was the strategy the EPA had pursued for nearly a decade as its best option for imposing climate regulations by unilateral executive action.

The EPA’s attempt to impose such a scheme on states was particularly bold because Congress had just declined to enact a similar scheme. After the 2008 election, Democrats introduced the Waxman-Markey bill, a sweeping cap-and-trade scheme to reduce carbon emissions dramatically. Even with Democratic supermajorities in both houses, Congress failed to pass the bill.

Bill Steigerwald recounts his encounters with Thomas Sowell.

Kevin Williamson is correct that Hillsdale College president Larry Arnn is correct that education majors are generally among the least-impressive of college students. A slice:

Side note: The CBS reporter, Phil Williams, describes Hillsdale as “ultraconservative.” I wonder what he thinks that means? For comparison, Williams is a graduate of Middle Tennessee State University, which didn’t manage to admit its first black student until 118 years after Hillsdale did, Hillsdale having been open to African Americans from its founding by abolitionists in 1844. Hillsdale was also the second U.S. college to grant four-year degrees to women. It is true that Hillsdale emphasizes classical and Christian education, and that Larry Arnn is what you would call a “movement conservative.” I suppose Hillsdale is “ultraconservative” if your yardstick is Bryn Mawr, but why should we accept that as our norm?

(DBx: My observations from a long career of teaching at the collegiate level confirm Arnn’s assessment. Exceptions, of course, exist – some quite notable. But as a rule, education majors are below average as students.)

David Henderson asks: “What caused gas prices to jump?” A slice:

So, if we’re going to blame the entities that caused inflation, they are, in order, the Federal Reserve, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden. On the plus side, we should give huge credit to Joe Manchin, the Democratic senator from West Virginia, for standing strong against Biden’s further huge spending increase, misleadingly labeled “Build Back Better.”

John Staddon ponders “science in an age of unreason.” A slice:

Many social scientists have difficulty separating facts from faith, reality from the way they would like things to be. Critical research has itself become taboo which, in turn, means that policy makers are making decisions based more on ideologically-driven political pressure than scientific fact.

Adding to the intrinsic difficulty of social science, race, particularly, has become a topic where disinterested research on the causes of, for example, racial disparities, has become almost impossible. “Scientific” conclusions increasingly reflect ideological pre-dispositions, rather than appropriately cautious inferences from necessarily inadequate data. The rise of the influential concept of systemic racism is the result. Systemic racism is unmeasurable, hence ineradicable. Its rise has been accompanied by a stifling of research that might shed real light on racial and gender disparities. This suppression bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the tragedy of Soviet Lysenkoism.

Reason‘s Eric Boehm wonders if the Democrats really are so clueless as to end filibustering in the senate in order to protect abortion rights.

“Do mask mandates work? Bay Area COVID data from June says no.”

John’s Mom tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

I’ll never forget the moment I realized that the U.S. was in deep trouble; Fauci was testifying in Congress very early in the pandemic and admitted that they weren’t weighing costs and benefits in their response. “Aghast” best describes my reaction.

Jay Bhattacharya tweets:

US schools closed because public health officials from Tony Fauci on down misled parents about covid risks to children. Now that the scope of the catastrophe is clear, many claim they supported opening schools “safely”. Schools would still be closed under the conditions they set.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 31 of Randy Barnett’s and Evan Bernick’s important 2021 book, The Original Meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment: Its Letter and Spirit (original emphasis):

We concur with the claim that the “due process of law” is a “procedural” guarantee. But we then show that this procedure is “substantive” insofar as it requires judges to examine the substance of legislation. When it comes to the legitimacy of statutes, the “due process of law” is not limited to whether a statute was duly enacted by the requisite legislative procedure.

The original meaning of “due process of law” in the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees some judicial process before any person can be deprived of life, liberty, or property. This judicial process includes a jury trial. The question then concerns the proper scope of this process. Such a judicial process potentially involves an inquiry into two questions: (1) Was an accused person actually guilty of violating a preexisting law – whether a statute or the common law, and (2) if a statute was being enforced, was it within the proper power of the relevant legislature to enact? The second of these questions requires an examination of the substance of the statute that is being enforced.