Russell Roberts's Blog, page 138
May 29, 2022
Quotation of the Day…
… is from pages 107-108 of Eamonn Butler’s 2021 book, An Introduction to Trade & Globalisation:
Morality is an idea that can apply only to the actions of free individuals. A person who is forced to act in some way, even in a beneficial way, cannot be said to have moral agency. Free societies, free markets and free trade are therefore necessary for moral action.
May 28, 2022
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 6 of Aaron Director’s insightful 1964 Journal of Law & Economics paper, “The Parity of the Economic Market Place” – a paper in which Director criticized the notion that economic freedoms are less fundamental and important than are political freedoms:
Short of a revolution in tastes which would make people want much less than they now have of material well-being, or a revolution in technology while keeping present material wants constant, neither of which can be expected, the bulk of mankind will for the foreseeable future have to devote a considerable fraction of their active lives to economic activity. For these people freedom of choice as owners of resources in choosing within available and continually changing opportunities, areas of employment, investment, and consumption is fully as important as freedom of discussion and participation in government.
Some Non-Covid Links
My GMU Econ colleague Bryan Caplan explains that land-use zoning really is taxing.
Mr. Glaeser, 55, is arguably the foremost economist who studies cities. It’s a growing tribe, he says in a Zoom interview from his office on the Harvard campus, to which, he’s keen to stress, he’s been going in person since August 2021. The “hallmarks” of the urban economic models he studies involve space—“recognizing that people and firms make choices about where to locate.” Zoom and hybrid work may be here to stay, he allows. “But for most of us the most important interactions of our lives will occur in the real world and, consequently, location remains absolutely critical.”
The way Mr. Glaeser tells it, cities are among mankind’s finest creations—engines of entrepreneurship, inventiveness and economic growth. His intellectual inspiration as an urban economist is Alfred Marshall (1842-1924), who formulated the hypothesis that Mr. Glaeser says has been central to his own career. “Great are the advantages,” Marshall observed of cities, “which people following the same skilled trade get from near neighborhood to one another. The mysteries of the trade become no mystery but are, as it were, in the air.”
That explains why young people are drawn to cities—and why, in Mr. Glaeser’s view, in-person work is vital in the early stages of a career. Cities—and face-to-face contact at work—have “this essential learning component that is valuable and crucial for workers who are young,” he says. The acquisition of experience and improvement in productivity, “month by month, year by year,” ensures that individual earnings are higher in cities than elsewhere.
Mr. Glaeser commends a “superb paper,” published in the Review of Economic Studies in 2017, that documents how people learn by working in big cities. The authors show that workers in Madrid earn 55% more than those in rural Spain. “These wage benefits don’t appear magically when workers come to Madrid or Barcelona,” Mr. Glaeser says. “Instead, a new worker in the big city earns only about 10% more than a worker in a mid-sized city.” After 10 years, that earnings gap grows to 35%.
Also from Eric Boehm is this report on the budgetary lies told by the Biden administration.
Importantly, the authors rightly disparage the view of slavery recently espoused by the so-called New History of Capitalism (NHC), a menagerie of bad history and worse economic theory critiqued by scholars like Eric Hilt, Phil Magness, Alan Olmstead, and Gavin Wright (no relation). Ferguson and Witcher add to such critiques by countering NHC with new views of slavery by scholars like Jeffrey Rogers Hummel and myself. Hummel points to the deadweight losses created by slavery, while in The Poverty of Slavery: How Unfree Labor Pollutes the Economy, I point to the negative externalities inherent in the various forced labor regimes that have cursed humanity throughout time and the globe.
The authors correctly conclude from such studies that US chattel slavery did not make America wealthy and in fact hurt its economic development. Ditto with the forced labor regimes that replaced slavery in the postbellum period and the injustices of the Jim Crow and The New Jim Crow (mass incarceration) eras. Although a relatively few white people grew wealthy from slavery and segregation, white Americans as a group did not benefit from those policies, and in fact were hurt by them. Hence they owe nothing to the descendants of slaves except equal access to the classical liberal market economy that undergirds America’s prosperity.
“Let us not hope to create equality by dragging the majority down,” the authors conclude, “but rather by pulling the minority up.” To that end, the authors suggest selling government land to finance “the capital investments of any poor entrepreneur” or of anyone of any wealth level who can prove that they are an American Indian or the descendant of slaves.
Larry Sand reports on the continuing deterioration of the quality of K-12 government ‘schooling’ (so called). (HT George Leef) A slice:
So what is the increasingly corrupt educational establishment doing as a corrective? Two primary “fixes” are in the works: grade inflation and graduating students from high school who are functionally illiterate. In fact, a report released on May 16 by ACT, a nonprofit organization that administers the college readiness exam, finds evidence of grade inflation in high school seniors’ GPAs. While ACT scores declined between 2016 and 2021, the average GPA for students taking the test increased.
The trend was especially noticeable among black students and those from low to moderate income homes. Sadly, this is nothing new. Big city districts with their equity-obsessed leadership and powerful teachers unions know they need to show they are not failing. So instead of providing true rigor and firing bad teachers, they simply raise grades.
Detroit is a particularly egregious case. While 72% of the city’s students are graduating from high school this year, only 8% of them are academically ready for college.
George Will reflects on the first 500 days of Biden’s presidency. A slice:
Progressives’ Trumpian conviction that elections are ripe for rigging was fueled by their indignation about what they called Georgia’s new “voter suppression” law. It was the subject, in January, of perhaps the most unpresidential speech in living memory, Biden’s Atlanta eruption in which he asserted that if you disagree with him about Georgia — “Jim Crow 2.0” — you are a compound of Jefferson Davis, George Wallace and Bull Connor. Well.
If the Georgia law’s purpose is voter suppression, it is failing spectacularly: More than 857,000 unsuppressed Georgians voted early before Tuesday’s primaries, about triple the number who voted early in the 2018 primaries.
Welcome to the “Through the Looking Glass” world of unfalsifiable beliefs: Time was, obsessives about the John F. Kennedy assassination said that the complete absence of evidence of a conspiracy proved the conspiracy’s diabolical thoroughness. Today’s voter-suppression obsessives say the surge of Georgians voting proves the law’s wickedness, because it energized voters.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 699 of W.H. Hutt’s 1966 paper “Twelve Thoughts on Inflation” (available without charge on-line here) as it appears in Liberty Fund’s 1981 single-volume collection of New Individualist Review (original emphasis):
As a teacher of business administration during the last thirty-eight years, the writer’s attention has been repeatedly forced back to this question of the spasmodic, yet persistent, depreciation of money. How can businessmen co-ordinate the private sector of the economy effectively when the most important measuring-rod of all – the monetary unit – has been left with no reliable, defined value? Units of length, volume, and weight have been universally defined with meticulous care; but dollars, lire, francs, and pounds have been allowed to change in every significant attribute over time.
May 27, 2022
Enough With Potted History
I thank Neera Badhwar for alerting me to this Bloomberg piece.
Editor, Bloomberg
Editor:
Mark Gongloff bemoans the U.S. Fifth Circuit’s recent ruling that might signal a reining in not only of the Securities and Exchange Commission, but of the entire administrative state (“Enjoy Safe Markets, Food and Workplaces While They Last,” May 19). In Gongloff’s telling, Americans are protected from the likes of securities fraud, toxic drugs, and lethal home appliances only by the stalwart work of federal bureaucrats who, since the New Deal, thankfully have been largely free to regulate us Americans as they see fit.
Gongloff’s potted version of history, alas, would embarrass a fifth grader. Were he actually to study the relevant history and economics, Gongloff would discover that most of the fraud and hazards that allegedly plagued Americans until the New Deal are fictional, and that much of the government-imposed regulation suppressed competition and, thus, likely reduced rates of improvement in consumer welfare.
Consider, for example, financial markets. As summarized by University of Virginia law professor Paul Mahoney, “evidence offered in support of widespread fraud in early twentieth-century securities markets is extremely thin.”* Securities regulation – first by states and then by the national government – was crafted to protect politically powerful banks and houses from competition. As Mahoney concludes his detailed study of the much-revered Securities Act of 1933, “a closer look at the statute, in light of the competitive conditions in the underwriting market in the 1920s, shows that even the Securities Act was a likely source of rents for the firms it subjected to regulation.”**
As for our physical well-being, Americans’ death rate began an extended and precipitous fall long before the courts set Congress free, in violation of the Constitution, to delegate its legislative powers carte blanche to administrative agencies.***
The bulk of the protection we enjoy from fraud and dangerous products comes not from bureaucratic diktats but from competitive markets. Firms compete to build solid reputations through brand names, which become far more valuable to their owners than any short-run gains these owners might squeeze out of fraudulent actions.**** In addition, retailers – who also care about their reputations – inspect the goods they offer to their customers.
In markets, businesses and consumers spend only their own money for their own purposes, thus giving each person strong incentives to choose wisely and not be shanghaied by political fads or frenzies. Bureaucrats, in contrast, spend other people’s money for other people’s purposes, and so are ever-tempted to subject the populace to the latest intellectual craze or ideological fever.
By reining in the administrative state, national legislative power will be restored to where it constitutionally belongs – Congress – and, in the process, individuals will gain what Thomas Sowell describes as “a refuge from the rampaging presumptions of their ‘betters.’”*****
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
* Paul G. Mahoney, “The Origins of the Blue-Sky Laws: A Test of Competing Hypotheses,” Journal of Law & Economics, Vol. 46, April 2003, page 233.
** Paul G. Mahoney, “The Political Economy of the Securities Act of 1933,” Journal of Legal Studies, Vol. 30, January 2001, page 31.
*** See, for example, Stanley Lebergott, The Americans: An Economic Record (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1984), Figure 40.3, page 516.
**** See, for example, Daniel B. Klein, ed., Reputation: Studies in the Voluntary Elicitation of Good Conduct (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997).
***** Thomas Sowell, Knowledge and Decisions (New York: Basic Books, 1980), page 383.
Some Covid Links
Back then, hundreds of professors associated with Yale University organized a letter with signatures to send to the White House. The letter was dated March 2, 2020. It was signed by 800 credentialed professionals largely from the fields of epidemiology and medicine. It was not what I would call a treatise in market liberalism, to be sure, and I did not agree with parts of it.
Still, it might have taken us in a different direction than the one in which governments took us soon after it was published. The letter warned that the crackdowns, shutdowns, travel restrictions, sweeping closures, and work restrictions could be counterproductive and not produce the results people hope for. This echoed the concern expressed by Stanford epidemiologist John Ioannidis and his soon-after published work that warned that we are taking extreme measures with low-quality information with little interest in costs. The letter foreshadowed themes in the Great Barrington Declaration.
Rav Arora decries what’s become of Canada. A slice:
Two decades ago, when I was 4 years old, my parents immigrated to Canada from India in search of greater freedoms, autonomy and economic opportunities. They’re core Canadian values — enshrined in our national anthem, which gloriously heralds “The True North strong and free.”
However, the past two years have seen a near complete erosion of the foundational liberal values that have attracted millions of immigrants like myself to this country.
Under the once-righteous guise of COVID safety and online protections, the Canadian government has taken its power to extreme levels once only imaginable — let alone permissible — in a dissent-stifling authoritarian state.
The control has extended to nearly every element of Canadian society, but nowhere more so than in our everyday personal lives.
actually having had covid was a near useless predictor of “long covid” symptoms but “belief that you had had covid” was a strong predictor of PASC, even in those who were antibody negative. those who had never had covid but thought they did were more likely to claim to have long covid than people who had actually had covid and this held for every symptom except for loss of smell/taste.
Betsy McCaughey warns of the Fauci-fueled effort to crush genuine scientific debate.
The Spectator is unforgiving of Boris Johnson for imposing lockdowns. A slice:
But in the end, they did not get away with it. The Prime Minister remains guilty – most explicitly of misleading the House of Commons when he denied that any parties took place. He has shown a serious failure, too, in not learning from his mistakes. It is no use him or anyone else in government complaining about the triviality of the charges. His government put the lockdown laws on the statute book in the first place, framing them in such a way as to criminalise everyday interactions.
Now the Prime Minister’s allies plead for clemency. It is in human nature, they say, to gather to bid farewell to a departing friend or colleague, to offer friendship and succour. Quite so. Johnson’s allies further argue that, as he raised his glass in a toast, he did so in a work capacity – as evidenced by the presence of his red box. This Jesuitical defence would be more plausible if the government’s laws had not seen ordinary people dragged to court and found guilty of far milder offences.
“Lockdowns saved just 10,000 lives in Europe and US combined: Updated John Hopkins study finds draconian measures had ‘little to no effect’ on Covid death rate.” (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
A variation on this theme is the utility of moral panics — spiritual warfare — for pursuing top-down projects of social transformation, typically by administrative fiat. The principle of equality under the law, which would seem to be indispensable to a liberal society, must make way for a system of privileges for protected classes, corresponding to a moral typology of citizens along the axis of victim and oppressor. Victim dramas serve as a permanent moral emergency, justifying an ever-deeper penetration of society by bureaucratic authority in both the public and private sectors.
…..
This is one front in a larger development: an intensifying distrust of human judgment when it operates in the wild, unsupervised. Sometimes this takes the purely bureaucratic form of insisting on metrics of performance and imposing uniform procedures on professionals. “Evidence-based medicine” circumscribes the discretion of doctors; standardised tests and curricula do the same for teachers. At other times, this same impulse takes a technological form, with algorithms substituting for individual judgment on the grounds that human rationality is the weak link in the system. For example, it is stipulated that human beings are terrible drivers and must be replaced in a new regime of autonomous vehicles. The effect, consistently, is to remove agency from skilled practitioners on the grounds of incompetence, and devolve power upward toward a separate layer of information managers that grows ever thicker. It also removes responsibility from identifiable human beings who can be held to account for their decisions. Such mystification insulates various forms of power, both governmental and commercial, from popular pressures.
Once this pattern of government by emergency snaps into focus, one experiences a Gestalt shift. The self-image of the liberal West — as based on the rule of law and representative government — is in need of revision. Our society’s response to Covid brought this anachronism to mass awareness.
…..
How are we to understand the dramatically different responses of our society to the Spanish flu of a century ago and to Covid today? There is an inverse relationship between the severity of these pandemics and the severity of measures to control them. Clearly, Covid acquired some of its emergency energy from the ambient political crisis dating from 2016, which put the establishment on a war footing. But it also slotted nicely into the more general politics of emergency that is the unacknowledged core of technocratic progressivism, and is further advanced today than it was in 1918.
In 2020, a fearful public acquiesced to an extraordinary extension of expert jurisdiction over every domain of life, and a corresponding transfer of sovereignty from representative bodies to unelected agencies located in the executive branch of government. Notoriously, polling indicated that perception of the risks of Covid outstripped the reality by one to two orders of magnitude, but with a sharp demarcation: the hundredfold distortion was among self-identified liberal Democrats, that is, those whose yard signs exhorted us to “believe in science”.
In a technocratic regime, whoever controls what Science Says controls the state. What Science Says is then subject to political contest, and subject to capture by whoever funds it. Which turns out to be the state itself. Here is an epistemic self-licking ice cream cone that bristles at outside interference. Many factual ambiguities and rival hypotheses about the pandemic, typical of the scientific process, were resolved not by rational debate but by intimidation, with heavy use of the term “disinformation” and attendant enforcement by social media companies acting as franchisees of the state. In this there seems to have been a consistent bias toward scientific interpretations that induced fear, even at the cost of omitting relevant context.
…..
Let us acknowledge that many of our hygiene maximalists are acting, not out of fear for themselves, but in the name of the common good, and this is attractive. Indeed, maybe deep-blue Covid culture was prompted by dissatisfaction with liberal individualism. We have unsatisfied longings for belonging; for anything that could pull us out of the liberal mindset of rights and recall us to duties. The pandemic provided an opportunity to rise above the selfish concerns of the bourgeois and discover a public-spiritedness in oneself. Zero Covid is a heroic battle, to join which requires a literal effacement of the individual. As in any war, those who have answered the call recognise one another, not by their faces but by their uniform, the N95.
This is inspiring but it is also a little creepy, at least for those of us leery of mass movements. There is a cult-like quality to public spaces in the Bay Area. One may efface oneself, not out of fear, but out of identification with the Vulnerable One who is currently elevated, the immunocompromised. How many of these are there, really? It doesn’t matter. Note that in this Hobbesian dynamic, the politics of emergency is intimately tied to victimology.
…..
The good invoked by our hygiene maximalists was that of health. But not health considered broadly, which would require an accounting of the health costs of lockdowns. There is a lively empirical debate about this in the back channels of the Internet, as well as about the efficacy of lockdowns in controlling the course of the pandemic, quite apart from any rise in non-Covid mortality they may have caused.
My point here isn’t to litigate these factual questions, which are contested. But I do want to register the lack of curiosity about them in officialdom, and note that among those who identify as liberals, there seems to be little interest in such an accounting, though it would seem to be crucial. The real attachment seems to be, not to actual health, but to a source of collective meaning that floats free of the empirical: the Covid emergency itself.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 27 of the late Wesleyan University economic historian Stanley Lebergott’s brilliant 1993 book, Pursuing Happiness: American Consumers in the Twentieth Century (footnote deleted):
The number of cultural novelties added to GNP since 1921 is twenty times as great as the additional flavors, shapes, and kinds [of goods] sold in supermarkets and pharmacies, though seen as waste and superfluities by some onlookers. Many of these proved creative, desirable, or fresh to actual consumers. Grant that some “superfluities” should never have been published, or recorded. But what secular authority is entitled to specify which they are? And what principle would guide it except gut preference for, say, Sholokov rather than Akhmatova?
Those who volunteer to instruct us on the items appropriate for consumer markets call to mind Bishop Warburton’s cheerful distinction: “Orthodoxy is my doxy. Heterodoxy is another man’s doxy.”
May 26, 2022
Coase and Covid
The missed step that caused what I believe to be a calamitous misstep was identified more than 60 years ago by an economist who was, in 1991, awarded a Nobel Prize largely for his pioneering analysis of externalities: the late Ronald Coase. Coase was no obscure scholar, and his most famous paper on this topic is no obscure publication: “The Problem of Social Cost,” first published in 1960 in the Journal of Law & Economics, is one of the most cited economics papers ever published.
And yet in the hysteria over COVID Coase was ignored.
What did Coase say that’s so important yet that was missed? To put Coase in popular parlance, what most policymakers, pundits, and economists missed is the fact that it takes two to tango; that is, it takes two, or at least two, to externality. More dryly, all externalities are “bilateral.”
Smith cannot harm Jones unless Jones is in a position to be harmed by Smith. The neighborhood residents who are harmed by soot emitted from a nearby factory smokestack would not be so harmed if they lived further away. People who live near an airport would not suffer the disturbance of airplane noise if they lived elsewhere.
As stated, this reality sounds trivial. And indeed it is trivial. Yet it’s a reality with three key implications that are frequently overlooked in discussions of externalities.
The first key implication is that, because the harm wouldn’t occur if one or the other of the parties had chosen at some point to act differently, each of the two parties to the harm can be said, in a purely physical sense, to “cause” the harm, which implies that neither of the parties alone “causes” the harm.
Second, it follows that the harm can be reduced or eliminated by actions taken by one or the other (or by both) of the parties. Just because the factory’s smokestack emits soot that falls on nearby homes doesn’t necessarily mean that responsibility for mitigating the harm should fall on the factory owner. Maybe it should, but maybe it shouldn’t. The conclusion that the factory should be held responsible doesn’t follow as a matter of logic from the situation. An alternative means of avoiding the harm is for the residents to take steps to protect themselves from the factory’s soot, which brings us to the third implication:
Whether and the extent to which one or both of the parties to the externality should be responsible for reducing the harm depends upon the relative costs of doing so. In Coasean language, legal liability, and, I submit, also ethical responsibility for reducing the harm of any externality should be on the parties who can mitigate the harm at lowest cost
The reason the example of a factory’s emitting soot onto nearby households seems so easy is that our instincts scream, probably correctly, that the lowest-cost avoider of this harm is the factory. From the limited details of this hypothetical, it’s almost certainly the case that putting a scrubber on the smokestack, or switching to a cleaner source of power, is less costly than having each of the homeowners suffer the soot or attempt individually in their own ways to protect themselves from the soot.
But suppose the factory had been in its current location for decades, surrounded by no one for miles, with its soot falling harmlessly to the ground, affecting no third party. Now along comes Jones who wants to build a home on land close to the factory.
You overhear Jones’s wife point out the existence of the factory and its soot emissions, and then ask her husband, “Why not build our new home just a few miles away, in a location nearly as convenient as this one, but that is clear of the soot? Choosing that other location is easy and will cost us no additional funds.”
Then Jones responds: “Nah. We’re going to build here and then sue to have the factory stop emitting soot.”
The assessment of the case is now not so simple. It’s now at least plausible to identify as the party who legally causes the harm, not the factory owner, but the homeowner, Jones. If Jones can build a home just as nice and in a location nearly as lovely and as convenient as is the location near the factory, isn’t it at least plausible that the low-cost avoider of this harm are the Joneses? And would it then be economically or ethically appropriate to compel the factory to eliminate the externality at a cost higher than Jones would have incurred by building in a different location?
I think not.
Examples such as this one reveal that our moral sense of who “causes” an externality depends on our economic sense of which of the two parties to an externality is the lower-cost avoider. And so the lowest-cost avoider of a dangerous respiratory virus is not necessarily each of us as breathing human beings going about ordinary affairs of life.
Perhaps, instead, the lowest-cost avoiders are the vulnerable.
In fact, I think that there’s no “perhaps” about it. Because COVID overwhelmingly reserves its dangers for the very old and the seriously ill, it’s relatively easy to identify the vulnerable and to focus protection on them, while letting the rest of humanity go about life unmolested.
Of course, this policy is precisely the one recommended by the Great Barrington Declaration, a declaration that, I am sure, Ronald Coase would applaud.
Some Non-Covid Links
George Will wisely predicts the return of the Disinformation Governance Board – the “DGB.” Two slices:
Government pratfalls such as the DGB are doubly useful, as reminders of government’s embrace of even preposterous ideas if they will expand its power, and as occasions for progressives to demonstrate that there is no government expansion they will not embrace. Progressives noted approvingly that DHS was putting a disinformation “expert” — a “scholar” — in charge, so science would be applied, including the “science” of sorting disinformation from real information.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’s short-lived choice as DGB executive director was Nina Jankowicz. Before becoming, for three weeks, head of the “nonpartisan” (so said the president’s press secretary) disinformation board, Jankowicz had a colorful career chastising “Republicans and other disinformers.” The contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop? “A Trump campaign product,” she decreed. Her certitudes are many.
…..
In 1939, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration conditioned one station’s license renewal on ending anti-FDR editorials. (Tulane Law School professor Amy Gajda’s new book, “Seek and Hide: The Tangled History of the Right to Privacy,” reports that earlier, FDR had “unsuccessfully pushed for a code of conduct for newspapers as part of the Depression-era National Recovery Act and had envisioned bestowing on compliant newspapers an image of a blue eagle as a sort of presidential seal of approval.”) John F. Kennedy’s Federal Communications Commission harassed conservative radio, and when a conservative broadcaster said Lyndon B. Johnson used the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964 as an excuse for Vietnam escalation, the Fairness Doctrine was wielded to force the broadcaster to air a response.
As the Disinformation Governance Board floundered in ignominy, Mayorkas, the DHS secretary, said, “We could have done a better job of communicating what it is and what it isn’t.” It is ever thus: No progressive ideas are foolish or repellant, although a few are artlessly merchandized.
John Stossel decries the overly restrictive rules that reduce the supply of pilots.
GMU Econ alum Nikolai Wenzel reports on the return of gonzo journalism. A slice:
The final example of gonzo journalism moves from media to the academy, with Duke University Nancy MacLean’s historical novel, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America (2018). In this book, MacLean attacks economist James M. Buchanan and the Koch network – the narrative that brings everything together is, of course, racism, with a hint of oligarchy. I should note in passing that I don’t mind scholarly questioning of Buchanan and his Public Choice theory; I spent many enjoyable hours in graduate school analyzing Donald Wittman’s The Myth of Democratic Failure: Why Political Institutions are Efficient, among other critiques. After graduate school, I engaged in friendly battle with “idealist” conservative political philosophers. But MacLean’s gonzo style is not helpful. As a historian, she does not even attempt to engage with the economics of Public Choice. What is even more troubling is MacLean’s method of “speculative historical fiction,” which includes fabricated assertions presented as evidence, and speculative links with no foundation. This makes no sense, except if the work is understood as gonzo journalism; naturally, MacLean’s book fits with “the narrative,” so it garnered adulation from the usual suspects and a number of national prizes, despite the widespread criticism it received.
Alvaro Vargas Llosa laments the decline of liberalism in Latin America.
Yet all along, it was the racial demagoguery about the Georgia law, not the law itself, that was obscene and immoral. You wouldn’t know it from the rhetoric about “Jim Crow,” but Black voter turnout has been rising steadily for years, even in Republican-dominated states with voter ID requirements. In 2018, according to an analysis by the Pew Research Center, “all major racial and ethnic groups saw historic jumps in voter turnout.”
In Georgia specifically, Black voters over the past quarter-century have become an ever-larger share of the electorate.
In 1996, the year Bill Clinton was reelected, there were 930,000 registered Black voters in Georgia, of whom 497,000, or 53 percent, cast ballots in the November election. By November 2020, all those numbers had jumped: There were 2.3 million registered Black voters, of whom nearly 1.4 million, or about 60 percent, cast ballots. In the face of such unambiguous evidence that Black Georgians are active and committed voters, the Democratic smear about “Jim Crow on steroids” was disgraceful partisan rabble-rousing.
The thunder of lies about S.B. 202 led some voters to expect the worst. The Washington Post spoke with Patsy Reid, a 70-year-old African-American retiree from Spalding County who, given the “reports of voter suppression against people of color in Georgia,” said she was surprised by how easy it was to cast her ballot in the Democratic primary.
“I had heard that they were going to try to deter us in any way possible because of the fact that we didn’t go Republican on the last election, when Trump didn’t win,” she told a reporter. “To go in there and vote as easily as I did and to be treated with the respect that I knew I deserved as an American citizen — I was really thrown back.”
There was no voter suppression, no Jim Crow, no “red-clay” assault on Black civil rights. Patsy Reid is one more Georgia voter who knows that now.
Behind this whole mess is the progressive belief that demanding that a company sell you some mayonnaise with a side of social justice will be profitable for the cause and business. Both are unlikely. Attempts at measuring the profitability of wokeness reveal that many companies that build politically correct actions into their strategies could lose serious income and turn off large chunks of their consumer bases. Lost profits are bad for business sustainability, as Netflix’s CEO seems to have finally understood.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 4 of the 2006 Liberty Fund edition of Ludwig von Mises’s 1956 volume, The Anti-capitalistic Mentality (available free-of-charge on-line here):
It is quite customary to liken the entrepreneurs and capitalists of the market economy to the aristocrats of a status society. The basis of the comparison is the relative riches of both groups as against the relatively straitened conditions of the rest of their fellow men. However, in resorting to this metaphor, one fails to realize the fundamental difference between aristocratic riches and “bourgeois” or capitalistic riches.
The wealth of an aristocrat is not a market phenomenon; it does not originate from supplying the consumers and cannot be withdrawn or even affected by any action on the part of the public. It stems from conquest or from largess on the part of a conqueror. It may come to an end through revocation on the part of the donor or through violent eviction on the part of another conqueror, or it may be dissipated by extravagance. The feudal lord does not serve consumers and is immune to the displeasure of the populace.
The entrepreneurs and capitalists owe their wealth to the people who patronize their businesses. They lose it inevitably as soon as other men supplant them in serving the consumers better or cheaper.
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