Russell Roberts's Blog, page 153

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 54 of Martin Wolf’s excellent 2004 book, Why Globalization Works:

A competitive market economy neither ends inequality nor eliminates the desire for power and prestige. It tames them instead.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 1 of David Mamet’s hot-off-the-press 2022 book, Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch:

But we are not all good, neither is any of us good all of the time; in fact, one might say that the essence of human nature is that far from being “flawed,” we are not very damned good at all. And we know it.

The repression of this knowledge is an engine of human wickedness. And we’ve seen, in this last year, that once begun, it must escalate, like a fire searching for air.

DBx: Yes. And so we move closer to self-destruction with every grant to any human being, or to any group of human beings, of the power to coerce other, peaceful human beings.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins speculates about the motivation behind the Chinese government’s deranged and dystopian pursuit of zero Covid. Three slices:

What exactly is the function of China’s zero-Covid lockdowns, which individually and cumulatively now are far bigger than even the Wuhan lockdown in early 2020, when the disease was poorly understood, treatments hadn’t been identified, and vaccines were still months away?

The current lockdown in Shanghai and a recently relaxed one in Shenzhen forced 43 million people to remain in their homes and rely on government food deliveries. These were the biggest shutdowns the country has yet tried, aimed at two vital entrepôts of the global economy.

The data China publishes are hard to make sense of. Daily reports indicate upward of 95% of cases discovered in relentless mass testing have been asymptomatic. Of the 130,000 or so cases reported in Shanghai since March 1, 5,000 were said to have been serious enough to require medical treatment. Two people were reported to have died. Government officials say the ratio applies nation-wide. Why lock down for a disease that is so mild?

The puzzle is both nagging and urgent given damage to China’s and the global economy over a disease that is cold-like, not even flu-like, in most cases. One theory, bruited even on Chinese social media, is that the government is bending over backward, whatever the cost, to preserve a zero-Covid talking point that Xi Jinping has adopted as proof of the superiority of Chinese governance.

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By every report, Shanghai healthcare is already strained by a government requirement that anyone testing positive and their close contacts be hospitalized or, more recently, placed in a special quarantine facility staffed with doctors and nurses. Exhausted medics are standing guard over tens of thousands of healthy patients who have nothing to do but share their aggravation on social media.

Another problem has finally begun sneaking out of the corner of Chinese officials’ mouths: 24 months of zero-Covid propaganda has caused millions of Chinese not only to exaggerate Covid’s deadliness, but to be on the edge of panic about potential lockdowns, having heard repeated reports of hunger, missed medical treatments and the inability to bring help to loved ones.

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The sane outcome may be impossible because the regime has caused its zero-Covid ideology to morph into something insane. If transmission must be suppressed and anything else is a defeat, then the Communist Party has set a game for itself in which no victory is possible.

Also writing about China’s Covid hysteria and Beijing’s deranged pursuit of zero Covid is National Review‘s Jack Butler.

And here’s Reason‘s Liz Wolfe on the on-going terror in Shanghai. A slice:

Due to strict containment and isolation measures in place for COVID-positive people, some mothers report being forcibly separated from their COVID-infected children by authorities. Health authorities allege parents will be able to appeal this and seek permission (!) to accompany their COVID-positive children to hospitals and isolation wards. It is unclear how this will actually apply in practice and whether this will end the brutal measure of separating parents from their young, sick children.

From UnHerd: “Inside Shanghai’s Zero Covid Camp.”

Vinay Prasad warns of medical-experts’ hypocrisy. Two slices:

On the one hand, there are many biomedical faculty who are passionately arguing why 2-4 year olds should be forced to wear cloth masks. (NY City is fighting this in the courts). Even though there is no randomized data, even though cloth masks failed in adults (let alone toddlers), even though it contradicts the WHO, even though it fails common sense, we must keep doing this!

On the other hand, doctors post pictures of them attending industry sponsored academic conferences. Getting drinks and partying. Packed in tight rooms. No masks. Praising each other for their work. Drenched in financial conflict of interest and pro-new and pro-costly bias.

How can both these things be true?

We are facing such a health emergency that we have to mask toddlers by force of law AND we can continue to enjoy entirely superfluous medical gatherings that risk viral spread.

Don’t say it’s vaccines.

Because the vaccinated, boosted 50 year old, elevated BMI doc with comorbidities has far higher risk than the healthy, unvax’d 4 year old.

…..

COVID-19 policy reveals the selfishness of adults, the indifference to kids, and the hypocrisy of medicine. It’s disgusting to witness and history will judge it poorly.

Eric Boehm reports on some of the collateral damage done to the U.S. economy by reckless government Covid responses.

Here’s the great Great Barrington Declaration in Chinese. (HT Martin Kulldorff)

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 367 of the 2016 second edition of Thomas Sowell’s important volume Wealth, Poverty and Politics:

What is remarkable about many crusades to have the government intervene in the terms of economic transactions involving incomes is the contrast between the fervor of the campaigns for these interventions and the far lesser interest, or no visible interest at all, in empirical evidence about how these interventions turn out.

Some Non-Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy – writing at National Review – is rightly appalled by the lousy ‘reporting’ done by the New York Times‘s David Leonhardt about the stance toward Ukraine taken by AIER’s Will Ruger and the Koch organization Stand Together. Here’s Vero’s conclusion:

Here’s the bottom line: David Leonhardt seems to have done no actual investigating whatsoever before accusing Charles Koch and Will Ruger of being pro-Putin. This is particularly sad in a piece that actually quotes some people praising Putin. It’s obvious that he has delegated to others (in this case a Democrat political operative writing for a subscription-based newsletter — funny for a guy who throws Koch-funded accusations around) whatever “investigation” is done for this section of the report. That alone is disappointing enough. But what is more disappointing is to equate disagreement over just what the U.S. should do regarding the Ukrainian invasion or disagreement about why we shouldn’t put boots on the ground in Ukraine (no national-security stakes, vs. Putin has the nuclear bomb) with support for Putin himself. These types of attacks, especially in the pages of the NYT, hinder debates and make us all stupider at a time when we need more debates and more ideas.

P.S. Also sloppy and laughable is calling AIER a Koch-funded organization. Can we please stop assuming that scholars on the right or on the left hold their policy positions because of who funds them? AIER received a small grant from the Koch Foundation in 2018 and 2019. If that makes them a Koch-funded organization, then the NYT should start referring to the ACLU as a Koch-funded organization, too.

Also defending the Koch network from atrocious smears is Reason‘s Robby Soave. A slice:

Stand Together is a charitable organization founded by Charles Koch that gives money to libertarian groups and causes. It works to advance classically liberal ideas on a variety of issues: school choice, criminal justice reform, regulation, and foreign policy, to name just a few. Stand Together works with right-leaning organizations on some of these issues, left-leaning organizations on other issues, and also with organizations that don’t neatly fit the left-right paradigm. (Disclosure: Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes Reason, receives support from Stand Together.)

Unfortunately, many progressive journalists—and even some populist conservatives—view everything connected to Charles Koch and his late brother David as nefarious by default. In their zeal to denounce the Koch brothers’ influence on American politics, they end up attacking policies that they should otherwise support.

Case in point is this bizarre and misleading “exclusive” report on Stand Together from Judd Legum, a progressive journalist who writes the newsletter Popular Information. Legum accuses Stand Together of supporting a “partial victory” for Russia in Ukraine, and wanting the U.S. to drop “virtually all” Russian sanctions.

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Most irresponsibly, Legum highlights the following line: “An outright victory by either Russia or Ukraine is increasingly unlikely and a diplomatic resolution is the path that best limits the bloodshed.” He describes this as Stand Together advocating for the U.S. to “seek to deliver Russia a partial ‘victory’.”

But [Dan] Caldwell clearly does not wish for Russia to achieve “victory,” partial or otherwise; he is merely acknowledging that any peace will likely involve both Russia and Ukraine getting some things that they want. It’s perfectly reasonable to concede that in order to end all the death and destruction, Putin will have to emerge from the conflict as something short of a complete and total loser.

Legum quotes two foreign policy experts—Brian Katulis and Daniel Fried—who think the current sanctions should remain in place and believe they are working to “reduce Putin’s resources for further aggression.” They are certainly entitled to that opinion; there is little reason to doubt that the sanctions are making things harder in Russia, including for ordinary Russians. But it is not crazy to wonder whether the sanctions will meaningfully prevent Putin from continuing the war in Ukraine, or whether the amount of suffering we are dispensing to the Russian people is ultimately counterproductive or even immoral.

Brent Orrell and Alex Nowrasteh argue that America should welcome the skilled workers fleeing Russia.

Reason‘s J.D. Tuccille wisely warns against extending the already horrendous precedent for use of the banana-republic practice of civil asset forfeiture. Two slices:

Efforts to punish Russia for invading Ukraine rely not just on funneling weapons to the beleaguered defenders but also on economic sanctions to deny Vladimir Putin’s regime resources and to inflict pain until the aggression stops. Among the targets are “Russian elites and their families,” in President Joe Biden’s words, whose assets are being seized to pressure the regime. But calling somebody an “oligarch” is no substitute for legal proceedings, and the U.S. government is stretching already sketchy asset forfeiture powers in ways that will, no doubt, create precedents for the future.

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Russian billionaires will probably survive economic sanctions in relative comfort. But the precedent set by labeling people as untouchables and then imposing penalties without proof of a crime will set the tone for future abuses. Powers used against wealthy Russians now will be deployed in the years to come against people who cross the authorities and have fewer resources for defending themselves.

Speaking of civil asset forfeiture, Reason‘s C.J. Ciaramella has more.

In this letter in today’s Wall Street Journal, my Mercatus Center colleague Alden Abbott defends the consumer-welfare standard for antitrust:

The consumer-welfare standard, defended eloquently by Phil Gramm and Christine Wilson in “The New Progressives Fight Against Consumer Welfare” (op-ed, April 4), is fundamental to advancing the rule of law in antitrust. It provides a clear benchmark for understanding when business conduct is economically beneficial to consumers, while also benefiting workers and producers.

When producers obtain raw materials more cheaply, savings can be passed on to consumers. When workers are more productive, they tend to earn more and can buy more goods or save money. Worker efficiency helps companies produce more and better goods, reducing prices further. Consumers are emphasized because, in the end, everyone is a consumer.

The consumer-welfare standard isn’t concerned with a business’s size or industry. Maintaining the rule of law necessitates that antitrust enforcers not discriminate. This creates an equal playing field, again to the benefit of consumers.

Abandoning the consumer-welfare standard and considering a broader range of conduct to be antitrust violations would undermine years of progress. By assigning weights and making judgments based on ill-defined criteria like “fairness,” enforcers would be picking winners and losers, arbitrarily and inconsistently applying antitrust in defiance of the rule of law.

For most of the 132 years that antitrust laws have been on the books, enforcement has been inconsistent and unpredictable. In the late 1970’s, acceptance of consumer welfare as the guiding principle allowed for unprecedented growth and innovation. The last thing we should do is quickly throw out the consumer-welfare standard, disrupt the rule of law, and introduce a new and arbitrary standard that threatens this success story.

Alden Abbott
Mercatus Center at George Mason
Arlington, Va.
Mr. Abbott was the Federal Trade Commission’s general counsel (2018-21).

Bradley Smith, writing in the Wall Street Journal, offers some advice to Twitter’s largest shareholder, Elon Musk. Two slices:

I wouldn’t dream of telling Elon Musk, who recently became Twitter’s top shareholder, how to turn a profit. But I do know something about free speech. If Mr. Musk is serious about making the social-media behemoth a force for free speech, here are 10 things he can do:

1. Leave more content up. Twitter has rules about posts, and the bulk of enforcement is done through artificial intelligence. The algorithms err on the side of taking down material that might violate Twitter rules. Instead, they should err on the side of leaving questionable material up until there has been human review.

2. More aggressively screen complaints. Currently, there is too much bad-faith reporting done for the purpose of getting controversial, but legitimate, content taken down. For every 10 content moderators tasked with taking down content, hire a content defender, whose job is to advocate for keeping or putting content back up. Err on the side of speech, not censorship.

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10. Stop supporting congressional legislation that would reduce speech, such as the misnamed “Honest Ads Act.” Make the company an advocate for free speech, not censorship.

David Henderson reminds us of an insidious consequence of obstructions on commerce.

My GMU Econ colleague Dan Klein, writing at Law & Liberty, corrects Oren Cass’s mistaken reading of Adam Smith. Three slices:

On the matter of foreign investment, Cass misrepresents Smith in two ways. First, he seems to suggest that Smith’s theorizing assumes that there is little to no foreign investment. Cass writes, “Smith and Ricardo…assumed that capital would remain in the domestic market. And as a corollary, both conceived of trade as occurring only on the basis of goods for goods.” In a reply to [Dominic] Pino, Cass writes: “Smith and Ricardo wrote about one very specific kind of trade — the direct exchange of goods for goods — and assumed this would occur in a world where capital remained within national boundaries.”

Second, Cass suggests that Smith’s favor for liberal policy depended on this same assumption of little to no foreign investment. Cass writes: “Smith and Ricardo never suggest that this pursuit of profit abroad will align with the public interest at home, no other theory gives a reason that it should, and empirically it has not.”

On both points, Cass is wrong about Smith. I do not mean to imply that Smith would not under any circumstances favor a restriction on foreign trade or investment. Smith considered arguments for making an exception to the principle of free trade, but, as Boudreaux explains, Smith himself tended to diminish those arguments. We cannot rule out that Smith might favor certain restrictions under certain circumstances, for polity reasons, perhaps because they would support political stability or national security, or simply because they would play a part in the crafty art of liberal politics. Smith strove to make governments less dishonest and illiberal, but knew that foreign countries had governments too. Smith’s friend Edmund Burke exemplified the virtuous pursuit of circumstantial liberal politics.

…..

Does Smith ever frown on foreign investment? Smith does say that British capital invested in Britain more surely augments employment in Britain than British capital invested abroad. But universal benevolence does not stop at the border: “The capitals of the British manufacturers who work up the flax and hemp annually imported from the coasts of the Baltic, are surely very useful to the countries which produce them.” Smith hardly seems opposed to British investment in the Baltic countries. Elsewhere Smith writes: “Though the same capital never will maintain the same quantity of productive labour in a distant as in a near employment, yet a distant employment may be as necessary for the welfare of the society as a near one; the goods which the distant employment deals in being necessary, perhaps, for carrying on many of the nearer employments.”

…..

Cass suggests that Smith wishes to confine the invisible-hand point to circumstances in which the individual invests domestically, writing: “If a capitalist wishes to deploy his capital domestically, and if the domestic investment that will generate the most profit for him is also the one that will create the most value and employ the most people in his country, then we will have a well-functioning capitalist system.” I take it that Cass means only then.

But it is daft to think that Smith thusly confined the invisible-hand idea. As Peter Minowitz has shown when criticizing a similar misreading, the invisible-hand idea is all over Wealth of Nations. Minowitz’s textual analysis refutes Cass’s attempt to confine the point.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Jim Bovard warns against politically motivated statistics. A slice:

Federal agencies don’t count what politicians don’t want to know. President Joe Biden and other Democrats perennially invoke “science and data” to sanctify all their COVID-19 mandates and policies. But the same shenanigans and willful omissions that have characterized COVID data have perennially permeated other federal programs.

Jeffrey Tucker talks with Knut Wittkowski.

The New York Post asks:

Will the Gray Lady ever move on? Yes, cases are “ticking up” in parts of the city, but COVID hospitalizations have averaged only 20 a day over the past week and have been dropping; deaths have averaged just three and are also decreasing. Scaring the public might sell papers and attract clicks, but at some point even the Times needs to acknowledge the pandemic is over.

With supporting data, Martin Kulldorff tweets:

Scandinavia have had fewer Covid restrictions and lower Covid mortality than the rest of Europe.

Covid hysteria appears to be ramping up again in Philadelphia. (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

“Boris Johnson admits Covid lockdowns are STILL on the cards: PM says he ‘can’t rule out’ draconian stay-at-home restrictions in future – despite promising the route back to pre-pandemic normality was ‘irreversible’.” (DBx: This totalitarian attitude is now, unfortunately, perhaps baked in to many countries; it was baked in by the overwhelming tolerance of authoritarian Covidocratic diktats.)

Karol Sikora reports that “[l]ockdown has stretched cancer services to breaking point.”

“Corgi beaten to death in Shanghai over fears it might spread Covid.” Two slices:

Outrage has erupted online after a video of a corgi dog being beaten to death by a Shanghai healthcare worker went viral, over unfounded concerns that the pup could be infectious after its owners tested positive for Covid.

The corgi’s owners said they let their dog out after being sent to a quarantine building in the hopes the animal would be better off fending for itself in the streets, rather than risk starving to death at home without anyone to look after it, according to screenshots of a group chat shared online.

“We hoped to let him outside to be like a stray dog. We didn’t want him to starve to death,” the dog’s owner said on the group. “As long as he could live, it would be ok. We never expected that he would be beaten to death.”

It is the latest example of pets including dogs and cats being killed by Chinese healthcare workers over unfounded concerns they might infect humans with coronavirus.

Another dog was beaten to death with a crowbar after it was discovered alone during disinfection of a flat in Jiangxi province, while in Hong Kong, authorities threatened to cull thousands of hamsters over Covid fears.

For many Chinese, however, the fate of their pets is just one of the many worries they have to deal with if forced into quarantine facilities by the government.

Young children have been stranded home alone after parents were carted off to quarantine, while others have taken to the internet to seek help for their elderly parents in isolation.

…..

Chinese authorities are continuing with drastic measures given its “zero-Covid” policy. About 1,000 people were locked down at a mall in Hangzhou, a city near Shanghai, overnight this week after it was discovered that two women from Shanghai had visited the centre.

A supermarket chain in Shanghai was forced to shut down after an unexpectedly large number of people showed up with fake passes sold online by scalpers. Lockdowns mean most people are stuck at home and going hungry while waiting for government rations to be delivered.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 197 of the late Robert Tollison’s 1978 paper “Is Industrial Concentration the Cause of Inflation?” which is chapter 38 in The Attack on Corporate America (M. Bruce Johnson, ed., 1978):

In sum, there is neither a logical nor factual argument for the claim that corporate market power causes inflation in the United States.

DBx: Yes. And since Bob wrote these words nothing on this front has changed.

Now as then, blaming inflation on monopoly power, or on corporate greed, is the intellectual equivalent of blaming the 9/11 terrorist attacks on Americans’ tolerance of homosexuality and transgender rights: It’s motivated, ignorant, lazy, unfounded, and plain ol’ stupid.

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Pictured above is Bob Tollison (1942-2016), who was my colleague at George Mason during my first stint on this august faculty from 1985 through 1989. I learned much from him.

Progressives Should Look in the Mirror

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a letter to the New York Times:

Editor:

Although Ross Douthat’s criticism of conservatives for being insufficiently enthusiastic about Covid vaccines features some welcome nuance, it still misses several elephants in the room (“How Republicans Failed the Unvaccinated,” April 6). Here are three.

The first such beast is the decades-long history of Americans being warned, chiefly by Progressives, that no new pharmaceutical product is to be trusted until the FDA approves it as being both safe and effective – an approval process that has come to take, on average, ten years. However unwise, the hesitancy of many Americans to trust the rapidly developed and approved Covid vaccines surely is rooted in this history.

Another elephant is the dismissal by most government leaders, along with prominent advisors and pundits, of the relevance of a key Covid fact (one reported in your pages as early as March 2020) – namely, the risk of suffering severely from Covid rises steeply with age, with the risks to children and young adults being minuscule. Given that officials ignored this key scientific fact when crafting Covid policy, it’s unsurprising that many Americans worried that some other key scientific fact was ignored by officials who issued assurances of the vaccines’ safety.

A third Dumbo is the disgraceful effort by Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci to shut down debate over the Great Barrington Declaration, and to smear the reputations of its three accomplished co-authors. When prominent public-health scientists behave, as did Collins and Fauci, in a manner so obviously at odds with the tradition and values of science, public distrust of official public-health pronouncements and assurances is to be expected.

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

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 363 of Karl Popper’s June 1947 speech “Utopia and Violence,” as this speech is reprinted in Popper’s 1963 collection – dedicated to F.A. Hayek – Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge:

The true rationalist, by contrast, will always know how little he knows, and he will be aware of the simple fact that whatever critical faculty or reason he may possess he owes to intellectual intercourse with others. He will be inclined, therefore, to consider men as fundamentally equal, and human reason as a bond which unites them. Reason for him is the precise opposite of an instrument of power and violence; he sees it as a means whereby these may be tamed.

Some Non-Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy warns of the dangers of price controls. A slice:

To believe that inflation is the product of corporate greed requires even more obliviousness to reality. Inflation is truly a general and ongoing increase of all prices, including wages (which are the price of our labor). This reality means that all companies would have to be getting greedier simultaneously, and that all workers are, at the same time, overcome with similar avarice.

Scott Shackford criticizes “California’s incredibly stupid, market-denying emergency ‘price-gouging’ laws.”

John Stossel is rightly critical of some media companies. A slice:

The New York Post broke the [Hunter Biden] laptop story near the end of the presidential campaign. The story was explosive, of course, and the media pile-on intense. Some piled on Hunter Biden, but more piled on the Post. They questioned the authenticity of the hard drive and the timing and accuracy of the story.

Twitter blocked the story from even being shared. Facebook hid the story. Politico said it might be “Russian disinformation.” A Washington Post column called it “laughably weak.” A New York Times piece labeled it “farcical retread of the Russian hack-and-leak operation that helped torpedo Hillary Clinton’s presidential aspirations.” The story was mocked and buried.

Now, a year and a half later, the Post and Times admit that major parts of the story were accurate.

Do you know what they haven’t said?

“Sorry. We cannot stand the idea of another Trump term, so we didn’t report on bad things Democrats did.”

The Washington Post finally wrote that the way the media handled the story was an “opportunity for a reckoning.” But then they spent the rest of their editorial making excuses for their mistakes.

I’m an Atlanta Braves fan, but – for reasons explained by J.C. Bradbury – that team’s stadium deserves no fans.

Robert Wright rightly applauds Mario Rizzo’s and Glen Whitman’s book, Escaping Paternalism. A slice:

The most brilliant chapter in Escaping is Chapter 8, which turns behavioral economics on itself after unleashing utter carnage upon behaviorists’ assumptions and studies in the first seven chapters. It essentially asks how, if behavioral economists are correct that most individuals suffer from sundry irrationalities, people, including the behavioral economists themselves, can expect paternalistic policymakers to affect positive change.

Colin Grabow reports that even labor unions (quietly) agree that the cronyist Jones Act impedes Americans’ access to supplies.

Here’s Pierre Lemieux on different meanings of “liberal democracy.”

GMU Econ student Sebastián Rodríguez, writing with Gilberto Ramírez, examine the history of classical-liberal ideas in Colombia.

This letter-to-the-editor in the Wall Street Journal reveals some of the many dangers of Biden’s proposed wealth tax:

Put aside the constitutional questions. Jason Furman’s support for a wealth tax on unrealized appreciation (“Biden’s Better Plan to Tax the Rich,” op-ed, March 29) is based significantly on a market-liquidity argument, fairly identifying that an estate basis step-up creates large incentives to hold stocks longer than many investors otherwise would.

The Biden plan would enhance liquidity, however, through widespread forced liquidations, with harsh economic consequences, including clear downward market pressure from selloffs to fund taxes. Perhaps most significant would be the deterrence to invest in startups and private companies without liquid or, often, any traded market, leading to many fire-sale exits—potentially devastating to companies and investors alike. Even orderly liquidations over the proposed five-year window could leave some founders and investors with negative net worth should a catastrophic event occur to their companies after accrued tax liabilities, or where margin loans to fund taxes become due on highly devalued assets.

Further, one can easily anticipate the necessary Rube Goldbergesque regulations for implementing broad-based mark-to-market rules, and the certain litigation that will come with administering exceptions, exemptions and costs of establishing valuations. Surely, it would give rise to an extra—and entirely legal—economic drag of tax-avoidance schemes. And it isn’t hard to imagine the politicization of granting exceptions and special treatment for the right kind of companies and shareholders.

Mark Noonan
New Canaan, Conn.