Russell Roberts's Blog, page 208

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 254 of the 2016 second edition of Thomas Sowell’s excellent volume Wealth, Poverty and Politics:

The crucial fact is that it is far easier to concentrate power than to concentrate knowledge.

DBx: Undeniably true. It is, therefore, especially astounding that nearly all proponents of government intervention succeed in passing off as science-based their proposals for policies that will work only if sufficient knowledge is concentrated in the heads of those persons who wield concentrated power. These peddlers of faux scientific policy analyses simply assume that such concentration of knowledge not only can happen, but will happen.

If an engineer submitted a design for a bridge suspended by nothing but thin air, and in doing so announced that he assumes that gravity doesn’t operate on bridges, that engineer would of course be roundly criticized and never again asked to design a bridge (or anything else). Yet when the likes of economists, lawyers, and think-tank scholars submit – as they very often do – designs for public policy built on the assumption that the requisite knowledge will somehow be concentrated in the heads of the appropriate government officials, professors, pundits, and politicians Oooh! and Ahhh! as if they are witnessing the work of great geniuses.

The spectacle would be nothing but low comedy if the consequences weren’t so horrible.

Phil Magness Responds to Nancy MacLean

(Don Boudreaux)

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With this letter in tomorrow’s (Nov. 22nd’s) print edition of the Wall Street Journal, Phil Magness – responding to the error-infected ‘arguments’ peddled by Nancy MacLean – sets the historical record straight about Milton Friedman and school choice:

In her Nov. 19 letter, Nancy MacLean accuses me of ignoring the substance of her research findings, which purport to implicate Milton Friedman in a collusive partnership with segregationists to advance the cause of school vouchers. It’s a brazen charge, considering that Prof. MacLean ignores clear evidence that Friedman not only supported racial integration, but saw vouchers as an essential tool to achieve that end.

Rather than engage the economist at his word, Ms. MacLean imputes opportunistic motives to the date of Friedman’s 1955 article on the economic theory of school choice—one year after Brown v. Board of Education. Yet Friedman’s papers at the Hoover Institution confirm that he drafted his paper before the Brown ruling. The timing came about from an ordinary lag in academic publishing, not the conspiratorial designs that Ms. MacLean imagines.

Curiously, Ms. MacLean’s argument becomes inattentive to dates when it suits her case. Her argument repeatedly conflates Virginia’s 1959 tuition grant program with the arch-segregationist “Massive Resistance” laws of 1956-57 that it displaced. This allows her to obfuscate the evidence I present in my op-ed (“School Choice’s Antiracist History,” Oct. 19), which illustrates how the Virginia Education Association (VEA) allied with segregationists to attack school vouchers after the courts struck down the Massive Resistance statutes in January 1959. Like Friedman, the Virginia teachers union recognized that vouchers would expedite the integration of schools. While Friedman considered this a desirable outcome, the antivoucher activists warned it would lead to the “negro engulfment” of the public schools.

Confronted with this evidence, Ms. MacLean elsewhere makes excuses for the VEA: “To save the schools for future generations, some advocates appealed to that racism in their arguments.” She evidently believes these actions were necessary to “stem the revenue drain” from public schools under a voucher system, “not to protect segregation per se.” This attempt to rationalize the teachers union’s collusion with segregationists is deeply ironic, given that it is the same charge she falsely makes against Friedman. Apparently, segregationist political collusion is acceptable to Ms. MacLean, provided that it services her own anti-voucher beliefs.

Phillip W. Magness
American Institute for Economic Research
Great Barrington, Mass.

DBx: Historical scholarship is performed with about as much precision and effectiveness by Nancy MacLean as brain surgery would be performed by a drunk wrestler firing a bazooka.

Again, There Is Simply No Good Argument for Mandated Paid Leave

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a letter to a long-time reader of Café Hayek who describes herself as “very skeptical but appreciative.”

Ms. T__:

Thanks for your e-mail and kind words.

While acknowledging that most workers in America already have paid leave, you think me “wrong to oppose a government requirement of paid leave.” You base your conclusion on the fact that “it is hard for each worker to get a tailor-made job package…. Workers have to accept what most of their co-workers want.”

With respect, I’ve two related reasons for believing that you fail to make a compelling case for government-mandated paid leave.

First, no worker is destined to hold – and no worker is stuck in – any particular job. Workers who value paid leave highly enough can work for employers that offer such leave, while workers who don’t, don’t. Many employers, in both the private sector and public sector, offer paid leave. And so while it’s true that transaction costs prevent each worker from having an employment package tailored exactly to his or her desires, it’s not true that each worker must accept the employment package that is desired by (and, hence, offered to) the majority of workers for any particular company.

Second, your argument cuts both ways. Precisely because transaction costs prevent each worker from having an employment package tailored exactly to his or her desires, any randomly chosen worker is just as likely to prefer to have less paid leave (and higher money wages) as to have more paid leave (with lower money wages). It’s therefore mistaken to conclude that the transaction costs that prevent each worker from getting an employment package tailored to his or her exact desires results in too little private provision of paid leave. It very well might be the case that these costs result in too much private provision of paid leave – a reality that only further weakens the already unsalvageable case for mandated paid leave.

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

Why Not Also Compel Workers to Purchase from Their Employers On-the-Job Back Massages?

(Don Boudreaux)

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David Henderson has an excellent new post at EconLog on paid leave. But not all EconLog readers share my positive assessment of David’s post. Commenter Peter Gerdes is one who takes issue with David’s case against government-mandated paid leave.

I left this reply at EconLog to Mr. Gerdes’s comment:

Peter Gerdes: Although the U.S. government doesn’t require that employers provide paid family leave, the portion of workers in America who have some form of paid leave is almost two-thirds. This fact is evidence – although admittedly not proof – against your claim that workers are too likely to irrationally choose not to purchase (by accepting lower money wages) paid leave. Is your claim that every rational worker would choose to purchase paid leave? If not, do you have in mind a percentage – 70, 80, 95? – of workers for whom purchasing paid leave is rational?

Also, this comment of yours reveals an implicit yet mistaken assumption:

[R]emember that this policy [presumably of mandating paid leave for all workers] isn’t wholly neutral.  It also effects a transfer from workers who have less need for medical/family leave to those who have more need.  A transfer which wouldn’t happen in the free market.  One could reasonably believe, in fact I think I may believe, that such a transfer is desirable.

The mistaken assumption is that all workers get the same bundle of fringe benefits. Yet precisely because some workers can choose to purchase paid leave by taking lower money wages while other workers can choose not to make this purchase, there is no need for government to force any transfer of the sort that you mention. Smith can have paid leave while Jones doesn’t. It’s a beautiful, peaceful, and mutually agreeable outcome.

Finally, why do you assume that the welfare losses imposed by mandated paid leave on workers who prefer higher money wages in lieu of paid leave would be less than are any resulting welfare gains enjoyed by workers who are willing to be forced to purchase paid leave at the price of lower money wages? Not only (again) can and do many workers already choose to so purchase paid leave, how can you possibly know that the harms that a paid-leave mandate would impose on, say, young childless couples working to save money to have families in the future would be less than the gains to other workers?

More generally, how can you be so sure – so sure as to endorse government coercively imposing paid leave – that the losses that such a policy would impose on workers desperate to earn as much money today as they possibly can would be more than offset by the gains so enjoyed by workers who could, but for some mysterious reason choose not to, purchase paid leave on their own?

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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National Review‘s Wesley Smith reports on the Covidocracy’s authoritarian nature – specifically here, on the demand by Francis Collins, the outgoing head of the National Institutes of Health, that those who dissent from his and other officials’ claims about Covid and Covid-mitigation efforts not only be censored, but “brought to justice.” A slice:

There are abundant reasons why our public-health leaders are less than universally trusted. For example, Anthony Fauci admitted to lying about masks early in the pandemic. He also prevaricated — at best — about U.S. goverment funding of “gain of function” viral research. And he seemed intoxicated by his fame, to the point that he often acted more like an A-list celebrity than a scientist.

Beyond personalities, people have noticed that our most prestigious scientific and medical journals have gone woke. This ideological poisoning of “science” breeds distrust in the process and the conclusions published in these journals — as I and others have written.

Not only that, but people have also noticed that many in “the science community” seem to relish their newfound power — and want to expand it beyond fighting COVID. For example, Fauci has urged that the U.N. and WHO be strengthened to “rebuild the infrastructure of human existence” to prevent future pandemics. Meanwhile, others want technocrats to be empowered to force policies on the public to fight climate change, as they have during the pandemic.

Noah Carl reports that, from early January 2020 through mid-June 2021, Sweden’s excess mortality was negative. A slice:

Sweden has had negative excess mortality. In other words, the level of mortality between January 2020 and June 2021 was lower than the five-year average. If this isn’t a vindication of Anders Tegnell’s approach, I don’t know what is.

Among the recommendations offered by this new paper in BMC Public Health is “Reopen schools now” and “Avoid lockdowns.” (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

Freddie Sayers tweets about the newly announced arrival in Austria of the straw man in full:

Well that didn’t last long.

Cases actually started increasing *faster* after the lockdown for the unvaccinated, so Austria is now moving to universal lockdown and mandatory vaccination from the spring.

Fortunately, more Europeans are protesting the straw-man’s current stomping through their countries…. And, because the U.S. media are largely silent on these protests, el gato malo offers this post.

Also from el gato malo is this appropriate ridicule of the insufferable harasser-of-Americans-in-chief Anthony Fauci, who complains of being ‘harassed’ by false accusations.

James Alexander decries totalitarianism even when it is “nice.” Two slices:

We need to recognise that these are three elements of what we should probably call NICE TOTALITARIANISM. The words ‘social control’ do not quite capture the total significance of what is being put forward by our governments. Every government ever in the history of the world has believed in some measure of social control. To some extent, we define government in terms of its achievement of social control – though this, of course, may be minimally or maximally interpreted. The reason I prefer the phrase ‘nice totalitarianism’ is that it captures the fact that the control now, if not maximal, is a lot closer to maximal than anyone would have expected a few years ago. But there is another reason I prefer it: and this is because it captures the distinctively Western, or specifically, in our case, British, tonality of this totalitarianism: the fact that it is nice.

We are being nice, through ‘saving the planet’ (by sitting down on a busy road or sightseeing wind turbines), ‘making oppressed people feel included and secure’ (by tossing a statue into the sea or signing a petition) and ‘preventing Covid deaths’ (by wearing a mask or getting vaccinated). Who would not want to do those things?

…..

COVID is the name of the threat: it threatens us as individuals, threatening us with suffering and an early death, though our response to it has been interestingly not only collective but coercive. Let us call the response to this threat FAUCISM. (We need a name for the response, to cover the myriad of non-pharmaceutical and pharmaceutical interventions. Anthony Fauci’s name may stand for the whole enterprise, as he is more internationally famous than our own Chris Whitty or Patrick Vallance, as well as more determined and more obviously compromised: and he has become the object of a cult in the United States at least.)

TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid.)

William Nattrass asks why, throughout much of the European continent, lockdowns of the unvaccinated have so quickly become the norm. A slice:

It is now common for Covid vaccine sceptics in the Czech Republic and Slovakia to compare the level of state control being exercised against them to the authoritarianism they witnessed in the twentieth century. A regional head of the Czech state healthcare body responsible for enforcing pandemic restrictions recently complained that members of the public were comparing them to the Czechoslovak secret police during the Communist era.

Peter Scammell is grateful that at least some of his fellow Australians are protesting the malignant growth – supercharged by Covid hysteria – of legalism. A slice:

The Covid capers of the last couple of years have clearly highlighted the fact that there is a dearth of good leaders who are able to make, without threat, reasonable and convincing arguments to a largely peaceful and law-abiding population.  

The behaviour of leadership has also highlighted another and much more serious problem and that is that there is no longer any faith in the notion of responsibility. Responsibility has long since been replaced with legislation which intrudes into every nook and cranny of our lives. It has become the way society manages itself. The idea that every problem can be solved with a piece of legislation, has taken over as the pre-eminent tool of leadership. We have drifted into a form of legalism which is at odds with true democracy. 

If there is a good thing to come out of the pandemic it is the highlighting of the divisive nature of this form of societal management.

Megyn Kelly talks with Scott Atlas:

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 62 of the 2007 collection of some of Joseph Epstein’s essays, In a Cardboard Belt!; specifically, it’s from Epstein’s essay “Memoirs of a Cheap and Finicky Glutton”:

Who, I wonder, invented the BLT? His or her identity ought to be known, for that person brought much more happiness into the world than any modern poet.

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Why Can’t These Officious Scoundrels Simply Leave Us Alone?

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a letter to the Washington Post:

Editor:

George Will’s criticism of Sen. Josh Hawley’s (R-MO’s) scheme for using tariffs and other industrial-policy weapons allegedly to protect American males’ manliness is appropriate (“” November 20th). Real men neither turn for protection to big brother, nor compel others to cooperate by summoning big brother to act as bully.

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

Some Non-Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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. A slice:

As a presidential candidate, Elizabeth Warren said: “Break up big tech.” Concerning his new book, “The Tyranny of Big Tech,” Hawley, displaying what could be called “the victim mind-set,” says: “This is a book the corporate monopolies did not want you to read. Corporate America tried to cancel it, just as they have tried to cancel me.” Hawley has somehow survived, and his book’s message is, of course: Break up big tech.

Big tech is, however, not nearly as big as the government that Hawley wants to wield against companies that have become big by pleasing many scores of millions of Americans. Hawley, like many progressives, thinks Americans need to be protected from the companies by a paternalistic government.

John Cochrane writes wisely on the reality of – and on the true causes of – inflation. Here’s his conclusion:

All prices and wages rising together means that one thing is falling in value — money, and government debt. Inflation is a change in the relative price of money and government debt relative to everything else. Inflation comes thus, fundamentally, from the overall supply vs. demand for money and government debt.

We seem, sadly, to be repeating all the confusion on these affairs that prevailed in the 1970s. Oil price “supply” shocks will surely be “transitory.” President Biden is sending the FTC to hound the oil companies to lower prices. Can “guideposts” be far behind? For a thousand years, inflation has led to a witch hunt after “speculators” and “middlemen” and price rising conspiracies. Here we go.

Speaking of inflation, Allison Schrager explains to Biden’s top economist (Janelle Jones) what, in 2021, should not have to be explained to any economist – namely, that there is no long-run trade-off between inflation and unemployment.

“No, the United States Has Not Always Paid Its Debts” – so explain Marc Joffe and Jeffrey Rogers Hummel.

Pierre Desrochers and Joanna Szurmak explain why Paul Ehrlich, now riding a more than half-century record of spectacularly mistaken predictions, should stop worrying about alleged “over-population.” Two slices:

For instance, in his correspondence with Malthus the French economist Jean-Baptiste Say argued that the belief that a reduced population would “enable those which are left to enjoy a greater quantity of those commodities of which they are in want” was nonsensical because it ignored the fact that a reduction in manpower simultaneously destroyed the means of production. After all, one did not see that “the wants of the inhabitants are more easily satisfied” in thinly populated countries. On the contrary, it was the “abundance of productions, and not the scarcity of consumers, which procures a plentiful supply of whatever our necessities require.”

…..

Closer to us, uber-optimist economist Julian Simon believed that “it is only the past that gives us any insight into the laws of motion of human society and hence enables us to predict the future.” If the future was going to differ, he added, “the bias is likely to be in the direction of understating the rate at which technology will develop, and therefore underestimating the rate at which [natural resource] costs will fall.”

Despite the prevalence of the current apocalyptic environmentalist rhetoric and the self-inflicted economic wounds of lockdowns, we do not doubt that Simon will once again be proven right and Paul Ehrlich wrong, provided that humanity rediscovers its curiosity, motivation to explore and innovate, and the desire to participate in trade and exchange instead of blame and self-flagellation.

From late September is this wisdom-filled essay, in Forbes, by Tilak Doshi. (HT Jonathan Fortier) A slice:

Since the 1920s, the global death rate from extreme weather events, for instance, has fallen by 98% despite the tripling of the world’s population. Average global life expectancy at birth in 1850 was just over 29 years; a century later it was over 45 years, and in 2019, it was almost 73 years. In 1820, almost 90% of the global population lived in absolute poverty. By 2015, this had dropped to less than 10% despite a sevenfold increase in world population.

Robby Soave criticizes the poorly informed who express their disapproval of Kyle Rittenhouse’s acquittal. A slice:

The accounts of former quarterback Colin Kaepernick and the Black Lives Matter movement made similar statements. These remarks all reek of ignorance: A jury acquitting a white defendant for killing two white men is hardly an example of white supremacy.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that activists and Democratic politicians would reflexively cite white supremacy in a trial outcome that disappoints Team Blue. More troubling is the response to the verdict from an organization that should know better: the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). In a statement reacting to the verdict, ACLU-Wisconsin Interim Executive Director Shaadie Ali lamented the “deep roots of white supremacy” in Kenosha that prevented Rittenhouse from being “held responsible for his actions.”

Charle Cooke writes that, in the Rittenhouse case, the justice system worked. A slice:

That Rittenhouse was likely to be acquitted was blindingly obvious from the start. Not only did the State of Wisconsin elect to file its charges just two days after the incident in question — before passions had cooled, before the facts were known, before even a cursory investigation had been conducted — but the charges it picked were wholly unsuited to the facts. With the exception of the now-dropped firearms charge, every single accusation that the state made against Rittenhouse was in the first degree, reflecting a set of assumptions that could not be sustained by the evidence. “How could Rittenhouse have walked?” the cavilers ask. A better question is: How could he not have walked? Contrary to the insinuations of many in the media, this was not a trial of America or of men or of white people or of gun-owners or of teenagers or of people who live in the Midwest, but of a single person, Kyle Rittenhouse, and of the single set of facts that pertained to him. There is no such thing as collective guilt in the United States.

Telegraph columnist Janet Daley decries the rejection in the west of the values that are necessary for liberal civilization. A slice:

The US and Britain – both, within recent memory, confident exponents of free enterprise, now seem determined to repudiate it. In the case of the US, this renunciation is being made explicit. In this country, it is sort-of denied in rhetorical terms but embraced with enthusiasm in actual policy. This is not accidental. Governing politicians do not construct their programmes accidentally. They are conceived, packaged and presented with the most assiduous study of what are taken to be public attitudes and opinions.

So why are we heading for big-government, high-tax, high-spend economic measures when the avowedly state-run economies proved to be so disastrous that they could not survive? Because public opinion seems to indicate that such measures will be popular, if only in the short term.

The problem with this assumption should be easy enough to see. Public opinion is hugely affected (often determined) by those who are most expert at manipulating it – and that is the one thing at which socialism truly excelled. This is the great irony of the post-Cold War world. Anti-capitalist activism is having a golden age. It has become bizarrely more influential in respectable, mainstream Western discourse at the same time as being much less coherent and economically literate in any proper terms.

I know a stupendously bright young woman who several months ago applied for admission to Yale but was denied. If the Yale student quoted here by the Wall Street Journal – in today’s “Notable & Quotable” – is any indication of the quality of Yale’s undergraduates, Yale made the correct decision regarding my young friend: Yale clearly isn’t up to my young friend’s high intellectual standards.

Yakeleen Almazan writing for the Yale Daily News website Nov. 17:

With the number of minutes of daylight in New Haven dropping each week, some students have expressed increased stress levels as they head into the final few weeks of the semester.

Students explained that they are still adjusting to the change as they start to leave their discussion sections in the dark, their days feel shorter and melatonin initiates earlier in the day. Jaden Gonzalez ’25 said that, even after living in New York his whole life, he finds the whole concept of daylight saving to be confusing and said he felt “victimized” by its occurrence.

“Personally, I respond really well to daytime,” Gonzalez said. “I know nothing about the occurrence and why it happens, but I know that I genuinely have worse days because I cannot enjoy the sun as much as I normally could.”

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Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Steve Templeton explains that the quest for virus-free air is futile.

Reason‘s Christian Britschgi reports on the straw-man’s intensified stomping in Austria. Two slices:

Austria has announced a nationwide lockdown, travel restrictions, and forthcoming populationwide vaccine mandate—the first in the European Union.

…..

Austria reported 15,000 new COVID-19 cases yesterday, a record that’s well above last year’s winter peak of 9,262 daily reported cases, according to the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering’s dashboard. The country reported 55 COVID-19 deaths yesterday, which is about half the daily deaths reported during last year’s winter peak.

Some Europeans continue to protest the straw-man’s increasingly violent stomping on the continent – protests that, of course, prompt the Covidocracy to respond with more violence.

Telegraph columnist Camilla Tominey writes that “[a]uthoritarian Europe’s slide back into lockdown vindicates the UK embrace of freedom.” A slice:

The hills are not alive with the sound of music in Austria, where the authorities this week took the quite extraordinary step of locking down the unvaccinated before deciding to shut down the Alpine country altogether.

An entire nation, von Trapped, all over again – 20 months on from the first coronavirus case being confirmed there in February 2020, amid unconfirmed reports of corpses being stored in overcrowded hospital corridors. The Austrian chancellor has also announced deeply authoritarian plans to make it a legal requirement to get vaccinated against Covid by next year.

Swathes of the rest of Europe are also getting tough in a bid to tackle a fourth wave with yet more restrictions – even though the need to do so suggests that the restrictions didn’t work well enough in the first place.

Warning that “unspecified” rules would be introduced in some of Germany’s worst-hit states, Chancellor Angela Merkel set the tone for the Continent on Thursday as she dramatically declared: “It is absolutely time to act.”

She announced that the unvaccinated would be stopped from visiting bars, restaurants and theatres if hospitalisation rates got too high. It came as hospitals in Bavaria have come under so much pressure that patients are having to be transferred to neighbouring countries for treatment.

And here’s Ross Clark on the straw-man’s current abuse of Austrians. A slice:

So, Austria’s experiment to persuade more people to get vaccinated by placing the unvaccinated in lockdown didn’t last long. A week, to be precise. From Monday, the entire country will be placed under stay at home orders and other restrictions — this, after it seemed that the era of lockdowns was over. But perhaps more significantly is Austria’s announcement this morning that from 1 February next year Covid vaccination will be compulsory, with large fines for those who refuse to be jabbed.

Remarkably, in doing so, Alexander Schallenberg’s government is taking a step that even the Chinese Communist party considered going a bit too far — back in April, when some regional governments were trying to impose compulsory vaccination on their populations, the central government ordered them to stop. Austria will join a tiny number of countries that have attempted to mandate vaccination — including Indonesia, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan, although the latter two have not actually enforced compulsory vaccination with any sanction, financial or otherwise.

(DBx: Austria’s population is just over 8.9 million. As of yesterday [Nov. 19th, 2021], the total number of deaths in that country attributed to Covid, since Covid first arrived early in 2020, is 11,951, or about 0.13 percent of Austria’s population. Draconian measures such as are now being imposed in Austria seem to me to be clear and convincing evidence of the reality of Covid Derangement Syndrome – single-minded efforts to suppress exposure to this one disease, until it is virtually eliminated, as a goal that swamps all others. Such an action isn’t modern public health; it’s medieval public torture.)

A close relative of the straw man is visiting Bavaria, where he is – among other holiday tidings – obstructing the right of private people to gather in their own homes for Christmas.

TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid.)

Campus tyranny in Ireland.

el galo mato decries the lies told by the Covidocracy. A slice:

these people either had no idea what they were pushing on you or worse, they DID know and lied to make you do it anyway.

either way, they are now so pot committed that they cannot fold no matter how bad this gets and how wrong they become.

they have to try to brazen it out.

after all, it’s not THEIR lives they wagered, it’s yours.

do you seriously expect this new round of “trust us we’re the experts” to go any better?

for those of you who fell for the “get vaxxed and life will be normal again,” well, i don’t break it out often, but you’ve earned it.

About the Congressman from Illinois who scurrilously attack Jay Bhattacharya, Rav Arora tweets (HT Martin Kulldorff):

Disgusting smear of @DrJBhattacharya by @CongressmanRaja as some kind of supporter of the Chinese Communist Party at the subcommittee hearing on Covid misinformation.

His attacks on Dr. Jay were incredibly dishonest and manipulative.

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Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 5 of the late David Landes’s 2000 paper “Culture Makes Almost All the Difference,” which is chapter 1 in Culture Matters, Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington, eds. (2000):

To be sure, cocoon economies … helped to shelter Argentina and other Latin American economies from the worst effects of the Great Depression. Such is the nature of cocoons. But it also cut them off from competition, stimuli, and opportunities for growth.

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