Russell Roberts's Blog, page 23

Some Links

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board decries what are obviously politically motivated attempts to discredit today’s U.S. Supreme Court. A slice:

“Ethics” is a time-honored political weapon in Washington, and it’s being used now against the Court because conservatives have a majority that is cleaning up some of the legal mistakes of recent decades. It has sent abortion policy back to the states (to the political benefit of Democrats in most places), expanded protections for the Bill of Rights, and is slowly restoring constitutional guardrails on the administrative state. Most of all, the Court is no longer a backstop legislature for progressives to impose policies they can’t get through Congress.

The first sign that this is all politics is the context for the hearing. Note that it’s been triggered by easilydebunkedreports about the conservative Justices, especially claims that Justice Thomas didn’t properly disclose certain financial transactions.

But Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson didn’t get the same attention when she revised her financial disclosures in 2022. Her oversights were far more extensive than Justice Thomas’s. There was also no outcry in 2020 when Justice Sonia Sotomayor amended her financial disclosures after the group Fix the Court found that she hadn’t disclosed reimbursement for trips to universities.

Glenn Reynolds weighs in on the media’s role in attempts to discredit the Court. A slice:

“Wait till the next empty shoe drops.”

That’s how law professor Josh Blackman concludes a discussion of The New York Times’ open-mouthed discovery that law schools have summer study-abroad programs and sometimes they recruit celebrity professors, even Supreme Court justices, to teach them.

The Times believes it has found a scandal because George Mason’s Scalia Law School has one of these programs and seeks Supreme Court justices to teach in the summer.

My law school has one of these too. So does Blackman’s.

He comments: “Shocker! A DC law school works hard to connect its students with the leaders of the profession. My own law school has organized similar programs in the past with Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Ginsburg. (My students described it as a once-in-a-lifetime experience.)”

But, you see, the law school and the justices involved here are conservative, so the Times thinks — or, more accurately, wants its readers to think — there must be something nefarious going on, perhaps “collusion.”

Why, George Mason’s legal clinic sometimes files friend-of-the-court briefs in the Supreme Court, which the paper would like you to believe is some sort of conflict of interest.

Never mind that schools like Harvard and Yale were — until recently, anyway — much closer to many justices on the court than this.

Speaking of the U.S. Supreme Court, it has agreed to hear a case on the Chevron doctrine (which, as described by the Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board, “says judges should defer to regulators’ interpretations when laws are supposedly ambiguous”). A slice from the WSJ‘s Editorial:

Applying the Court’s Chevron (1984) framework, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the government’s broad interpretation as “reasonable” because it was not expressly precluded by the law. In other words, as long as a law doesn’t forbid the government from doing something, it can do it. Where have we seen this before?

The Biden vaccine mandate and eviction moratorium were particularly egregious examples. The High Court resolved challenges to those policies under its major questions doctrine, which requires clear authorization from Congress for regulations that are politically or economically significant.

The Court is taking the next logical step by agreeing to revisit its much-abused Chevron precedent. This suggests that there could be five Justices willing to overturn the doctrine or at the least pare it back, which would strengthen the separation of powers and individual liberty. More potentially good news from the High Court.

Samuel Gregg applauds the late Ramón Díaz.

Colin Grabow and Alfredo Carrillo Obregon report on “the Jones Act’s role in encouraging Puerto Rico’s use of Russian energy.”

Pierre Lemieux has now reviewed all three volumes of the new edition of Hayek’s magnificent 1970s trilogy, Law, Legislation, and Liberty. A slice:

Liberal democracy originally referred simply to “a method of procedure for determining government decisions” or, more practically, for getting rid of governments without bloodshed. Democracy was a protection against tyranny. It is an error to view democracy not as “a procedure for arriving at agreement on common action,” but instead “to give it a substantive content prescribing what the aim of those activities ought to be.”

The current, unlimited democracy leads to rent-seeking (competition for government privileges), the triumph of special interest groups, and legal corruption. The cause is that a government with unlimited powers “cannot refuse to exercise them,” so everybody will rush to the public trough.

Scott Atlas talks with my GMU colleague Todd Zywicki about the public-health establishment’s abuse of its power.

Ramesh Ponnuru singles out four claims made by Fauci during his recent interview with David Wallace-Wells of the New York Times. Two slices:

First: Fauci tells David Wallace-Wells that the U.S. mortality rate from Covid was “worse than virtually all other countries.” Wallace-Wells points out that this isn’t remotely true, and Fauci seems to concede the point. This seems like a pretty basic question to get wrong.

…..

Third: Fauci says that he has been unfairly criticized for government Covid policies that he did not set. He did not shut down schools or factories, he says. He says that “public-health people” including him looked only at the public-health dimensions of policy options. They left it to other people — such as governors, presumably — to incorporate other considerations, such as the economy, into the final decisions they made.

Our editorial scorns this self-defense. Its availability goes to the heart of what I think went wrong with our Covid regime. You can’t really say, in one breath, hey, we’re just technical experts making non-binding recommendations and then, in the next, if you deviate from these recommendations you are an anti-science lunatic. Fauci is not wholly responsible for the “follow the science” mindset but he certainly contributed to it.

Jay Bhattacharya tweets:

When a cult dies, and it should now be clear to all that the covidian cult is dying, many cult members will feel the pain of loss, as they search for something else to fill the virus shaped hole in their heart.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from page 24 of David Schmidtz’s hot-off-the-press 2023 book, Living Together:

In practice, the first thing we need from institutions is a settled framework of mutual expectation that keeps the peace well enough to foster conditions that enable society to be a cooperative venture for mutual  benefit.

“Common-Good Capitalism” Is Really “Person X’s-Good Statism”

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

In my latest column for AIER I explain that, because so-called “common-good capitalism” rejects the liberalism within which genuine capitalism is and must be rooted, “common-good capitalism” is really a front for the preferred variety of statism peddled by a “common good capitalist.” A slice:

In his important new book, Living Together, the liberal philosopher David Schmidtz describes (although he doesn’t use the term) the common good for liberals as being an effective system of managing the “traffic” of countless individuals interacting with each other in pursuit of their own diverse goals:

Justice [as understood by liberals] is our way of adapting to a miraculous feature of our ecosystem; namely, our ecosystem is populated by beings with ends of their own – highly plastic animals who choose (and sometimes second-guess) not only means but ends themselves…. Liberalism’s defining insight is that effective traffic management is not about agreeing how to rank destinations. Liberal justice does not task travelers with even knowing other people’s destinations, much less with ranking them….

When travelers respect each other in that easily understood and profoundly egalitarian way, implicitly treating the values of their respective journeys as presumptively (even if not necessarily) on a par, they do what it takes to constitute their society as a place that promotes value. Society depends less on people knowing how to promote value than it depends on people who share the road reading signs, seeing whose turn it is, and in that way knowing how to respect value.

If the economic system implied by this kind of common good — a common good that is real and remarkable — is all that is meant by Marco Rubio, Oren Cass, and other “common good capitalists,” then nothing distinguishes “common good capitalism” from capitalism unprefixed. But of course Messrs. Rubio, Cass, and other “common good capitalists” dohave in mind an economic system profoundly different from that which is championed today by liberal scholars such as Vernon Smith, Thomas Sowell, Bruce Yandle, Deirdre McCloskey, Robert Higgs, and my colleague Pete Boettke. What each “common good capitalist” wants is an economic system engineered to serve his or her preferred set of concrete ends. Gone would be the liberal freedom of individuals to choose and pursue their own ends. Under “common good capitalism,” everyone would be conscripted to produce and consume in ways meant to promote only the ends favored by “common good capitalists.”

Note the irony. The economic system that, say, Oren Cass claims to advocate as a means of promoting the common good is, in reality, a means of promoting only the good as conceived by Oren Cass (which, for him, consists largely of an economy with more manufacturing jobs and a smaller financial sector). The hubris here is undeniable. “Common good capitalists” not only presume to have divined which concrete ends are best to guide the actions of hundreds of millions of individuals, nearly all of whom are strangers to them, but also are so confident in their divinations that they advocate pursuing these with the use of force.

The liberal doesn’t object to attempts to persuade others to adopt different and, hopefully, better ends. By all peaceful means, do your best to persuade me to embrace, as the lodestar for my choice of concrete ends, Catholic Social Teaching, economic nationalism, Marxism, veganism, or whatever other teaching or -ism you believe best defines the common good. But do not presume that your sincere embrace of a specific system of concrete values provides sufficient warrant for you to compel me and others to behave as if we share your particular values.

To the extent that the state intrudes into market processes in order to redirect these toward the achievement of particular ends, it replaces market competition and cooperation with command-economy dirigisme. Income earners are not allowed to use the fruits of their creativity and efforts as they choose. Instead, consumption ‘decisions’ will be directed by government officials. The result will be a reallocation of resources achieved through the use, mostly, of tariffs and subsidies. And by so redirecting consumption expenditures, the pattern of production will obviously also be changed from what would prevail in a free market. (In fact, the specific goal of most “common good capitalists” seems to be the achievement of a particular manner of production — for example, more factory jobs — than would arise with markets left free.)

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from page 115 of Robert Higgs’s insightful Summer 1998 Independent Review essay, “Official Economic Statistics: The Emperor’s Clothes Are Dirty,” as this essay is reprinted in the 2004 collection of some of Bob’s essays, Against Leviathan (footnote deleted):

Because they are ill defined conceptually, many official economic statistics fail to capture what they purport to measure. Figures on “poverty,” for instance, are notorious in this regard. Is poverty an absolute or a relative condition? If the latter, what is the proper standard of comparison? Obviously, the living conditions of many Americans below the “poverty line” must seem affluent to billions of submerged denizens of the Third World. Apart from international comparisons, many Americans now classified as poor would have seemed well-to-do in the eyes of, say, their grandparents. Above a certain absolute income, “poverty” becomes less a definite condition than a staging area from which armies of redistributionists launch their attacks on higher-income people.

Some Links

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

Someone should inform Nancy MacLean that statements are not libelous if they’re true. She should also be warned that her own false claims might well be libelous (although, as is evident by her tweet – and, indeed, by much of her ‘scholarship’ – she can plausibly defend herself by pleading feeblemindedness).

Matt Welch reasonably wonders about “the very strange new respect for authoritarian Democrat Robert F. Kennedy Jr.” A slice:

Recasting RFK Jr. as a foe of censorship and potential tamer of government requires ignoring what he has been and imagining things he’ll never be. Among a lifetime of eyebrow-raising public activities, Bobby Kennedy’s son has repeatedly egged on government to punish those who disagree with his idiosyncratic understandings of science.

Here he is in a September 2014 interview, for example, arguing that billionaire industrialists/philanthropists/political donors Charles Koch and his then-still-alive brother David Koch (both of whom donated to the Reason Foundation over the years) “should be in jail…enjoying three hots and a cot at The Hague with all the other war criminals” and that politicians who agree with the Kochs about global warming are “contemptible human beings” of whom he “wish[ed] that there was a law that you can punish them under”…..

After this lock-’em-up interview drew criticism (including from National Review‘s Charles C.W. Cooke, who described it as “a sure sign of mental imbalance, and a gold-leafed invitation to be quietly excluded from polite society”), Kennedy came out with a clarification removing from his prosecutorial crosshairs most of the individual “climate-deniers,” but stressing that “corporations which deliberately, purposefully, maliciously and systematically sponsor climate lies should be given the death penalty.”

The Wall Street Journal‘s Nicholas Tomaino reports on the latest shabby attempt to paint a conservative U.S. Supreme Court Justice as unethical.

Jason Sorens explains how restrictions on the ownership of guns might well make governments accomplices to crimes.

Pierre Lemieux understandably wonders what the term “marginalized group” means.

Scott Sumner decries the costs of economic nationalism.

How many millions of hours of regulatory paperwork has Biden added since his inauguration?

Wall Street Journal columnist Allysia Finley ably defends the stance taken by Florida’s Surgeon General, Joseph Ladapo, on covid vaccines for young people. Here’s her conclusion:

Dr. Ladapo’s findings might not be accepted by the “broader medical community,” but they also aren’t outliers. A study in Nature Communications in March found a 70% increased risk of cardiac death after a second mRNA vaccine dose among 12- to 29-year-old males in England. (The study still found the absolute risk of death to be very small—about 1 in 360,000.)

The orthodox view is that the myocarditis risk for young men from vaccines pales in comparison to Covid infection, but that isn’t clear since their risk of severe illness from the virus is tiny and the vaccines don’t prevent infection. That’s why Dr. Ladapo recommended against them for young men. If he’s wrong, why are his critics responding with personal attacks rather than data and analysis?

The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board is amazed at “Randi Weingarten’s incredible covid memory loss.” A slice:

Alas, her “detail” omitted a few things. Such as her description in July 2020 of the Trump Administration’s push to reopen schools for in-person learning that autumn as “this reckless, this callous, this cruel.” That summer she also endorsed teacher “safety strikes” if unions deemed local reopening protocols to be inadequate. Hundreds of private and charter schools did open that fall without the surge of illness that Ms. Weingarten claimed to fear.

She also left out the detail that local union affiliates were the most aggressive opponents of school reopening throughout 2021 and even into 2022. “We are practically begging [the Chicago Teachers Union] to come to the table so we can get a deal done,” Chicago’s Democratic Mayor Lori Lightfoot said in February 2021.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from page 325 of the 2016 second edition of Thomas Sowell’s excellent volume Wealth, Poverty and Politics (footnote deleted; original emphases):

There is, however, a fundamental difference between a fixed structure and a fluid process. [Thomas] Piketty glosses over the process in which people’s incomes change very substantially over the course of their lives – or even in the course of just one decade. More than half of all taxpayers moved to a different income quintile between 1996 and 2005, and the same was true in the preceding decade. Piketty’s crucial misstep has the effect of verbally converting a fluid process over time into a rigid structure, with a more or less permanent top one percent living isolated from the rest of society that is supposedly subject to their influence. It is a vision divorced from demonstrable facts, however consonant it may be with prevailing preconceptions.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from pages 161 of the 1971 Augustus M. Kelley reprint of the 1880 Sixth American edition of Jean-Baptiste Say‘s 1803 A Treatise on Political Economy (Traité d’économie politique):

Should any one maintain, that the advantage of producing at home counterbalances the hardship of paying dearer for almost every article; that our own capital and labour are engaged in the production, and the profits pocketed by our own fellow-citizens; my answer is, that the foreign commodities we might import are not to be had gratis: that we must purchase them with values of home production, which would have given equal employment to our industry and capital; for we must never lose sight of this maxim, that products are always bought ultimately with products. It is most for our advantage to employ our productive powers, not in those branches in which foreigners excel us, but in those which we excel in ourselves; and with the product to purchase of others. The opposite course would be just as absurd, as if a man should wish to make his own coats and shoes. What would the world say, if, at the door of every house an import duty were laid upon coats and shoes, for the laudable purpose of compelling the inmates to make them for themselves? Would not people say with justice, Let us follow each his own pursuits, and buy what we want with what we produce, or, which comes to the same thing, with what we get for our products. The system would be precisely the same, only carried to a ridiculous extreme.

DBx: Indeed.

The following reality cannot be too often proclaimed: Protectionism is to sound economics what Lysenkoism is to sound biology. It is embraced only by the uninformed, the ideologically benighted, the incurably dull-witted, or the greedy rent-seekers.

Some Links

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

Scott Winship writes consistently, and informatively, with wisdom.

Laura Williams applauds the miracle of the 99¢ pineapple. Here’s her conclusion:

Pineapples were once a supreme luxury item, which (through a combination of industrial process improvement, specialization, and relocation to regions with marginal advantages in pineapple growing) have become accessible to almost everyone. When past centuries’ most-iconic luxuries become commonplace and affordable, we always have specialization and market innovations to thank.

David Henderson: “When is income not income? When the Washington state Supreme Court says it’s not.”

Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins rightly warns of the lawless administrative state. A slice:

But antitrust enforcers get no attention if they don’t block deals—no press, no prestige, no bump in resources. Their leaders don’t get their tickets punched. Parents, let your children know: When opportunists smell advantage, opportunists will be seen diving in head first. After the Trump administration’s AT&T-Time Warner folly, I speculated trustbusting would hit rock bottom when Lina Khan’s Federal Trade Commission attacked Microsoft-Activision purely on big-tech animus. Rock bottom turns out to be deeper than I suspected. Ms. Khan has been caught playing footsie with the Brits to sandbag two U.S. companies because she feared U.S. law might not let her sandbag them.

Chuck Baird weighs in on the Biden administration’s preposterous scheme to penalize mortgage borrowers with good credit in order to subsidize mortgage borrowers with bad credit.

Matthew Lau makes the case for school choice in Canada. A slice:

Moreover, the case for school choice, as Milton Friedman said, does not assume that private schools are better than public schools, but simply that competition is better than monopoly. Whether in schools or anything else, diversity is better than an imposed monolithic conformity. And as in the United States, in Canada the consequences of political mismanagement, overly powerful teachers’ unions, and education bureaucrats run amok provide plenty of strong evidence of the value of divergence from the government monopoly.

“Immigration Should Be as Easy for Everyone As It Is for NBA Players.”

Mark Paoletta, writing at National Review, defends Justice Clarence Thomas from the exaggerated accusations now leveled against him by progressives.

Even Stephen Gillers, a left-wing judicial-ethics expert often quoted in these sorts of stories, stated that “before the recent amendments, the situation was sufficiently vague to give Thomas a basis to claim that reporting was not required.”

Moreover, there is a video Senator Sheldon Whitehouse helpfully posted recently on Twitter of an exchange he had with a Senate Judiciary Committee witness at a hearing last year on this issue. In the hearing, both Whitehouse and witness agreed with Justice Thomas’s interpretation. Senator Whitehouse asked Kedric Payne, of the far-left Campaign Legal Center, if he agreed that a justice wouldn’t have to disclose a “free vacation” under the then-current personal-hospitality rule. Payne agreed because “the way that rule is interpreted is not clear by the courts and it could be used in that way.”

Senator Whitehouse and Kedric Payne do not like the way this rule was implemented. But that is immaterial to the conclusion that Justice Thomas had no obligation to disclose these innocuous trips. The simple fact is that this was permissible.

Spiked‘s Tom Slater is correct: Biden is a willing tool of the woke. A slice:

And yet he has effectively become America’s first woke president. He doesn’t just genuflect to identitarian narratives, as Barack Obama was wont to do later on in his presidency, following the first blush of Black Lives Matter. Biden has put them at the centre of governance.

There are those who will say it’s ridiculous to suggest that Biden, an octogenarian machine politician who wasn’t even particularly socially liberal for much of his career, is now some sort of leftist ideologue. But such people are letting the old political labels obscure the new and sinister things that are taking place.

Wokeness – though it might have first germinated among sections of the left – has never been progressive in the slightest. It wants to rehabilitate racial categories. It wants to rip up sex-based rights. It relies on coercion and censorship to defeat its opponents. It cannot compute class politics. Indeed, its obsession with race only pits working-class people against one another.

Vinay Prasad justly criticizes Anthony Fauci and Randi Weingarten each for denying any responsibility for calamitous policies that they endorsed. Two slices:

Fauci’s next claim is that he always wanted school reopened. This is contradicted by a detailed timeline of his position on schools, which was consistently to fearmonger about kids and keep them closed.

…..

Randi claims she just wanted to open schools safety, but the problem is you didn’t need 750 billion dollars and hepa filtration to open safely. Even masks were unnecessary. Ultimately, schools reopened and ~100% of kids got COVID anyway, the vast majority did fine, most did not have the vaccine beforehand, and there is no reliable evidence the vax lowered the risk of severe disease for kids. All you needed to reopen were teachers with courage, sadly Randi and Tony sapped that away from them with constant inaccurate rhetoric.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from page 13 of David Schmidtz’s hot-off-the-press 2023 book, Living Together (original emphasis):

What we need to avoid is not mistakes per se so much as being slow to admit mistakes. Being quick to admit mistakes, thus quick to learn, drives progress.

DBx: Yes. And in this insight there is yet another lesson for industrial policyists. For their schemes to have even a remote prospect of working as well as free markets at improving the public welfare, the government officials in possession of the discretionary power both to spend other people’s money and to impose restrictions on how other people spend their own money must have access to reliable knowledge about how well or poorly their subsidies and trade restrictions are working. Yet because these officials censor many market signals, and ignore many other such signals that are not censored, these officials receive no good or timely feedback about the performance of their schemes.

Furthermore, because neither the benefits nor the costs of the decisions made by industrial-policy mandarins are concentrated on those mandarins – these benefits and costs are dispersed across the country’s entire population – these mandarins will be much slower than are private entrepreneurs and investors to admit their errors and take corrective action even when evidence of error arises.

The bottom line is that anyone who argues that industrial policy is a sound means of improving the performance of the overall economy is someone who believes in miracles.

…..

Industrial policyists are very much like the archer depicted here.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from page 25 of William Gladstone’s January 1890 contribution to a debate, with James G. Blaine of Maine, on free trade versus protectionism; these remarks are published in volume CCCXCVIII of the North American Review:

In speaking thus, we speak greatly from our own experience [in Great Britain]. I have personally lived through the varied phases of that experience, since we began that battle between monopoly and freedom which cost us about a quarter of a century of the nation’s life. I have seen and known, and had the opportunity of comparing, the temper and frame of mind engendered first by our protectionism, which we now look back upon as servitude, and then by the commercial freedom and equality which we have enjoyed for the last thirty or forty years. The one tended to harden into positive selfishness; the other has done much to foster a more liberal tone of mind.

DBx: Protectionism is legalized plunder. It is the unjust use of state power to do deeds that, were a person to attempt to perform privately, that same power would justly be used to prevent.

Yet economic ignorance, often combined with ignorance of empirical realities, often leads well-meaning people to view protectionism favorably. The rent-seekers who are unjustly enriched by protectionism of course welcome this ignorance and often stoke it. But ignorance that causes acts of plunder to be falsely perceived as acts of productive statesmanship, or at least as something less than acts of plunder, does not change the underlying reality: Protectionism is plunder gussied up to appear peaceful and unobjectionable to the untrained eye.

As Gladstone suggests, the greater is the acceptance of this form of plunder, the more will it encourage the exercise of people’s venal and conniving muscles. One benefit, therefore, of a steadfast policy of free trade is that it helps these dangerous muscles to atrophy as it stimulates better and more-civilized muscles, such as those of genuine commerce and of mutual respect. Insofar as trade is free, everyone gains by helping as many as possible of his or her fellow citizens to gain as much as possible. Insofar as trade is restricted, the few gain by inflicting larger losses on the many.