Russell Roberts's Blog, page 324

Continuing to Resist the Further Politicization of Society

(Don Boudreaux)

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I’m dismayed by the number of people who are willing to further politicize American society by holding private companies liable for First Amendment violations.

Mr. E___:

Thanks for your e-mail.

After reading my letter in today’s Wall Street Journal – a letter in which I object to holding private companies liable for alleged violations of the First Amendment – you ask:

How do you compare your thought that “Government may not silence speech and other expression that it dislikes—private citizens may”, to a fellow letter to the editor writer using the lunch counter analogy of refusing service to anyone they choose. In the latter, you are going to feel the wrath of government for violating a person’s civil rights. Why is there any difference? Do corporations have rights to refuse service to one group doing something the corporation doesn’t “like” and grant service to another group that does the same as the first because they are of the same mind-set as the host?

First and for the record: When I say “private citizens may … silence speech” I mean as long as, in doing so, they violate no one else’s property or contract rights.

Second, as I explain in this January 16th blog post, I don’t see how having taken one or a few steps down the road of government improperly prescribing or proscribing private behavior renders acceptable the taking of further steps down that treacherous road. While I deplore bigotry, I believe that individuals in their private affairs (including operating businesses) should be left free by government to discriminate in whatever peaceful ways they wish. The fact that we Americans long ago lost this particular freedom does not justify the loss of other freedoms – including the freedom to determine what is and what is not said or otherwise peacefully expressed in our privately owned spaces.

But the most direct answer to your question involves the First Amendment’s explicit reach. That amendment prohibits government from obstructing people’s freedom of speech, of the press, of religion, of assembly, and of petition. It says nothing about prohibiting government from obstructing people’s freedom to choose whom to serve commercially and whom to employ.

Regardless of your, my, or anyone else’s attitude toward anti-discrimination legislation, such legislation doesn’t plausibly violate anyone’s First Amendment rights. Therefore, the existence and widespread acceptance of anti-discrimination legislation does not excuse the use of government power, including that of the courts, to superintended and obstruct private citizens’ freedom to use their private property to express themselves, using speech or the written word, in whatever peaceful ways they choose.

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

The Great Thomas Sowell

(Don Boudreaux)

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This new video by John Stossel featuring Thomas Sowell is marvelous.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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In this video, biologist Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying expose some of the shoddiness behind the flawed “science” now spreading virally and causing lethal Covid Derangement Syndrome. (HT Sheldon Richman)

“Americans Are Fleeing Lockdowns, When They Can Afford It” – so reports Jeffrey Tucker.

Covid dictators such as Boris Johnson refuse to let go of their tyrannical powers. And don’t think that what much of humanity is now suffering isn’t real, honest-to-badness tyranny.

Michael Psaras calls for more questioning of the case for lockdowns. Here are his opening paragraphs:

For whatever reason, the Government and much of the media are uninterested in questioning the new orthodoxy surrounding public health — even though the policy of ‘lockdown’ is completely new and, surely by this very reason alone, is worth being sceptical about.

It seems almost heretical to many, in these troubling times, to question the assumption that ‘lockdowns’ work in reducing the prevalence of COVID-19. Arguments may rage over whether governments locked down quick enough or hard enough, but it is hard to come across anyone, especially in the media, proposing that lockdown itself may not be as effective as is so widely assumed.

Will Jones defends lockdown skeptics from the charges hurled at them by pro-lockdowners, who almost to a man and woman is an hysterical zealot no more motivated by genuine science than was Torquemada. A slice:

Lockdowners love to point the finger at the failed predictions of sceptics. But do they check their own rear-view mirror? How much revisiting of their own prognostications have they done to see if they hit the mark? Or is it one rule for the sceptics and another rule for the lockdown zealots?

Meanwhile, one of the most fervent supporters of lockdown, the BBC, has run an analysis asking whether the much-hyped Christmas surge – supposedly resulting from mass household mixing over the festive season – actually materialised. There was no sign of it.

‘It is almost a month since Christmas was “downsized” across the country. But in many parts of the UK, people were allowed to meet in Christmas “bubbles” – if only for just one day. So what impact did this have? The overall picture shows a sharp increase in cases around this time.

‘However, a closer look at the numbers suggests this trend was already happening and was probably caused by the new, more infectious variant of the virus rather than increased contact between people.’

It’s not as though people didn’t mix: ‘A survey from the Office for National Statistics suggests that roughly half the population in Great Britain who were allowed to hold gatherings did so.’

And here’s another video, this one from November, of British MP Charles Walker speaking out against the tyranny of lockdowns:

Some Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Pete Boettke remembers his late classmate, and our mutual friend and former colleague, Jerry Ellig.

Also remembering Jerry is Veronique de Rugy. And here’s the announcement of Jerry’s passing by his employer, George Washington University’s Regulatory Studies Center.

Brian Albrecht explains how price theory helps us navigate the minimum-wage debate. A slice:

One thing that price theory stresses, beyond Walrasian competitive models or supply and demand is that all markets are connected through prices, but not only prices. People also adjust on quantity, as the previous example shows. Moreover, there are many margins that people can change their behavior with the changing circumstances. People aren’t chessmen you move on a board at your whim. There are innumerable subtleties that our models will always miss.

There is always another margin where people can adjust and substitute on.

Also writing intelligently on the minimum wage is Michael Strain.

Yet more must-reading on the minimum wage is offered by John Cochrane. A slice:

Since about forever, young unskilled and poorly socialized people have worked for a while at low or no wages while they pick up skills. Historically it was understood, and part of the employer’s obligation to give them skills and training as part of the deal, to “teach them the trade.” This still happens. Hang out at any small business, and see a teenager sweeping up and learning a lot about how the world works. For rich white college kids it’s called internships. The minimum wage,  restrictions on gig work, and other labor force interventions saying employers must offer either 8 hours full time work with benefits or nothing, cut off this long-standing institution for those on the lower end of the labor market.

So the main effect of minimum wages is to encourage, nay to force, employers to be more picky about who they hire. It benefits the few who are already good workers and can put up with a harder, less flexible schedule, fewer other benefits, and so forth. It hurts the others, many of whom miss the second chance, the on-ramp to legal work.

It’s not so much about how many jobs there are. It’s about who gets them.

National Review‘s David Harsanyi is rightly fearful of the authoritarianism of John Brennan.

Mike Huemer argues that ideology isn’t really about ideas. (HT Arnold Kling)

Here’s David Henderson on Valerie Ramey and the good sense behind taking serious account of the value-of-statistical-lives.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 269 of Richard W. Duesenberg’s insightful 1962 article “Individualism and Corporations” (available without charge on-line here) as it appears in Liberty Fund’s 1981 single-volume collection of the New Individualist Review:

The value of individualism lies in the fact that it encourages pluralism, thrives on dissent and permits the pursuit of all legitimate objectives while it resolves disputes as collisions of interests arise. It permits the pursuit of particular objectives by everyone, individually or collectively, without the coercion of state intervention.

That Rarest of Creatures: A Politician Both Wise and Humane

(Don Boudreaux)

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…..
(HT my excellent Mercatus Center colleague Jack Salmon – a native of Britain and an acquaintance of this MP.)

Liberalism in Peril

(Don Boudreaux)

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The great classical-liberal scholar, and network creator and maintainer extraordinaire, Walter Grinder earlier this evening sent to me the following e-mail. I share it here with his kind permission.

Dear Don,

The fight over the next four years and beyond will be what it has been since the nation’s founding–centralizers vs decentralizers [subsidiarists], Hamiltonians vs Jeffersonians, rationalizers vs spontaneous order folks, and so forth.

Everything I’ve read and heard today is all about praising to the hilt national plans and that there is extant across our fair nation a massive and unnecessary breakdown in coordination. This is not exactly Tom Sowell’s two different visions, but it is close to it. I keep hearing about the lunacy of not having a national plan to fight the coronavirus or a national plan to rejuvenate the US infrastructure, and so forth. Centralizers, rationalizers, central organizers, expediters, coordinators, standardizers, harmonizers–all in the name of efficiency and getting things done right! That itch, that urge to control!

This is very much another example of what Gabriel Kolko found in his studies of the ‘rationalizing’ of market forces [competition] during the first Progressive Era. It demonstrates, of course, a total misunderstanding of economic theory and history, but, nonetheless, here we are.

You will have to hammer away at this theme. The other side [consisting of both Progressives and mainstreamers] will not even listen to you let alone be convinced. It will be a long hard slog. I have no idea where it will end, but I am sure it will not end well, at least in our lifetimes. They will begin to listen only when things fall completely apart. We must prepare young folks to be ready when that happens. More writing and teaching and organizing and nonviolent demonstrating around issues that everyone can understand. The slog will get even ‘slogier.’

Warm regards,
Walter

DBx: Indeed.

Liberalism is today on the ropes – perilously so. It is not simply in disfavor. Liberalism is regarded as being worse than retrograde; it is regarded as evil. And we liberals are regarded as being beneath contempt – perhaps even as subhuman. The cause of liberalism – which is to say, the cause of the open society and of civilization itself – is today in serious peril. We liberals have our work cut out for us.

Bonus Quotation of the Day..

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from philosopher Doug Den Uyl’s excellent September 9th, 2019, essay “A Stake in the Heart of Capitalism“:

The greedy capitalists of the old shareholder model of corporate responsibility had one thing in common with their shareholders, namely, both were largely motivated in the same way. Management was incentivized to maximize profits, and investors invested so that those managers would do so. Under the new stakeholder dispensation, presumably management is to be concerned with the public good. Greed and self-interest are replaced by concern for public well being. Of course there might still be a way to interpret the actions of management under this new dispensation as self-interested. They can now avoid having to answer solely to the group most likely to monitor their activities – their investors – in favor of a concern for their stakeholder pool in general. This might be another way of saying they don’t have to answer to anybody while pretending to care about everybody.

Jerry Ellig

(Don Boudreaux)

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I just learned that Jerry Ellig died suddenly last night. This news is awful and terrible at both a personal and professional level.

Jerry was a GMU Econ alum and former Mercatus Center scholar. For the past several years he worked at George Washington University’s Regulatory Studies Center.

Jerry was a uniquely insightful and careful economist, and a helluva nice and funny guy. As my colleague Pete Boettke just observed by e-mail, Jerry seemed like the kind of person who never aged. (Jerry and Pete were in the same grad-student cohort at GMU, one that entered in 1984.)

Regular readers of Cafe Hayek – or of the Wall Street Journal – will recognize Jerry’s name. Recently, he’s written several pieces with Phil Gramm, each busting prevalent and dangerous economic myths. This piece from 15 months ago is especially relevant now.

Among the papers that I’m most proud to have my name on is this one that Jerry and I wrote together in 1992.

In this photo taken on GMU’s Fairfax campus in the Spring of 1987, Jerry is the guy in the white shirt standing at the far right in the second row (from the front).

Rest peacefully, my friend. You’ll be intensely missed.

Thought Experiments About the Minimum Wage

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a letter to a high-school senior in Wisconsin who (I boast) reads Café Hayek:

Mr. S___:

Thanks for your e-mail.

I share your negative opinion of Pres. Biden’s proposal to more than double the national minimum wage to $15 per hour. And I’m unsurprised that most of your classmates disagree with you: Raising the minimum wage does seem to most people to be an obvious means of increasing low-paid workers’ incomes.

In a follow-up e-mail I’ll send you links both to recent empirical research on the minimum wage as well as to some excellent short economic analyses of this policy. But here let me suggest two thought experiments for you to put to your classmates.

I’m sure that many of your classmates earn income by doing odd-jobs such as babysitting, mowing lawns, and shoveling snow. So ask them what they think would happen if government forced them to double the amounts that they charge to do these jobs. Do your classmates think that parents with young children will continue to hire as many hours of babysitting at (say) $30 per hour as they hire at $15 per hour? Will homeowners’ willingness to hire neighborhood kids to mow lawns be unchanged if the price of getting a lawn mown is forced up from (say) $25 to $50? Will neighbors be just as willing to pay (say) $40 to have snow shoveled off of their driveways as they are when they must pay only $20?

Hopefully these questions will cause your classmates to see that a forced increase in the prices they must charge to sell their labor will cause the quantity of labor that they’re able to sell to fall. (I encourage you to emphasize to your classmates that raising the minimum wage is government’s way of forcing low-skilled workers to raise the prices that they charge for their labor.)

But I predict that some of your classmates will find the above questions unpersuasive. To these classmates you can put some follow-up questions.

Take note of items that they purchase with their own money – items such as bottled water, meals at fast-food restaurants, movie-theater tickets (pre-Covid, of course), jeans, headphones and other electronic items. Then ask them how they’d react if the prices of these items were to double. Would they buy as many bottles of water at $3 per bottle as they buy at $1.50 per bottle? Would they go to the movies just as often if the ticket price rose from $10 to $20? Would they be just as willing to buy a pair of jeans priced at $250 as they are when it’s priced at $125?

Alas, some classmates will intransigently insist that their willingness to buy would remain unchanged. But deep down they’ll know they’re not telling the truth – and they’ll know that you know it.

Good luck!

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