Russell Roberts's Blog, page 39

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from pages 71-72 of Thomas Sowell’s monumental 1980 volume, Knowledge and Decisions:

Many of the products which create a modern standard of living are only the physical incorporation of ideas – not only the ideas of an Edison or Ford, but the ideas of innumerable anonymous people who figure out the design of supermarkets, the location of gasoline stations, and the million mundane things on which our material well-being depends. It is those ideas that are crucial, not the physical act of carrying them out. Societies which have more people carrying out physical acts and fewer people supplying ideas do not have higher standards of living. Quite the contrary. Yet the physical fallacy continues on, undaunted by this or any other evidence.

DBx: Indeed so.

What Sowell calls the “physical fallacy” is especially visible today in the many lamentations over the decline in the United States of manufacturing employment, and in the accompanying proposed schemes for using government power to artificially create more manufacturing jobs. Such lamentations and proposals reflect deep economic ignorance.

As Sowell points out a few pages prior to the above-quoted passage, true physical creation is performed only by nature. All that we humans do is to take the atomic and molecular structures created by nature and rearrange these into structures more useful to us.

Nature, for example, creates trees (although we humans have creatively cross-bred and cared for trees in ways that improve them for our purposes). But trees, as such, aren’t very useful to humans beyond their ability to cast shade. Trees become useful only by being transformed, in cost-efficient ways, into items such as firewood, canoes, hammer handles, toy choo-choos, two-by-four studs, plywood, flooring, household furniture, paper, maple syrup, and rubber. Every one of these useful items is the product of human creativity and ideas, as is each of the processes for transforming trees into such items. To identify as productive only those actions that involve the physical handling of trees and lumber is to fail to identify not only a set of other necessary steps in production, but what are the most important steps – most important in the sense of being the steps that are the ultimate source of value-creation: the creativity and ideas.

Recognition of this reality, of course, demolishes the Marxian (and many other dogmas’) notion that value-creation is done only, or chiefly, by physical labor. Physical labor, of course, is necessary. But it is downstream from the ideas that put it into motion. Indeed, that which gives human labor its value are these ideas. Toiling to rearrange matter into forms that are useless to human beings creates no value; in fact, such toil is wasteful and, hence, harmful to society. Human work effort becomes valuable – becomes truly productive – only if and when someone figures out how to conduct that effort in ways that transform physical matter into things useful to human beings.

The ‘someone’ who performs this creative task might be the same individual who toils to do the physical transformation. In a modern economy, however, that someone is almost never the physical worker. It’s typically an entrepreneur or a firm manager. In addition, no manufacturing worker’s toil would be worth much absent the complex processes of contract formation and enforcement, transportation, wholesaling, retailing, marketing, financial intermediation and risk management, insurance, and communications – all activities of the much-derided service sector.

Those persons and organizations – in the U.S., from the Economic Policy Institute on the left to American Compass on the right – who ridicule financial markets and free trade while scheming to create more jobs in manufacturing – are simply economically ignorant. They fall victim to the physical fallacy, and remain mired in it. And their proposed policies, to the extent that these are enacted, inevitably reduce the living standards of the ordinary men and women who are the objects of these organizations’ concerns.

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(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s part 2 of James Harrigan’s and Antony Davies’s discussion with Phil Magness about the 1619 Project.

George Will decries governments’ abuse of plea bargaining. Two slices:

A just-published report by an American Bar Association task force says plea bargaining has not only become the primary way to resolve criminal cases, “some jurisdictions have not had a criminal trial in many years.” Think about that: Years can pass without a defendant exercising the constitutional right to an adversarial process conducted in public in front of a neutral judge and a jury of the defendant’s peers.

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This often begins with detention in frightening conditions: To be arrested is to be suddenly plunged into control by a government speaking an often arcane legal language. Then there is “stacking” — prosecutors piling on charges which, in a context of mandatory minimum sentences, force defendants to choose between risking potentially life-ruining trials and pleading guilty to lesser charges, even if innocent.

This “trial penalty” for exercising a fundamental constitutional right is intolerable. In terms of justice, what is the superiority of confessions achieved by the coercion of “stacking” in a courthouse negotiation, and those achieved in the bad old days by beatings with truncheons in the back rooms of police stations?

The task force’s report stresses that plea bargaining has legitimate uses. It incentivizes defendants to accept responsibility for criminal conduct, and offers finality to their victims and the community. Furthermore, prosecutorial resources are scarce, and plea bargaining is a mechanism for efficiently resolving cases. No value in life, however, invariably supersedes all others, and the pursuit of efficiency has too often become “the driving force of criminal adjudication,” supplanting transparency and justice.

“Taxes Have Made New York Into an Empire of Cigarette Smuggling” – so explain Todd Nesbit and Mike LaFaive in the Wall Street Journal. Two slices:

New York has created a cigarette-smuggling empire, and the worst is yet to come. It’s the unavoidable consequence of the state’s decadeslong history of raising the cigarette tax, which Gov. Kathy Hochul wants to continue with an additional levy of $1 a pack. She also wants to ban flavored cigarettes. This will only lead to more lawbreaking and less tax revenue, defeating its purpose.

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New York can’t keep tobacco, drugs and other contraband out of its prisons and jails. How does it expect to stop smugglers from finding ways to bring untaxed cigarettes into the state? It’s hard to see a scenario in which Ms. Hochul’s proposal would achieve its ends or have a positive impact. The negative consequences are easy to predict—they’re happening now. New York should be looking for ways to end cigarette smuggling. One great way to start is by not increasing taxes even more.

Robert Wright asks: “Why have any government-mandated occupational standards at all?”

Arnold Kling introduces himself to his new readers on Substack.

Here’s my former GMU Econ colleague Bill Shughart on the Fed. A slice:

Fed officials thus exercise considerable discretion over the central bank’s monetary policymaking, the goals of which are to pursue what Milton Friedman called the “Holy Trinity” of stable prices, full employment, and economic growth. In so doing, Boris Pesek and Thomas Saving once observed that “even a moron who gets the right to print government currency (Federal Reserve notes) and sell it for income-earning assets … is bound to show a profit.” Those profits, unsurprisingly, are plowed back into the Fed itself and “expensed” on its balance sheet as amenities (lavish office spaces, thick carpets) for the benefit of the central bank’s employees.

Walter Olson is correct: “General bans on election untruths would violate the First Amendment.”

“Delivering on the Promise of Platforms.”

Here’s a discussion with Matt Ridley on the lab-leak theory.

Chabria tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

The problem with public health is the problem with government bureaucracy in that you cannot serve the public while serving a government hand in glove with special interest groups and completely divorced and detached from the people affected by the burden of your decisions.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 401 of the late, great UCLA economists Armen Alchian’s and William R. Allen’s Universal Economics (2018; Jerry L. Jordan, ed.); this volume is an updated version of Alchian’s and Allen’s magnificent and pioneering earlier textbook, University Economics:

Thousands of years of recorded history present a persistent story of poverty and tyranny, with an occasional experiment in personal freedom and opportunity being fulfillingly productive. If we are to foster the good society and its responsive, efficient economy, intellectual competence must be married to high character. Otherwise, we will defeat ourselves by generating increasingly efficient gulags.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 267 of Thomas Sowell’s 1999 book, Barbarians Inside the Gates:

One of the most dangerous trends of our times is that increasing numbers of people have a vested interest in the helplessness of other people.

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(Don Boudreaux)

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Scott Atlas, writing in Newsweek, identifies ten lies that were at the root of America’s irrational, tyrannical, and dangerously counterproductive response to covid. Two slices:

Almost all of America’s leaders have gradually pulled back their COVID mandates, requirements, and closures—even in states like California, which had imposed the most stringent and longest-lasting restrictions on the public. At the same time, the media has been gradually acknowledging the ongoing release of studies that totally refute the purported reasons behind those restrictions. This overt reversal is falsely portrayed as “learned” or “new evidence.” Little acknowledgement of error is to be found. We have seen no public apology for promulgating false information, or for the vilification and delegitimization of policy experts and medical scientists like myself who spoke out correctly about data, standard knowledge about viral infections and pandemics, and fundamental biology.

The historical record is critical. We have seen a macabre Orwellian attempt to rewrite history and to blame the failure of widespread lockdowns on the lockdowns’ critics, alongside absurd denials of officials’ own incessant demands for them. In the Trump administration, Dr. Deborah Birx was formally in charge of the medical side of the White House’s coronavirus task force during the pandemic’s first year. In that capacity, she authored all written federal policy recommendations to governors and states and personally advised each state’s public health officials during official visits, often with Vice President Mike Pence, who oversaw the entire task force. Upon the inauguration of President Joe Biden, Dr. Anthony Fauci became chief medical advisor and ran the Biden pandemic response.

We must acknowledge the abject failure of the Birx-Fauci policies. They were enacted, but they failed to stop the dying, failed to stop the infection from spreading, and inflicted massive damage and destruction particularly on lower-income families and on America’s children.

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Numerous experts—including John Ioannidis, David Katz, and myself—called for targeted protection, a safer alternative to widespread lockdowns, in national media beginning in March of 2020. That proposal was rejected. History’s biggest public health policy failure came at the hands of those who recommended the lockdowns and those who implemented them, not those who advised otherwise.

The tragic failure of reckless, unprecedented lockdowns that were contrary to established pandemic science, and the added massive harms of those policies on children, the elderly, and lower-income families, are indisputable and well-documented in numerous studies. This was the biggest, the most tragic, and the most unethical breakdown of public health leadership in modern history.

Speaking of covid fallacies, Joel Achenbach’s recent surreal piece in the Washington Post is properly called out by Will Jones. Two slices from Jones:

“An incalculable number of lives were likely saved by delaying what would have been the natural spread of the virus” [so wrote Achenbach]. Good grief. Is it really 2023 and a national newspaper will still print such blatant misinformation? With so many studies now making clear that restrictions had no clear relationship with outcomes, where are the fact checkers when you need them? Presumably reading the latest work of fiction from Neil Ferguson et al.

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The WashPo even wheels out the ‘man collapsed in Wuhan street and died from deadly virus’ image from January 2020 to adorn its ludicrously lockdownphilic piece.

Isabel Oakeshott talks with Brendan O’Neill about why she released the Lockdown Files – files that expose the … the… the… oh, I truly cannot find a word sufficiently harsh to convey just how evil were covidians with political power.

Dr. Karol Sikora – an oncologist – writing in the Telegraph: “Lockdown supporters called me a killer – they should be disgusted with themselves.” Two slices:

Opposing the relentless raft of lockdown policies was a lonely and, at times, extremely unpleasant experience. Those of us who voiced concerns about effectively closing down a country were labelled as far-Right extremists who were happy to see millions perish to the disease. It was a disgrace, legitimised by low-grade politicians such as Matt Hancock who were far too interested in advancing their own public image. Thousands succumbed to the destructive, and often pointless, lockdown measures they pushed at every opportunity.

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My lockdown inbox was overflowing with desperate cancer patients whose treatment had been indefinitely postponed. I remember one case of a mother who had her chemotherapy cancelled, leading to her tragic death leaving behind three young children and a loving husband. And it’s not just cancer: cardiac issues untreated, blood pressure out of control, strokes uncared for, other preventative measures forgotten and of course soaring obesity. The post-lockdown crisis is across all aspects of healthcare, physical and mental. That is for those lucky enough to receive any medical support or diagnosis at all. Others were told to stay home and that’s exactly what they did – dying there without the care they needed and deserved.

To those of you who took a brave stand speaking out against various restrictions and policies – from me, a sincere thank you. We comprehensively lost the argument in the court of public opinion, but hopefully a small difference was made. I suspect the national mood may have significantly shifted over the last week. Sunlight is the best disinfectant after all, and spring is on the way.

Jay Bhattacharya was recently interviewed by NBC News.

My GMU Econ colleague Vincent Geloso explains that economic freedom matters more than you likely think it does.

Inspired by Randy Holcombe’s great 2018 book, my intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy, warns of the contradictions and dangers of “political capitalism.” A slice:

Consider the export subsidies that have been around for decades. These handouts mostly benefit the same giant manufacturers, like Boeing and GE, that were the main beneficiaries decades ago. It doesn’t matter which party is in power: Big exporters will collect their largesse and express their gratitude to friends in Congress with campaign contributions and votes. This is why The Wall Street Journal‘s Andy Kessler calls this crony system “Kickback Capitalism.”

Once you understand how political capitalism works, it becomes obvious that it drives most decisions in Congress. For decades, sugar subsidies have benefited the same small group of wealthy sugar-beet farmers and processors through an unholy alliance with politicians that goes far beyond who happens to be in power in Washington, Florida, or Louisiana.

The CHIPS and Science Act, passed last year, is another episode of politicians granting favors to their friends in the semiconductor industry. The previous episode took place in the 1980s and ran through the 1990s.

The COVID-19 era’s $54 billion in airline bailouts were allegedly granted to avoid the layoff of some 30,000 airline employees. Yet during that same time, Regal Cinemas announced the temporary closure of all 536 of its U.S. locations and furloughed 40,000 employees. There was no one in Congress calling for a special Regal bailout (thankfully). The simple reason is that the airline bailouts were not about airline employees as much as they were a means of granting a favor to airline shareholders who have many friends in Congress.

Maybe the most striking example of political capitalism took place during former President Donald Trump’s administration, on live TV no less. Back in March of 2018, Trump hosted a “listening session” with steel and aluminum executives he had invited to the White House. The whole thing was televised, allowing us to see Trump joking around with his CEO friends while they pleaded for government support for their industry. The head of Nucor, for instance, told the president how his 25,000 employees would really benefit from steel tariffs imposed on American buyers of steel. And just like that, those of us watching saw in real time the president grant Nucor’s demand.

GMU Econ alum Adam Michel identifies the eight biggest tax hikes in Biden’s proposed budget.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page xxxii of the 2003 Third Edition of economic historian Eric Jones’s 1981 book, The European Miracle:

Resources are a function of the available technology, and have no economic meaning until a technology has been invented to employ them. The North American Indians knew about oil but had no conception or means of using it as petroleum.

DBx: Yes. Resources (as opposed to raw materials) are created and produced by human ingenuity. And so because human creativity is open-ended, the notion that there is a fixed amount of resources on earth, or even in any region of earth, is economically mistaken. See the work of the late, great Julian Simon.

Pictured here is one of the oil-drilling rigs erected by Edwin Drake.

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(Don Boudreaux)

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National Review‘s Dominic Pino is proud to be an alum of GMU Econ. [DBx: And we at GMU Econ are proud of Dominic.]

George Will describes woke word-policing as being “now beyond satire.” Here’s his hopeful conclusion:

Wokeness is being shrunk by the solvent of the laughter it provokes.

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy, warns Republicans to get serious about reforming Social Security and Medicare.

George Leef productively riffs on David Henderson’s and Phil Magness’s accurate description of the case for slavery reparations as “tooth-fairy economics.”

GMU Econ alum Alexander William Salter is correct: There’s no such thing as a wage-price spiral.

John Stossel introduces us to students pushing back against collectivism.

My GMU Econ colleague Bryan Caplan wisely encourages us to treat others by their track record.

“Billions in Subsidies for Solar and Wind Are Wasted by Delayed Approvals of Connections to a Slow-Growing Grid.”

Rupa Subramanya explains that “[t]he only healthy endgame for ESG is another acronym: RIP. And it will not be a moment too soon.” A slice:

Former attorney general William Barr, who served under Donald Trump, told me ESG is “a form of extortion” that is forcing “companies to take particular actions whether or not those actions are in the financial interests of shareholders.”

What is most disturbing about ESG, Barr told me, is the way it’s being implemented. “It’s completely non-transparent,” he explained. “And that, to me—that’s the worst. That is affecting a lot of decisions in corporate America in a non-transparent way, because of the political predilections, or the policy predilections, of a small group of people who are not using their own money, but leveraging off other people’s money.”

Ron Bailey warns: “Beware of activists touting ‘responsible research and innovation.’ The sensible-sounding slogan masks a reactionary agenda.” Three slices:

No sensible person could favor irresponsible research and innovation. So RRI—”responsible research and innovation“—may sound like an innocuous idea. As it takes hold in Europe, though, the term has clearly become a cover for what amounts to a Luddites’ veto. Now the notion is percolating among American academics. If it finds its way to the halls of state, RRI would dramatically slow technological progress and perhaps even bring it to a grinding halt.

That wouldn’t be an unexpected byproduct. Several RRI proponents have explicitly argued for “slow innovation,” even “responsible stagnation.” One of them—Bernd Carsten Stahl, a professor of critical research in technology at De Montfort University in the United Kingdom—has even compared technological breakthroughs to a pandemic. “We should ask whether emerging technologies can and will be perceived as a threat of a similar level as the current threat of the Covid virus,” he wrote in 2020. If so, he added, they would require “radical intervention.”

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Without bothering with the camouflage of citizen engagement, RRI supporter Robert Braun of the Institute for Advanced Studies got right to the point. “Instead of asking whether we need self-driving vehicles, why not ask whether we need cars at all?” he wrote in 2018. Better, he argued, to walk, bike, or take public transportation.

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RRI proponents are quite right that largely unfettered technological innovations and economic growth over the past two centuries have disrupted old social values. And certainly, they have been accompanied by downsides, such as pollution, deforestation, economic dislocation, and the discord that sometimes follows the spread of new mores.

But let’s look at what humanity has gained in that time. Absolute poverty—living on less than $1.90 per person per day—has declined from 85 percent of the world’s population in 1820 to less than 9 percent now. Total global gross domestic product (GDP) stood at about $1.2 trillion (in real dollars) in 1820, then nearly tripled to $3.4 trillion in 1900. Since then, world GDP has grown nearly 40-fold to around $134 trillion in 2021. As a result, GDP per capita increased from $2,000 per person in 1900 to nearly $15,000 per person in 2016.

Global cereal production has quadrupled from 740 million metric tons in 1961 to 3 billion tons in 2020. Before 1700, about 300 out of 1,000 infants died before their first birthday; the number is around 30 now. As a result, global average life expectancy has risen from around 30 years to more than 72 years over the same period. Global literacy has increased from roughly 10 percent in 1820 to around 90 percent today. In 1900, no country allowed women to vote; now nearly all do.

All of these positive trends occurred either as a direct result of technological innovation or as a result of the economic development that innovation made possible. Adam Thierer of the R Street Institute calls this a system of “permissionless innovation.” This is, in his words, “the idea that experimentation with new technologies and innovations should generally be permitted by default and that prior restraints on creative activities should be avoided except in those cases where clear and immediate harm is evident.” In other words, innovators engage in trial-and-error experimentation to develop new products and services, whose desirability they then test in the marketplace.

University of Illinois Chicago economist Deirdre McCloskey similarly notes that the “Great Enrichment” of the past couple of centuries was driven by “technological and institutional betterment at a frenetic pace, tested by unforced exchange among the parties involved.” She calls this “market-tested betterment,” but it’s the same “technology-market dyad” that von Schomberg and other RRI proponents aim to “challenge” by requiring that new technologies obtain “public permission” before they are allowed into the marketplace. RRI would foreclose not only new technologies but the evolving social values and ways of living they make possible.

“Fostering innovation requires a certain amount of self-sacrifice,” Thierer and James Broughel of the Mercatus Center wrote in 2019. “Sometimes we must tolerate disruption today for a better world tomorrow.” That is the core truth that the RRI movement refuses to recognize.

Nick Gillespie talks with the heroic Vinay Prasad about covid policy.

Ron DeSantis writes to Biden on behalf of Novak Djokovic.

James Allan is rightly furious at what the covidians did to society. A slice:

You have to read some of these released text messages to believe them. Children made to mask-up when they knew there was no scientific evidence, none, for doing so but the politics were good. Top bureaucrats laughing at people who would have to go from business class flights into pokey little hotel rooms for weeks on end. The explicit targeting of sceptics and dissenters, including some of the best epidemiologists in the world, to discredit them and have them silenced because that was undercutting the pollies’ messaging – no mention of truth, notice. When they were told various idiotic rules had no utility they carried on with them because to do otherwise might make them look bad. Seriously, go and read these WhatsApp revelations because we citizens can never again trust these (what’s the word I’m looking for? Two syllables. Might start with an ‘f’).

It will be extra tough reading for those whose small businesses were destroyed. Or those with children whose lives were ruined. (And yes we knew from day one that the chances of a healthy person under 30 dying from Covid was less than one one-thousandth that of someone over 75. It was essentially zero. They knew it too.) Or those who resisted useless mandates. Well, it’ll be cold comfort reading these texts but do it. Because all of us labelled ‘conspiracy theorists’ were right on almost everything. And the whole ‘fact-checking’ industry is nothing more than partisan opinion claims, often worse and verging on a propaganda operation, on behalf of out-of-control government. Laugh at the mere mention of ‘fact checkers’.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 45, of Book I, Chapter IV of the 1981 Liberty Fund edition of Adam Smith’s monumental 1776 An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations:

For in every country of the world, I believe, the avarice and injustice of princes and sovereign states, abusing the confidence of their subjects, have by degrees diminished the real quantity of metal, which had been originally contained in their coins.

DBx: Trusting anyone or any institution – including the state – with monopoly power over the supply of money is the height of folly. Common sense says so, with history confirming this conclusion.

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An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations was published 247 years ago on this date, March 9th.

On the Banana Republic Practice of Civil Asset Forfeiture

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal:

Editor:

Robert Frommer deserves applause for challenging the FBI to return to his client money that the agency seized using civil asset forfeiture (“How the FBI Took an Innocent Woman’s Savings,” March 8).

More Americans citizens – indeed, more American judges – should be aware of the origins of civil asset forfeiture. This legal maneuver was created centuries ago in Britain to enable courts there to lawfully punish owners of captured pirate ships. Because these ship owners were physically outside of British jurisdiction, they couldn’t be punished in Britain as criminals. To deal with the problem of criminal wrongdoers outside of British jurisdiction, Parliament created civil asset forfeiture under which property used to commit crimes – then mostly piracy – could be charged in civil actions with wrongdoing. If the property was found ‘guilty,’ the British government gained ownership of the property.

Crucially, civil asset forfeiture could be used only when the owner of property allegedly used to commit a crime was outside of British jurisdiction. Otherwise, the property could not be forfeited until and unless its owner was duly convicted in British courts of criminal wrongdoing – which convictions, of course, require a higher standard of proof than do findings of liability in civil actions.*

The fact that today in the U.S. civil asset forfeiture is used against persons who are within the jurisdiction of American courts reflects a dangerous distortion of civil-asset-forfeiture’s original purpose: U.S. authorities seize ownership of the property of people who the authorities can, but simply don’t bother to, prosecute criminally. Perversely, therefore, civil asset forfeiture in the U.S. is now a form of government piracy flying under a false and flimsy flag of lawfulness.

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

* On the history of civil asset forfeiture, see Donald J. Boudreaux and A.C. Pritchard, Innocence Lost: Bennis v. Michigan and the Forfeiture Tradition, 61 Missouri Law Review 593 (1996), and Donald J. Boudreaux and A.C. Pritchard, Civil Forfeiture and the War on Drugs: Lessons from Economics and History, 33 San Diego Law Review 79 (1996).

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Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Robert Frommer describes the FBI’s use of the banana-republic practice of civil asset forfeiture. A slice:

The FBI has apt incentive to stretch the law to breaking, given that federal agencies keep the proceeds from forfeited property. In the US Private Vaults case, the FBI admitted under oath that even before the raid occurred it had decided to pursue property forfeiture against everything worth over $5,000 in the renters’ boxes. Using federal forfeiture records, the Institute for Justice calculated that from 2017 to 2021 Justice Department agencies gained more than $8 billion through forfeiture, with the FBI taking in more than $1.19 billion of that bounty.

David Henderson and Phil Magness accurately describe the economic case made for reparations as “tooth-fairy economics.” A slice:

Vaguely sensing that there’s no such thing as a free lunch, Hannah-Jones asks where the federal government would get the money to pay such a massive amount. Wouldn’t taxes have to be raised, she queries. [Duke University economist Sandy] Darity confidently asserts that no such action is necessary.

“It’s a matter of the federal government financing it in the same way that it financed…the stimulus package for the Great Recession” and the COVID-era CARES Act, Darity continues. To do so, the federal government need only “spend the money but without raising taxes.”

This verges on tooth-fairy economics.

The cold reality of public finance means that every government outlay must be paid eventually, whether through taxes in the present, higher inflation, which is also a tax, or higher taxes on future generations. The federal government has no good option when it comes to just “spending the money.”

[DBx: David and Phil are too kind in qualifying their description with the word “verges.” It is tooth-fairy economics, full stop. Darity’s pronouncement is the economic equivalent of a professor of medicine proclaiming that the broken bones of long-dead ancestors can be fixed with voodoo.]

GMU Econ alum Dominic Pino applauds George Will’s defense of stock buybacks.

My Mercatus Center colleague Mikayla Novak explains “why tourism matters to liberty.”

Jay Bhattacharya tweets:

The Biden US Department of Homeland Security used is immense power to censor scientific debate online about covid in the US. I would love to debate the omniscient scientists who collaborated on this unconstitutional and anti- scientific activity.

The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board describes “what the covid lockdown files tell us.” Two slices:

They were “following the science,” politicians told the public at every opportunity during the height of the Covid pandemic. The public in many countries has learned that was often far from true, and now we have proof from what our British friends are calling the Covid lockdown files.

The United Kingdom has witnessed in recent days the release of some 100,000 text messages that government officials sent each other during the pandemic. The glib resort to casual authoritarianism is shocking even for those who are cynical about politicians.

From the start, Britain’s Covid policies became a question of politics rather than science. Health Secretary Matt Hancock, a leading lockdown hawk, mused in January 2020—after news of the virus emerged in China but before the crisis in the West—that an outbreak could be good for his political career. He shared with a media adviser a message purportedly from “a wise friend” telling Mr. Hancock that “a well-handled crisis of this scale could propel you into the next league.”

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In the most serious incident exposed to date, Mr. Hancock conferred with colleagues about how to “deploy” news of the so-called Kent variant of Covid in December 2020 at the right moment to “frighten the pants off everyone” in order to build support for a new lockdown and boost compliance.

A month after Mr. Hancock scared everyone’s pants off, a senior civil servant suggested that a new national mask mandate would be worthwhile because it was “effectively free and has a very visible impact.” He appears to mean “visible impact” in the sense of creating an appearance of government action, not that masks would slow the spread of the virus. “Yep,” Mr. Hancock replied, before discussing the politics of various proposed measures.

Mr. Hancock and others schemed to suppress scientific research that didn’t support their political goals. In the most significant example, Mr. [Boris] Johnson was persuaded to ignore evidence that the data used to justify Britain’s second national lockdown in 2020 were out of date and unduly alarmist.

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The big news here is how quickly and easily the expansive powers that governments exercised in that period bled into the personal ambitions of the politicians making the rules. Politicians said they were using Covid science as a tool to protect the public. Instead they contorted science to impose the most onerous peacetime restrictions in history on the liberty of their fellow citizens. When lockdown skeptics demand “never again,” this is why.