Russell Roberts's Blog, page 393

“If You’re Against Racism, Then You Should Be a Capitalist”…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… so argues Jason Siler in this excellent video (which is less than eight-minutes long). (HT Dan Klein)

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(Don Boudreaux)

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Matt Purple ably defends the signers of the Harper’s letter against the mad intolerance of woke cancelers. (HT Walter Grinder) A slice:

Second and more importantly, the reaction to the letter demonstrates just how oblivious the left has become to its own power. Back in the 1960s, to be a leftist was to be countercultural, smashing monogamy and fighting the man. Today’s left wants that same rebellious aura, except that they’ve since marched through just about every major institution. Academia swallows whole their assumptions; so does the publishing industry, many corporate boards, much of the media, the federal bureaucracy, a healthy section of the internet. Those who speak out against the Harper’s letter are thus not remotely “marginalized”; they are heard loudly and often. Many of them have blue Twitter checkmarks, that garish amulet of the modern elite. This is how power works now: money and rank matter less than they used to, visibility and influence count for more. And by those yardsticks, the woke are plenty powerful.

Peter Earle pleads with technocrats to observe the Hippocratic Oath.

Jeffrey Tucker worries that the lockdown might be killing the arts.

Peter Suderman warns of the disincentives created by paying people not to work.

Walter Olson offers sound advice on how to promote more accountability by the police in America.

“What’s it like to be a business owner during covid-19?”

Corey Deangelis documents yet another reason to loathe the government-schooling racket.

Sarah Skwire is correct: economics is everywhere.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 160 of Robert Higgs’s indispensable – and now more relevant than ever – 1987 book, Crisis and Leviathan:

My thesis is that the institutional revolution of the 1930s depended crucially on the existence of national emergency, a condition that was partly real, partly contrived, enormously exploited for political purposes.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 1 of my former colleague Thomas Hazlett’s 2017 book, The Political Spectrum: The Tumultuous Liberation of Wireless Technology, from Herbert Hoover to the Smartphone; it’s the book’s opening sentence:

No natural resource is likely to be more critical to human progress in the twenty-first century than radio spectrum. Invisible, odorless, and ubiquitous, it is the space through which electronic communications travel.

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(Don Boudreaux)

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Washington Post columnist Matt Bai wisely insists that journalists (and others) should stop calling ‘wokeness’ and cancel culture “liberal.” This ideology is as illiberal as ideologies get. A slice:

Liberals are supposed to believe that the freedom to dissent is an essential part of a functioning democracy. More points of view lead to a better grasp of complex problems. Liberals believe that the price of that freedom is the tolerance of ideas we may find self-evidently wrong, or even odious.

Some of us viscerally remember when American liberalism was defined by the American Civil Liberties Union’s courageous defense of Nazis marching in Skokie, Ill. Real liberalism says you can’t discredit an argument without recognizing its right to be heard.

Richard Morrison reviews Carlos Ball’s The Queering of Corporate America: How Big Business Went From LGBTQ Adversary to Ally.

Holman Jenkins is rightly critical of Joe Biden’s climate “plan.” Here’s Jenkins’s opening paragraph:

A Joe Biden presidency would guarantee one thing. We might be finished with Donald Trump, but we’ll still have the problem that gave us Mr. Trump. I’ll borrow a term from an analyst of the European Union: sophisticated state failure.

James Bovard is not fooled by sham bailout stats; he sees the lockdown’s tyranny. A slice:

But the Trump team’s data is farcically inaccurate. Last month, the Small Business Administration, which administers the PPP, told the Associated Press that it was “too consumed by the urgent effort of helping small businesses through the economic downturn to provide” data on where the loans went. But the SBA has now specified how many jobs were retained for each PPP loan. While Congress slumbers, the Washington Post speedily crunched the numbers.

PPP loans – a.k.a. “Magic Beans” – are so effective that they saved more jobs than the total number of employees in at least 15 industries. Landscape architecture firms “retained 114,000 jobs — more than three times the number of people who worked in that sector in 2019,” the Post reported. The SBA also claimed that the PPP loans “preserved tens of thousands more jobs than are known to exist in other industry sectors,” including specialty food stores, cattle ranching, performing arts companies, corn and wheat farming, and fishing.

Logan Kolas identifies five problems with Joe Biden’s supply-chain “plan.” A slice:

1. A President Joe Biden does not need to “rebuild manufacturing in the U.S.”

The myth that never dies. Worse, it continues to buttress poorly conceived campaign proposals such as Biden’s new supply chain plan. The United States manufacturing sector is not dead. Just last year, before being devasted by the pandemic, U.S. manufacturing output set a record high. And the sector once again proved itself an attractive destination for investment in 2018 when FDI stock in American manufacturing rose by 10% to $1.77 trillion. Decline in American manufacturing employment, however, has long been a story of American progress, as the sector has stayed competitive by learning how to do more with less. Using the decline in employment to tell a story of sectoral decline, not progress, is a mistake – and it’s a mistake that permeates the rest of the proposal.

Here’s David Henderson on Walter Block’s defense of his – Walter’s – academic freedom.

Gene Healy dives into the power of the U.S. president to pardon.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 371 of the final chapter of Matt Ridley’s splendid new (2020) book, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom:

I repeat: the stories of innovation that I have documented in this book teach a lesson that it relies heavily on freedom. Innovation happens when ideas can meet and mate, when experiment is encouraged, when people and goods can move freely and when money can flow rapidly towards fresh concepts, when those who invest can be sure their rewards will not be stolen.

DBx: It’s too bad that this lesson has been learned by so few people. Very many people today ‘reason’ that if they can imagine in their heads economic outcomes that are (believed to be) better than those that prevail in the market – and if they can then describe with words in broad outline what these ‘better’ outcomes would look like – then they have made a solid case for using government coercion to override the private choices of millions of consumers and investors in order to engineer the economy toward these imagined ‘better’ outcomes.

Forget these people’s impertinence. Instead recognize that their intellectual achievement is akin to a dreamer who, fancying that it would be lovely for horses to fly, sketches some pictures of Pegasus and then charges biologists with the task of creating herds of such creatures posthaste.

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: “For oil, tap ingenuity”

(Don Boudreaux)

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In my column for the February 24th, 2010, edition of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review I pondered humanity’s relationship with petroleum. You can read my column beneath the fold.

(more…)

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My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy is rightly critical of fiscally irresponsible state and local government officials. A slice:

What’s more, these stories about state and local governments being hit hard rarely explain that politicians in those states failed to responsibly budget for crises. Such rainy-day budgeting should not have been that difficult, given that the country was experiencing an unprecedented decade of economic growth when rivers of revenue poured into state and local coffers. More revenue makes it easier to beef up rainy-day funds, which then helps fill in budget gaps. While some states have learned their lessons from the last recession, most states did not.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Bjorn Lomborg draws a lesson for climate activism from the covid lockdown. A slice:

The lockdown economy of recent months has made consumption less discretionary, more a matter of basic needs. We should expect old habits to return as economies revive. But this unexpected experiment with less consumption and lower emissions does put the challenge in perspective. Even with the dramatic drop in economic activity in recent months, the world will still emit about 35 billion tons of carbon in 2020. Achieving global “net zero” emissions in three decades, as a growing number of activists and politicians advocate, would require the equivalent of a series of ongoing and ever-tightening lockdowns until 2050.

I was very happy to be a guest again of Ben Domenech on The Federalist Radio Hour.

Kevin Williamson laments the Venezuelafication of American politics.

Jeffrey Tucker bemoans the intellectual and ethical collapse of the New York Times.

“The point that I would make is that Demonization and Persuasion are mutually exclusive rhetorical modes. The former is dehumanizing and the latter is humane. The young social justice activists employ Demonization with pride. Again, think of them as adherents of a religion that seeks to identify and persecute heretics.” – Arnold Kling.

Billy Binion reports that Andrew Cuomo’s coronavirus response has been a failure.

George Will is justifiably appalled by the thugocracy that today reigns in Russia.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 337 of Joseph Epstein’s 2011 essay “English As It’s Taught,” as this essay is reprinted in Epstein’s 2014 collection, A Literary Education and Other Essays:

Along with American Studies programs, which are often their subsidiaries, English departments have tended to become intellectual nursing homes where old ideas go to die. If one is still looking for that living relic, the fully subscribed Marxist, one is today less likely to find him in an Economics or History Department than in an English Department, where he will be taken seriously. He finds a home there because English departments are less concerned with the consideration of literature per se than with what novels, poems, plays and essays – after being properly X-rayed, frisked, padded down like so many suspicious-looking air travelers – might yield on the subjects of race, class and gender.

DBx: Intellectuals today, as always, are especially prone to claim to know better than others how the details of complex reality should be arranged. And they are, as ever, happy to offer blueprints for social engineers to follow in order to carryout the necessary rearrangement. Increasingly, though, intellectuals claim also to have keys to unlock the secrets of individuals’ souls and psyches. And when the souls and psyches of ‘non-minority’ heterosexual males are unlocked by intellectuals, always are revealed the same corruptions: bigotry, misogyny, greed, homophobia, transphobia, and abiding hostility to “diversity and inclusion.”

Why, it’s almost as if intellectuals know what they’ll find upon their unlocking of souls and psyches before they actually unlock them! Good thing we have intellectuals on the job to protect society from prejudice.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 277 of the Introduction to Book II of the 1981 Liberty Fund edition of Adam Smith’s 1776 An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations:

The person who employs his stock in maintaining labour, necessarily wishes to employ it in such a manner as to produce as great a quantity of work as possible. He endeavours, therefore, both to make among his workmen the most proper distribution of employment, and to furnish them with the best machines which he can either invent or afford to purchase.

DBx: Smith here observes that businesspeople using their own funds (and funds voluntarily entrusted to them) seek to produce for the market as much output as possible by employing what we today call “optimal” amounts, and kinds, of capital goods and labor. And in seeking maximum possible profit in this way, businesspeople are led as if by an invisible hand to promote the welfare of countless other human beings, nearly all of whom are strangers to businesspeople and to each other.

Since Smith first published these words 244 years ago, a great deal of economists’ attentions has been devoted to obtaining a better understanding of just how this market process works and what are the institutional arrangements that promote its working or stifle its working.

It is, by now, easy to rattle off reasons why free markets fail to reach “perfection.” It’s done frequently by sophomores and pundits. But it is also impossible – at least for the historically informed – to deny that market failures in reality are swamped by market successes. The standard of living of ordinary people in the modern world testifies to this truth.

What no one has done is to offer a compelling reason to believe that substituting government direction of economic activity for market direction of this activity will generally outperform markets. The only truly serious attempt to offer such a reason is found in the work of the so-called “market socialists” of the first half of the 20th century. That effort failed.

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Adam Smith died on this date, July 17th, 230 years ago in Edinburgh.