Russell Roberts's Blog, page 83
October 31, 2022
Some Links
Jay Nordlinger talks with George Will.
John Tierney reports that even Greenpeace now admits that recycling doesn’t work. Two slices:
The Greenpeace report offers a wealth of statistics and an admirably succinct diagnosis: “Mechanical and chemical recycling of plastic waste has largely failed and will always fail because plastic waste is: (1) extremely difficult to collect, (2) virtually impossible to sort for recycling, (3) environmentally harmful to reprocess, (4) often made of and contaminated by toxic materials, and (5) not economical to recycle.” Greenpeace could have added a sixth reason: forcing people to sort and rinse their plastic garbage is a waste of everyone’s time. But then, making life more pleasant for humans has never been high on the green agenda.
These fatal flaws have been clear since the start of the recycling movement. When I wrote about it a quarter-century ago, experts were already warning that recycling plastic was hopelessly impractical because it was so complicated and labor-intensive, but municipal officials kept trying in the hope that somebody would eventually find it worthwhile to buy their plastic trash. Instead, they’ve had to pay dearly to get rid of it, typically by shipping it to Asian countries with cheaper labor and looser environmental rules. In New York City, recycling a ton of plastic costs at least six times more than sending it to a landfill, according to a 2020 Manhattan Institute study, which estimated that the city could save $340 million annually by sending all its trash to landfills.
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Environmentalists’ zeal to ban plastic is far more destructive than their former passion to recycle it; it’s also harder to explain. Recycling, while impractical, at least offered emotional rewards to hoarders reluctant to put anything in the trash and to the many people who perform garbage-sorting as a ritual of atonement—a sacrament of the green religion. But why demonize plastic? Why ban products that are cheaper, sturdier, lighter, cleaner, healthier, and better for the environment? One reason: the plastic scare helps Greenpeace activists raise money and keep their jobs. Environmentalists need something to replace their failed recycling campaign.
The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board rightly ridicules Progressives’ – including the Biden administration’s – utter irrationality about energy. Here’s the Editorial Board’s conclusion:
Mr. Biden and fellow Democrats simply refuse to understand the economic consequences of their assault on American fossil fuels. They have come to believe that climate is a crisis and that banishing oil and gas is urgent. But that means higher prices, which they now blame on the very companies they want to go out of business. Economic logic won’t persuade them, but maybe a rout at the ballot box will.
David Simon asks: “Who are the real climate science deniers?” A slice:
In “Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters,” Obama Department of Energy Under Secretary for Science Steven Koonin shows that the United Nations climate models that the doomsters use to predict future global temperatures are so speculative and unreliable that they have been unable even to reproduce the 20th century’s temperature changes.
Steven Greenhut describes Gavin Newsom as “doing his best Jimmy Carter impression.”
Wai Wah Chin writes that “racial discrimination in college admissions is uglier than sausage-making.” (HT George Leef)
A professor of urban and property law at Yale Law School, Ellickson gets quickly to the heart of the matter: “Local zoning measures may be the most consequential regulatory program in the United States. Local barriers to housing production elevate housing costs and distort household migration decisions. Nonetheless, members of the mass media tend to regard anything that happens at a city hall as unworthy of attention.” He characterizes zoning’s reach into private life as “Leviathan gone Local.”
In case after case, he illustrates how typical zoning standards drive up home costs. These include minimum sizes for both the size of a lot and of a house, as well as the widespread requirements for detached single-family homes or even sharp limitations on where townhouses or duplexes may be built. In much of Greenwich, Connecticut, for example, a new home requires a lot size of four acres. Three Silicon Valley towns (Los Altos Hills, Woodside, and Portola Valley) have a combined area of 30 square miles, of which only two acres (0.01 percent) are zoned for multi-family homes. It’s no surprise that in nearby Atherton, which requires one-acre minimum lots, the median home value is $6.5 million. Palo Alto, California, finds another way to restrict construction—by limiting the height of potential apartment buildings downtown. Five of the Connecticut towns that Ellickson analyzes not only mandate large lot sizes but also restrict 99 percent of the land to single-family detached homes. And once a neighborhood is zoned that way, it almost never changes—thus, the “frozen” part of his title.
Harvard has a long and ugly history of discriminating against high-achieving minorities. As many historians have pointed out, Harvard’s leadership once believed it had too many Jews on campus because almost a quarter of all Harvard freshmen were Jewish. Holistic admissions criteria were concocted to limit the number of Jews admitted.
GMU Econ alum Michael Thomas has tips for driving liberty in the traffic of tolerance. A slice:
When politics is expanded to include ethics it becomes picking winners from among those groups vying for rents. This eliminates the role of providing formal rules for procedure and becomes arbitrating between prescriptions for ethical living. When the sphere of government extends beyond what Adam Smith would call the grammar of justice, the what of the ethical becomes salient for every member of society, especially underrepresented groups. Citizens caught between contested ethical claims must position themselves to win the way that some drivers use horns and trade paint. A proper set of political institutions frees us from vying for rent.
David Stockman cheers “Bravo, Elon!”
Vinay Prasad tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
I hope Elon swaps out the COVID-19 health experts curated by Twitter with people who actually understand evidence based policy
Writing in Newsweek, Laura Rosen Cohen decries the political left’s hypocrisy about mental health.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 21 of Thomas Sowell’s superb 1993 collection, Is Reality Optional?:
Government is a blunt instrument. Its policies should be limited to what blunt instruments can do. We gain nothing by pretending to know what we cannot know and to be able to do what we cannot do.
DBx: This truth is denied by many, and not least by proponents of industrial policy.
A corollary to the truth expressed here by Sowell is that these deniers believe in miracles.
October 30, 2022
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 83 of Samuel Gregg’s superb 2022 book, The Next American Economy: Nation, State, and Markets in an Uncertain World:
Protectionism may make American consumers pay more for often lower-quality goods, but tariffs and import quotas directly benefit those American businesses who resent the disciplines of competition and want to make it harder for others to enter “their” markets.
DBx: Yes.
All protectionists – left, center, and right – aid and abet the plunder of fellow citizens by politically powerful producer groups. Fellow citizens as consumers, fellow citizens as workers, fellow citizens as investors, and fellow citizens as entrepreneurs all, as groups, suffer as a result of the special privileges bestowed by protectionist measures on protected producers.
Protectionists – many out of ignorance, some out of cunning – boastfully point to thriving protected industries and workers and scream “Success! Protectionism works!” Ignored are the higher prices and lower product qualities endured by home-country consumers. Ignored are the home-country businesses shrunken or destroyed by the artificial diversion of resources into protected industries. Ignored are home-country jobs that are destroyed, that are never created, or that pay less. Ignored are the resulting lower rates of economic growth. Ignored are the perverse incentives that protectionism gives to business people – incentives for business people to lobby for protection rather than to produce for consumers. And, of course, ignored is the battering of freedom that is an inevitable result of protectionism.
Protectionism is piracy – piracy carried out by brutes in suits.
The Case for Free Trade Is Stronger Than Protectionists Imagine It to Be
The market doesn’t ‘fail’ by not satisfying desires that are too idiosyncratic to justify the costs of supplying such desires.
Mr. Y__:
Thanks for your reply to my note in which I argue that workers can protect their jobs against imports by offering to work at wages low enough to make it profitable for these workers’ current employers to continue to employ them.
You describe my argument as “an academic’s daydream because even a lone worker who willingly would take a pay cut to retain his job will still lose that job unless almost all of his co-workers would do the same thing. No one worker has the power to protect himself against imports like you [Boudreaux] postulate.”
You’re correct that no worker – call him or her “Jones” – can alone keep his or her employer solvent, and thus keep his or her current job, by offering to work at lower wages. Unless most of Jones’s co-workers make the same offer to work at lower wages, Jones will indeed lose to imports the current job to which he or she attaches much non-monetary value.
But the reality that you identify only reveals my argument’s strength. Precisely because so few workers are willing to ‘pay,’ in the form of taking wage cuts, to keep jobs threatened by imports, today’s commonplace assertions that most, or even many, workers who lose their current jobs to imports thereby lose a great deal of non-monetary amenities that they value highly – non-monetary amenities allegedly ignored by competitive markets – are simply mistaken. If these assertions were correct, enough workers would willingly take pay cuts to protect their employers – and hence their jobs – from the competition of imports. That too few workers in reality are willing to ‘pay’ for these alleged non-monetary amenities of their current jobs is evidence as powerful as evidence gets that these amenities exist more in the minds of intellectuals and rent-seekers than in the minds of the workers themselves.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030
Some Links
The harsher the crackdown, the more smugglers shift to more potent, easier-to-conceal drugs, such as fentanyl.
This is similar to the unintended consequences of the crackdown on prescription painkillers. Non-medical users who relied on stolen or diverted pills did not stop using opioids as a result of the crackdown; they switched to the more dangerous heroin. Meanwhile, genuine pain patients suffered immensely.
Fentanyl is entering the United States because consumers — almost all of them U.S. citizens — are willing to pay for illicit opioids. As long as there is demand, supply will follow. That’s the lesson of the past century of prohibition — first of alcohol, then drugs. Policymakers must focus on helping people with addictions, not on banning immigration or throwing more taxpayer dollars at ineffective border measures.
Rich Vedder urges colleges to “go back to basics.”
John O. McGinnis writes about meritocracy and multiculturalism. Two slices:
Meritocracy has long been a feature of advanced liberal democracies. Whether determining who goes to elite universities or who gets what job, making decisions on the basis of merit—the ability to perform well in education or at work—has substantial economic, political, and even geopolitical advantages. Economically, it puts the most productive and talented people in the places where they will make the most difference in making scientific breakthroughs, shaping technical applications of those breakthroughs, and managing the business organizations bringing that technology to market. Meritocracy also encourages citizens to gain skills that make them more productive than they otherwise would, because the efforts over which they exert their control, like studying and working hard, earn a return regardless of the characteristics that they cannot change, like family, tribe, neighborhood, or race.
Meritocracy has moral and political benefits too. It gives everyone a sense of agency over their own lives and opposes the fatalistic belief that their lives are predestined by relatively immutable characteristics. Moreover, the alternative to meritocracy empowers political factions and thus political conflict. For instance, when decisions were made on the basis of tribal affiliation, it made that identity an axis of political warfare. And by removing from political discussion the questions of what characteristics gain access to jobs and education, modern meritocratic democracy makes politics more tractable and less chaotic. Politics then hinges on a debate about whether and how much we should redistribute the wealth that meritocracy facilitates.
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Moreover, multiculturalism leads to some groups turning against the culture—Western civilization—that has been responsible for meritocracy and much of the rise in standard of living in the world. That opposition is doubly ironic. First, Western civilization is itself the product of many cultures, including the ancient Greek philosophical culture and the Semitic religious culture from which Judaism and Christianity emerged. Second, there are thinkers in the West who have questioned meritocracy. But the wholesale rejection of Western tradition can be the most destructive of all to meritocracy, because like any political structure, it rests on cultural and philosophical foundations—in this case premises of individual responsibility and the possibility of objective truth nurtured by the predominant strands of that tradition.
David Henderson remembers the late economist Shirley Svorny.
Having watched last night on Netflix the new version of All Quiet On the Western Front, I agree with Michael Brendan Dougherty’s assessment and praise of this film. (DBx: Long ago – I think in 1980 – I read the 1929 novel, authored by Erich Maria Remarque. It was a memorably moving experience. I still recall a scene in the book, which I did not see in the movie, that was especially gruesome yet effective: A wounded soldier was crawling across a battlefield keeping himself alive by clamping shut with his teeth a severed artery in his arm. It’s possible that over the past four decades I’ve forgotten some of the details of this scene, but I’ve never forgotten its essence.)
The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board rightly decries the physical attack on Paul Pelosi. A slice:
The political and media classes can help by avoiding hateful rhetoric aimed at their opponents. They can also not pile on Justice Samuel Alito, as some did this week after he said that the leak of his draft Supreme Court opinion in the Dobbs abortion case led to the threats against Justice Kavanaugh. Justice Alito was right, but left-wing Twitter treated him like a paranoid complainer.
The risk of violence will grow as the election nears and passions get hot, and as more people come to mistakenly believe that any one election will determine the country’s fate. Small-d democratic tolerance is in short supply these days, but it behooves everyone in public life to practice it.
By pretending that all of these horrors were attributable to public panic, apologists for the response to Covid are attempting to shift blame away from the political machines that imposed lockdowns and mandates onto individuals and their families. This is, of course, despicable and bunk. People did not voluntarily go hungry, or stand in the freezing cold to get food, or remove themselves from hospitals while they were still sick, or bankrupt their own businesses, or force their own kids to sit outside in the cold, or march hundreds of miles in exodus after losing their jobs in factories.
The collective denial of these horrors, and the refusal of media, financial, and political elites to report on them, amounts to nothing less than the greatest act of gaslighting that we’ve seen in modern times.
Further, the argument that all of these terrible outcomes could be attributed to public panic rather than state-imposed mandates would be far more convincing if governments hadn’t taken unprecedented actions to deliberately panic the public.
Three years after it came to global attention as home to the world’s first Covid cases, Wuhan has been plunged back into lockdown. While the rest of the world is putting the pandemic behind it, China obsessively maintains a zero-Covid policy which is imprisoning its people and its economy. Naturally, it is not just the destructive policy itself which is rigorously policed, but any criticism of it, too. While US Senate Republicans said this week the virus most likely escaped from a lab, the Chinese regime continues to shut down any debate over its origins.
(DBx: Well, thanks to Chairman Xi, at least tyrannized and impoverished Chinese citizens might be less likely to come into contact with the covid monster.)
A reminder: public health and medicine serve the public, not the other way around.
I get the impression that many in public health and medicine have forgotten this basic fact.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 48 of the late, great Julian Simon’s 1996 magnum opus, The Ultimate Resource 2 (original emphasis):
The central difficulty again is: Which expert will you choose to believe? If you wish, you can certainly find someone with all the proper academic qualifications who will give you as good a scare for your money as a horror movie.
DBx: Pictured here is one such scare-mongering “expert” – Neil Ferguson – whose mad ‘model’ predictions many people gullibly, and calamitously, fell for in early 2020.
UPDATE: As Tim Worstall reminds me by e-mail, Ferguson is not only incompetent at the science at which he pretends to possess expertise, he’s also a hypocrite. His hypocrisy speaks to his own lack of belief in his ‘science.’ Here’s what Matt Ridley had to say about Ferguson in May 2020:
Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College “stepped back” from the Sage group advising ministers when his lockdown-busting romantic trysts were exposed. Perhaps he should have been dropped for a more consequential misstep. Details of the model his team built to predict the epidemic are emerging and they are not pretty. In the respective words of four experienced modellers, the code is “deeply riddled” with bugs, “a fairly arbitrary Heath Robinson machine”, has “huge blocks of code – bad practice” and is “quite possibly the worst production code I have ever seen”.
October 29, 2022
Trying to Get Into the Heads of Today’s Progressive Racists
While I uncompromisingly condemn thievery, I easily understand thieves. Thieves seek to acquire goods they desire at costs they believe are lower than they’d have to pay were they to purchase or produce these items honestly. Pretty simple. While I also uncompromisingly condemn many of today’s pet political beliefs, both progressive and populist, in contrast to my understanding of thievery I do not easily understand those persons who hold such political beliefs sincerely. I’m baffled, especially, by today’s obsession with race.
Of course, I understand and loudly applaud hostility toward racist attitudes and actions. No one should be treated as an inferior person, or as a superior person, simply because of his skin color, religion, or ethnic background. And like my attitude toward thieves, I also understand, but strongly condemn, persons who wish, on the basis of their race, to gain an artificial advantage over others. Blacks seeking special privileges in 2022 simply because they are black are just as detestable, in my opinion, as were whites in 1822 and 1922 who sought special privileges simply because they were white. Both the race-based-privilege-seeking blacks of today and the race-based-privilege-seeking whites of yesterday are motivated by greed that differs little from the greed of thieves. It’s as unmysterious as it is ugly.
What I don’t understand is the worldview that leads many well-meaning people – of whom there are many – to support the likes of affirmative action and other race-based policies. What, I ask myself, are the priors of well-meaning people who obsess today over race? What are such people thinking when they demand that government grant special privileges to members of minority groups merely because many of these minority-group members are descendants of individuals who, in the past, were victims of unjust discrimination – including of that horror of horrors, chattel slavery?
Why don’t today’s well-meaning proponents of race-based policies understand that special privileges given today to blacks come at the expense both of many non-racist white people and – in a terrible irony documented by scholars such as Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, and Walter Williams – also at the expense of many blacks? Why do so many well-meaning people today embrace state-based racism as they reject market liberalism and its proven track record of eating away at non-state-enforced unjust barriers to opportunity?
I have a hypothesis: the motivation of most of today’s well-meaning proponents of race-based policies is rooted in a simple, if profound, misconception of economic reality. This misconception is that material wealth is produced automatically, independently of human institutions and effort. If material wealth were, in fact, produced independently of human institutions and effort, then the only economic impact government policies could possibly have is to determine who gets how much of the automatically dispensed wealth. The total amount of wealth produced would remain unaffected.
I suspect that Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, and most other well-meaning opponents of color-blind policies and attitudes – or, stated differently, most well-meaning proponents of racist policies and attitudes – believe that material wealth is merely grabbed as it oozes out mechanically and ineluctably from factories, warehouses, retail stores, and banks. Because, on a per-capita basis, whites in America are, now as in the past, wealthier than blacks, and because a majority of Americans today are white, white Americans (so apparently goes the thinking) use the disproportionate power that comes from their raw population size to grab for themselves a disproportionately large share of wealth. This result is unjust, based as it is on nothing more than brute power grounded chiefly in population size.
An obvious solution for this injustice is to make enough whites feel guilty for their unearned advantage, or at least to make them “aware” of their unmerited white privilege, in order to enlist a sufficient number of them in the effort to enable blacks to grab more of what whites have been grabbing. Key policies here are redistributive taxation and affirmative action. The happy consequence of such redistribution of income, of wealth, and of opportunities is that blacks will have more of these good things. Unfortunately, because wealth and opportunity exist independently of human institutions and actions, arranging for blacks to grab more wealth and opportunity necessarily entails whites grabbing less. But so be it, goes the thinking. Whiteness does not justify whites having disproportionate shares of wealth and opportunity that they’ve so long enjoyed at the expense of blacks simply because whites outnumber blacks.
If wealth really did emerge independently of human institutions and actions, then unjust indeed would be any individual’s – and, hence, any group’s – disproportionately large possession of wealth. And in such a world “opportunity” would be nothing more than being well-positioned to grab wealth as it emerges from the mysterious wealth-producing engine.
The world that I hypothesize is believed by today’s well-meaning proponents of racist policies is wholly fictional. Wealth does not ooze automatically and ineluctably from some mysterious wealth-producing engine. Wealth must be incessantly produced – a result that requires ongoing creativity, attention, risk-taking, and effort. And the amount of wealth produced per period of time depends overwhelmingly on institutions, formal and informal, as well as on attitudes.
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 41 of Rachel Davison Humphries’s essay “Isabel Paterson (1886-1961),” which is Chapter 4 of the 2022 collection, published by the Fraser Institute, The Essential Women of Liberty (reference omitted):
Presidents Herbert Hoover and Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Great Depression all greatly affected Paterson. Highly skeptical of the “Best Minds” (as she would sarcastically call them in her columns) making decisions for Americans, Paterson went so far as to advocate for no intervention at all in the economy in the wake of the Great Depression in the 1930s. According to Paterson scholar and biographer Stephen Cox, Paterson saw a major difference between the depression she lived through in the 1890s and that of the 1930s: the loss of resilience among Americans to suffer the hardship necessary to get back to a sound economy without government intervention.
Some Links
The witch hunt against @DrAseemMalhotra is anti-science. Assessing risks and benefits is important for all vaccines and a pro-vaccine position. I trust @RCPhysicians supports that.
(DBx: It’s simultaneously saddening and maddening that so many people irrationally leap to the conclusion that a person is irrationally “anti-vax” if that person (1) notes that all vaccines – like nearly all actions in life – have costs and benefits, risks and rewards, and hence open discussion of these risks and rewards is not only acceptable but healthy; (2) thereby recognizes that a particular vaccine might reasonably be judged by some persons to have risks for those persons higher than the rewards; and (3) especially if (as is the case with covid vaccines) the vaccine does little or nothing to prevent the vaccinated from spreading the disease – and those who have recovered from covid have substantial natural immunity – conclude that there is no case for mandating vaccination.)
Aaron Kheriaty reports on his ordeal with University of California covidians. A slice:
I contracted the virus in July 2020, and despite my efforts to self-isolate, passed it to my wife and five children. Living and breathing COVID for a year, I eagerly awaited a safe and effective vaccine for those that were still not immune to this virus. I happily served on the Orange County COVID-19 Vaccine Task Force, and I advocated in the Los Angeles Times that the elderly and sick be prioritized for vaccination, and that the poor, disabled, and underserved be given ready access to vaccines.
I had worked every day for over a year to develop and advance the university’s and state’s pandemic mitigation measures. But as the prevailing COVID policies unfolded, I became increasingly concerned, and eventually disillusioned. Our one-size-fits-all coercive mandates failed to take account of individualized risks and benefits, particularly age-stratified risks, which are central to the practice of good medicine. We ignored foundational principles of public health, like transparency and the health of the entire population. With little resistance we abandoned foundational ethical principles.
Among the most glaring failures of our response to COVID was the refusal to acknowledge the natural immunity of COVID-recovered patients in our mitigation strategies, herd-immunity estimates, and vaccine-rollout plans. The CDC estimated that by May 2021, more than 120 million Americans (36 percent) had been infected with COVID. Following the Delta-variant wave later that year, many epidemiologists estimated the number was close to half of all Americans. By the end of the Omicron wave in early 2022, that number was north of 70 percent. The good news — almost never mentioned — was that those with previous infection had more durable and longer-lasting immunity than the vaccinated. Yet the focus remained exclusively on vaccines.
TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid.)
Brendan O’Neill ponders the political left’s hysterical fear of Elon Musk’s ownership of Twitter. Two slices (emphasis added):
So he’s done it. The richest man in the world and self-styled ‘free-speech absolutist’ has taken over Twitter. The bête noire of illiberal liberals has got his hands on social media. Cue meltdown. Listening to the woke set you’d be forgiven for thinking that the gates of hell had been flung open and every manner of evil and blasphemy will now pour forth. Twitter could become a ‘soap box for hate speech’, fretted one media outlet yesterday. It really is extraordinary how much some people fear freedom.
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The most striking thing about Musk and Twitter is the demented reaction to it. Musk himself is not going to singlehandedly restore the hard fought-for liberty to utter. It will take more than online ventures by a contrarian billionaire to turn back the tide of censorship, cancellation and social shaming for wrongthink that have become such a key and horrid feature of Anglo-American political life. Musk’s plan for Twitter is sensible, not revolutionary. It is ‘important to the future of civilisation to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence’, he said in his note of reassurance to advertisers yesterday. That town square should not be a ‘hellscape’, he said, where ‘anything can be said with no consequences’. A town square, you say? With people talking? Fetch my smelling salts.
Who could possibly be affronted by such a polite, classical-liberal vision? And yet affronted people are. Loads of them. Hysterically so. Their dread of Twitter without moderation is intense. ‘Twitter without content moderation… means lies and disinformation will overwhelm the truth’, says that New Republic piece. We’ve come a long way since John Milton’s 1644 cry against the censorship of the press: ‘Let Truth and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worst in a free and open encounter?’ Today’s woke set did. In their eyes truth will always be bettered by bullshit in an open clash. If only they knew how much this told us about the corrosion of their own faith in humankind, about the decay of their trust in ordinary people and our capacity for reason and goodness, I think they’d stop saying it.
For months now, the prospect of a little more leeway to say what you want online has been driving the woke elites to the cliff edge of sanity. ‘I am frightened by the impact on society and politics if Elon Musk acquires Twitter’, said Max Boot of the Washington Post. Shorter version: I am frightened of freedom. Jeff Jarvis of the City University of New York went full Godwin’s Law. ‘Today on Twitter’, he said back when it first seemed that Musk would get it, ‘feels like the last evening in a Berlin nightclub at the twilight of Weimar Germany’. In short, the Nazis are coming. Stop with this ahistorical drivel, please. Do these people know anything about the past? Do they know that fascism was — how can I put this — not very liberal? The Nazis burned books, banned art, banned political parties, tightly controlled every means of mass communication. The fashionable new notion that freedom allows fasicsm to flourish really needs to be confronted. It is the destruction of freedom that allows fascism to flourish.
On the left, the reaction has been like something out of the Book of Revelation. “The sun is dark,” tweeted a journalism professor. A writer at the Verge argued: “It turns out that most people do not want to participate in horrible unmoderated internet spaces full of s— racists.” The left dominates American media, but it sounds horrified that Mr. Musk might be politically ecumenical.
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Give Mr. Musk credit for working to find a free-market fix to complaints about the narrowing of online speech permitted by the tech platforms. Some Republicans are so fed up they think the government is a solution. Sen. Josh Hawley once proposed making big internet sites get a certificate from the Federal Trade Commission, proving their moderation policies are unbiased, whatever that might mean to the bureaucratic enforcers.
Good work too by the Delaware Chancery Court, which didn’t let Mr. Musk wriggle out of the deal when he had second thoughts. There’s a reason that Delaware is America’s corporate capital. Mr. Musk overpaid for Twitter in the end, its debt load is considerable, and in the past decade it posted eight years of losses. That debt is another reason to think Mr. Musk will be responsive to what users actually want.
Juliette Sellgren talks with Michael Cannon about Medicare.
The U.S. Supreme Court will consider on Monday whether racial preferences in college admissions are illegal. David Bernstein argues they’re irrational.
The argument at the high court is that Harvard and the University of North Carolina unlawfully discriminate against Asian-Americans to hold down their numbers and ensure a diverse student body. But what does it mean to say “Asians” are overrepresented on campus? Presumably elite colleges don’t have hordes of applications from America’s roughly 27,000 Mongolians. “Imagine you are a child of Hmong refugees,” says Mr. Bernstein, a professor at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, referring to an ethnic group from Southwest China and Southeast Asia. You might hope the admissions officers see you as contributing to diversity. “They say, ‘Oh, no, no, you’re Asian.’ But this Asian thing is purely a statistical construct.”
Mr. Bernstein, 55, is the author of a recent book, “Classified,” that traces the haphazard codification of the federal government’s racial labels. “We created these classifications in 1977 in a very different America, right, that was primarily black-white,” he says. “Now we have all these other groups, and we have much more division within the groups, and we’ve barely changed them at all.”
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As for the white classification, it covers Cajuns, Quebecois, indigenous northern Scandinavians, Greeks, Arabs, Iranians, and most Jews, not to mention people who see themselves as simply American but whose parents or grandparents identified as minorities. A push for a multiracial category faded as the census began to let people check multiple boxes in 2000.
Things could have been different, which is a theme of Mr. Bernstein’s book. The government in the 1970s might have thought the term Hispanic too broad for rooting out discrimination. Today about a third of U.S. Hispanics accept terms such as mixed race or mestizo, and the feds might have created a category like that.
Nineteen years ago, the court said: “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary.” Actually, preferences will flourish forever unless the court undoes the damage it did in 2003 by saying, in effect, that the Constitution guarantees equal protection of the laws only until a university claims “educational benefits” from ignoring the guarantee, at the expense of some disfavored minority. Today’s multibillion-dollar “diversity industry” of consultants and academic bureaucrats is part of the damage.
The diversity rationale for racial discrimination in admissions — in 1978 the court cheerfully anticipated a “robust exchange of ideas” — is mocked by campuses that offer racially segregated dormitories, graduation ceremonies, etc. And by the survey of Harvard’s class of 2025 showing that 72.4 percent are predominantly liberal, and 8.6 percent are very or somewhat conservative. And by the fact that since the court embraced the “diversity” rationale for racial discrimination, universities have become markedly more intellectually monochrome and intolerant.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 152 of Phil Gramm’s, Robert Ekelund’s, and John Early’s 2022 book, The Myth of American Inequality: How Government Biases Policy Debate:
The primary reason for the improvements in the relative income distribution for Black households was that average hourly earnings by Black workers (adjusted for inflation) rose by 217 percent over the fifty-year period [1967-2017], while hourly earnings for White workers rose by a somewhat smaller 196 percent.
DBx: According to today’s ‘progressive’ intellectual convention, we must therefore conclude that this higher rise in the hourly earnings by black workers, compared to that of white workers, is explained by one thing and one thing only: racism! According to this convention, it must be that, over the half-century that ended in 2017, white workers in America were victims of black racism.
Of course, racism is not here a genuine explanation. And racism when used, as it too often is, as an ‘explanation’ for such statistical differences between whites and black, is utterly inappropriate.
Adult, informed, and open minds, when seeking to understand and explain social phenomena, do not ignore preferences and motives. But nor do these minds stop – as children’s minds stop – at preferences and motives, or refuse to consider that other causes might dominate and even utterly swamp preferences and motives. ‘Progressives” minds, alas, typically behave childishly.
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Pictured above are Phil Gramm and my dissertation director Bob Ekelund.
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