The Latest from Cafe Hayek

(Don Boudreaux)

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George Will decries the racism against Asians that many Americans today – including many “Progressives” – proudly embrace. A slice:

The school principal, who is fluent in the flowery, obfuscating argot resorted to when recommending racial spoils systems, says TJ “is a rich tapestry of heritages” but does not “reflect” the county’s “racial composition.” As the district judge said in allowing the parents’ suit against the county to proceed, “You can say all sorts of beautiful things while you’re doing others.” Many have noted that the use, by TJ and others, of “holistic” metrics to limit Asian American admissions and fine-tune a school’s “culture” resembles the use of geographic preferences and “character” considerations employed by Ivy League universities to restrict Jews, before being recycled to restrict Asian Americans.

It’s simply infuriating to read of such wanton abuses of power.

Steve Davies has written an important new paper titled “Grounds for Debate.”

David Henderson wisely worries about some likely ill consequences of a universal basic income.

I’d never before heard of MEHKO legislation, but like Baylen Linnekin, I hope America gets more of it.

Florida governor Ron DeSantis deserves applause for his refusal to lock Floridians down during Covid, but he deserves criticism for his support of legislation that intrudes into decision-making by private companies.

Ethan Yang celebrates the country of Taiwan.

Here’s Chris Edwards on Biden’s proposed “budget.”

Here’s Simon Lester on country-of-origin labelling.

Alejo José G. Sison and Dulce M. Redín have written a new paper titled “Francisco de Vitoria on the Right to Free Trade and Justice.” (HT Walter Grinder). Here’s the abstract:

In 1538–39 Francisco de Vitoria delivered two relections: de indis and De iure belli. This article distills from these writings the topic of free trade as a “human right” in accordance with ius gentium or the “law of peoples.” The right to free trade is rooted in a more fundamental right to communication and association. The rights to travel, to dwell, and to migrate precede the right to trade, which is also closely connected to the rights to preach, to protect converts, and to constitute Christian princes. This has significant repercussions on the field of business ethics: the right to free trade is ultimately founded directly on natural law and indirectly on divine law; trade is not independent of ethics; and trade is presented as an opportunity to develop the virtues of justice and friendship, among other repercussions. Vitoria is portrayed as a defender of private initiative and free markets.

Ian Rowe and Nique Fajors talk with Jason Riley about the legacy of Thomas Sowell.

Tim Worstall writes about the long thread of lessening labor. Here’s his conclusion:

We all have more leisure now than our forebears did. We have more time to do as we wish and fewer needs that force us to do as we must. But this wonderful outcome of human progress is obscured by the fact that, in large part, it is the household labor that has been automated away. Sure, the Roomba might not be a great leap forward, but it is just the latest iteration of a process that began a thousand years ago. And there is no sign of it ending.

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 14 of the first volume (“Rules and Order,” 1973) of F.A. Hayek’s brilliant trilogy, Law, Legislation, and Liberty:

In civilized society it is indeed not so much the greater knowledge that the individual can acquire, as the greater benefit he receives from the knowledge possessed by others, which is the cause of his ability to pursue an infinitely wider range of ends than merely the satisfaction of his most pressing physical needs. Indeed, a ‘civilized’ individual may be very ignorant, more ignorant than many a savage, and yet greatly benefit from the civilization in which he lives.

DBx: Who can seriously doubt either the truth or the significance of this insight?

Think of any five-minute slice of your life today: you munching on breakfast; you showering; you putting in your contact lenses; you driving to the gym; you using your smartphone to chat with your mother or with your child or with your business associate; you reading this blog post; you having a hard roof above your head and with your feet and furniture resting firmly on hard floors. You having indoor plumbing and artificial lighting. It’s impossible to comprehend all the uncountable different bits of knowledge that were put to use, almost all by strangers, to make each of these experiences possible for you.

You know virtually nothing about how to make any of these experiences a reality. And yet these experiences are not only a reality, their reality is so regular and reliable that you (as do we all) take them for granted. Each of us in modern society, every moment of every day, is served by the knowledge and efforts of billions of strangers.

Why are you not in awe of this amazingness? Why do you believe that the relatively few glitches, real or unreal, in the modern economy – “Damn, my Internet connection just went down!” or “Damn, Amazon’s delivery of my gourmet Keurig coffee pods is delayed by 24 hours!” or “Damn! Thomas Piketty has graphs that reveal that some people have lots more money in their financial portfolios than I have in mine!” – are the relevant facts to focus on rather than the sheer amazingness of modernity for ordinary people?

…..

I’ve often said that this book by Hayek – volume one of Law, Legislation, and Liberty – is the single most important book that I’ve ever read. I’m now re-reading it, cover to cover, for what is probably the fourth time since I first read it as a senior in college in 1979. My assessment of it stands. It’s not perfect, but it’s sublime. No book has had as big an impact on my worldview as has this one. Some works have come close: Leonard Read’s “I, Pencil”; Deirdre McCloskey’s Bourgeois Dignity; Frederic Bastiat’s Economic Sophisms; Richard Dawkins’s The Blind Watchmaker; Julian Simons’s The Ultimate Resource 2; Armen Alchian’s Economic Forces at Work; Adam Smith’s An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations; H.L. Mencken’s A Mencken Chrestomathy; James Buchanan’s and Richard Wagner’s Democracy in Deficit; Thomas Sowell’s Knowledge and Decisions; Geoffrey Brennan’s and Loren Lomasky’s Democracy and Decision; Robert Higgs’s Crisis and Leviathan; Richard Epstein’s Simple Rules for a Complex World; Don Lavoie’s National Economic Planning: What Is Left?; Paul Heyne’s textbook, The Economic Way of Thinking; Oliver Williamson’s The Economic Institutions of Capitalism; Etienne de la Boetie’s The Politics of Obedience – but none quite matches the first volume of Hayek’s Law, Legislation, and Liberty.

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 113 of Thomas Sowell’s superb 1984 book, Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality?:

From an economic point of view, to say that any group is systematically underpaid or systematically denied as much credit as they deserve is the same as saying that an opportunity for unusually high profit exists for anyone who will hire them or lend to them.

DBx: This point, at once so obvious, is obviously overlooked in too many cases. How many are the professors, pundits, preachers, and politicians who insist that women as a group are underpaid? That blacks as a group are underpaid? That low-wage workers as a group are underpaid? That CEOs as a group are over-paid? That minorities as a group are denied adequate access to credit? Some of the people who so insist even claim to have empirical data to support their insistence. Yet almost none of these people act with their own resources on their words, despite in each case being able to personally profit from the alleged market imperfection.

Instead, people who assert that members of some group are systematically underpaid (or overpaid) issue their assertions as a means of prodding government to intervene by, say, imposing minimum-wage requirements (or caps on the incomes of employees who are allegedly overpaid). People who make such assertions, and who offer such policies, systematically fail to put their own money where their mouths are. This fact alone is sufficient to discredit the assertions issued by such people.