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Some Links

Posted: 08 Jun 2022 04:46 AM PDT
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
Phil Magness explains how Milton Friedman fought segregation through the
American Economic Association. A slice:

The AEA’s stance presented an opportunity for Friedman to act on a theory
that his doctoral student, Gary Becker, proposed the same year in a
dissertation written at the University of Chicago. Segregated businesses
ultimately harmed themselves by denying their services to excluded racial
groups, thereby losing them as customers. As Friedman later observed,
economic decision-making could be used as a powerful weapon against
discriminatory practices. In this case, if the Roosevelt Hotel would not
allow black guests to stay on its premises, the economists would take their
conference and its paying customers elsewhere.

Friedman would elaborate on this principle in his now-classic 1962 book,
Capitalism and Freedom. As he wrote in that text, “It is often taken for
granted that the person who discriminates against others because of their
race, religion, color, or whatever, incurs no costs by doing so but simply
imposes costs on others.” This view, Friedman continued, rested on an
economic fallacy. “The man who objects to buying from or working alongside
a Negro, for example, thereby limits his range of choice. He will generally
have to pay a higher price for what he buys or receive a lower return for
his work. Or, put the other way, those of us who regard color of skin or
religion as irrelevant can buy some things more cheaply as a result.”

When Friedman advocated making the AEA’s hotel contract contingent upon
their desegregating their facility, he aimed to drive home this point. If
the Roosevelt Hotel [in New Orleans] would not integrate in time for the
conference, it would not receive any business at all from the organization.

This report by Randy Holcombe of the research interests of economists today
does little to promote my pride in my profession.

Reviewing Rainer Zitelmanns Hitlers National Socialism, Daniel Johnson
reminds us that Hitler was a socialist. A slice:

Throughout his career, Zitelmann insists, Hitler was an anti-capitalist and
he became more so during wartime, when he increasingly came to admire
Stalin’s command economy as a far superior system than that of the West.
The book is a tour de force of critical exegesis, ranging across the vast
corpus of the dictator’s speeches, orders, correspondence, “table talk,”
and other documents to grasp what he meant by National Socialism. What
emerges is an ideology of remarkable consistency, more coherent and
sophisticated than most historians have hitherto been willing to concede.

Eric Boehm reports that Joe Biden believes that Joe Bidens tariffs on solar
panels are a threat to U.S. national security. A slice:

Like most industries that involve building things, the solar industry in
America needs two conditions to grow: reliable supply chains to provide
access to goods produced anywhere in the world and greater private
investment. Tariffs make the former more complicated and expensive while
introducing uncertainty that scares away the latter.

Scott Lincicome writes that globalization is alive, well, and changing. A
slice:

Its undoubtedly true that international trade, like all forms of market
competition, disrupts some American companies and workers that, through
government protection, formerly had the U.S. market to themselves. However,
the economic case for free trade remains rock solid. American consumers
(who are also American workers, by the way) gain from new access to goods
and services at lower prices and in greater varieties. These gains come not
only from foreign-made items but also from similar domestic ones that are
now forced to compete with imports on price and quality. Studies show that
trades consumer surplus is far more significant than a few cents on the
proverbial cheap T-shirt. Recently, for example, several economists have
found that falling prices caused by Chinese imports into the United States
during the 2000s generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in consumer
benefits for each American job potentially displaced by the China Shock—the
equivalent of giving every American $260 in extra spending per year for the
rest of their lives. Similar gains occur outside the United States:
European consumers, for example, save €60 billion per year (about $64
billion) from lower tariffs resulting from the European Unions entry into
the WTO. Studies also uniformly find that these benefits—again contrary to
the conventional wisdom—tend to disproportionately aid the poor and the
middle class, who have tighter budgets and concentrate their spending on
tradable sectors like food, clothing, footwear, and consumer electronics.

Phil Magness reports that the straw man is not yet leaving Shanghai. (HT
Tim Townsend)

The Wall Street Journals Editorial Board decries the fraud fueled by the
U.S. governments fiscal incontinence an incontinence worsened by covid
hysteria. A slice:

The Small Business Administration (SBA) was in charge of the $814 billion
Paycheck Protection Program, and a report last month from its inspector
general is a bracing read. PPP provided forgivable loans to keep workers
paid and businesses whole while the economy went into a government-ordered
cryogenic freeze. To get the money into businesses quickly, local banks
were authorized to approve PPP claims.

Yet the SBA “did not provide lenders sufficient specific guidance to
effectively identify, track, address, and resolve potentially fraudulent
PPP loans,” the IG says. The official fraud hotline has taken more than
54,000 complaints. Scams were “rapidly evolving” and included “false
attestations on loan documents, inflation of payroll, falsified tax
documentation, identity theft, and misuse of proceeds.”




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Quotation of the Day

Posted: 08 Jun 2022 01:30 AM PDT
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
is from pages 588-589 of my former GMU Econ colleague Tom DiLorenzo’s
excellent Fall 1984 Cato Journal paper, The Political Economy of National
Industrial Policy:

The market is a process in which individuals voluntarily interact with one
another in pursuit of their own interests. With appropriately designed
institutions such as well-defined, enforced, and respected property rights
and freedom of contract, freedom of exchange, and the enforcement of
contracts self-interested behavior generates a spontaneous order. This
order is chosen by no one, yet it tends to maximize the subjective values
of all the market participants. Only in this sense can the market process
be termed “efficient.” The maximization of subjective values, as
individuals perceive them, is the end result of the market process and
cannot be defined or “maximized” by any outside observer. A market
situation can be judged “efficient” to the extent that it allows
individuals to exercise their preferences subject only to the principles of
mutual agreement and noninterference with the equal rights of others. The
determination of what is efficient by some third party, such as government,
would require interpersonal utility comparisons that are arbitrary and
meaningless. In the absence of an omniscient and benevolent despot, market
efficiency can he defined only in terms of the extent to which existing
institutions facilitate mutually advantageous trade, subjectively valued.




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My Review of Thomas Pikettys Time For Socialism

Posted: 07 Jun 2022 04:41 AM PDT
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
My review of Thomas Pikettys 2021 collection of his popular essays, Time
For Socialism, has just been published at EconLib. (For inviting me to
write this review I thank Amy Willis.) Here are two slices from my review:

In Piketty’s universe, the tools, enterprises, and economic processes that
are necessary for modern prosperity just materialize, as if out of thin
air. About the formation and operation of capital goods and services the
reader gets no information beyond the alleged fact that, above a certain
level, wealth—that is, the value of capital—”tends to grow mechanically.”
An implication of this mysterious reality is that, because the value of
capital depends upon the value of what it produces, the total output
generated by capital also tends to grow mechanically. In Piketty’s
universe, then, capital goods and services are neither caused by—nor
affected by—entrepreneurship, risk-taking, and individuals’ private
investment choices. Economic and social institutions thus have almost no
impact on wealth creation. Ditto for economic and fiscal policies. Adam
Smith’s 1776 inquiry into how institutions and norms cause the wealth of
nations—Smith’s investigation into how different institutions and norms
cause differences in the wealth of nations—must be for Piketty a project
wholly sterile and inexplicable.

My best guess is that Piketty is enough of a Marxist to assume that that
which “mechanically” generates businesses, factories, tools, and all other
productive assets are the historical forces that form society. The toil of
physically extracting from capital the outputs with which capital is
pregnant is left to laborers, but Piketty’s belief that the value of
capital “tends to grows mechanically” allows for only very minor variation
over time in the total amount of final output that labor helps capital to
birth.

..

Given the bizarreness of Piketty’s economic vision, the reader is not
surprised to find in his work fatal inconsistencies.

One such inconsistency arrives when Piketty asserts that “long-term
economic performance is primarily determined by investment in training.”
Well. Now that we’re told that improving the training of workers improves
the performance of capital, it’s impossible to believe that the value of
capital “tends to grow mechanically.” What’s left of the asserted non-role
of capitalists in affecting the value of capital once we learn that
economic growth is affected “primarily” by the choices humans make
regarding how much, and presumably which sorts of, human training to demand
and supply? After all, prominent among those who surely have incentives to
provide at least some worker training are workers’ capitalist employers.

And so might the amount of worker training currently supplied by real-world
employers be optimal? A strong case can be made that it is, especially
given that when Piketty measures the growth over time of the value of
non-human capital he finds that this growth appears to happen
“mechanically.” But if, instead, privately provided worker training is
suboptimal, what’s the best way to provide more and better training? Is the
answer to entrust government, as Piketty predictably wishes, with more
money to supply training? Or might a better way to improve training be
through changes in labor law, or increases in the amount of training
expenses that employers are allowed to deduct from their taxes? And how
about, contrary to Piketty’s demand for a higher minimum wage, lowering or
eliminating minimum wages, thus enabling more low-skilled workers to find
employment—employment that gives workers valuable on-the-job experience and
training?

Questions such as these are naturally asked by economists. Questions such
as these are never asked by Piketty.

A second inconsistency is highlighted by Piketty’s insistence that worker
training doesn’t merely positively affect economic performance, but that
such training is the primary determinant of performance. This insistence,
though, is at odds with Piketty’s exclusion of human capital from his
measures of capital.




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Some Links

Posted: 07 Jun 2022 03:39 AM PDT
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Ilya Shapiro explains why he quit the
Georgetown University Law Center. Two slices:

After a four-month investigation into a tweet, the Georgetown University
Law Center reinstated me last Thursday. But after full consideration of the
report I received later that afternoon from the Office of Institutional
Diversity, Equity and Affirmative Action, or IDEAA, and on consultation
with counsel and trusted advisers, I concluded that remaining in my job was
untenable.

Dean William Treanor cleared me on the technicality that I wasn’t an
employee when I tweeted, but the IDEAA implicitly repealed Georgetown’s
Speech and Expression Policy and set me up for discipline the next time I
transgress progressive orthodoxy. Instead of participating in that
slow-motion firing, I’m resigning.

IDEAA speciously found that my tweet criticizing President Biden for
limiting his Supreme Court pool by race and sex required “appropriate
corrective measures” to address my “objectively offensive comments and to
prevent the recurrence of offensive conduct based on race, gender, and
sex.” Mr. Treanor reiterated these concerns in a June 2 statement, further
noting the “harmful” nature of my tweets.

But IDEAA makes clear there is nothing objective about its standard: “The
University’s anti-harassment policy does not require that a respondent
intend to denigrate,” the report says. “Instead, the Policy requires
consideration of the ‘purpose or effect’ of a respondent’s conduct.” That
people were offended, or claim to have been, is enough for me to have
broken the rules.

..

Fundamentally, what Mr. Treanor has done—what he’s allowed IDEAA to do—is
repeal the Speech and Expression Policy that he claims to hold dear. The
freedom to speak is no freedom at all if it makes an exception for speech
someone finds offensive or counter to some nebulous conception of equity.

Georgetown’s treatment of me shows how the university applies even these
self-contradicting “principles” inconsistently depending on ideology.
Contrast my case with these recent examples:

• In 2018, Prof. Carol Christine Fair of the School of Foreign Service
tweeted during Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation process: “Look at
this chorus of entitled white men justifying a serial rapist’s arrogated
entitlement. All of them deserve miserable deaths while feminists laugh as
they take their last gasps. Bonus: we castrate their corpses and feed them
to swine? Yes.” Georgetown held this to be protected speech.

The Wall Street Journals Editorial Board opines on Ilya Shapiros Orwellian
treatment by Georgetown. A slice:

The episode underscores again that American academia is dominated by the
censoring left. Mr. Treanor has shown himself to be a weak man who bends to
the mob. When the left-wing mob won’t tolerate a thoughtful scholar like
Mr. Shapiro, it shouldn’t be surprised if the response becomes a right-wing
mob.

Excellent news! Chris Freiman will be a guest blogger at Bryan Caplans Bet
On It.

David Henderson asks if Milton Friedman was a nobody.

Jeff Jacoby writes wisely. A slice:

Countless Americans have lost an essential component of citizenship: the
ability to grant that their opponents are sincere and that at least some of
their claims are not easily dismissed. Even if you are unwaveringly
pro-life and regard abortion as a tragic act of violence, you should be
able to recognize that to a woman who is in the first stages of pregnancy
and desperate to avoid the turmoil, pain, expense, or trauma of bearing an
unwanted child, the right to an abortion is a fundamental matter of liberty
and bodily autonomy. Even if you are a fierce defender of Roe v. Wade and
have always believed that abortion rights are indispensable, you should be
able to concede the threshold scientific truth that a fetus at 12 weeks is
unmistakably human, alive, and vulnerable.

The truth is that the best argument on each side is a damn good one, and
until you acknowledge that fact, you arent speaking or even thinking
honestly about the issue, wrote Caitlin Flanagan in a powerful essay in The
Atlantic in 2019. You certainly arent going to convince anybody.

Doug Bandow explains how the brutal Chinese state used covid as an excuse
to double-down on its tyrannical ways. A slice:

The real cost of Chinese policy, however, became evident with the PRC’s
attempt to maintain a zero-COVID policy as the Omicron variant swept the
globe. The plight of Shanghai, China’s economic engine and home to nearly
29 million people, has been in the news of late. The Chinese were long used
to authoritarian social controls, but popular anger exploded at the
imposition of brutal totalitarian restrictions. The authorities locked
people in their apartments, broke down doors to remove residents, tossed
Chinese into overcrowded quarantine facilities, denied people access to
non-COVID medical care, left residents without food, and killed family
pets. The city is finally emerging from a two-month lockdown, slowly.
Reported Reuters: “the authorities have been allowing more people out of
their homes and more businesses to reopen over the past week. But most
residents remain confined to their compounds and most shops can only do
deliveries.”

Tim Halliday and Ge Bai, writing in the Wall Street Journal, warn of the
high cost of constant covid testing. A slice:

Testing labs in the U.S. have been earning windfall profits as a direct
consequence of the Covid-19 pandemic. Using tax data from Hawaii, we found
that statewide growth in private diagnostic labs’ monthly revenue tracked
the volume of Covid-19 PCR tests in lockstep. Between May and December
2020, lab revenue grew at an average of 8% a month. Labs are making more
than $10 a test in profit.

Why are these profits possible? The American healthcare system let labs set
prices for Covid-19 tests well above their costs, costing taxpayers and
private insurance companies dearly, for three reasons.

J.D. Tuccille is correct: Lingering covid-19 restrictions are a costly
hazard. A slice:

Researchers find that children suffered significant anxiety and depression
during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic, according to a May 2021
article in Pediatric Clinics of North America. Social isolation,
loneliness, lack of physical exercise, and family stress may contribute to
these problems.

Battles over closures, masks, and bungled remote learning poisoned families
relations with school administrators. New York City schools still require
masks on younger children despite protests. Other public schools used the
pandemic to impose surveillance states.

Writing at The Hill, GMU Econ alum Ben Powell calls on Congress to end the
federal mask mandate once and for all. A slice:

The U.S. Department of Justice’s appeal of a judge’s ruling against the
federal mask mandate on public transportation illustrates why the House of
Representatives needs to join the Senate and vote to permanently end the
mandate. It made little sense before, and it makes even less sense now.

Jeanne Noble tweets

From the epicenter of COVID theater, Berkeley reinstates mask mandate for
schools only, while Alameda county reinstates mask mandate for everyplace
except schools (but includes summer school/camps), despite falling case
rates.

and Margery Smelkinson chimes in: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

This is what it looks like when public health wants to just do something to
fight rising cases.

No science, no cohesion. Just strange rules which are transparently foolish
and ineffective.




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Quotation of the Day

Posted: 07 Jun 2022 01:30 AM PDT
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
is from page 5 of Richard Vedder’s and Lowell Gallaway’s vital 1993
volume, Out of Work:

[T]he evidence generally points to the conclusion that the unemployment
situation was better in the relatively laissez-faire era before the Great
Depression than in periods since.




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Toddler-like Thinking

Posted: 06 Jun 2022 11:25 AM PDT
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
In my latest column for AIER I express my dismay at the jejune thinking and
commentary that passes these days for serious policy analysis. A slice:

Pay close attention to how the clerisy (who are mostly, although not
exclusively, Progressives) propose to ‘solve’ almost any problem, real or
imaginary. You’ll discover that the proposed ‘solution’ is superficial;
it’s rooted in the naïve assumption that social reality beyond what is
immediately observable either doesn’t exist or is unaffected by attempts to
rearrange surface phenomena. In the clerisy’s view, the only reality that
matters is the reality that is easily seen and seemingly easily manipulated
with coercion. The clerisy’s proposed ‘solutions,’ therefore, involve
simply rearranging, or attempting to rearrange, surface phenomena.

Do some people use guns to murder other people? Yes, sadly. The clerisy’s
superficial ‘solution’ to this real problem is to outlaw guns. Do some
people have substantially higher net financial worths than other people?
Yes. The clerisy’s juvenile ‘solution’ to this fake problem is to heavily
tax the rich and transfer the proceeds to the less rich. Are some workers
paid wages that are too low to support a family in modern America? Yes. The
clerisy’s simplistic ‘solution’ to this fake problem – “fake” because most
workers earning such low wages are not heads of households – is to have
government prohibit the payment of wages below some stipulated minimum.

Do some people suffer substantial property damage, or even loss of life,
because of hurricanes, droughts, and other bouts of severe weather? Yes.
The clerisy’s lazy ‘solution’ to this real problem focuses on changing the
weather by reducing the emissions of an element, carbon, that is now (a bit
too simplistically) believed to heavily determine the weather.

Do prices of many ‘essential’ goods and services rise significantly in the
immediate aftermath of natural disasters? Yes. The clerisy’s
counterproductive ‘solution’ to this fake problem “counterproductive” and
“fake” because these high prices accurately reflect and signal underlying
economic realities is to prohibit the charging and payment of these high
prices. When inflationary pressures build up because of excessive monetary
growth, are these pressures vented in the form of rising prices? Yes
indeed. The clerisy’s infantile ‘solution’ to the very real problem of
inflation is to blame it on greed while raising taxes on profits.

Is the SARS-CoV-2 virus contagious and potentially dangerous to humans?
Yes. The clerisy’s simple-minded ‘solution’ to this real problem is to
forcibly prevent people from mingling with each other.

Do many Americans still not receive K-12 schooling of minimum acceptable
quality? Yes. The clerisy’s lazy ‘solution’ to this real problem is to give
pay raises to teachers and spend more money on school administrators.

Do some American workers lose jobs when American consumers buy more
imports? Yes. The clerisy’s ‘solution’ is to obstruct consumers’ ability to
buy imports. Are some people bigoted and beset with irrational dislike or
fear of blacks, gays, lesbians, and bisexuals? Yes. The clerisy’s
‘solution’ to this real problem is to outlaw “hate” and to compel bigoted
persons to behave as if they aren’t bigoted.

Do many persons who are eligible to vote in political elections refrain
from voting? Yes. The ‘solution’ favored by at least some of the clerisy
to this fake problem – “fake” because in a free society each person has a
right to refrain from participating in politics – is to make voting
mandatory.

The above list of simplistic and superficial ‘solutions’ to problems real
and imaginary can easily be expanded.

The clerisy, mistaking words for realities, assumes that success at
verbally describing realities more to their liking proves that these
imagined realities can be made real by merely rearranging the relevant
surface phenomena. Members of the clerisy ignore unintended consequences.
And they overlook the fact that many of the social and economic realities
that they abhor are the result, not of villainy or of correctible
imperfections, but of complex trade-offs made by countless individuals.




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MacLean Is Best Ignored

Posted: 06 Jun 2022 06:48 AM PDT
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
I received a very nice note from someone suggesting an open letter in
response to Nancy MacLean’s latest work of fiction. Here’s my reply:

Mr. L__:

Thanks for suggesting that I and other classical-liberal scholars write an
open letter expressing our many sound reasons for regarding Nancy MacLean’s
attacks on economists James Buchanan, Milton Friedman, and W.H. Hutt as
nothing but a river of ridiculous nonsense. But I concur with the advice
that you report receiving from Deirdre McCloskey: MacLean is best ignored.

MacLean reveals in her work that she’s either as stupid as a stump or
driven delusional by her ideological priors. A third possibility is that
she’s an outright liar. My suspicion, though, is that she doesn’t lie in
the sense of being aware that what she writes and says is utterly detached
from reality. But regardless of whether she’s stupid, delusional, or
deceitful, neither she nor any of the pathetic souls who swallow her
preposterous tales deserves attention from anyone whose time has any value
at all.

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




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Some Covid Links

Posted: 06 Jun 2022 02:55 AM PDT
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
Writing in todays Wall Street Journal, Jay Bhattacharya decries the White
Houses continuing stoking of the unjustified fear that covid poses a
serious threat to children. Two slices:

In a May 30 tweet, Dr. [Ashish] Jha asserted that Covid is “a far greater
threat to kids than the flu is.” He linked to an article by Harvard Medical
School instructor Jeremy Faust, which claims that Covid killed more than
600 children in 2021, whereas the flu kills “an average” of only 120
children annually. But Dr. Faust’s data are severely skewed, for three
reasons.

First, while flu is seldom tested, everyone admitted to a hospital for any
reason gets a Covid test. Between October 2018 and September 2019, 1.4
million flu tests were reported to public-health and clinical labs. As of
May 31, 2022, there had been 897 million PCR tests for Covid.

Second, evidence from audits of death certificates found that 35% of all
pediatric deaths in 2020 “had co-occurring diagnosis codes that could not
be plausibly categorized as either a chain-of-event or significant
contributing condition,” according to a study published by the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention. Put another way, in at least 35% of
pediatric “Covid deaths,” Covid couldn’t have been the cause.

Third, Dr. Faust relies on a figure for confirmed flu deaths that is
well-known to underestimate actual flu deaths by an order of magnitude.
Correcting for the lack of flu testing, the National Center for
Immunization and Respiratory Diseases estimated 1,161 pediatric flu deaths
in the 2012-13 season rather than the 142 that Dr. Faust reported.

..

There are far greater risks to children than Covid. Since March 2020, more
than 1,000 kids have died with Covid (an average of around 38 a month),
according to the CDC. In the same period more than 1,400 children died from
drug- and alcohol-related causes.

The Wall Street Journals Editorial Board writes about the recent official
finding that Florida governor Ron DeSantis did not falsify that states
covid numbers. Two slices:

A frequent phenomenon of our times is the flurry over an alleged scandal
that on examination turns out to be false. The latest case is the claim
that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis manipulated Covid data.

Mr. DeSantis became public-health enemy number one by defying the left’s
lockdown consensus early in the pandemic. When former state health
department employee Rebekah Jones claimed she was fired for refusing to
fudge state Covid data to support the state’s reopening in spring 2020,
national and local media outlets reported her allegations as fact.

“Florida Dismisses A Scientist For Her Refusal To Manipulate State’s
Coronavirus Data,” NPR reported. After the Florida Department of Law
Enforcement executed a search warrant of her home, Ms. Jones claimed Mr.
DeSantis had “sent the gestapo” to silence her. “FDLE raid dramatizes
Florida’s COVID-19 coverup” the South Florida Sun Sentinel editorialized.

But according to the Governor’s office, Ms. Jones was fired for repeated
“insubordination” and making “unilateral decisions to modify the
Department’s COVID-19 dashboard without input or approval from the
epidemiological team or her supervisors.”

..

“If the complainant or other DOH staff were to have falsified COVID-19 data
on the dashboard, the dashboard would then not have matched the data in the
corresponding final daily report,” the IG explained, adding that “such a
discrepancy” would surely have been detected by Bureau of Epidemiology
staff, researchers or the media. The IG found no truth to any of Ms.
Jones’s accusations.

Covidocratic tyranny in China became so egregious that even a CNN reporter
reported it.

The New York Posts Editorial Board calls on the Biden administration to end
the nonsensical requirement that all international travelers test negative
for COVID to board flights here. A slice:

Most important, the pandemic is over: COVID will keep on sickening and
killing a few people, but only as a background threat, much like the flu.
Pandering to the remaining hysteria only feeds fear, holding back the full
return to normalcy.

el gato malo believes that humans natural discomfort with cognitive
dissonance is an important part of why covidocrats acted as they did. A
slice:

to be sure, there are serious, dangerous liars in the mix here as well (a
fellah whose name rhymes with “phony slouchy” comes to mind) but i suspect
it’s far fewer than many have come to presume.

consider:

we have a large group of highly unqualified people with generally
technocratic/authoritarian mindsets that have failed up into positions of
power for which no one, much less they are really suited.
in a crisis, the emotional drive to “do something” is overwhelming.
everyone clamors for action.
so they did things, visible things, bold things, wrong things.
then it all blew up and went wrong and by then, they were too emotionally
invested to own the mistakes so they doubled and tripled down and blamed
everyone but themselves for “not pandemicing hard enough.”
and they all got trapped.
and their cognitive dissonance and selection bias took over to protect
their mental states.


and so in their minds they did not lose the debate. “you were too too
benighted and dim to see that they won” is just the low energy pathway to
preserve sense of self and self-worth.

Jay Bhattacharya tweets:

PM Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act against anti lockdown truckers to
suppress a legitimate protest, seize bank accounts of regular people, and
take political prisoners. Public health that needs this kind of
authoritarian power to get its way has lost moral authority.




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Quotation of the Day

Posted: 06 Jun 2022 01:30 AM PDT
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
is from page 173 of economist Arthur Diamond, Jr.’s excellent 2019 book,
Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism (original
emphases; footnote deleted):

Federal disclosure rules [imposed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange
Commission] result in long, opaque documents that almost no one reads,
resulting paradoxically in consumers who are less well-informed but who
believe that the government is protecting them. Remember that a good part
of the reason why financial information is so lengthy and opaque is that
government regulations require it.




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Enough With "Greedflation"

Posted: 05 Jun 2022 12:33 PM PDT
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
I’m catching up on my correspondence.

Mr. K__:

Thanks for your follow-up e-mail.

About this Café Hayek post of May 21st you write: Greed is a necessary part
of the explanation for inflation. Not greed alone. But greed in tandem with
the Ukraine invasion and other supply constrictions. This cannot be denied.
Greed is the motive for corporations to increase prices.”

I can and do deny that any part of an explanation of inflation is “greed.”
And while the unusually tight supply constraints that we’ve endured lately
account for some one-time jumps in prices, they can’t account for the
on-going price hikes – the inflation – that we’re now suffering. Either
way, no legitimate part of the explanation of inflation is provided by
“greed.”

I ask my students to imagine New York City police officers arriving on 34th
Street to investigate the death of someone who fell from the Empire State
Building. An officer approaches the crowd surrounding the mangled body and
asks “Does anyone here know what caused this to person fall?” A young man
proudly answers “I do! Gravity!”

My students rightly laugh at this explanation’s absurdity. And my students
– no less rightly – remain unimpressed with the “gravity” explanation even
after I note the indisputable fact that, absent gravity, the person now
splattered dead on Manhattan’s pavement would still be alive. My students
understand that the actual cause of this death is something that changed –
say, a decision to commit suicide, or a snapped cable on window-washing
scaffolding – to enable ever-present gravity to pull the person fatally to
the ground.

The same logic applies to inflation. To truly explain inflation we must
identify something that changed something that changed both to incite
sellers to charge higher prices and, more importantly, to enable buyers to
pay these higher prices. That something clearly isn’t “greed.” Not only is
greed (or, using a more measured term, self-interest) ever-present, it’s
not something that consumers can spend. Therefore, the only plausible
explanation of inflation is excessive growth in the money supply – which,
as it happens, we’ve lately had a great deal of.

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




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