The Latest from Cafe Hayek

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Here’s a letter to The Telegraph:

The usually wise Zoe Strimpel entirely misses the mark with her hostile reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade (“America is headed for another civil war where one side has to vanquish the other,” June 25.) It’s perfectly appropriate to criticize the legal reasoning and ruling in Dobbs, perhaps concluding that these are errors committed by a court. But Ms Strimpel instead criticizes the ruling as if it’s the product of a legislature or of a constitutional convention.

The ultimate question before the Court in both Roe and Dobbs was not the normative one of whether or not American women should have legal access to abortion. Instead, the question was one of fact, namely: Does the U.S. Constitution protect the right to abortion? Roe found that it does; Dobbs found that it doesn’t. Even if the majority of justices in Dobbs are mistaken, no less mistaken are the many pundits – including Ms Strimpel – who judge the Court according to how well or poorly it achieves particular policy outcomes rather than according to how well or poorly it interprets and applies the law of the Constitution. Not all that is desirable is protected by the Constitution, and not all that is undesirable is prohibited by it.

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

…..

Nothing in the above letter implies anything about my personal views on the morality of abortion, about appropriate abortion policy, or about the merits or demerits of the reasoning and rulings in Roe and in Dobbs.

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… is from pages 12-13 of Randy Barnett’s and Evan Bernick’s important 2021 book, The Original Meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment: Its Letter and Spirit (footnotes deleted):

Why good-faith construction? Upon taking their Article VI oath to adhere to the Constitution, all constitutional actors receive a great deal of discretionary power. With this power comes a corresponding normative obligation to implement the Constitution in good faith in a way that is analogous to the duty that private law imposes on “fiduciaries.” Fiduciaries are power-exercising parties who have been delegated control over resources belonging to other (think attorneys, agents, and boards of directors). Similarly, to fulfill their duty, judges and legislators must act consistently with the letter of the instrument from which they draw their power. They also must not abuse their delegated powers by using whatever discretion that original meaning gives them to pursue their own extralegal ends, goals, purposes, or objects, rather than serving the interests of their principals. Where the letter of the Constitution is unclear, fidelity to the Constitution’s design requires that judges, legislators, and other constitutional decision-makers turn to the law’s original spirit.

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Peter Calcagno and GMU Econ alum Edward Lopez encourage us to remember the lessons of James Buchanan’s and Richard Wagner’s pioneering 1977 book, Democracy in Deficit. A slice:

On the eve of the early 1980s high inflation rates, mainline economists James Buchanan and Richard Wagner drew attention to the rising debt and inflationary risks of the time. Their 1977 book carried the evocative title, Democracy in Deficit: The Political Legacy of Lord Keynes. Buchanan and Wagner’s prose minced few words, describing the Keynesian influence as the culprit behind “continuing and increasing budget deficits, a rapidly growing governmental sector, high unemployment, apparently permanent and perhaps increasing inflation, and accompanying disenchantment with the American sociopolitical order.”

Buchanan and Wagner argue that the post-Keynesian era suffers from the “presuppositions of Harvey Road.” Harvey Road is a reference to the Keynes family home in Cambridge. A biographer of Keynes, R. F. Harrod, coined this “presuppositions” expression, and Buchanan and Wagner use it to argue that Keynes’s economic theory operates in a political vacuum where the world of monetary and fiscal policy is carried out by wise men in authority. This intellectual aristocracy could ensure conditions of prosperity, freedom, and even peace. In 2011, after President Obama’s stimulus package, many remarked that “Keynes was back.” In reality, the Keynesian influence never died, and modern macroeconomists and policymakers still suffer from the presuppositions of Harvey Road.

Jim Dorn warns of “the menace of fiscal inflation.” A slice:

John Cochrane (2022), a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, makes a convincing case that, although inflation generally can be understood as a monetary phenomenon, its roots often can be traced to fiscal dominance—that is, to political pressure to use the central bank to accommodate government deficit spending. Both debt monetization and fiscal helicopter drops—or what Cochrane calls “fiscal inflation”—need to be recognized.

Eric Boehm is correct: “Biden ignores his own role in inflation.”

Ryan Bourne reports that, thankfully, “economists still believe in the price mechanism.” (DBx: Well, most economists still believe in the price mechanism. It’s distressing that not all do. Those economists who don’t believe in it – those economists who ‘agreed’ with the propositions in the survey reported by Ryan – are the equivalent of modern-day ‘biologists’ who do not believe in natural selection.)

This past February, Deirdre McCloskey gave “an address on liberty” on the Occasion of the 800th Anniversary of the University of Padova. A slice:

But the second pair of Roosevelt’s four freedoms, “freedom from fear” and “freedom from want,” are positive ones, and dangerous. They are freedoms to have, like Amartya’s “capabilities.” In the short run, obviously, if the state taxes Giovanni and is enabled thereby to give a positive liberty of free goods and services to Dario, Dario is mightily pleased—at any rate if he does not have ethical worries about the negative liberty not granted to Giovanni. Giovanni in turn views the transfer as an act of goberno ladro, and feels justified to turn to the Italian indoor sport of evading the taxes.

Ray Domanico says that Betsy DeVos “has much to teach.” A slice:

The true threat DeVos posed to the Washington education “blob” was her commitment to localism, pluralism, and federalism in educational matters and her belief that parents should be the ultimate arbiters of how and where their children are educated. These values are anathema to Washington’s self-appointed mandarins and the self-serving national teachers’ unions, which are more interested in pressing their influence in Washington than in fighting for better schools state by state.

Heather Mac Donald rightly criticizes Biden’s “green hypocrisy.” A slice:

Mocking climate-change warriors for their private jets and yachts, far-flung vacation homes, and chauffeured SUVs has become routine among jaundiced observers of the world’s increasingly numerous environmental conferences. Such mockery hasn’t had the slightest effect on the conferees’ conspicuous consumption of the miraculous products of Western innovation and capitalism. The celebrities and climate ministers continue to enjoy their fabulous lifestyles in plain view, confident in the cardinal rule of all environmentalism: one’s own activities are always important enough to be exempt from any environmental limits. Only the other person should have to sacrifice.

Matt Ridley calls for an independent inquiry into covid’s origins.

Matt Ridley and Alina Chan ask: “What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?”

Blake Stone-Banks reports on life in lockdowned Shanghai. Two slices:

Raising two-year-old twins, my wife and I faced the real prospect of having our children taken from us into quarantine facilities with no way to contact them. We deliberately began sharing cups and utensils with our kids with the hope that if one of us contracted Covid, we would all test positive and avoid family separation. We made plans to bar our door if we tested positive and kept a list of emergency numbers, including that of the U.S. Consulate in Shanghai, which would soon order non-emergency employees to depart China.

We also began hearing reports of more compounds in both Pudong and Puxi where residents were unable to receive food deliveries. I began calling colleagues and friends to check in on them, and I discovered, to my horror, how lucky our family was to live in a large, centrally located compound. Several of them who lived in smaller compounds were struggling to get food. The logistical nightmare of a 25-million-person lockdown was already coming into focus.

…..

Nothing made much sense about how the lockdown was implemented, and we had nowhere to turn for answers. In the first month of lockdown, almost no one could leave their apartment for access to healthcare. Of the three times I am aware someone in our compound called an ambulance, each time the ambulance was denied. There is no official toll of those who died due to Covid hospital restrictions, but many stories were shared on WeChat, including that of a nurse who died from asthma after being refused access to her own hospital. Every time one of our kids bumped his head or choked on his food, we immediately entered triage mode because the ambulances weren’t getting through.

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el gato malo posted the image just below at his blog, bad cattitude. If you doubt its veracity, behold, when you’re next in a modern supermarket, the entire – or, in some cases, almost entire – aisle devoted to pets. Pet food (available for animals of different ages and body weights). Pet snacks. Pet toys. Pet accoutrements. Pet grooming equipment. It’s no exaggeration to say that pet dogs and cats – and perhaps even pet parakeets – in America and other rich countries today live better than did most of humanity prior to the industrial, capitalist age – and that, were these countries to make a serious move toward socialism, many of these pets would become human food.

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… is from page 226 of my colleague Peter Boettke’s 2017 paper “Rebuilding the Liberal Project,” as this paper appears in Pete’s 2021 book, The Struggle for a Better World:

True liberals must be vociferous critics of the intellectual errors committed by the progressive elite, and the empirical consequences that such errors have brought in their wake.

DBx: Pictured here is FTC chairwoman Lina Khan – a progressive elite who fancies that she knows better than markets what are the details of competitive processes and outcomes – and when, and by how much, market competition should be suppressed in order to attempt to promote other goals and fancies.