The most obvious example is taxation for purposes of income redistribution. Whatever the merits or demerits of a policy of redistribution, the essence of any such policy is that some people (the net recipients of tax revenues) live partially at the expense of other people (the net payers of tax revenues). Consistent application of the economic logic that powers textbook explanations of externalities leads to the conclusion that government-engineered income redistribution causes too many people to seek such redistribution (chiefly, by exerting less effort than they otherwise would to increase their own earnings), while at the same time causing high-income earners to exert too little effort at earning taxable income.
Absent redistribution, each person would be paid as income an amount closer to the value of what he or she contributes to the market economy — meaning, the market causes each person to internalize the costs and benefits of whatever amount of effort they choose to devote to earning income. But redistribution obstructs this market result; it artificially dims both the personal penalty for not working and the personal reward for working.
Another example of the externalization of internalities is protectionism. Producers’ earnings in competitive markets reflect roughly the value of that product to consumers. When consumers spend their own incomes in whatever peaceful ways they choose, they personally pay the costs and reap the benefits of their choices. Producers that better please consumers are rewarded with higher profits — higher profits voluntarily paid to them by consumers. Markets, in other words, internalize on producers the value of their efforts to please consumers.
Protectionist tariffs and non-tariff barriers, by contrast, externalize this internality. By shrinking consumers’ range of choices, protectionism artificially increases consumer demand for the outputs of protected producers. Protected producers thus earn higher profits without creating more value for consumers. A consequence that belonged inside the producer-consumer relationship has been transferred outside it.
Protected firms free-ride on a portion of their fellow citizens’ incomes — the funds these citizens would otherwise have spent on imports. As a result of protectionism, producers exert less effort than otherwise to please consumers. Far from correcting a market failure, protectionism distorts markets. Protectionism externalizes an internality.
Say socialism and college-educated young people start to dance and cheer. But when you ask them about the specifics of what it would mean, they quickly sour on it as shown in a recent Harvard Caps/Harris poll.
Karl Marx promised a utopia governed by the principle “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” The Democratic Socialists of America has called for an “adequate income for all” and a guaranteed federal job paying a “living wage” to anyone who wants one. But the poll finds that 77% of registered voters under 25 believe their paycheck should be based on the “merit and value of their work.” That belief is even more prevalent among older voters.
Sixty-eight percent of young voters say they want to own their own home. Meanwhile Cea Weaver, Zohran Mamdani’s director of the New York City Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants, has declared that “private property and . . . especially home ownership is a weapon of white supremacy” and that housing should be regarded as a collective good.
Mr. Mamdani and the DSA platform have also called for “seizing the means of production” and nationalizing all large corporations and essential industries. Claire Valdez, Democratic nominee for New York’s Seventh Congressional District, would “nationalize the airlines.” The mayor plans to establish city-owned grocery stores that he says would “pay no rent and no taxes,” giving them a competitive advantage over ordinary privately owned shops.
All this is out of touch with young voters and how they see their future. Seventy percent of them want to own their own business and 63% see America as the land of opportunity.
Today’s young adults must be the most entrepreneurial socialists in history. What accounts for the divergence between their stated views and the ideology they claim to endorse? Another result may provide a clue. The same poll asked Americans if they have a favorable view of America. For all age groups, 74% answered yes. Only 52% of those under 25 did. Nearly 40% liked China.
Speaking of socialism, here’s Cato’s Tad DeHaven on Trump’s continuing embrace of it.
President Donald Trump’s latest temper tantrum over Canada, including the renaming of Lake Ontario as Lake America after the collapse of trade negotiations, is premised on the claim that “Canada has been ripping off the United States for decades.” At least, that’s what the White House insisted in an August 25 press release about the tariff dispute. But, if that’s true, why are Canadians poorer than Americans and falling further behind?
A new study from Canada’s Fraser Institute points out that while our northern neighbors started the century with high hopes for their economic prospects, the years since have shown them lagging Americans. If Canadians are taking advantage of us, they’re doing a remarkably poor job of it.
“In 1999, inflation-adjusted gross domestic product (GDP) per person in the US was CA$10,766 higher than in Canada. By 2024, that gap had more than doubled to CA$23,757,” write study authors Grady Munro, Jake Fuss, and Joel Emes. “Similarly, in 2010, inflation-adjusted median employment income in the US was CA$6,126 higher than in Canada. By 2024, that gap had increased to CA$8,663.”
The Fraser study notes that since 1999, government-sector employment has been growing faster than private-sector employment in Canada. The opposite has been true in the United States. And while Canadian workers have increased their productivity by 26.7 percent since 1999, they’ve still lost ground as Americans increased productivity by 67.9 percent.
…..
“Despite some early hopes prior to 2014, Canada has made virtually no economic progress relative to its southern neighbour and has instead fallen further behind where it stood at the turn of the century,” the Fraser authors conclude.
Every Labor Day, unions claim responsibility for much of modern America’s cushy living standards. They argue that the eight-hour workday and five-day workweek wouldn’t exist without their valiant efforts against the mighty industrialists. We are supposed to thank unions for minimum wages and workplace safety laws, too, and for banning the scourge of child labor. If not for organized labor, the story goes, we would essentially still be living in the Gilded Age.
The comforts of working in today’s U.S. economy are nothing to scoff at. But to attribute these improvements to labor unions — ignoring the underlying force beneath them all — is to engage in historical revisionism. At best, organized labor ratified improvements in living standards that were already enabled by rising productivity.
It is crucial to remember that mankind’s economic baseline is universal grinding poverty, with life sustained only by subsistence. All improvements in material welfare, from the First Agricultural Revolution onward, must be forged through investment and ingenuity. The Industrial Revolution, the era that unions decry, was an extraordinary advancement in human welfare. Daily economic life has only gotten better since, as free peoples have developed new ways to arrange capital and labor to yield greater wealth for all involved.
Begin with labor hours. Since the 19th century, the number of hours worked per lifetime has more than halved worldwide, while leisure time has increased fivefold. Weekly hours worked by men in the United States have also gradually declined, even as the unionization rate rose and then collapsed. The same is true of American seniors.
The now-standard workweek — five eight-hour days with a two-day weekend — was not a union creation. Rather, it was innovated by Henry Ford at his company’s strictly non-union Highland Park Plant. The productivity revelation that was the assembly line first permitted Ford to give workers one day off a week in 1922, then two days off in 1926. With mass production came the free time needed for mass consumption.
Wages for production workers were rising steadily for decades before the advent of unions. When the first federal minimum wage took effect in the 1930s, at 25 cents an hour, most unskilled workers were earning nearly twice that amount.
As for safety conditions, the rate of workplace fatalities in America has been falling since at least the 1920s, as factories became increasingly automated and more workers shifted into the service sector. When we look at a graph of deaths over time, it’s impossible to tell when federal workplace safety rules were enacted. Child labor was almost nonexistent by the time Congress prohibited it in 1938, since it had plummeted in the prior decades.
Time and again, laws pushed by labor unions were enshrined only after economic growth made them feasible — and after such standards were already being adopted voluntarily. When businesses must compete for employees, they have every incentive to boost productivity and share the proceeds through higher wages and more attractive working conditions.
“The jobs apocalypse is postponed. An AI jobs boom is here.”
Corey DeAngelis continues to expose the dysfunction of government-supplied K-12 “education.”
We study the effects of vast increases in U.S. small business program eligibility standards, which expanded larger firms’ access to support for small businesses. Exploiting quasi-random variation in the timing of these expansions and using administrative Census data, we show that revenues decline for the smallest firms, particularly those that are younger, more productive, and financially constrained. Government procurement contracts also are reallocated to larger firms. Consequently, firm exits increase, wages decline, and patenting falls. These findings highlight the economic consequences of expanding eligibility: by crowding out the smallest firms, resources shift away from high-potential firms, reducing dynamism and innovation.
… is from pages 304-305 of my late, great colleague Walter Williams’s 2015 book, American Contempt for Liberty, which is a collection of many of Walter’s columns and essays; this quotation specifically is from Walter’s January 6th, 2010, syndicated column, “Untrue Beliefs“:
In 1790, farmers were 90 percent of the U.S. labor force. By 1900, only about 41 percent of our labor force was employed in agriculture. By 2008, less than 3 percent of Americans were employed in agriculture. What would you have Congress do in the face of this precipitous loss of agricultural jobs? One thing Congress could do is outlaw all of the technological advances and machinery that have made our farmers the world’s most productive…. U.S. manufacturing has gone through the same kind of labor-saving technological innovation as agriculture. Should we discard that innovation in the name of saving jobs?
Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal.
Editor:
Patrick Walsh is right that Alexander Hamilton was more of a protectionist than Andrew Langer made him out to be (Letters, September 7). But this reality doesn’t imply that Hamilton would support Trump’s tariffs. As Phil Gramm and I noted in these pages, Hamilton defended protection largely as a means of helping nascent American manufacturers overcome established European competitors. Because many of Mr. Trump’s tariffs protect mature, and in some cases world-leading, American industries – including steel, automobiles, and pharmaceuticals – it’s illegitimate for Mr. Walsh to leap from Hamilton’s support for infant-industry protection to the conclusion that Mr. Trump’s tariffs are Hamiltonian.
Mr. Walsh, however, is correct on another point – namely, that “Messrs. Trump and Vance, like Hamilton, scorn ideology. They are interested in what Hamilton called the ‘particular situation.’” Sad but true, for a name for people who scorn ideology in order to judge only each “particular situation” is “unprincipled.” Although Mr. Walsh regards this lack of principle in American leaders as a feature to cheer, wiser people recognize it as a bug to fear.
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
The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board reports on Teamsters’ Union violence. A slice:
The Teamsters have a long history of bullying that often becomes violent, and its campaign to organize Amazon workers resulted in a bloody confrontation last week in Riverside, Calif.
The protest at Amazon’s facility has followed a familiar Teamsters playbook. First, the union claimed Amazon workers had signed cards showing support for the union. Then the Teamsters demanded that Amazon bargain with the union, though a secret ballot election was never held and the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) hadn’t certified the union.
When Amazon refused to bargain, the Teamsters accused the company of committing an unfair labor practice. Last Wednesday the union launched what it called a one-day “unfair labor practice strike” in which labor organizers—most of whom weren’t employed by Amazon—blocked vehicles from entering and exiting the facility.
Amazon says it notified the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department several times throughout the day of “hostile acts by the picketers and blocking the ingress and egress of the site.” Law enforcement declined to respond until people were hurt.
Video footage we’ve seen shows Teamsters blocking a motorcyclist who worked for an Amazon contractor from entering the facility. The worker circled around and tried to bypass their blockade, but in the process knocked down two protesters and crashed on his bike. Teamsters then beat him up as he lay on the ground.
The motorcyclist and the two protesters who were knocked down were hospitalized. It may have been imprudent for the worker to try to circumvent the protesters, but he was trying to make a living by showing up for his job. The Teamsters were denying him that ability, and their blockade made it more likely that someone would get hurt. Yet the union claims it is the victim. Irony alert: The Teamsters claim joining a union improves worker safety, yet their protests are resulting in hazardous work and road conditions.
[DBx: When, to achieve your goal, you must coercively interfere with people voluntarily engaging in commercial activities, your goal is wicked.]
As Americans have fled unions, workers themselves are making more money than ever. The average American worker made $86,977 in wages in 2025. Adjusting for purchasing power, only the average worker in Iceland, Luxembourg or Switzerland made more.
A high union approval rating with a low union membership rate is another case of the disconnect between Americans’ opinions of their own financial situations (pretty good) and their opinions of the economy in general (pretty bad). Americans think unions are a nice idea — for other people. And the gap between what they imagine unions could be and what they actually are does not compel them to sign up to these relics of a bygone economy.
[DBx: Even workers in the bygone past were generally harmed, not helped, by labor unions, for unionized-workers’ win their advantages only by artificially shrinking employment opportunities for other workers – and also, of course, by raising prices of final outputs.]
Charles Cooke warns of misguided nostalgia. A slice:
Consider how common it is at the moment to hear people on both the left and the right talk of a given period within the recent past as if it represented Eden before the Fall. On the left, the period in question might be the New Deal, or any time “before Reagan,” or perhaps any day up to and including the one before Donald Trump became president. On the right, the period might be the 1920s, or the 1950s, or the week before Richard Nixon took the United States off the gold standard. Pick an epoch; the details don’t especially matter. What matters is that, for whatever reason — be it the latest cost of housing or health care or burritos; the existence of billionaires; a sense that there are insufficient opportunities for the young; the decline of religious belief — millions of people have decided that the past was preferable to the present, and those millions of people do not sort into neat left/right groups.
That alone sets this predictor apart from the others. One would expect self-described conservatives to be more prone to nostalgia, and yet polling shows that, in 2026, self-described Democrats are more likely to take a backward glance than self-described Republicans. Asked earlier this year by Pew whether America’s best days were “ahead of us” or “behind us,” only 34 percent of Democrats answered “ahead of us,” compared with 46 percent of Republicans. Historical polling suggests that this gap is a by-product of the incumbent president’s being a Republican and that it will be reversed when a Democrat is next voted into the White House. But this underscores rather than diminishes the point — which is that within both parties, a majority of voters are of the view that modern life is inferior to what preceded it.
This matters, for just as a man who has been given two weeks to live will make profoundly different choices from those of a man who expects to live for another 60 years, so an American who is comfortable with contemporary life — and who expects to remain so — will behave differently than one who is not. Among other things, those two individuals will adopt differing opinions about the integrity of their civic institutions, about the virtue of their regnant culture, about the wisdom of their fellow citizens, and more. One will become habitually pessimistic, the other habitually optimistic. One will be open to change; the other will feel perpetually in danger of losing his national inheritance. One will be more likely than the other to have children, build a business, and otherwise engage with what Edmund Burke described as the “little platoon we belong to in society.”
GMU Econ alum Erik Matson reminds us of the wisdom of John Witherspoon and Pelatiah Webster. [HT my GMU Econ colleague Dan Klein]. A slice:
Witherspoon and Webster supported the ratification of the Constitution against Anti-Federalist dissidents, and they sympathized with Hamilton’s emphasis on the importance of sound money and public credit. But their political–economic visions were ultimately more liberal than his, rooted as they were in a deep appreciation of the beneficial order that obtains when the state concerns itself with enforcing the sacred rules of commutative justice—and relatively little else.
Witherspoon was widely recognized by his colleagues in the Continental Congress for his knowledge in matters pertaining to public finance and economic policy. He was consulted by George Washington about aspects of Washington’s personal finances and frequently by Hamilton and Robert Morris about economic policy. In addition to his clerical and academic obligations, he served on 126 committees in the Continental Congress in the late 1770s and early 1780s, mostly pertaining to public finance.
… is from page 273 of Joseph Epstein’s December 2019 Commentary, “Susan Sontag, Savant-Idiot,” as this essay is reprinted in the 2020 collection, titled Gallimaufry, of some of Epstein’s essays and reviews:
An idiot savant, as is well-known, is a person with serious learning disabilities but gifted in a peculiar and extraordinary way, often mathematically or musically. A savant-idiot, as is not well-known, since I have only just now coined the phrase, is a person who is learned, brainy, even brilliant, but gets everything important wrong.
DBx: The modern world has quite a few savant-idiots.
President Donald Trump’s preferred monetary policy is simple. Is the economy sluggish? Cut interest rates. Is it heating up? Also cut interest rates. Now there’s a new addendum: If his handpicked Federal Reserve chair won’t play ball, hold the economy hostage.
At least, that’s what Trump threatened on Friday on Truth Social. He wrote that if the Fed doesn’t “get smart” and lower rates, he will halt trade entirely with any country that maintains a trade deficit with the United States. That would include China, Mexico, Canada, Vietnam, South Korea and dozens of others — in short, many of America’s top trade partners.
If Trump thinks elevated interest rates slow the economy, wait until he sees what cutting off trade would do.
Wilfred Reilly rightly ridicules the doomsaying of Bill Gates and other panic peddlers. A slice:
The world is not coming to an end — again.
In October 2025, Microsoft’s Bill Gates — long the worst sort of climate doomsayer — published a lengthy memo explaining that, while global climate change is real, “it will not lead to humanity’s demise.” According to Gates, the “doomsday view of climate change” that says it “will decimate civilization . . . is wrong. . . . People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future.”
The desktop baron argues for reevaluating temperature targets, writing that strict focus on near-term temperature and emissions goals is an imperfect measure of progress. Most important, he now advocates a policy shift toward maximizing “human welfare” and human flourishing — shifting much of the absurdly inflated climate budget toward projects fighting disease, famine, and poverty itself. In summary, the climate problem exists, but the cutting-edge view today is that it is fairly minor in comparison with other issues and can best be combated by human initiative.
Gates’s memo had a familiar ring to it. As I note in my upcoming Broadside/HarperCollins book Confidently Wrong, one of the defining features of upper-middle-class life during the past 50–60 years has been scientists, activists, and public intellectuals making the most horrifying kind of doomsday predictions — which invariably fail to come true. Remember the Club of Rome and the Limits to Growth report?
Back in 1972, a group of top academics used then-advanced regression analysis to argue that the planet at some poin must run out of key resources. Quite specific dates were provided for this global near-apocalypse. And then not one of the predictions came true. As the American Enterprise Institute’s Mark Perry noted 40 years later, in his teasingly titled “Time Has Not Been Kind to the Limits to Growth,” the report “got it so wrong because its authors overlooked the greatest resource of all: our own resourcefulness.”
Because of the so-called Green Revolution in agriculture and horticulture, humanity’s food supplies have not collapsed. In fact, Perry reports, “malnourishment has dropped by more than half,” from well over 30 percent of the world population to about 15 percent. “Nor are we choking on pollution,” as electric, hybrid, and even hydrogen vehicles have replaced many of the high-dollar gas hogs of the past. In fact, the annual risk of pollution-caused death has shrunk from one in 500 to one in many thousands since 1900. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given their think tank’s focus, the AEI boys argue that the real solution to environmental problems is innovation, driven by “economic growth.”
Democratic socialism is a terrible ideology. If implemented, its agenda would cause grave harm and imperil democracy itself. And in seeking massive state control of the economy, today’s socialists ironically have much in common with the MAGA nationalists they claim to oppose.
Both promote government control over the economy, and both paths undermine liberty, prosperity and democracy. Socialists do not control the Democratic Party in the way MAGA largely dominates the Republicans. But their influence is growing.
My GMU Econ colleague Vincent Geloso tells “what critics keep getting wrong about capitalism.” A slice:
There is nothing wrong with criticising capitalism, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman or classical liberalism. The problem is that much of the discussion does not pass even a modest ideological Turing test. An ideological Turing test asks whether one can state an opposing position so accurately that its proponents would recognise the argument as their own before one proceeds to criticise it. Here, too often, they would not.
This points to a common reflex in debates over ‘capitalism’ and ‘neoliberalism’. The vocabulary is often not used to define but rather rationalise already-held ideological priors. The characteristics one dislikes are incorporated into the definition of the system, after which those same characteristics are rediscovered as criticisms of it. The conclusion has, in part, been smuggled into the premises. But these end up being recycled over and over as one scholar states it before another regurgitates it back as fact and so forth.
Trump is right to support data centers, but his tariffs work in the opposite direction.
… is from Samuel Gregg’s excellent July 2024 paper, “A Free, Prosperous and Secure America”:
Certainly, trade liberalization should not be regarded as ushering in the type of perpetual peace envisaged by Kant. Nonetheless, we ought to resist the temptation to imagine that, in a world in which states remain the essential building-block of international relations, economic nationalist policies are more likely to help realize national security objectives.
Through trade liberalization, America accentuates its economic growth and helps to create relationships with other states that gives them some interest in America’s ongoing economic prosperity and overall well-being. These benefits contribute significantly to America’s national security in a world of growing geopolitical rivalries. The prospect of liberal international order may be fading. But continuing efforts to liberalize America’s trade relations with other states and steadily diminish barriers to cross-border exchanges of goods and services will serve US national security interests in ways that neo-mercantilist and economic nationalist policies cannot.
George Mason University Econ grad students are generous – as recounted at Facebook by Ilya Somin:
Some studies indicate that economists are more selfish than people in other fields (e.g. – they are more likely to defect in the prisoner’s dilemma). I have always had some reservations about these studies. Now, I believe them even less.
Recently, I was involved in helping “Bob,” a graduate student from an authoritarian state, who has been blacklisted by his government, for speaking out against the dictator’s human rights violations and other repressive policies; if he returns to his home country, he faces further persecution and possible imprisonment (I won’t say which one, so as to avoid attracting further attention to him from his government). He needed to find housing here, while looking for a graduate program in the West, where he can continue his studies (which he can no longer do in his home country), and finding a way to adjust his visa status, so he can work. And, at the moment, he has virtually no resources.
I asked George Mason University econ professor Bryan Caplan for help with the housing issue. Bryan sent an e-mail message to the GMU economics department grad student e-mail list. Within a few hours, we had multiple offers to house Bob for free! All from econ grad students, most of whom aren’t exactly living in palatial accommodations. Bob accepted one of the offers, for which we are very grateful. All thanks to the generosity of economists!
You might ask, why couldn’t I house Bob myself? The answer is that I’m out of town much of the time this semester, as a visiting professor at U of Virginia, and I thought it would be unfair to burden my wife and kids at a time when they already have an extra burden on days when I have to be away. But I was able to provide some other types of assistance.
Two, what do you mean by “fear” of inflation? (Sorry, I mean Inflation.) It exists right now, and Americans are not exactly thrilled about it.
Three, no, “growth” doesn’t cause inflation. Excessively loose monetary policy, which is what the president demands of the Fed, causes inflation.
Four, our GDP growth should not be at 15 or 20 percent, because that is verifiably ridiculous. And GDP growth isn’t currently at 4, 3, or even 2 percent. It’s at 1.5 percent.
Five, our debt would not be paid off if interest rates were lower. We would barely cut our annual deficit in half if interest rates on every federal bond went to zero.
Six, yes, each percentage-point increase in Treasury bond interest rates does cost the federal government a whole lot of money. Unfortunately, the rate on Treasuries is not legally tied to the Fed’s benchmark rate and is, in fact, free to rise much higher should bond markets think it appropriate — as the last month has demonstrated. Seems like a good reason to get our fiscal house in order. (But we won’t.)
Not that any more is needed, but here’s yet another recent piece of evidence that Trump understands absolutely nothing about trade: (HT Scott Lincicome)
Trump: We could do tremendous good for ourselves by just not trading with countries.. We lose with Mexico $195 billion a year. They have nothing that we have to have, I mean. Hot tamales, tomatoes, a couple of things
Mr. Newsom last week issued a press release claiming the state is leading the country in job growth and “boosting productivity and delivering higher wages for workers.” The state’s $16.90 an hour minimum wage—set to rise to $17.40 in January—helps “ensure workers share in that growth,” he said. Where to begin?
It’s true the AI boom is boosting business productivity, driving investment and turbocharging earnings for tech workers. The average weekly wage for information workers in Silicon Valley’s San Mateo County near San Francisco increased to $16,242 during the first quarter of this year (equal to $846,904 a year), up from $15,792 in the prior year and $6,187 in early 2019.
But in recent years the state has added few jobs outside of government, healthcare and social assistance. One reason is that its high minimum wage has raised costs for employers, which in turn are cutting back on unskilled labor. These trends have been exacerbated by California’s $20 an hour minimum wage for fast-food workers.
The Employment Policies Institute reports that California’s restaurant employment has declined for three consecutive years between March 2023 and March 2026—a total of 12,600 job losses in food services and drinking places—according to the Labor Department’s most recent payroll data, while employment in the industry increased nationwide by some 151,700.
Average weekly hours for workers in all industries in California declined to 33.1 hours in July from 34.5 hours three years earlier, while remaining flat nationwide at 34.3. Teen unemployment in California has risen to 22.1% from 11.3% in January 2023, a significantly bigger increase than in the rest of the country (12.1% in July from 10.6% in January 2023 nationwide).
More teens in the Golden State are also dropping out of the workforce. Labor participation has fallen by five percentage points for teens in California, versus 2.3 percentage points nationwide since early 2023. More unemployed youth is a recipe for social problems and a less prepared future workforce.
Meanwhile good news arrived Friday about the national job market as the Labor Department reported 162,000 new jobs in August. That exceeded expectations and is higher than the 31,000 average in the last 12 months. The best news was a 683,000 increase in the civilian labor force and a bump in the labor participation rate to 61.6%. Falling participation has been a growing worry.
The national jobless rate held steady at a low 4.1%, while California’s in July was 5.1%. That’s the fourth highest in the country, after Oregon and Connecticut’s 5.2% and the District of Columbia’s 5.9%.
While most media operate in a laissez-faire regime, terrestrial radio and television broadcasting are licensed, and their airwave access has sometimes been deemed a privilege, not a right. Harvard Law’s Laurence Tribe traces the anomaly to a technical error: “a profound fallacy about spectrum scarcity.” Or as comedian George Carlin put it, “radio and television [are] the only two parts of American life not protected by the free speech provisions of the First Amendment to the Constitution. I’d like to repeat that because it sounds vaguely important.”
Whose cockamamie idea was this? Why, the broadcasters’ own.
The 1927 Radio Act’s “public interest” language was written by the National Association of Broadcasters, as the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Clarence C. Dill (D., Wash.), explained in his 1938 book, “Radio Law.” From the start, Dill saw that “the ‘twilight zone’ between censorship and the refusal to renew a station license because of the service rendered, is undetermined.”
The broadcasters traded freedom for free licenses and a lucrative, protected market. Upstart rivals—the DuMont Television Network in the 1940s and ’50s, then cable TV and satellite in the 1960s—were suppressed, while only a handful of viable stations were assigned to more than 80 TV channels. In return, regulators gained clout over an industry and influence over content.
…..
When Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.) and Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R., Kan.) argued that the 1996 Telecommunications Act should sell TV stations their new digital broadcasting licenses at market prices—and liberate both their content and their spectrum—the industry again rallied to block deregulation.
ABC now feigns shock that a president could advance his political animus into official determinations of “public interest.” Welcome to the modern era. First Amendment compromises via “regulation by raised eyebrow,” as Nixon’s FCC chairman put it, have long been the currency of the realm.
Leave it to Donald Trump to up the ante radically and tweet out his worst. The list price of censorship just blew the budget, and broadcasters are suing to reclaim their constitutional rights.
Best of luck, ABC. May free speech soon, finally, be yours.
GMU Econ alum Paul Mueller talks with Reason‘s Stephanie Slade about how conservatism lost its way.
Eric Boehm explains what shouldn’t – but, alas, what nevertheless today does – need explaining: As Trump seizes more power for the executive branch (a seizure to which Congress cowardly complies), “Democrats are already eyeing the new tools.” [DBx: As Arnold Kling says, “Have a nice day.”] A slice from Boehm’s essay:
President Donald Trump has greatly—and, in many cases, quite recklessly—expanded the executive branch’s power over private businesses.
The Trump administration has invoked claims of “national security” to levy higher tariffs on everything from steel to musical instruments. It has used the same argument to seize equity shares in more than two dozen private companies, including a so-called “golden share” in U.S. Steel that grants the president the authority to veto future attempts to relocate headquarters or make changes to its production facilities.
And if you think a future Democratic administration will try to stuff those executive powers back into their proper, constitutional boxes, well…don’t hold your breath.
Take California Gov. Gavin Newsom, widely regarded as a serious contender in the 2028 presidential race, for example. Last week, a Canadian journalist asked Newsom to give assurances that a future Democratic administration would roll back the massive tariffs Trump has imposed on goods from Canada.
“I cannot guarantee that,” Newsom said. “But I can guarantee you nothing like this, the level of disrespect, talking past people, talking down to people, talking past and down to you.”
In other words: a kindler, gentler tariff regime, delivered with carefully chosen language.
That might be an improvement, in some ways, over the haphazard nature of Trump’s various trade wars. But it would not be a win for free trade, and it would not help Americans who are struggling to afford the cost of higher tariffs.
Here is at least some good news about the goings-on in the Potomac Swamp.
… is from page 394 of the 2016 second edition of Thomas Sowell’s Wealth, Poverty and Politics:
Most notable economic, technological or intellectual achievements involve multiple factors – beginning with a desire to succeed in the particular endeavor, without which all the ability and opportunity mean nothing, just as desire and the opportunity mean nothing without the ability. What this implies, among other things, is that an individual, a people, or a nation may have some, many or most of the prerequisites for a given achievement without having any real success in producing that achievement. And yet that individual, that people or that nation may suddenly burst upon the scene with spectacular success when whatever the missing factor or factors are finally get added to the mix.
