Writing in today’s Wall Street Journal, Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) explains that Dodd-Frank – which turns five-years-old tomorrow – has failed to improve the economy. (gated) Hensarling cites this 2013 from my Mercatus Center colleague Patrick McLaughlin (co-authored with Robert Greene) showing that the 2008 financial crisis was emphatically not caused by deregulation. A slice from Hensarling’s essay:
Before Dodd-Frank’s passage, former Sen. Chris Dodd said that “no one will know until this is actually in place how it works.” Today we know. The law he co-wrote with former Rep. Barney Frank is gradually turning America’s largest financial institutions into functional utilities and taking the power to allocate capital—the lifeblood of the U.S. economy—away from the free market and delivering it to political actors in Washington.
Baylor University’s Per Bylund explains that robots will indeed destroy more and more jobs currently performed by humans and that such progress is today, and will be tomorrow, a great blessing – just as it has been in the past. (HT Warren Smith) A slice:
Automation also leads to greater efficiency and abundance that raises living standards for all of us. Sticking with the example of agriculture, technological advancement has led to an unprecedented abundance and diverse selection of foods. According to a United Nations report, “the number of hungry people decline[d] globally by more than 100 million over the last decade and by 209 million since 1990-92.”
Also from Pethokoukis is this nice response to a new proposal by Nick Hanauer and David Rolf to allegedly make workers better off in the ‘gig economy.‘ (Nick Hanauer seems to be in a competition with Pope Francis to prove who of the two is the most economically ignorant. I’m unsure who is now ahead in this unseemly race.)
Bart Hinkle explores the bizarro and unintellectual world of political correctness at Virginia Tech. (HT David Boaz – who, e-mailing me, notes that it’s likely good that Gordon Tullock, who served for many years on Virginia Tech’s faculty, did not live to witness this nonsense in Blacksburg.)
