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Here are the opening lines of Shikha Dalmia’s latest:

Plenty of people love government welfare when it seems like someone else will pay for their benefits. The problem with that, as Margaret Thatcher famously pointed out, is that eventually you run out of other people’s money. And when that happens, the state goes after your money – because a government that is powerful enough to give you everything you want is also powerful enough to take away everything you’ve got.

GMU Econ doctoral candidate Jon Murphy exposes the illogic of yet another of the seemingly endless number of “studies” purporting to prove with numbers that the law of demand does not operate – or is overridden by mysterious forces – in the market for low-skilled workers.

Richard Epstein writes on reducing the hysteria over climate change.  A slice:

As I indicated in my earlier column on the subject, there are at least two principled ways to defend Trump’s decision to exit Paris. First is the weak scientific case that links global warming and other planetary maladies to increases in carbon dioxide levels. There are simply too many other forces that can account for shifts in temperature and the various environmental calamities that befall the world. Second, the economic impulses underlying the Paris Accords entail a massive financial commitment, including huge government subsidies for wind and solar energy, which have yet to prove themselves viable. The President should have stated these two points, and then challenged his opponents to explain how the recent greening of the planet, for example, could possibly presage the grim future of rising seas and expanded deserts routinely foretold by climate activists.

Unfortunately, Trump’s silence on these critical issues has let his critics have a field day in portraying the president as a man who is prepared, in the coarse language of The New Yorker’s John Cassidy, to say “screw you to the world” in order to implement “his maniacal, zero-sum view.” But what is so striking about the endless criticisms of the President is that they all start from the bogus assumption that a well-nigh universal consensus has settled on the science of global warming. To refute that fundamental assumption, it is essential to look at the individual critiques raised by prominent scientists and to respond to them point by point, so that a genuine dialogue can begin. By failing to state a case for his policy, the President has disarmed his allies. Alas, his recent statement, through U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, that climate change is “real” is singularly useless. No defender of the President’s decision would care to deny that platitude.

Ben Zycher is (correctly) skeptical of the case for carbon taxes.

David Henderson (citing Walter Olson) praises a politician who seldom deserves praise: Jeff Sessions.

Marxists are emphatically not on the “right side of history.

Matt Ridley wonders why so little rational optimism.

My great colleague Walter Williams argues that, contrary to popular belief, the Democratic Party has been no great friend to American blacks.

 

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