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David Boaz nicely summarizes the ways that government policies, such as occupational-licensing requirements and restrictions on land use, impede Americans’ geographic and, in turn, economic mobility.

George Will explains that the G.O.P. has become the party of the grotesque.

To protect the environment protect property rights.  And protect markets.

Here’s a video of a superb lecture from last summer, by Mike Munger, on externalities and market failure.

David Bier reveals some bizarre details in current efforts in the U.S. to reduce legal immigration.

Also on immigration, here’s Sheldon Richman on social-engineers’ itch to use immigration restrictions in their schemes.  A slice:

But what is this thing they call “the economy,” which has needs? Social engineers of all parties and persuasions talk as though an economy is some kind of mechanism to be centrally fine-tuned and overhauled occasionally according to a plan. Even those who style themselves free enterprisers display the central-planning mentality when it comes to immigration.

Contrary to this establishment view, the economy is not a mechanism. It is, rather, hundreds of millions of American producers and consumers, who also happen to be embedded in a global marketplace. Why can’t they be trusted, without the direction of politicians, to decide for themselves what they need and to engage in social cooperation — that is, among other things, to trade goods and services — to obtain it?

It is we whom the social engineers wish to manipulate. In the process they would cruelly keep poor people in perpetual misery and political oppression by locking them out of America. Why? Because the economy doesn’t need them.

Like all central planners, the immigration planners exhibit what F. A. Hayek called “the pretense of knowledge.” Do these presumptuous frauds know what specific skills will be demanded in the future? To know that, they would have to know what products will be demanded in the future. But we don’t know what we’ll want because lots of things have not been invented yet. And we can’t predict who will invent them. People who today have few skills and who speak no English will be among those who make our lives better. Let them come here to make better lives for themselves. That’s their right, which is justification enough. But we will benefit too.

Arnold Kling is correct: the wealth and poverty of nations is not at root determined by resource availabilities.

My Mercatus Center colleague Dan Griswold assesses the Trump economy.

Tim Worstall finds a silver lining in the publication of Nancy MacLean’s scandalously reckless hallucinating.

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