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Bonus Quotation of the Day…

… is from pages 187-188 of H.L. Mencken’s marvelous essay “On Government,” as it is reprinted in the 1996 Johns Hopkins University Press collection of some of Mencken’s essays, Prejudices: A Selection:

All I presume to argue is that something would be accomplished by viewing it [government] more realistically – by ceasing to let its necessary and perhaps useful functions blind us to its ever-increasing crimes against the ordinary rights of the free citizen and the common decencies of the world. The fact that it is generally respected – that it possesses effective machinery for propagating and safeguarding that respect – is the main shield of the rogues and vagabonds who use it to exploit the great masses of diligent and credulous men.

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Some Links

The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board decries Biden’s hostility to Nippon Steel’s proposed purchase of U.S. Steel. Three slices:

Everyone knows the Trump-Biden election campaign is going to be nasty, brutish and not short enough, but the unknown is how much policy damage it will do. One unfolding example is the fiasco of self-destructive opposition to Nippon Steel’s proposed acquisition of U.S. Steel.

The American political consensus used to be that foreign investment is a sign of U.S. economic strength and a source of good-paying jobs. Protectionists focused on blocking imported goods that compete with American products. But now they’re targeting even investment in U.S. manufacturing from friendly countries.

That’s the case with Nippon Steel’s non-hostile $14.1 billion offer to buy U.S. Steel, a venerable American name that has fallen well down the ranks of world producers. Nippon Steel executives plan a major capital infusion to make U.S. Steel more productive. But the merger is opposed by Cleveland-Cliffs, a U.S. Steel competitor, and the United Steelworkers, and the politicians are following like sheep.

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The world is awash in steel, so it isn’t clear why steel must be made in the U.S. But if steel is made in U.S., why is it “vital” that it be “domestically owned”? Nippon Steel is the world’s fourth-largest steel maker and far more efficient than U.S. Steel’s aging plants. Nippon Steel’s expertise and capital would enhance U.S. economic strength by making U.S. Steel’s operations more competitive.

Nippon Steel already employs some 4,000 Americans, and it has wanted to expand here for some time. One reason is the 25% tariff on steel imports that Donald Trump imposed and Mr. Biden hasn’t lifted. Manufacturers are moving to the U.S., especially from Europe, to avoid U.S. tariffs and take advantage of lower-cost American energy and the vast subsidies for green energy. The U.S. needs more steel to meet this demand.

But the political opposition to Nippon Steel isn’t about the economic merits. It’s about Cleveland-Cliffs, the steelworkers union and the electoral competition for blue-collar workers in November.

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Mr. Biden as President is supposed to represent the national interest, and maintaining America’s reputation for inviting foreign capital really is a “vital” interest. So is treating allies well, and mistreating a Japanese firm as hostile won’t make friends in Tokyo. Mr. Biden has already jolted allies with his recent decision to stop approvals for liquefied natural gas export projects. Barring Nippon Steel for political reasons sends a rotten message to friends—especially since it would be a boon to Chinese steel makers that compete with Nippon.

Robby Soave argues that “banning TikTok would give the Feds way too much power.” A slice:

It is easy to see how this legislation creates a blueprint for taking future action against social media companies beyond just TikTok. In the wake of the 2016 election, Democratic lawmakers, mainstream media pundits, and national security advisers all accused Facebook of being complicit in Russia’s various schemes to sow election-related discord online. Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said Russia was more responsible for Hillary Clinton’s loss than Trump was. The thrust of this argument was that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had allowed his platform to be compromised by Russian misinformation.

Desmond Lachman reports that President Xi’s policies are weakening, not strengthening, China’s economy.

Jimmy Alfonso Licon offers a heap of understanding about government indebtedness.

Juliette Sellgren talks with David Henderson about the late MIT economist Robert Solow.

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy, is not in favor of monetary loosening.

The Institute for Justice’s Robert Frommer talks with Charles Cooke about the banana-republic practice of civil asset forfeiture.

Pierre Lemieux wisely recommends that you read the late Anthony de Jasay.

Martin Kulldorff talks with John Tierney about his (Kulldorff’s) firing by Harvard.

Check out this tweet from John McWhorter.

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Quotation of the Day…

is from page 8 of the Introduction to the 5th edition (2020) of Douglas Irwin’s great book Free Trade Under Fire:

While the views of economists deserve critical scrutiny, they also deserve a fair hearing. Economists have studied trade for a very long time and have noticed that the same worries and fears about trade tend to get repeated generation after generation. “With America’s high standard of living, we cannot successfully compete against foreign producers because of lower foreign wages and a lower cost of production.” This claim is heard today, but this particular statement comes from President Herbert Hoover in 1929 as he urged Congress to pass what became known as the Smoot-Hawley Tariff on the eve of the Great Depression. Among the claims heard yesterday and today is that trade will destroy jobs, leading to higher unemployment and lower wages, and that trade deficits will siphon away a country’s wealth. To economists, these are fallacies that history and experience have refuted time and again.

DBx: Protectionists today write and talk confidently as if they are either offering cutting-edge insights or revealing long-ago-discovered faults with economists’ theory of trade – faults that economists today stubbornly ignore. Both stances are mistaken. My guess is that the last time an original argument against free trade was offered was well over a century ago.

And as for the greater and more-nuanced understanding of trade that people such as Robert Lighthizer, Oren Cass, and Ha-Joon Chang claim to possess, it’s bogus. Protectionists such as these routinely mischaracterize – out of ignorance rather than intention – the case for free trade (such as, for example, when they assert that free trade ‘works’ only when trade is ‘balanced,’ meaning no trade deficits or surpluses).

It is no exaggeration to say that, with rare exceptions, arguments made against free trade, yesterday and today, are ridiculous in their assumptions, reasoning, and conclusions. These arguments, no matter how elaborate and well-footnoted – amount to nothing more than futile attempts to prove that ten minus two sometimes equals thirteen.

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Bonus Quotation of the Day…

… is from page 434 of the final (2016) volume – Bourgeois Equality – of Deirdre McCloskey’s soaring trilogy on the essence of bourgeois values, on their transmission, and on their essential role in modern life:

Zero-sum is the default in thinking about my gain and thine. It is the chief error in economic thinking in the street and in politics.

DBx: Or, it is among the chief errors. In addition to the chief error of zero-sum, there is also the error of of failing (as McCloskey says) “to stay for the whole play” – that is, the failure to look past the most immediate consequences of some action or event. There’s also the error of what Hayek calls “constructivism,” which is the fallacy of believing that all observed order is the result of conscious design.

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Some Links

Mike Munger’s letter in today’s Wall Street Journal is important:

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) called for the Biden administration to block Capital One’s acquisition of Discover (“Block Capital One’s Merger With Discover,” op-ed, March 8) because she believes that two firms are always better than one. But this is a misunderstanding of how competition works. One need only look at the broader industry—Visa, Mastercard and American Express control more than 95% of credit-clearing transactions—to realize the folly of the many-small-firms approach. If the deal is approved, there will be more competition in the industry, not less.

Competition in the market over the past three decades has streamlined technology and reduced costs to the point where credit-card acceptance is nearly universal. Providing a smaller network like Discover with the financial power of Capital One creates an environment where fees can fall and security can improve.

It’s time to put the Econ 101 definition of competition back on college blackboards and bring real competition to the financial-services industry.

Mike Munger
Duke University

[DBx: In the Econ 101 course that I regularly teach, I never describe competition as being a simplistic function of the number of firms in an industry (a surprisingly vague concept, btw). Instead, I teach competition as Mike here describes it: as rivalry among firms experimenting with different methods to better enable them to attract consumers – rivalry that is ultimately hampered only by government-imposed restrictions on the ability of businesses to enter different avenues of enterprise and to so experiment.]

Mark Jamison decries the fact that, “when it comes to big tech, regulatory ambition ignores consumers’ choices.” A slice:

The FTC, driven by Chair Lina Khan, is fixated on reengineering markets by, for example, breaking up Amazon and Meta, ignoring how customers have flocked to the large and successful companies that she seeks to shrink. Khan wants to make Amazon more like eBay, which saw a notable decline in its user base during the pandemic. Her fixation fails to acknowledge the vibrant ecosystem that drew millions of customers to Amazon while eBay shrunk. The story is similar with Facebook and Instagram, with the latter’s pre-acquisition struggles to create a functioning business model casting doubt on the wisdom of forcibly decoupling these two.

My Mercatus Center colleague Alden Abbott writes about antitrust and AI.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Bjorn Lomborg warns that, too often, “‘follow the science’ leads to ruin.” Three slices:

More than one million people die in traffic accidents globally each year. Overnight, governments could solve this entirely man-made problem by reducing speed limits everywhere to 3 miles an hour, but we’d laugh any politician who suggested it out of office. It would be absurd to focus solely on lives saved if the cost would be economic and societal destruction. Yet politicians widely employ the same one-sided reasoning in the name of fighting climate change. It’s simply a matter, they say, of “following the science.”

That assertion lets politicians obscure—and avoid responsibility for—lopsided climate-policy trade-offs. Lawmakers contend that because climate change is real and man-made, it is only scientifically logical that the world end fossil-fuel use. Any downsides are a mathematical inevitability rather than something politicians chose to inflict on constituents.

The Biden administration has set the goal of achieving a net-zero emissions economy by no later than 2050. President Biden has pushed costly yet ineffective programs such as the Inflation Reduction Act to reduce U.S. emissions. If you ask the president’s outgoing climate envoy, John Kerry, there is no alternative. He claimed only a couple of weeks ago that “nothing that we are doing, nothing that President Biden has sought to do, has any political motivation or ideological rationale. It’s entirely a reaction to science, to the mathematics and physics that explain what is happening.”

…..

A new peer-reviewed study of all the scientific estimates of climate-change effects shows the most likely cost of global warming averaged across the century will be about 1% of global gross domestic product, reaching 2% by the end of the century. This is a very long way from global extinction.

Draconian net-zero climate policies, on the other hand, will be prohibitively costly. The latest peer-reviewed climate-economic research shows the total cost will average $27 trillion each year across the century, reaching $60 trillion a year in 2100. Net zero is more than seven times as costly as the climate problem it tries to address.

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Careful science can inform us about the problem of climate change, but it can’t tell us how to solve it. Sensible public debate requires all the facts, including about the costs of our choices. Some of the most popular climate policies will have costs far greater than climate change itself. When politicians try to shut down discussion with claims that they’re “following the science,” don’t let them.

Bruce Yandle exposes some of the Biden administration’s hypocrisy. Two slices:

When I read of Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm’s concern that consumers are being “bigfooted” with low-cost electric vehicles from China and that our government may step in and keep prices higher, I was taken aback. While the Biden administration’s protectionist trade stance has been fairly clear, officials have also been vocal about protecting ordinary shoppers from corporate America’s high prices. So, it’s remarkable to hear one choosing, apparently, to protect our taxpayer-subsidized manufacturing sector.

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If “bigfooting” means we consumers can enjoy a higher standard of living through greater access to the world’s goods, I say let him stomp on! You may feel differently, but we can still agree on the administration’s mixed message.

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy, warns of Biden’s proposal to raise the corporate income tax. Two slices:

In the latest volley of policy proposals that seem more rooted in populist rhetoric than economic knowledge, President Joe Biden’s budget plan to hike the corporate income tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent strikes me as particularly misguided. This move, ostensibly aimed at ensuring a “fair share” of contributions from corporate America, is a glaring testament to a simplistic and all-too-common type of economic thinking that already hamstrings our nation’s competitiveness, stifles innovation, and ultimately penalizes the average American worker and consumer.

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In addition, for all the concerns about fairness expressed by the administration to justify its tax hike, the corporate tax is quite unfair. Profits are already subject to taxation at the individual level when distributed as dividends or realized as capital gains. Increasing the corporate tax rate will exacerbate the issue of double taxation, distorting investment decisions and reducing economic efficiency, not to mention encouraging aggressive planning for more tax avoidance.

George Will rightly criticizes the U.S. Supreme Court for its failure – in a challenge to the bigoted admissions policy of Fairfax County’s Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology – to do more to prohibit race-based policies in government schools. Here’s his conclusion:

In last year’s college admissions case, Roberts warned schools that “what cannot be done directly cannot be done indirectly.” Today, however, that is not true, given the court’s refusal to hear the challenge to TJ’s blatant, because proclaimed, racial discrimination. Progressives’ thinly — very thinly — disguised racialist policies will multiply nationally until the court stops flinching from applying its precedents.

Arnold Kling explains where he stands on libertarianism.

Bob Graboyes is correct: “Happiness comes from doing something, not from being handed something.”

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Quotation of the Day…

… is from page 90 of the late Ronald Max Hartwell’s 1975 paper “Capitalism and the Historians,” as this paper appears in Essays on Hayek (Fritz Machlup, ed., 1976):

Historical myths about capitalism are basic to the widespread dislike of capitalism, and do much to discredit the economic system of private property and market economy. Destroy these myths, and the easy ideological attack on capitalism is weakened and made more difficult to sustain.

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Some Links

The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board applauds a recent court ruling against yet another overreach by the Biden administration. A slice:

The decision, which vacates the rule nationwide, is a major relief to companies. Under the NLRB’s rewrite, McDonald’s could be dunned for unfair labor-practice complaints against its franchisees. Hospitals could be required to bargain with staffing-agency workers. Ditto tech companies with restaurant workers in their office buildings. Big businesses could be dragged into labor disputes involving workers they neither employ nor control.

This would make it easier for unions to organize small businesses, especially franchisees, by leveraging pressure against bigger companies. Big businesses might have to exercise more control over the workers of their franchisees, contractors and suppliers, which neither the former nor the latter want. With Congress dysfunctional, the courts are the only resort to slow the Biden Administration’s assault on business.

Eric Boehm isn’t swallowing the White House’s whopper-of-a-claim that borrowing $16 trillion over the next decade is fiscally responsible. A slice:

But simply piling up debt at a slightly slower rate shouldn’t pass for fiscal responsibility—not when the government is already $34.5 trillion in debt, and when Biden is proposing to borrow more than $16 trillion over the next 10 years. (And keep in mind that those figures don’t account for any unexpected crisis—a recession, a war, etc.—that might push the government to borrow even more heavily.)

“The level of borrowing under the President’s budget would be unprecedented outside a war or national emergency,” notes the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonprofit that advocates for lower deficits.

Ramesh Ponnuru reminds us that Trump’s record is also one of fiscal irresponsibility.

And warning of the increasing bitterness of budget battles is my intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy. A slice:

Also, by 2034, mandatory spending will be $8.3 trillion and consume 80 percent of the budget. That leaves 20 percent for Congress to oversee annually. Do you think the budget fights that everyone claims to hate so much will intensify or moderate? I think you should get used to threats of government shutdowns, budget and debt-ceiling fights, and more, because as mandatory spending grows, passing a budget will be as pleasant as feeding a bunch of hungry dogs from a constantly shrinking plate of food.

Alfredo Carrillo Obregon’s and Clark Packard’s letter in today’s Wall Street Journal is a gem:

In “Will China Drive Its Electric Cars In From Mexico?” (op-ed, Mar. 6), Connor Pfeiffer notes that Chinese producers, particularly those subsidized by the Chinese state, could export cheap cars to the U.S. from Mexico at only a 2.5% tariff rate by exploiting “gaps” in the rules of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement. Yet Mr. Pfeiffer errs because this is simply a feature of U.S. tariff code.

The U.S. code prescribes three tariff rates for most imports—a “general” most-favored-nation rate, a “special” rate, and a “column 2” rate. The general rate applies to every country with which the U.S. maintains permanent normal trade relations. This includes most members of the World Trade Organization. The special rate, which is lower than the general rate and is often zero, applies to countries with which the U.S. has an active free-trade agreement. The column 2 rate applies to countries with which the U.S. does not have permanent normal trade relations, including North Korea, Cuba and Russia.

The 2.5% tariff rate Mr. Pfeiffer refers to is the U.S. “general” rate for cars, not a rate unique to non-USMCA-compliant exports from Mexico or Canada. This rate applies to any cars exported to the U.S. from non-free-trade-agreement countries. Since the U.S. established permanent normal trade relations with China in 2000, this rate also applies to cars exported from China. Yet Chinese cars are subject to an additional 25% tariff as part of the tariffs imposed by the Trump administration.

Mr. Pfeiffer suggests that U.S. officials should take the advice of Mexican business leaders and raise the tariff on non-USMCA-compliant car exports. But there is no straightforward way of doing so without also raising tariffs on exports from other countries or violating the most-favored-nation principle under WTO rules.

Colin Grabow celebrates NAFTA’s thirty years of “driving free trade critics,” such as Helen Andrews, “crazy.” Two slices:

Almost since its inception, the North American Free Trade Agreement has generated controversy far out of proportion to its economic consequences. From Ross Perot’s 1992 warning that NAFTA would create a “giant sucking sound” of jobs flowing to Mexico to Barack Obama’s (and Hillary Clinton’s) campaign trail threat to pull out of the agreement to Donald Trump’s 2016 description of it as a “disaster,” criticism of the trade deal has been a near-constant feature of American politics.

Veracity aside, such swipes are curious. The agreement signed among Mexico, Canada, and the United States — building on a pre-existing free trade deal between the latter two — was never going to significantly alter the United States’ economic trajectory. It just wasn’t possible. Eliminating US tariffs on imports from a single, relatively smaller country already facing very low tariffs — an average of two percent — isn’t the stuff that economic game-changers are made of.

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More relevant when evaluating a free trade agreement are economic outcomes — and from that perspective, NAFTA looks pretty good. From the date of the agreement to the present day, per-capita GDP has nearly doubled in Mexico and almost tripled in the United States, and US manufacturing output, median wages, and median household income have all experienced healthy gains. To be clear, it’s a mistake to single-handedly credit NAFTA with such outcomes — correlation isn’t causation. But the same principle applies to NAFTA’s critics, who often blame the agreement for any and all economic problems since 1994.

Interestingly, even Andrews concedes that the number of jobs lost to Mexico was “relatively small.” But, keeping with her overarching narrative, she nonetheless holds NAFTA culpable for its alleged unleashing of forces that allowed globalization to run riot, contributing to various economic ills, including the loss of 5 million manufacturing jobsfrom 1995-2015.

But NAFTA’s claimed role is ahistorical, and blame placed on globalization for manufacturing job losses is mistaken. The decline in US manufacturing jobs — something that has been taking place since 1979 — is more a story of technology (robots, computers, and the like) and changing US consumer tastes than it is about trade. We know this because while the number of manufacturing jobs has declined, output has risen. Manufacturing jobs have declined abroad too, even in China. More recent US manufacturing job gains, meanwhile, have been accompanied by stagnant industrial productivity. Most lost manufacturing jobs were claimed by automation and economic development, not Mexico and China.

So what is NAFTA’s real record? Literature on the subject paints a consistent picture: the agreement significantly expanded trilateral trade but had only a modest —  and beneficial —  economic impact. A 2012 OECD literature review of NAFTA studies generally found small but positive results, as did a 2013 US International Trade Commission (USITC) review. GDP, productivity, and wages increased by modest amounts — economic welfare increased. Another 2014 paper examining NAFTA’s effects produced similar results. Given NAFTA’s scope and the long-established gains of free trade, that’s about what one should expect.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Michael Taube warns of the rise of authoritarianism in Justin Trudeau’s Canada. Two slices:

The 2002 film “Minority Report” depicts a specialized law-enforcement unit called Precrime that relies on information from psychics to apprehend would-be offenders before they can commit crimes. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau seems to have taken this as a suggestion rather than a warning.

On Feb. 26 Mr. Trudeau’s Liberal government introduced Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act, which targets so-called hate speech on the internet. One of its provisions would enable anyone, with the consent of the federal attorney general, to “lay an information before a provincial court judge if the person fears on reasonable grounds that another person will commit” an offense. The judge could then issue a “peace bond” imposing conditions, including house arrest and electronic monitoring, on the defendant merely because it’s feared he could commit a hate crime.

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The Online Harms Act would introduce not one but three new bureaucracies—a Digital Safety Commission of Canada to “ensure that operators of social media services . . . are transparent and accountable” and “contribute to the development of standards with respect to online safety”; a Digital Safety Ombudsperson of Canada to “provide support to users . . . and advocate for the public interest in relation to online safety”; and a Digital Safety Office of Canada, which would support the commission and the ombudsperson “in the fulfillment of their mandates.”

That almost sounds like a joke, but giving those bureaucrats something to do would entail shutting a lot of Canadians up.

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Quotation of the Day…

… is from pages 66-67 of Liberty Fund’s 2017 expanded English-language edition, brilliantly edited by David Hart, of Frédéric Bastiat’s indispensable work Economic Sophisms and “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen”; specifically, it’s from Bastiat’s undated essay “Does Protection Increase the Rate of Pay?” (“La protection élève-t-elle le taux des salaires?”):

On the national capital available. But has the law that says: “We will no longer receive such and such a product from abroad, we will manufacture it internally,” increased this capital? Not in the slightest. The law has withdrawn the product from one area to place it in another but it has not increased the product by one obole. Therefore the law does not increase the demand for labor.

A factory is shown off with pride. Has it been established and maintained with capital from the moon? No, capital has had to be withdrawn either from agriculture, shipping or the wine producing industry. And this is why while there are more workers in our mineshafts and in the suburbs of our manufacturing towns since protectionist duties became law, there are fewer sailors in our ports and fewer workers and wine producers in our fields and hills.

DBx: Protectionists are forever pointing to these workers employed because of tariffs, those goods rolling out of ‘our’ factories because of import quotas, and that domestic industry that has expanded since trade restrictions were tightened. These phenomena are real, and if they were free they would be net benefits to society. The case for free trade does not deny these phenomena.

But protectionists merely presume that, by pointing to the jobs, industries, and goods that exist only because of protectionism, protectionists thereby prove the economic wisdom of obstructing fellow citizens’ freedom to purchase goods and services offered for sale by foreigners. Protectionists either never ask “As compared to what?” or, on those rare occasions when this question does occur to them, they simply assume that the economic activity made possible by protectionism is more valuable than is the economic activity destroyed by protectionism.

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Some Links

Writing in City Journal, Martin Kulldorff, former professor of medicine at Harvard – and co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration – recounts why he was booted from that university for his resistance to the official “Truth”® about covid and covid mitigation. Three slices:

I am no longer a professor of medicine at Harvard. The Harvard motto is Veritas,Latin for truth. But, as I discovered, truth can get you fired. This is my story—a story of a Harvard biostatistician and infectious-disease epidemiologist, clinging to the truth as the world lost its way during the Covid pandemic.

On March 10, 2020, before any government prompting, Harvard declared that it would “suspend in-person classes and shift to online learning.” Across the country, universities, schools, and state governments followed Harvard’s lead.

Yet it was clear, from early 2020, that the virus would eventually spread across the globe, and that it would be futile to try to suppress it with lockdowns. It was also clear that lockdowns would inflict enormous collateral damage, not only on education but also on public health, including treatment for cancer, cardiovascular disease, and mental health. We will be dealing with the harm done for decades. Our children, the elderly, the middle class, the working class, and the poor around the world—all will suffer.

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I was not the only public health scientist speaking out against school closures and other unscientific countermeasures. Scott Atlas, an especially brave voice, used scientific articles and facts to challenge the public health advisors in the Trump White House, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci, National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins, and Covid coordinator Deborah Birx, but to little avail.

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Almost everyone now realizes that school closures and other lockdowns, were a colossal mistake. Francis Collins has acknowledged his error of singularly focusing on Covid without considering collateral damage to education and non-Covid health outcomes. That’s the honest thing to do, and I hope this honesty will reach Harvard. The public deserves it, and academia needs it to restore its credibility.

Science cannot survive in a society that does not value truth and strive to discover it. The scientific community will gradually lose public support and slowly disintegrate in such a culture. The pursuit of truth requires academic freedom with open, passionate, and civilized scientific discourse, with zero tolerance for slander, bullying, or cancellation. My hope is that someday, Harvard will find its way back to academic freedom and independence.

Four years ago this week, freedom was torched.”

My GMU Econ colleague Bryan Caplan finds a troubling pattern among economists who do randomized controlled trials. A slice:

Randomized Controlled Trials: Could you be any more scientific? The book I’m now writing, Unbeatable: The Brutally Honest Case for Free Markets, insists that the randomistas of the economics profession actually have a thinly-veiled political agenda. Namely: To get economists to humbly serve the demagogues that rule the world instead of bluntly challenging their unabated demagoguery.

Paranoid? I don’t think so. Show me a single published economics RCT that concludes, “Government should stop trying to fix this problem and just allow a free market.” No, no, no. They’ll always either find that (a) the treatment “worked” — so government should scale it up; or (b) the treatment “failed” — so government should keep running RCTs until they find a treatment that works. “Freedom” never counts as a “treatment.”

Colin Grabow shares important information that should be considered whenever national security is invoked to justify restricting imports people’s freedom to spend and invest their incomes in whatever peaceful ways they choose. A slice:

When push comes to shove, can foreigners be counted on to help meet US national security needs? The answer, according to a former deputy undersecretary of defense for industrial policy, is yes. In fact, they might be more responsive than American firms. It’s a reality that should call into question some premises of US trade policy.

In an op‐​ed last week, William C. Greenwalt recalls that during the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts the US military had a pressing need to obtain specialized steel for its Mine‐​Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) program. Thankfully, the US steel industry rose to the occasion, right? Not exactly. In Greenwalt’s telling, the industry—a beneficiary of protectionist measures including tariffs on steel imports and “Buy America” preferences—was not interested in supplying the Pentagon with the necessary materials.

Instead, the US military obtained steel from companies in Australia, Germany, Israel, and Sweden.

“When [the Department of Defense] urgently needed more steel, the US industry basically told Uncle Sam to pound sand,” Greenwalt writes. “Our allies then bent over backwards to help us, when our own industry would not.”

The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal is not impressed with Biden’s fantastical budget. A slice:

As a share of the economy, Mr. Biden wants spending to reach 24.8%, or a quarter of national wealth. The 1974-2023 average was only 21% and, as Mr. Biden told the country last week, the Covid crisis is over. But instead of letting outlays fall as a share of GDP, as they always have after a recession or crisis, the President wants the government to stay at a new and higher spending plateau.

Jon Miltimore reports on the implosion of China’s tyrannical ‘one child’ policy.

Ryan Bourne and Sophia Bagley decry “the incoherence of the White House’s anti‐“junk fees” agenda.” A slice:

It would clearly be more accurate to say that “junk fees” as weaponized by the White House are any fees the administration identifies some customers might dislike or find annoying. That means this war on prices is likely to create substantial uncertainty for a raft of businesses in the future.

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Quotation of the Day…

… is, on this “Equal Pay Day,” from page 57 of Thomas Sowell’s 2008 book, Economic Facts and Fallacies:

The replacement of human muscle by machine power, and the growing importance of industries and occupations not dependent on either, have made sex differences and age differences no longer as significant as they had once been. The economic consequences could be seen in the rising age at which people reached their peak earnings, now that experience and skill were more important than physical strength. Other economic consequences included reductions in male-female pay differentials, even before laws were passed mandating equal pay for equal work.

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