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… is from pages 63-64 of the late William Baumol’s 2002 book, The Free-Market Innovation Machine [original emphasis]:

But in both Roman and Chinese societies there were two types of activity that incurred unambiguous disgrace: participation in commerce or in productive activity (with the possible exception of some gentlemanly agricultural undertakings). In Rome, for example, such disgraceful endeavors were left to freedmen – to manumitted slaves and their sons. And these individuals, too, strove to accumulate sufficient means so that they could afford to leave their degrading occupations, ar at least make it possible for later generations in their families to achieve respectabilty. It is little wonder, then, that there was not much productive entrepreneurship in these societies. Even though the Chinese, in particular, produced an astonishing abundance of inventions, there was little innovation, in the sense of the application and distribution of the inventions. Most such inventions were put to little productive use and often soon disappeared and were completely forgotten.

DBx: The lesson: The more we denigrate commerce and entrepreneurship, the poorer we will be.

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Here’s a letter of mine that will appear in tomorrow’s – the March 19th – print edition of the Washington Post:

Regarding the March 12 news article “White House takes first step toward permanent fix for tariffs ruled illegal”:

Citing Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, the Trump administration announced a move to impose new tariffs by accusing more than a dozen countries of having “structural excess capacity.” Although Section 301 doesn’t mention excess capacity, it does permit the U.S. Trade Representative to restrict imports from trading partners found to impose what the Congressional Research Service calls “unfair and inequitable” burdens on American trade.

Forget that the economic meaning of “unfair and inequitable” — like that of “excess capacity” — is so vague as to invite abuse. Instead, recognize that for a foreign government to artificially create excess capacity in any industry within its jurisdiction requires drawing workers and resources away from other industries within its jurisdiction. If some industries in, say, Japan, really do have excess capacity, then other industries in Japan must have inadequate capacity. This artificially created inadequate capacity not only self-inflicts economic harm on countries that have it; it also might cause some foreign industries to reduce their production, increasing Americans’ opportunities to export.

Protectionists, of course, never mention this flip side of the “excess capacity” argument for raising U.S. tariffs.

Donald J. Boudreaux, Fairfax

The writer is the Martha and Nelson Getchell chair for the study of free-market capitalism at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center.

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Jason Riley describes the late Paul Ehrlich as “always wrong, never in doubt.” A slice:

Ehrlich had visited India and concluded that poor people were overbreeding. He believed that the developing world simply had “too many people” and calculated that the earth’s population needed to be cut in half. “The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions,” and the “pain may be intense,” he cautioned, sounding like a cartoon villain. But it would be “coercion in a good cause.” Ehrlich urged wealthy nations to cut off food assistance to the Third World. He endorsed an Indian official’s proposal for “sterilizing all Indian males with three or more children.” It was for their own good, he insisted.

The world’s population grew, but famine on the scale that Ehrlich predicted never materialized. Within a decade, India not only produced enough food to feed itself, thanks to technological advances in agriculture that Ehrlich hadn’t anticipated, but was a net exporter of wheat. “Since 1900 the world has increased its population by 400 per cent; its cropland area by 30 per cent; its average yields by 400 per cent and its total crop harvest by 600 per cent,” Matt Ridley wrote in his 2010 book, “The Rational Optimist.” “So per capita food production has risen by 50 per cent.”

Making spectacularly wrong predictions of imminent catastrophe became something of a habit for Ehrlich over the decades. His dire forecasts about global cooling and warming were wide of the mark, a twofer. He speculated that the U.S. and Europe would be forced to ration food and encouraged couples to limit themselves to one or two children. In 1971, he said that by “the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people.” Three years later, he predicted that “America’s economic joyride is coming to an end: there will be no more cheap, abundant energy, no more cheap abundant food.”

Peter Suderman writes about Paul Ehrlich that “there’s a strong case to be made that he is History’s Wrongest Man.”

Noah Rothman reports on Paul Ehrlich’s disastrous legacy. A slice:

Central to Ehrlich’s thesis in The Population Bomb was his contention that the Earth had a finite “carrying capacity,” and its limits were already being tested by the mid-20th century. Humanity would soon have to ration its resources and consign those for whom it could no longer care to triage.

Ehrlich’s modern Malthusianism fired the imaginations of the international environmental left, but he seemed compelled to forever up the ante on his dire predictions. He subsequently anticipated that, by 1980, the average American lifespan would decline to just 42. “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,” Ehrlich wrote in 1969. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years,” he declared the following year. By 1971, Ehrlich was willing to “take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.” Roughly 100 to 200 million people, he assumed, would die of starvation between 1980 and 1989 in what he deemed “the Great Die-Off.”

Sure, he got some of the “details and timing” of the events he predicted wrong, his allies will concede. But, to them, the eschatological gist of his work still rang true. “Population growth, along with over-consumption per capita, is driving civilization over the edge,” Ehrlich told The Guardian as recently as 2018, “billions of people are now hungry or micronutrient malnourished, and climate disruption is killing people.” With the confidence of a Marxian economist, Ehrlich never questioned his faith in where humanity’s addiction to prosperity was taking it. “As I’ve said many times, ‘perpetual growth is the creed of the cancer cell,’” he said.

While we’re on the subject of people proficient at making preposterous predictions, let’s look at Trump trade shaman Peter Navarro – as reported on here by my Mercatus Center colleague Jack Salmon. A slice:

When President Donald Trump implemented his Liberation Day tariffs last spring, the president’s senior adviser, Peter Navarro, suggested that these tariffs could generate an additional $700 billion a year.

At the time, I estimated that a more realistic estimate of the maximum additional revenue these tariffs could reap was likely less than $300 billion, which would barely fund two weeks of federal government spending.

Almost a year later, customs duties revenue data suggest that prediction was far closer to reality than what the administration was promising.

Tariff revenues did tick up during this 11-month period, averaging just under $27 billion a month from April 2025 through February 2026, or roughly $296 billion in cumulative tariff revenues since Liberation Day.

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy, tells of “the rare earth problem Washington doesn’t want to solve.” A slice:

To understand why America’s rare-earth problem is really a regulatory problem, it helps to understand what naturally occurring radioactive materials (NORM) actually are. Every piece of rock on earth contains trace amounts of every element, including radioactive ones. A mineral deposit is simply a place where a particular element is more concentrated than usual. Most of the time, the radioactive trace elements in a deposit stay with the waste rock when the ore is extracted, get dumped back in the hole, and nobody thinks about them again.

Rare earths are different. When you process rare earth ores, the naturally occurring thorium in the rock tends to concentrate alongside the rare earth elements you actually want. The processing step that gives you usable rare earth material also gives you concentrated thorium, which is radioactive. Concentrated radioactivity is, rightly, subject to strict regulation. The question is not whether to regulate it. The question is whether the regulations are sensible.

In the United States, they are not.

After numerous exchanges with Tim Worstall, a former metals trader and commodities analyst who spent decades working in rare earth markets with the enormous patience (thank you, Tim), here’s what I have come to understand. One of the most important rare earth feedstocks in the world is monazite, a mineral that occurs as a byproduct of common mining operations. When companies mine mineral sands for ilmenite and rutile, the feedstocks for titanium production, an industry operating at millions of tons per year, produce monazite as a leftover. Monazite is loaded with rare-earth elements. Because processing involves handling concentrated thorium, and because American NORM regulations make that legally treacherous for any company without specific legacy authorizations that almost no one has, the monazite either gets sold to China for a fraction of its value (because there is no other market) or is simply stockpiled on site indefinitely.

How stupid is that? A mineral containing exactly what America says it urgently needs sits in warehouses and waste piles across the country, made worthless by the regulations.

The Review of Austrian Economics is temporarily providing free on-line access to all of the papers contributed to that journal over the years by Roger Garrison, who died in February.

Reacting to FCC Chairman Brendan Carr’s repeated threats to shut down broadcasters that displease the administration, the Editorial Board of the Washington Post says that “the FCC chairman keeps showing why his agency shouldn’t exist.” A slice:

One common consequence of war is to make censorship more politically tempting, which makes it imperative to call out government efforts to chill free speech in moments like this.

President Donald Trump complained over the weekend on social media about a “misleading headline” that he said overstated the damage to United States warplanes from an Iranian strike in Saudi Arabia. His Federal Communications Commission chairman, Brendan Carr, sprung to attention, amplifying the president’s post and threatening broadcasters. Carr, who met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago on Saturday, said they will “lose their licenses” if they don’t “operate in the public interest.”

The message to broadcasters such as NBC, ABC and CBS is clear: They might face regulatory reprisals, up to being forced off the air, for casting the Iran war in a negative light — or as Carr puts it, engaging in “news distortions.” Presumably, coverage favorable to the war, even if distorted, would be in the public interest.

GMU Econ alum Julia Cartwright reviews Gary Galles’s new collection of some of Leonard Read’s writings.

John O. McGinnis talks about his new book, Why Democracy Needs the Rich.

James Hartley praises Adam Smith’s “knack for synthesis.”

The Wall Street Journal‘s Matthew Hennessey hits an important nail squarely on its head:

The Journal reports that 39 states now mandate high-school students take a personal-finance course as a graduation requirement.

Wonderful! Great! It’s good to learn how to live within your means. Young people need to hear about credit scores and nest eggs.

Unfortunately, economics is being edged aside to make room. To some ears that may sound like a wash. It’s actually a net loss.

The difference between economics and finance is the difference between physics and engineering. One is general, the other specific. If it’s easier to conceptualize, think of the difference between a literature course and a journalism class.

Economics is a social science, which means it’s fundamentally an attempt to better understand human behavior. It’s concerned with production and consumption. It teaches students to think about margins and trade-offs.

Finance is more concrete, pragmatic, practical. It’s budgeting and planning, savings and investment.

Studying economics makes you a more thoughtful decision-maker. Studying personal finance makes you a better manager of money and credit. Each has its place, but when teaching young people, we generally start with concepts before moving to real-world applications, right? We want students to walk before they run.

Basic economic education is essential. In an ideal world every American would get a rudimentary grounding in the principles of supply and demand while still in short pants.

Middle-school students would learn about scarcity, incentives and opportunity costs alongside their algebra and Earth science. High schoolers would read Adam Smith as well as Shakespeare.

That this isn’t already standard practice has contributed to an epidemic of economic ignorance. The consequences are everywhere—at least two generations of Americans who don’t understand what prices are and how they’re set, who are ignorant of how wealth is created, who see markets as a rigged game, who think that national prosperity is a fixed pie, who believe changes in tax rates have no effect on behavior, who think you can just freeze the rent . . . the list goes on.

Teaching kids how to be responsible in their personal financial lives is important. But let’s not stop teaching them why it matters. That’s a trade-off we’ll live to regret.

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… is from pages 272-273 of Casey Mulligan’s important 2012 book, The Redistribution Recession: How Labor Market Distortions Contracted the Economy:

The 2009 American Reinvestment and Recovery Act is probably the single piece of legislation with the most provisions expanding the safety net. To name a few: it increased unemployment and food stamp benefits; it expanded eligibility for both programs with its “alternative base period” calculation of the unemployment benefit and by granting states relief from the food stamp program’s work requirements; it federally funded extended unemployment benefits, so that employers would not have to pay for the extended benefits received by their former employees. The act’s “recovery” and “stimulus” monikers are ironic because, like other legislation that expanded the safety net, the transfer provisions of the act helped keep labor hours low after the act went into effect.

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Here’s a letter to Project Syndicate.

Editor:

Arguing that policymakers must choose between putting consumers or workers first, Dani Rodrik posits a false choice (“Consumers or Workers First?” March 12).

While correctly noting that “we derive meaning, social recognition, and life satisfaction” from work, Mr. Rodrik fails to see that we do so only because and insofar as we produce outputs that improve our and other people’s lives. The meaning and value of our work derive from our efforts’ end results and not from that effort itself. Were Mr. Rodrick right, society would be just as well served by someone who spends every morning strenuously digging holes, and every afternoon refilling those holes, as by someone who spends the day producing food, clothing, shelter, or medical care for that person and others to consume.

It is only because we inhabit a world of scarcity that we value human efforts that reduce that scarcity – which is to say, work is a valued means of promoting the end of increasing our ability to consume. And the only reliable way of determining which work efforts contribute most to our ability to consume – that is, which work efforts do most to help humanity loosen the grip of scarcity – is to allow consumers to spend their incomes as they choose. Only by protecting consumers’ freedom to spend their money in whatever peaceful ways they choose can policymakers ensure that work is a legitimate source of satisfaction and dignity.

The trade restrictions that Mr. Rodrik endorses do the opposite. These restrictions force consumers to subsidize workers who don’t contribute as much as possible to satisfying human wants. Far from such work being a legitimate source of satisfaction and dignity, it is – or would be were these workers aware of the full reality of protectionism – a source of dishonor and disgrace.

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

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Phil Gramm and Jeb Hensarling report that “ESG may be eating away at your investments.” A slice:

President Trump recently signed an executive order that aims to end a 20-year experiment in backdoor socialism usurping private wealth to serve special interests. It affirms fiduciary responsibility and extends it to proxy advisers “that prioritize radical political agendas over investor returns.” Fiduciary responsibility requires investment managers and advisers to act in “the best interest of the investor,” and it applies even when the investor is seeking nonfinancial outcomes such as environmental, social, faith-based or humanitarian gains.

Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Paul Atkins’s recent announcement that the commission is reviewing Biden-era rules governing so-called environmental, social and governance funds affirms this point. Fiduciary duty requires investment managers and advisers to exercise loyalty and care to ensure that investment objectives, whether financial or nonfinancial, are fulfilled.

Pursuing ESG objectives without the investor’s expressed consent has been part of a thinly veiled attempt by progressives to coerce investment managers and private corporations to advance their political goals and not the investors’ interest. This process began in 2006 when United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan announced the Principles for Responsible Investment initiative. Loud activists with anticarbon and pro-DEI agendas have colluded with asset managers to push through hundreds of corporate stockholder resolutions contrary to the financial interests of general investors.

As investors have noticed that ESG constraints produce lower returns while delivering few environmental or social benefits, opposition to ESG has grown. While the Biden administration used the same government agencies charged with protecting fiduciary responsibility to promote ESG, investor support for ESG stockholder resolutions fell from 33% in 2021 to 13% in 2025. The number of ESG proposals voted on in the last proxy year dropped 33% from the previous year. Support for ESG resolutions by asset managers, voting the shares of their investors, has dropped from 46% in 2021 to 18% in 2025.

Say! GMU alum Thomas Savidge draws an economic lesson from one of Richard Scarry’s books for children.

The Editorial Board of the Washington Post is correct about Paul Ehrlich: “The scholar lived long enough to see his once-influential ideas thoroughly discredited.” A slice:

Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich made his name as the author of “The Population Bomb,” a 1968 book that shaped the way many in his generation thought about demographics. He died on Friday at age 93, having lived long enough to see the world’s population quadruple.

He wrote that “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death” during the 1970s. The actual number of people who died in famines that decade: Under 4 million. It was under 2 million in the 1980s, and under 1 million in the 2000s, as the world’s population continued to climb.

In fact, famines today occur because of state failure or war, not natural causes or excess population. That’s because farming has become much more efficient. The world’s average farmer can now grow roughly twice as much rice and soybeans, or two-and-a-half times as much wheat or maize, on the same amount of land as he could in 1968.

Also writing about the late Paul Ehrlich is Ron Bailey. A slice:

Ehrlich seemingly never encountered a prediction of doom that he failed to embrace. For example, he was all-in on the projections of imminent economic collapse from nonrenewable resource depletion as argued in the Club of Rome’s 1972 book The Limits to Growth. In fact, Ehrlich was so confident that he bet University of Maryland cornucopian economist Julian Simon that a $1,000 basket of five commodity metals (copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten) selected by Ehrlich would increase in real prices between 1980 and 1990. If the combined inflation-adjusted prices rose above $1,000, Simon would pay the difference. If they fell below $1,000, Ehrlich would pay Simon the difference. In October 1990, Ehrlich mailed Simon a check for $576.07. The price of the basket of metals chosen by Ehrlich and his cohorts had fallen by more than 50 percent.

Here’s more wisdom from Arnold Kling:

There is no way for you to believe that the ratio of your net worth to that of Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos corresponds to your worth as a human being relative to theirs. But as far as the economy goes, chances are that they have created far more wealth than what they obtained for themselves. So strictly from that measure, one can argue that they are much more valuable to society.

Once again, the question becomes whether we live in luck village or effort village. If you think that the economy is a board game with a space that makes you a billionaire if you happen to land on it, then you resent the rich person’s luck. If you think that without Bezos there would be no powerful logistics system supporting online retail or that cloud computing would be nothing but an exotic niche, then you respect Amazon’s achievements.

David Inserra and Brent Skorup decry the Trump administration’s continuing authoritarian threats to silence broadcasters that displease it.

Stephen Slivinski and Ryan Bourne review the recent Executive Order on housing.

Nick Gillespie remembers the late Brian Doherty.

Tyler Cowen remembers studying with Ludwig Lachmann.

The Washington Post‘s Editorial Board explains that “hiking the minimum wage puts robots over people.” A slice:

Companies are already moving toward more automation, and this will speed up the process. An academic paper published last month shows how increases in minimum wages raise the likelihood of robot adoption in manufacturing. From 1992 to 2021, a 10 percent increase in the minimum wage increased robot adoption by roughly 8 percent.

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… is from page 1 of the late Brian Doherty’s great 2007 book, Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement:

The policymakers behind Social Security took it upon themselves to manage the future and savings of all Americans intelligently and rationally. But what they set in place was a system that would eventually bind the coming generations to promises they could not reasonably afford. It was, in other words, the foundational political program of the twentieth century – well meaning, choice eliminating, and ignoring obvious secondary effects.

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Wall Street Journal columnist Andy Kessler details the high cost of policies promising “affordability.” Two slices:

Economist Mark J. Perry’s famous Chart of the Century shows that since 2000 prices for things that government touches—hospital services, college tuition, textbooks, housing and food—have risen faster than overall inflation. Meanwhile, free-market items like computers, software, televisions and cellphone services (thanks Silicon Valley) as well as clothing, furniture, toys and even new cars (thanks globalization) have dropped in price or rose less than inflation after taking into account the increased value of technology, like 75-inch smart TVs. Try streaming March Madness on your 1980s 50-pound 19-inch Sony Trinitron.

…..

What scares me is that government can mandate affordability anytime it wants. Simply announce price controls. When you fix prices, you get shortages: Soviet supermarkets with empty shelves. Or available apartments in rent-controlled New York. Can’t get home insurance? Many state price caps sent insurers scurrying away, especially in coastal and flood prone areas. Drug shortages are next. And consumer credit if we cap credit-card interest rates.

In sectors with affordability problems, Adam Smith’s invisible hand got smashed by a giant regulatory gavel. Competition and freedom from constraints lower prices.

The Bernies and AOCs of the world complain about capitalism. Naive, but on brand. By invoking affordability, what they’re really protesting, with zero self-awareness, is the socialism-inspired heavy hand of the U.S. government: feds, meds and eds.

Those who yell the loudest about affordability are actually making the case for smaller government. Who wants to tell them?

Brian Albrecht makes clear that “Europe’s rigid labor markets are an economic death sentence.” A slice:

Why has Europe slowed down relative to the US?

I have my hobby horse about tech regulation and horrible antitrust laws, but I don’t think those are THE biggest reason. Instead, I agree with a recent piece by Pieter Garicano that points to labor market regulations. The timing and the magnitude fit much better than for other theories. See also their podcast discussion of it.

Edward Pinto explains that “the ROAD Act overlooks the role institutional investors play in providing critical housing opportunities to low-income families.”

Also rightly critical of the ROAD Act is GMU Econ alum Jace White. A slice:

The “large institutional investors” targeted by the proposed housing legislation make convenient villains, but in reality, they collectively own less than 1 percent of the single-family homes across the country. At their peak, large investors purchased just 2.5 percent of homes sold, and their purchasing activity has since fallen sharply. The vast majority of single family homes are owned by individual families and small, “mom and pop” landlords.

That’s part of the reason why, when politicians first began to advocate a ban on “Wall Street buying up homes,” the reaction was mostly one of annoyance from those that hold to the free-market principle that the government shouldn’t be in the business of dictating whom people can sell their property to. After all, there aren’t many political points to score by standing up for a principle that could be caricatured as sticking up for Wall Street over would-be homebuyers . Plenty of pundits criticized the proposed bans, but with more of a groan than an uproar. The problem is that incomplete and misleading views of the world, when left unrefuted, can lead to truly damaging policies.

That’s exactly what happened to the ROAD to Housing Act. The version of the bill that sailed through the Senate includes not just the expected ban on institutional homebuying (which was bad enough), but also a prohibition on investors building single-family homes and renting them out for more than seven years.

Today, roughly 47,000 single-family homes and duplexes per year are constructed by companies that will rent them out to individual families, just as they would rent out apartments or condos. Homeownership is a great thing for many, but families are not being duped or exploited if they choose to rent. Those without a credit history or extensive savings may not be able to buy, and even well-off families may find the math favors renting if they don’t plan on staying in one spot long enough for the benefits of ownership to overcome the high upfront costs of inspections, realtors’ fees, and mortgage down payments.

Stuart Benjamin, reflecting on FCC chairman Brendan Carr’s recent threat to deny licenses to broadcasters that report in ways that Carr doesn’t like, highlights the dangers of government ownership of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Scott Lincicome tweets this passage from a piece in The Guardian:

“The majority of all voters (72%) believe Trump’s tariffs have had a negative rather than a positive impact and 67% said tariffs aren’t the right solution for improving the economy.”

George Leef shares Rich Vedder’s realistic assessment of conservatives’ attempts to improve U.S. higher education from within.

Paul Ehrlich, who famously lost a bet to Julian Simon – and who, for all of his brilliance in biology, repeatedly hawked economic fallacies – has died.

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… is from page 128 of the 2021 Liberty Fund collection of some of Josiah Tucker‘s writings – a collection titled Josiah Tucker: A Selection from His Economic and Political Writings:

[I]t hath been the Observation of many Ages, that Bigotry and Industry, Manufactures and Persecution, cannot possibly subsist together, or cohabit in the same Country.

DBx: Yes. The more free and open is an economy, the more do the people in that economy flourish.