Many young lawyers hope for careers in which they can use the law to promote justice and change lives, but few succeed. One who did was William “Chip” Mellor, who died Friday at 73 years old.
Mellor co-founded and for many years was president of the Institute for Justice, whose causes have often been taken up in these columns. IJ’s mission is to help Americans whose rights are being violated by government. This is the opposite of most public-interest legal shops whose goal is to expand government power over individuals and business.
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The firm has brought or intervened in 30 lawsuits to give parents more educational options. Its 2002 Supreme Court victory in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris confirmed that school choice programs that include religious options are constitutional, and the group’s work has helped make possible programs that have awarded more than 4.8 million scholarships.
IJ has won 10 Supreme Court cases, including both it brought in the 2023 term, DeVillier v. Texas on the Fifth Amendment’s takings clause and Gonzalez v. Trevino on the First Amendment protection against government punishment for unpopular speech.
David Henderson, writing in the Wall Street Journal, describes the work of the newly minted Nobel-laureates in economics. Three slices:
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences to three economists. The recipients are Turkish-born Daron Acemoglu and British-born Simon Johnson, both of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and British-born James A. Robinson, an economist and political scientist at the University of Chicago. They received the award “for studies of how institutions are formed and affect prosperity.”
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In their 2012 book, “Why Nations Fail,” Messrs. Acemoglu and Robinson divide countries into two types: extractive and inclusive. In extractive countries, a small elite extracts wealth from the masses, whereas in inclusive countries, political power is shared. When governments are extractive, people have little incentive to produce. But the opposite is true when governments are inclusive, as people have property rights and can accumulate wealth.
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It’s good to see a Nobel Prize awarded to economists who understand the importance of private property and the rule of law. Unfortunately, Mr. Acemoglu’s understanding is incomplete. He recently signed a statement supporting the Brazilian government’s move to rein in freedom of speech for Brazilians who want to communicate using X. Only time will tell whether Mr. Acemoglu will favor further undercutting of the rule of law. Let’s hope he doesn’t.
Pierre Lemieux worries about Acemoglu’s naïveté about the state. A slice:
I reviewed the two latest books of Acemoglu: The Narrow Corridor with James Robinson, and Power and Progress with Simon Johnson. Acemoglu’s naïve and pre-public-choice conception of the state has become more obvious: if this was not apparent in his earlier work, it certainly is in these two books and especially in the last one. The words and expressions used sometimes betray Acemoglu’s progressive agenda.
I think of the election as a necessary evil. Elections are necessary because you want people to give up power. But they are evil because politics is like the worst of Twitter. You get followers by stirring up fear and anger.
We can have an argument over which candidate’s economic proposals are worse than the other’s. We can have an argument over which candidate’s rhetoric is more demagogic and out of touch with reality. Only a partisan hack could claim that either candidate is good on the economy. I wish we could elect Javier Milei.
The Republican presidential nominee’s threat to impose new tariffs on nearly all imports into the United States would make video game consoles 40 percent more expensive, according to an analysis published this month by the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), an industry group best known for its annual Las Vegas conference showcasing the latest tech for home and personal use.
The report assumes that Trump can carry out his threat to hit all imports from China with a 60 percent tariff, along with a baseline tariff of 10 percent or 20 percent on all other imports. (Trump has been unclear about which level he’d prefer, and recently suggested a “thousand percent tariff.”)
Scott Lincicome is always worth reading. Two slices:
This is indeed what’s happened historically in the United States, as work hours have declined and wages (and leisure time!) have increased dramatically. Contrary to what you might read on the internet, moreover, the connection between productivity and pay remains tight today. As the American Enterprise Institute’s Scott Winship thoroughly documented in May, for example, the supposed gap between the average American workers’ compensation and aggregate U.S. productivity is a statistical myth. Instead, he shows in several different ways that the linkage has fluctuated a bit in recent decades but still lines up quite well overall (and is light years away from the stark divergence we see in the online doomer memes).
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Most of the online discussion of these poor results has focused on the ports’ lack of automation, which ILA chief (and very fancy lad) Harold Daggett is indeed fighting tooth and nail, going so far as to recently demand “absolute airtight language that there will be no automation or semiautomation” in the union’s next six-year contract with the United States Maritime Alliance (USMX), which represents shippers and port operators. And he’s doing that even as “U.S. ports already lag those in Europe and Asia in their use of technology,” thus helping to “explain why U.S. ports score so poorly on the World Bank’s annual ranking of trade gateways.”
As we’ve discussed, however, the productivity issue at American ports runs a lot deeper (pun!) than just their relative lack of automation, and much of it stems from other union demands that further sap productivity. Their contracts, for example, “dramatically increase labor costs at port terminals …, expressly limit the number of hours that workers can work (total and per shift) and require overtime pay for unscheduled work, as well as any work on weekends and holidays.” (Here’s one particularly crazy cost.) Unions also fight “efforts by other port operators, especially in the South, to supplement their unionized labor force with non-union workers—a ‘hybrid system’ that ‘has underpinned robust container volume growth across the region.’” As a result, American ports don’t operate 24/7, unlike many other, more productive ports around the world.
Fiona Harrigan busts the myth of the voting noncitizen.
The man who has built himself a castle above the highway in order that he may exact a toll from the merchants on their way to market acquires wealth not by producing it but by seizing it. His predatory incursions arbitrarily yield the returns which would otherwise go to invention, industry, and thrift. But for his castle and his armed hands he would be poorer than the passing merchant whom he despoils: because he is more powerful but is unrestrained, he reaps a greater reward from highway robbery than other men can make by producing wealth. Thus the ideal of equal rights for all and special privileges for none is inseparable from the pursuit of liberty.
Nor, contrary to Prof. Teachout’s assertion, is there any evidence that good jobs have been shipped to Mexico. While the percentage of America’s nonfarm workforce employed in manufacturing has indeed fallen since 1994, that trend started in 1944, a half-century earlier. Over the course of the 369 months that have elapsed since NAFTA was instituted (January 1994 through September 2024), the percentage of American workers in manufacturing fell from 15.0 percent to 8.1 percent. Yet in the 369 months leading up to NAFTA’s implementation (April 1963 through December 1993), the percentage of American workers in manufacturing also fell, from 27.6% to 15.0%. The pace of the decline in the percentage of workers employed in manufacturing was the same before NAFTA’s implementation as it has been since.* Further, the inflation-adjusted hourly wage of nonsupervisory manufacturing workers in the U.S., even ignoring the increase in the value of fringe benefits, is today 27 percent higher than it was in January 1994.**
In personal life, no one relishes a crisis, but in political life, many people pray for a crisis as drought-stricken farmers pray for rain. For these people, a societal crisis promises to bring not extraordinary difficulties, dangers, and challenges, but rather enlarged opportunities.
The principle of self-interest rightly understood produces no great acts of self-sacrifice, but it suggests daily small acts of self-denial. By itself it cannot suffice to make a man virtuous; but it disciplines a number of persons in habits of regularity, temperance, moderation, foresight, self-command; and if it does not lead men straight to virtue by the will, it gradually draws them in that direction by their habits. If the principle of self-interest rightly understood were to sway the whole moral world, extraordinary virtues would doubtless be more rare, but I think that gross depravity would also be less common. The principle of interest rightly understood perhaps prevents men from rising far above the level of mankind, but a great number of other men, who were falling far below it, are caught and restrained by it. Observe some few individuals, they are lowered by it; survey mankind, they are raised.
