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… is from page 262 of Thomas Sowell’s 1999 book, Barbarians Inside the Gates:

One of the most amazing examples of the childishness of our times is that so many individuals and groups think that they have a right to other people’s favorable opinion – and that institutions or the government should punish or “re-educate” others who don’t have a favorable opinion of them.

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Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Brad Raffensperger and Deidre Henderson make the case that fraudulence surrounding America’s polling places is rare. Two slices:

As Republican chief election officials, we care deeply about the integrity of our elections. It should be easy to vote and hard to cheat.

Americans heading to the polls should know their vote will count. The system is working. Still, in recent days, bad actors have flooded social media with false allegations of election irregularities in several states, including ours. The cases we highlight indicate a widespread problem: Foreign adversaries, including Russia, China, and Iran, and domestic arsonists are trying to turn Americans against each other, destroying trust in our electoral process.

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First, we ask Americans to be skeptical of randomly sourced claims of election tampering. They often urge observers to believe something that our senses otherwise would find suspect. Overwhelming and desensitizing our ability to think and convincing us to assume the worst is the point of this malign activity.

Second, no election is perfect. Mistakes happen, and acknowledging them is necessary for transparency and trust. A polling station in Pennsylvania, for example, erred last week by closing prematurely. In response, a judge extended the period for voters to apply for mail-ballot applications in person. In Michigan, one noncitizen college student was discovered to have voted. In Colorado, the secretary of state’s office mistakenly exposed passwords to voting machines—an error that couldn’t be exploited because the machines aren’t connected to the internet and are accessible only by officials.

Walter Russell Mead is correct: “Politicians Aren’t What Make America Great.” A slice:

Our country’s division between a feckless and decadent establishment and a ragged, intellectually shaky populist insurgency doesn’t point to an easy way forward. And while we have had bitterly fought elections in the past, the grace that led Richard Nixon to concede in 1960 and Al Gore to give way 40 years later seems in perilously short supply. In my gloomiest hours I fear we are past choosing between the lesser of evils and are trying instead to discern which is the more survivable of two looming catastrophes.

But when I look back at almost 250 years of American independence, I feel better. We’ve had pretty rotten political leadership for much of our history. Neither Tippecanoe nor Tyler left much in the way of enduring policy accomplishments. The tombs of Franklin Pierce and Chester Arthur aren’t disturbed by throngs of pilgrims come to venerate their inspirational historical legacies. We’ve often been the bad kid in civics class. When Tammany Hall handed out Christmas turkeys to loyal supporters and votes were openly bought and sold at courthouses across the land, the world did not look to American democracy as a model of wise or rational governance. In no other country on earth could something called the Know Nothing Party become a significant political force.

GMU Econ alum Dominic Pino, writing at CapX, explains that “neither Trump nor Harris is prepared for the fiscal storm.” A slice:

One might think that this completely predictable confluence of fiscal issues would be a major focus of the campaign, but it has not been. Neither candidate has any plan to substantively deal with these issues, decisions on which will need to be made next year, whether they like the thought of that or not.

This ‘mother of all fiscal cliffs’ could blow a $5trn hole in the US economy just to keep current law in place. Making matters worse for the US fiscal situation, the first year of a new administration is generally a time when presidents want to spend more to reward their various voting blocs for electing them. So not only is no candidate promising fiscal rectitude, but the political winds will be at the president’s back to spend more on new initiatives next year.

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy, talks with Matt Mitchell about economic freedom.

Here’s Jon Miltimore on Rachel Cohen on individuals and political action.

Emma Camp remembers Peanut the squirrel.

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… is this tweet from David Harsanyi:

The problem with endlessly repeating that we live in a “democracy” is that ppl start to believing all political and legal legitimacy comes from 50 percent +1.

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In my latest column for AIER I explain that wealth is indeed “socially created,” but in a manner opposite of what socialists, Marxists, and many progressives mean when they describe wealth as being “socially created.” A slice:

Of course, in one sense it is indisputable that wealth is socially created, but in a sense directly opposite of what is meant by Marx, Jacobin, or Piketty. We can produce more and better outputs if we cooperate – more specifically, if we specialize in our productive tasks and then exchange the fruits of our labor for the fruits of other individuals’ labor, all voluntarily offered. The greater the number of people who are party to this cooperative effort, the greater the amount of wealth created per person. An extensive system of specialization and exchange enables each individual to consume far more than he or she could have ever produced on his or her own. Each and every person in modern society daily consumes goods and services that were produced by the effort, creativity, and cooperation of countless individuals, and in some cases literally billions of individuals.

Yet for this productive social cooperation to arise and continue, each individual must be adequately informed about how he can best assist his fellow humans and appropriately incited to do so. This information and these incentives come from prices, wages, and other signals that emerge and adjust on free markets. This understanding of the social creation of wealth makes clear the importance of these market signals and the danger of interfering with them. This understanding also makes it impossible to take seriously the mystical notion that wealth is created by social forces independently of human institutions, human action, and the incentives and constraints that guide human action.

Importantly, these incentives and constraints exist at the margin, meaning this: Although we are all part of a vast globe-spanning economy in which countless strangers do many different things almost none of which is under our individual control, each of the gazillions of daily decisions is conditioned by the unique information, constraints, and expected benefits that each person confronts at each moment of decision. In a market economy, each individual can and does exercise meaningful control over his decisions and actions. If the information that each person has is reasonably accurate, if each person is appropriately constrained from interfering with the decision-making processes of others, and if each person is free, within these constraints, to choose those courses of action that he believes are best for him, each person will act in ways that, when combined with the actions of others, contributes to massive production of wealth.

Although “social” in the sense that this market system of wealth creation involves untold numbers of strangers all cooperating to produce wealth, it works only if each of the individuals chooses and acts in ways that contribute to wealth creation. And individuals will generally choose and act in these ways only if the incentives that each of them confronts as individuals prompt them to do so.

Jacobin, Marxists, Piketty, and most progressives look only at “the economy,” supposing that it’s the elemental organism, with a will of its own, that produces all the wealth that we observe, and, thus, that “the economy” imposes its will on investors, workers, and consumers. But they are deeply mistaken. The elemental decision-making creatures in any economy are individuals. Much or little wealth is produced depending on how much or little individuals are prompted to choose and act in ways that lead to the production of wealth. There’s a reason, after all, why the “socially created” wealth in countries such as the United States, Sweden, and Singapore is multiple times greater than is the “socially created” wealth in countries such as Cuba, Venezuela, and Malawi.

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Wall Street Journal columnist Andy Kessler describes the 2024 U.S. presidential election as “the hemlock election.” Two slices:

Under Mr. Trump, expect me-me-me, mockery and misogyny. Under Ms. Harris, climate craziness, wokey woo-woo and pronoun patrols. I don’t like either scenario.

Mr. Trump says if he wins, there’ll be mass deportations. Believe him. Detention centers will be constructed, which the press will immediately compare to Nazi camps. It won’t be pretty. Add tariffs and a lower dollar in a misguided effort to help U.S. manufacturing. Prices will go up.

Ms. Harris says she’ll give money away in the form of tax credits, home subsidies and higher minimum wages. Believe her. Prices will go up. In 2026 maybe we’ll see a rebranding of the Dollar Store to the Five Dollar Store. The stock market may swoon on larger federal deficits.

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Economic illiteracy is bipartisan. Ms. Harris says she will “advance the first-ever federal ban on price gouging on food and groceries.” Price controls lead to empty shelves—ask the Soviets. Mr. Trump suggests of the U.S. debt, “Maybe we’ll pay off the $35 trillion dollars in crypto. I’ll write on a little piece of paper, ‘$35 trillion crypto, we have no debt.’ That’s what I like.” Dumb and dumber.

And George Will writes that “voters face the worst presidential choice in U.S. history.” Three slices:

Of this mercifully truncated presidential campaign we may say what Samuel Johnson said of Milton’s “Paradise Lost”: No one ever wished it longer. Why prolong this incineration of the nation’s dignity?

Donald Trump, a volcano of stray thoughts and tantrums, is painfully well known. There is nothing to know about Kamala Harris, other than this: Her versatility of conviction means that she might shed her new catechism as blithely as she acquired its progressive predecessor.

The Democratic Party’s reckless disingenuousness regarding the president’s frailty persisted until, in 90 June minutes, the truth became public. Then, with the nimbleness of those without the ballast of seriousness about anything other than hoarding power, his party foisted on the electorate a Play-Doh candidate. Her manipulators made her malleability into her platform. Prudence is a virtue, so do not fault her handlers for mostly shielding her from public interactions more challenging than interviews with grammar school newspapers.

Her sole notable decision as a candidate has been the choice of a running mate whose self-description (“knucklehead”) is more astute than his flippancies about serious matters (the electoral college is icky, socialism is “neighborliness,” etc.) and his self-celebratory fictions about his past. Tim Walz’s achievement during his pirouette in the spotlight has been to make his counterpart, JD Vance, resemble Aristotle.

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Trump and Harris are, however, crystal clear and completely agreed about the national debt, which increased $1.8 trillion in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30: They promise to do nothing about the main problem, entitlement (Social Security, Medicare) spending.

When Trump said “no tax on tips,” Harris, perhaps admiring the artful pander, said: Me, too! They also agree on repealing one of his good presidential deeds — the cap on deductions of state and local taxes from federal income tax liabilities. This would be a tax cut disproportionately for high-earners in high-tax blue states.

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Amazingly, although both candidates have constantly caused normal people to wince, neither’s voice has been the most embarrassing this year. That award goes to the Idaho Republican who, in a public forum, told a Native American to “go back where you came from.” Let’s do go back to where we come from: the nation’s founding of a limited government.

John Tierney asks: “Who’s the fascist?” Two slices:

Fascism is now routinely used to describe conservatives, but that’s only because of what Tom Wolfe called “the greatest hoax of modern history.” The original fascists were leftists. Benito Mussolini started his political career in the Italian Socialist Party, and Adolf Hitler’s Nazis took their name from “National Socialists.” Unlike their Communist rivals on the Left, those dictators didn’t directly seize the means of production, but they believed that a strong central government should direct the economy and the rest of society: “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state,” in Mussolini’s words.

Mussolini’s principles and policies were widely admired and emulated by progressives in America during the 1920s, and the underlying philosophy—a society planned and regulated by “experts”—is still shared by today’s progressives, as Jonah Goldberg showed in his 2008 book, Liberal Fascism. But after the horrors of the Holocaust, progressives rewrote history by reclassifying fascism as a right-wing movement. Since then, they have deployed the term against every Republican presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan—including, of course, Donald Trump.

It’s true that Trump often sounds like an authoritarian, particularly when he’s misquoted by the legacy media (like the recent false accusation that he vowed to unleash the military on his political enemies). Democrats were appalled by his statements during the 2016 campaign about locking up Hillary Clinton, but his Department of Justice (unlike Joe Biden’s) didn’t actually try to imprison his political opponent. How does his record on authoritarianism compare with his rhetoric—and how does it compare with Kamala Harris’s record?

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Trump’s greatest power grab occurred during the pandemic, which saw the imposition of the most authoritarian measures in American history. Unprecedented restrictions of individual liberty caused massive social and economic damage. Technically, the lockdowns and most other restrictions in 2020 were the doings of state governors, not Trump, but the governors were responding to pressure from his administration. Though Trump himself soon began calling for the lockdowns to end and for schools to reopen, the White House officials overseeing his Covid policies, Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci, continued successfully pressuring governors to extend the restrictions. Trump did have the good sense to consult with scientists critical of the restrictions—notably Scott Atlas of the Hoover Institution, the lone dissident on the White House Coronavirus Task Force, who advised him to overrule Birx and Fauci. But Trump and his political team feared taking such action in an election year.

Atlas and others (including the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025) have urged the next president to make sweeping reforms in the federal health bureaucracy to prevent it from repeating its disastrous mistakes during the next pandemic. Atlas says he is confident that Trump recognizes the mistakes and would be eager to make the reforms. But Harris seems an unlikely reformer. She and Biden have continued to insist that the pandemic restrictions were necessary.

Jacob Sullum is correct: “Trump’s critics keep undermining their case by lying about stuff he supposedly said.”

Juliette Sellgren and Samuel Gregg discuss industrial policy and national security.

With GMU Econ alum Caleb Brown, Eric Mack discusses Anarchy, State, and Utopia.

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… is from Pat Toomey’s superb October 28th, 2024, Wall Street Journal essay, “About Trump’s ‘Reciprocal’ Tariffs“:

No country has ever tariffed its way to prosperity.

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… is from page 390 of the 2016 second edition of Thomas Sowell’s excellent volume Wealth, Poverty and Politics (footnotes deleted; original emphases):

People who seek to find blame, as distinct from causation, often also seek a localized source of evil to blame. Professor Paul Krugman, for example, refers to slavery as “America’s original sin.” But it would be hard to find an evil less localized than slavery. Though universally condemned today, slavery was an institution accepted as a fact of life for thousands of years, be even moral and religious leaders around the world. Christian monasteries in Europe and Buddhist monasteries in Asia had slaves.

DBx: Because these days one cannot be too careful to avoid misinterpretation, what Sowell is saying here – and what I, by quoting Sowell approvingly, am agreeing with – is that slavery, although without question an unmitigated and inexcusable evil, was not unique to America. The fact that slavery lasted for several millennia does nothing to excuse it, but this fact does imply that slavery was not original or unique to America.

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The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal ponders what a second Trump term might bring. Two slices:

The best argument for a Trump victory is that it would be suitable penance for the many Democratic failures at home and abroad. A spending-fueled inflation that shrank real wages. Adversaries on the march. Abuses of regulatory power and law enforcement. If Ms. Harris wins, progressives will claim vindication and pursue more of the same—perhaps checked somewhat by a GOP Senate. A Harris defeat would slow the forced march left, at least for a time.

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Mr. Trump has instincts but no clear philosophy of government, and his second term will be more of a policy jump ball. Most of his 2017 tax reform will expire at the end of 2025, and he has already complicated renewal by proposing tax giveaways that will make pro-growth provisions harder to finance.

He’s promising more deregulation, which is a big plus. But he wants much higher and across-the-board tariffs, which will introduce uncertainty that would slow growth. His second term could be a struggle between free-market advisers like those in his first term, and the protectionist, industrial policy, pro-Big Labor voices who surround JD Vance.

If Mr. Trump goes with the latter, the GOP will no longer be a party of free markets and smaller government. This is one way the U.S. turns into slow-growth Europe where the major parties are all statist.

Tad DeHaven, of Cato, warns that American businesses now confront modern Caesars. A slice:

The flip side to a president disfavoring particular companies is favoring particular companies. For example, Scott Lincicome notes the Government Accountability Office found that the Trump administration’s “process for excluding certain goods from the tariffs suffered from political favoritism, untimeliness, and a lack of transparency.” Another study found that companies supporting Republicans, including Trump, were more likely to receive tariff exemptions. Trump also oversaw billions of dollars in taxpayer bailouts for farmers hurt by retaliatory tariffs.

Jason Hayes and Timothy Nash explain that rich people in market economies pay their fair share.

Walter Block exposes some of the damage to low-skilled workers by minimum-wage legislation.

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… is from page 519 of the 1988 collection of Lord Acton’s writings and notes to himself (edited by the late J. Rufus Fears), Essays in Religion, Politics, and Morality; specifically, it’s a note drawn from Acton’s extensive papers at Cambridge University:

Among all the causes which degrade and demoralize men, power is the most constant and the most active.

DBx: Indeed.

Power is so persistent because it is the only means by which the greedy and the arrogant amongst us – of whom there are many – can get us to do their bidding without them having to give to us at least equal value in return. Even the private corporation that currently ‘dominates’ some industry classification must offer workers wages that workers find attractive, and offer its customers bargains that customers find attractive. In contrast, people with genuine power are able to get other people to do their bidding, not by offering to make these other people better off, but by threatening to make them worse off if they disobey the power-holders’ commands.