Far too many children are still assigned to substandard schools, and too many remain unable to read or do math at grade level. Meanwhile, educators and policymakers seem preoccupied with nonsense like helping students “transition” behind their parents’ backs or indoctrinating impressionable youngsters with social-justice poppycock to promote trendy political causes. American kids are outperformed by their foreign peers on international exams while we have to concern ourselves with whether school libraries make sexually explicit texts available to third-graders.
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Critics of selective public schools claim that they serve too few minority students, divert resources from traditional schools, and exacerbate racial and economic achievement gaps. Yet the Manhattan Institute’s assessment found that at least a third of the students at selective high schools in Chicago come from low-income families, and Chicago Public Schools spend thousands more per student on nonselective schools.
Almost “70% of all students at selective enrollment schools are black and Hispanic,” according to the study’s author, Rene Mukherjee. And the “black-white, Hispanic-white, and low-income-non-low-income achievement gaps” in math and English test scores “are, on average, significantly smaller at the city’s eight top selective enrollment high schools than at CPS overall.”
We should be replicating successful school-choice models, not thwarting them. When will concern about the educational advancement of all kids reach the level of concern for their preferred pronouns?
Scott Winship offers an update on the earnings of young men in America.
Samuel Gregg dives into “a deep history of America’s tariff wars.” A slice:
Few figures better epitomised protectionism’s ascendency in Postbellum America than President William McKinley. When he ran for president in 1896, McKinley described himself as ‘a tariff man standing on a tariff platform’. Indeed, McKinley had been consistently in favour of tariffs from the beginning of his political career as an Ohio Congressman in 1877 until his assassination on 14 September 1901. Protectionism, according to McKinley, was about giving American businesses, especially manufacturers, a price advantage in US domestic markets as they competed against goods produced by foreign companies. For McKinley, this was one way to promote American prosperity. His dedication as a member of Congress to the protectionist cause resulted in the passing of what came to be called the McKinley Act of 1890. It raised the average tariff on imports from 38 per cent to an astonishing 49.5 per cent.
This is not to suggest that Postbellum protectionist designs went unchallenged. For example, Grover Cleveland – the first Democrat to be elected president after the Civil War – sought to reduce the tariff rate and restrict the use of tariffs to the raising of revenue. There was also considerable intellectual opposition to protectionist policies. In his 1888 book The Tariff History of the United States, the Harvard economist Frank Taussig looked closely into the political dynamics shaping US tariff policy. He found a steady pattern of ‘manipulation of the tariff in the interest of private individuals’, despite increasing hostility to tariffs throughout much of the United States. Though Taussig found no tangible evidence of bribery, he did stress that ‘contributions to the party chest are the form in which money payments by the protected interests are likely to have been made’. Taussig also argued that ‘some Congressmen thought it not improper to favour legislation that put money in their own pockets, and that many thought it quite proper to support legislation that put money into the pockets of influential constituents’.
High tariff policies suffered major setbacks in America in the 1900s. The establishment of today’s federal income tax via the Sixteenth Amendment and the Revenue Act of 1913 obviated the need for tariffs as a source of revenue. But protectionism also fell into disrepute because of growing awareness of the cronyism and the long-term diminishment of competitiveness that is inevitable with protectionist policies.
Hannes Gissurarson writes wisely about free trade.
Arizona State University economist Domenico Ferraro writes wisely about economics. Two slices:
Few ideas have done more to distort Western political and economic thinking than the claim, most famously popularized by Karl Marx, that economic life is a permanent power struggle among “classes.” In this account, societies are defined not by cooperation, exchange, or mutual gain, but by irreconcilable conflict between groups locked in a zero-sum contest over resources.
The durability of this belief is striking. It behaves less like a serious analytical framework than like an intellectual contagion — periodically receding, only to return with renewed force. It cuts across political, religious, educational, and demographic lines, appealing as readily to populists on the right as to progressives on the left. Even in the 21st century, the language and logic of class struggle remain deeply embedded in public debate.
This worldview has been, is, and will continue to be a serious obstacle to economic understanding and sound policy. It is corrosive, not merely mistaken. Its survival has helped fuel today’s political polarization, eroding the capacity for compromise and further displacing pragmatic problem-solving with moralized struggle.
Its most recent expression appears in policy arguments favoring tighter immigration controls, greater trade protection, and renewed enthusiasm for industrial policy. These ideas now attract bipartisan support, though in different forms. At their core, at least so far as economic thinking is concerned, lies the lump-of-labor fallacy: the belief that the number of jobs in an economy is fixed, so that employment gains by foreigners must come at the expense of domestic workers. This zero-sum reasoning mirrors the Marxian class-conflict narrative, which treats economic relations as a struggle over a fixed surplus, not a process of value creation.
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What is so often presented as a grand ideological struggle among classes — workers versus capitalists, domestic versus foreign workers, domestic producers versus foreign ones — is largely a political sideshow. It flatters our instinct for blame, fuels social tensions, and reliably produces bad policy and, unfortunately, successful political careers. Sound economic reasoning that emphasizes incentives, institutions, and human cooperation has raised living standards on a scale unmatched in human history — and can continue to do so. The real threat to prosperous societies is not disagreement or inequality, but the persistence of false narratives that turn economic life into a morality play and politics into permanent combat.
False narratives impede progress by undermining the cooperation increasingly required in a fast-evolving modern economy — one in which team production plays a central role — and by diverting resources from activities that are productive to those that are not.
“The Sanders-Khanna ‘Billionaire Tax’ would make all Americans poorer.”
To understand why this is so, consider the arguments of James Madison, who is sometimes called the “father of the Constitution” because of the important role that he played in the document’s drafting and framing at the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. “The constitution supposes,” Madison explained, “what the History of all [Governments] demonstrates, that the [Executive] is the branch of power most interested in war, & most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care, vested the question of war in the [Legislature.]”
Matt Ridley, in Britain, tweets:
Not developing our own shale gas reserves has a huge opportunity cost.
It got a lot huger this week.
Well, excuse me, but modern economic growth in its global form has done more for workers and the environment than any army of government inspectors, regulators, customs officers, or IRS accountants. We Americans are rich not because of unions or anti-trust or the Occupational Safety and Health Administration but because on the whole we have let capitalism work.
As the scope and role of government expands – whether by covering a larger area and population or by performing a wider variety of functions – the connection between the people governed and the people governing becomes attenuated. It becomes impossible for any large fraction of the citizens to be reasonably well informed about all items on the vastly enlarged government agenda, and, beyond a point, even about all major items. The bureaucracy that is needed to administer government grows and increasingly interposes itself between the citizenry and the representatives they choose. It becomes both a vehicle whereby special interests can achieve their objectives and an important special interest in its own right.
But people will say: if foreigners swamp us with their products, they will carry off our money.
Fix prices — and the problems will multiply; let prices find their own level in free markets — and the problems will disappear.
