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… is from page 338 of the “Random Thoughts” section of Thomas Sowell’s 2010 book, Dismantling America:

Perhaps the scariest aspect of our times is how many people think in talking points, rather than in terms of real world consequences.

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Phil Magness and GMU Econ alum Caleb Petitt expose the shoddiness (to put it mildly) of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy‘s entry on capitalism. Three slices:

Instead of attempting some semblance of balance, the new SEP entry author Chiara Cordelli, a professor of political philosophy at the University of Chicago, used this platform to air her own personal grievances with capitalism as an economic system. The resulting product gives scant attention to proponents of free-market economics. By contrast, Cordelli’s article is loaded with content from the Marxist or socialist far left. Space devoted to critics of capitalism far outpaces even basic descriptions of the economic concept, and proponents of capitalism are reduced to shallow parodies.

…..

Cordelli’s prose functions as an anti-capitalist advocacy piece rather than a neutral and descriptive encyclopedia entry. It breaks with the normal format of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, in which a concept or a philosopher’s work is usually described in its component parts to give a better view of the whole. While other entries usually offer space for debate and criticisms of the author or subject, they seldom comprise the majority of their verbiage.

Cordelli’s barrage of critiques against capitalism is almost twice as long as her description of capitalism’s supporters. Marxist accounts of capitalism account for three times the combined word count of Cordelli’s descriptions of market capitalism and institutionalist theories of capitalism. The author was clearly more concerned with highlighting every minute facet of anti-capitalist academic writing imaginable than with helping readers understand what the concept means, or the reasons that people defend it.

The resulting product is even more egregious when one considers the track records of these competing perspectives. Whatever criticisms may be offered of capitalism, its underlying economic theories have coincided with an unparalleled rise in prosperity and well-being between the late 18^th century and today, often known as the Great Enrichment. By comparison, the Marxist perspectives that dominate Cordelli’s work carry the ignominious baggage of mass atrocity and economic ruin in the 20^th century, though the phrase “Soviet Union” never appears in her entry. Neither do any of its catastrophic copycat regimes, from Maoist China to recent socialist experiments in Venezuela. Economists of any non-Marxian or socialist stripe are relegated to a minimal presence, and where their ideas are discussed at all, a socialist or anti-capitalist critic is almost always brought in at the end and given the last word.

The bizarre result is something akin to an encyclopedia entry about “astronomy” in which the majority of consulted sources are astrologers, and furthermore their horoscope readings are privileged over the empirical calculations of actual scientists who study star movements.

…..

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s unwillingness to select an author for the entry on capitalism who could provide a charitable or even neutral assessment of the concept is ultimately unscholarly. In the 20th century, socialism resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people, and capitalism and free markets were the critical factors for lifting billions out of poverty, and yet it is socialism that received the positive encyclopedia entry and capitalism that garnered the hate. Such imbalances could only emerge from an academic environment in which an ideological echo chamber supplants rigorous peer review, and the fashionable socialist perspectives of the professoriate lead it to mistake bad caricatures of a market economy for descriptive fact.

Michael Strain summarizes the myths of the “China Shock.” A slice:

Economic theory suggests that trade liberalization should have little effect on aggregate US employment because job losses from import competition can be balanced by job gains in export-intensive firms and sectors. The economist Robert Feenstra and his coauthors attempt to account for both sides of the ledger.

In a 2019 paper, Feenstra and his colleagues confirm the “China shock” result, finding that 1.9 million jobs were lost between 1991 and 2011, owing to import competition from China, with more jobs lost to competition from global imports. But they also find that a roughly equivalent number of jobs were gained due to export expansion.

One should also consider that manufacturing’s share of total US employment followed a relatively smooth downward trend from the early 1950s until the 2008 financial crisis, when falling productivity actually caused the trend to slow. The decline predates the “China shock” by decades. And there was no obvious trend break in manufacturing’s employment share in 2000 or 2001, which is consistent with the view that, over the long term, declines in manufacturing employment have been driven mainly by productivity growth, not by trade competition.

Finally, the US did not decide to open trade with China in the 1990s in the same way that I decided to have a third espresso this morning. The decision wasn’t nearly so simple or singular.

Yes, China was granted permanent normal trade relations in 2000 and entered the World Trade Organization in 2001. But the US had annually renewed China’s normal trade relations status since 1980, and US trade with China grew rapidly over two decades prior to its WTO accession. According to my calculations, China’s share of total US imports grew during the 1980s, hit 2.5% in 1989, had more than doubled to 5.4% by 1993, and stood at 8% in 1999.

The trend continued following China’s WTO accession. China’s share of total US imports doubled again, from 8.2% in 2000 to 16.4% in 2007. But even this overstates the role of US policy in facilitating the so-called China shock. China’s exports continued to grow in part because the US eliminated the uncertainty created by the pre-2000 annual renewal of trade-policy parameters. They also grew because of China’s internal, pro-market reforms—including a reduction in its own tariff rates.

Nor was the US decision to trade with China made by a shadowy elite. China’s exports to America grew as a result of millions of decentralized, individual decisions. During the 1980s and 1990s, US consumers and businesses increasingly chose to purchase goods made in China, a trend that continued following China’s entry into the WTO.

It is wrong to present the “China shock” as evidence that trade liberalization hurts the working class, or that a powerful, murky, nefarious elite is making deliberate, isolated choices that hurt the majority of Americans.

The Economist reports on what sees as, well, the banality of much of Daron Acemoglu’s research and commentary. Two slices:

More worrying is that his grand thesis of institutions may not reveal very much. Nations prosper when institutions are good, and stagnate when they are bad. True. But what, exactly, is an institution? Rules, norms, enforcement, culture—everything, really. Where do institutions come from? From “critical junctures” and “institutional drift”, whatever that means.

Reviewing one of Mr Acemoglu’s books in 2011, Tyler Cowen of George Mason University noted that the institutional changes it describes only seem to come from other institutional changes, making the core argument regress for ever—turtles all the way down. Duncan Green of the London School of Economics has argued that the framework works mainly in hindsight. Francis Fukuyama of Stanford University has argued that the book waves away the example of China, which has seen blistering economic growth alongside institutions that can quite plausibly be described as extractive.

…..

Mr Acemoglu’s influence in the AI debate is clear in a recent statement, signed by dozens of prominent economists, which argues that “we must act now” to “steer AI in a direction that complements humans and benefits society”. Who is the “we”, exactly? The Trump administration? And who is to decide what sort of AI does and does not complement humans? Even economists who signed the petition say they are not entirely sure. So great is Mr Acemoglu’s stardom that it can sometimes blind the critical faculties.

The Washington Post‘s Editorial Board continues – wisely – to decry the U.S. government’s fiscal incontinence. A slice:

Politicians are addicted to making promises that require sources of money they don’t have. Their failure to control spending remains one of the biggest threats to the country. If only the $40 trillion milestone [of government indebtedness] could be a wake-up call.

Arnold Kling reinforces the importance of this (Hayekian) point: “Problems in the physical world are complex. Social world problems reach a higher level of complexity.”

I very much enjoyed my conversation this past Friday with Rikki Schlott, for the Cato Podcast, on the absurdity of Comrade Mamdani’s government-created grocery stores.

GMU Econ alum Nikolai Wenzel is a fan of Stephanie Slade’s new book. Two slices:

Fusionism, a new book by Stephanie Slade, a Senior Editor at Reason, attempts to make sense of the seemingly incoherent New Right. Although Slade proposes a renewal of fusionism as a remedy to conservatism’s drift and the challenges facing a divided Republic, the book’s greatest strength lies in its analysis of the trends to date.

The Republican Party, for all its faults, was supposed to understand (instinctively, if not always intellectually) limited government, rule of law, and the basics of economics. From its elected leaders, though, we have gotten tariffs, increased public debt, dodgy respect for habeas corpus in immigration enforcement, and the Saturday Night Live tragicomedy of DOGE (a virtue-signaling, clumsy, and cruel flash in the pan destined to die on the vine when it removed entitlements from the chopping block). The coalition that constitutes the New Right has abandoned conservatism, and instead sells its own form of populist interventionism.

Slade starts by painting a rather glum sketch of the contemporary scene. Within the convoluted and heterogeneous mess she labels “the Dissident Right,” she identifies three major strains:

1. the predominant national conservatives, who are eager to use the coercive power of the modern administrative state to advance (allegedly) conservative causes and push for national primacy;
2. the theocons, who dream of “immanentizing the eschaton” by creating a state theocracy to impose (their understanding of) a transcendent moral order;
3. the neoreactionaries, the Pajama-Boy Nitzscheans who have been given legitimacy to spew their blend of vitriol and conspiracy.

The NatCons have turned their back on the basics of markets and skepticism about administrative power (how sad in this 250^th anniversary year of The Wealth of Nations!). The theocons would repoliticize salvation after three centuries of religious tolerance within Christendom. And, beneath all that, the country’s baser instincts toward power and suppression are flourishing within the neoreactionary right. On the other side, the interventionist excesses of American socialism, with DEI, cancel culture, and continued growth of the administrative-welfare state, are equally horrifying. To paraphrase Richard Nixon, we are all interventionists now.

…..

Today’s classical liberals are, indeed, alone in a two-front war. The paternalistic Left and the Dissident Right both aggressively push for social and economic control. Liberty, limited government, and free markets have few defenders. Fusionism is an appealing alliance, as Slade proposes it. But who will be the fusionist warriors for individual liberty? Where are the moderates to defend private property? Where have all the pro-business, small-government, free-trade conservatives gone? We can hope that there is a Nockian Remnant out there, biding its time while the dissident storm passes. In the meantime, the libertarian wing of fusionism stands alone, as core agreements have largely been abandoned by those who still call themselves conservatives, but now need hyphenations to distinguish conservatism from their preferred flavor of interventionism.

“ICE admits it investigated a critic based on constitutionally protected speech” – so reports Jacob Sullum.

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… is from Arvind Panagariya’s November/December 2003 Q&A, “Think Again: International Trade”:

Indeed, few developing nations have grown rapidly over time without simultaneous increases in both exports and imports, and virtually all developing countries that have grown rapidly have done so under open trade policies or declining trade protection.

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The Washington Post‘s Editorial Board is not impressed with Rep. Ro Khanna’s scheme to tax wealth. A slice:

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-California) supports his state’s billionaire tax proposal on the ballot in November. Texas businessman Mark Cuban had a question: What about founders of promising start-ups who are billionaires only on paper?

Khanna’s solution was revealing. Hint: It would create another tool for government control.

On Saturday, Cuban noted on X that California has more and more “deca unicorns” — start-ups with valuations of $10 billion. If a founder owns even 10 percent of such a company, he or she could be considered a billionaire despite not having much wealth aside from the paper value of a yet-unproven firm. It’s not clear how such a person would pay the supposedly one-time 5 percent tax Khanna wants to impose.

Khanna replied to Cuban that the paper-billionaire founders could, essentially, get loans from the government using their companies as collateral. “Allow illiquid founders to pledge shares with a loan from the government to pay tax,” Khanna posted. “At the end of the period, the loan is either paid back in cash, or the government assumes the shares.”

So, Khanna’s plan is for government to … front people money to cover their taxes. That’s a variation of current policy for people of modest means; a significant portion of welfare spending amounts to returning money that households already paid in taxes that same year.

But Khanna wants a revenue treadmill for people he considers rich. The state would lend taxpayers’ money to other taxpayers so they can pay a novel wealth tax back to the state.

The congressman’s proposed security for the wealth-tax loan is meaningless. If a deca unicorn start-up succeeds, its founders will likely have enough cash to pay back the loan. But if the business sputters and the high valuation disappears, the government would then own shares of a failed company.

That means many loans would never be paid back and the government would accumulate stakes in failed companies. It’s socialism without the purported benefit: California would own the means of non-production.

National Review‘s John Puri asks if Trump’s tariffs are fulfilling the promises under which they were peddled. Two slices:

Paradoxically, by incentivizing Chinese manufacturers to reroute shipments through third-party nations, the United States was helping to amplify Beijing’s economic influence around the globe. All for little to no reduced dependence on our end.

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Reducing our reliance on China through strategic tariffs and friendshoring may be a noble aim, but good intentions are not the measure of sound public policy. We must ask at a certain point, “Does this actually work?” Unfortunately for the confident planners atop U.S. trade policy, it is very hard to disentangle a globalized economy bound together by price signals, and nearly impossible to cut the world’s premier industrial power out of complex supply chains.

John Puri has yet another insightful piece at National Review about trade. Three slices:

One year, four months, and 15 days after Liberation Day, it is difficult to judge Trump’s expansive tariffs because the administration never settled on a standard for success or failure. Instead, it vacillated wildly between competing explanations. On every metric one can remember, however, tariffs are not accomplishing what the president claimed they would.

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More sophisticated protectionists maintain that the purpose of tariffs is — or at least, should be — to grow the U.S. industrial base by ensuring demand for what it produces. Set aside the issue of whether America’s industrial output is really lower than it used to be (it’s not), and whether the sector’s declining employment is primarily due to foreign competition (also untrue). Empirically, Trump’s tariffs have shown no sign of boosting American industry.

Domestic industrial production is flat. Manufacturing employment has continued falling since tariffs were imposed. These may not be fair indicators, as it would take time for new tariff-induced factories to come online. But investment in manufacturing facilities is also down, and most industrialists are complaining about tariffs rather than celebrating them.

There are a couple of reasons why Trump’s tariffs may not be incentivizing companies to build more in America. The president has imposed tariffs that are nearly universal, making little distinction between import categories. Yet half of U.S. imports are inputs for domestic production — 30 percent capital goods (excepting automotive), 20 percent industrial supplies and materials. When the prices of these goods rise because of tariffs, domestic manufacturing becomes costlier and less competitive. Not exactly an attractive opportunity.

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Other protectionist programs have much longer track records. The U.S. sugar industry, for example, has been shielded by a tariff-rate quota system for almost a century. A few thousand growers survive in Florida, but in return, Americans pay twice as much for the sweet stuff. Higher prices destroy approximately three times as many jobs in the downstream confectionery industry as they save in the sugar business. (They also induce food companies to put corn syrup in everything.)

Long-standing tariffs on Canadian lumber have driven up wood prices, which home builders and buyers don’t much appreciate. Protectionism helps insulate a flabby domestic car market from cheaper models. It raises the prices of essential foods like beef and peanuts. It makes clothing and shoes more expensive to protect domestic industries that hardly exist anymore.

Scott Winship is interviewed on his important work on the “misleading narrative about the ‘hollowing out’ of the middle class.” A slice:

We’ve been frustrated because the way that you get that result is if you define the middle class in terms of what the median household makes, the household that’s right in the middle. In the Pew analyses, the middle class makes between two thirds of the median and twice the median. And the problem with that is that if everybody’s income uniformly doubles over time and everybody is much better off in absolute terms, that measure would show the middle class hasn’t grown at all and you’re no better off than when you started. Steven [Rose] and I think there’s some merit to that measure, but it sort of hides changes in absolute living standards because it’s mixed in with changes in inequality. And we think you should focus on each of those things separately.

Here are further thoughts from Bob Graboyes on AI.

C. Jarrett Dieterle reports this unhappy news: “New Jersey revives the fight to reclassify gig workers as employees.”

Judge Glock offers lofty insight.

Also offering sound insight is my Mercatus Center colleague Salim Furth and his co-author Johanna Gilligan.

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… is from page 4 of James Ingram’s 1966 book, International Economic Problems [original emphasis]:

Nations trade with each other because they benefit from it. Other motives may be involved, of course, but the basic economic motivation for international trade is that of gain. The gain from international trade, like the gain from all trade, exists because specialization increases productivity. We are familiar with fruits of specialization and the division of labor in trade between regions of a single country, or between persons in a town, but we may not perceive that the same benefits exist in international trade. The political boundaries that divide geographic areas into nations do not change the fundamental nature of trade and the benefits it confers on the trading partners.

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John Puri decries Comrade Mamdani’s presumptuous notion that he, as mayor, is the owner of all of Gotham’s rental properties. A slice:

John Locke identified the moral basis of property as improvement upon the state of nature, forged by human labor. The essence of property, he wrote, is “Dominion.” Renowned microeconomist Armen Alchian defined this dominion as “the exclusive authority to determine how a resource is used.”

The modifier in private property makes it a thicker concept. Alchian reduced it to three elements: “(1) exclusivity of rights to choose the use of a resource, (2) exclusivity of rights to the services of a resource, and (3) rights to exchange the resource at mutually agreeable terms” — the legal ability to control, profit from, and dispose of one’s property. In New York City, buildings subject to rent control or “stabilization,” a euphemism for milder rent control, or all those constructed before 1974, have been drained of every aspect of private ownership.

The practical purpose of property rights, Alchian notes, is to allocate scarce resources in a civilized manner. The pre-modern distribution of New York’s regulated properties is evidence that they are no such thing. Accurate prices are replaced by hours spent waiting in line. The wealthiest residents receive the deepest discounts. Turnover is minimal by design, so outsiders are squeezed into the bursting unregulated market.

Once an initial lease is signed, landlords lose control of who may or may not occupy their rent-regulated units. If tenants stay put, as nearly all do, managers are required to renew their leases indefinitely. Tenants may also pass on apartments they do not own to any family member, or “family-like” individual with an “emotional and financial commitment” to them, who has lived in the unit for one or two years.

For the services they render, landlords may charge only what the city permits, no matter their expenses. The New York City Rent Guidelines Board voted in June to fulfill Mamdani’s rent freeze, despite knowing that operating costs for rent-stabilized buildings had risen by 5.3 percent. A tenth of units are unprofitable by fiat. Last year, 57,000 dilapidated “zombie” apartments sat vacant because they would cost more to fix up than the government would allow them to earn. (The mayor might seize a landlord’s building if they rent without repairs.) And if a tenant does not pay rent, it can take months to more than a year to evict them.

Reason‘s Jacob Sullum explains something that shouldn’t – but, alas, what nevertheless does – need explaining, namely, “Trump’s assault on judicial review undermines a crucial safeguard against tyranny.” Two slices:

Although Trump’s comment about [Judge Jon] Tigar was mild compared to his subsequent attacks on judges who dared to disagree with him, it prompted a rare public rebuke by Chief Justice John Roberts, a George W. Bush appointee. “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges,” Roberts said in a statement released by the Supreme Court. “What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them. That independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for.”

It should be obvious by now that Trump is not thankful for an independent judiciary, which he views as an illegitimate obstacle to his policy agenda and personal whims. That much is clear from his over-the-top denunciations of recalcitrant judges and justices, whom he habitually accuses of political bias or cowardice, sometimes recommending their impeachment. It is also clear from the arguments that Justice Department lawyers have made in court, especially during Trump’s second term.

Again and again, Trump’s legal representatives have argued that the courts have no business reviewing his decisions or, at the very least, owe him the sort of deference that would allow him to do pretty much anything he wants. They have staked out that position in cases involving issues such as Trump’s tariffs, his invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, his National Guard deployments, his retaliation against political opponents, and his plan to replace the East Wing of the White House with a huge, gaudy ballroom.

Trump’s resistance to judicial review goes beyond criticizing the reasoning or conclusions of judges who rule against him. It amounts to a frontal assault on the rule of law and the separation of powers.

…..

Trump, in short, claimed that Congress had completely delegated its tariff authority to the president, subject only to his own determination that the requisite emergency existed. That claim was rejected by every court that considered it, including the CIT, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

Trump’s response to the Federal Circuit’s decision reflected his knee-jerk assumption that judges who rule against him are motivated by political bias. The court was “Highly Partisan,” Trump explained. He described the majority as “a Radical Left group of judges,” implying that the result was dictated by ideology rather than a careful consideration of the facts and the law.

Wall Street Journal columnist Mary Anastasia O’Grady reports on Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum’s squelching of her fellow Mexicans’ individual liberties, including their freedom of speech. A slice:

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum says the “audience rights” initiative she announced last month is designed to protect the public from fake news. But by making a government agency the arbiter of the truth, the president’s effort greenlights censorship. Journalists, writers, intellectuals and entrepreneurs are alarmed.

The slow strangulation of democratic pluralism in Mexico by Ms. Sheinbaum and her Morena party started with President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (2018-24), also known as AMLO. He governed as a classic populist, expanding welfare rolls to buy loyalty at the ballot box. But as someone who came up in politics during the 71-year rule of the repressive Institutional Revolutionary Party, he understood that perpetual power for Morena required more.

By the end of AMLO’s presidency, Morena had wrested control of the formerly independent National Electoral Institute and the Electoral Tribunal. When the party failed to secure a supermajority in 2024 lower-house elections, electoral authorities manipulated rules around proportional representation to make it happen. During his final month in office AMLO pushed a new law through Congress establishing the election of all judges. The Mexican judiciary has become a farce.

This creeping authoritarianism, which AMLO dubbed Mexico’s “fourth transformation,” or 4T, continues. Ms. Sheinbaum insists she supports democratic norms. Yet under her leadership, the Morena machine is using its sharp teeth and claws to shred any remaining protection of individual liberty and the rule of law.

James Lileks is correct: Too many of today’s “disciplines” in the social sciences – especially, but not only, the slew of ‘disgruntled-studies’ ones – are platforms for undisciplined emoters, not actual thinkers, teachers, or researchers). Here’s his conclusion:

But now they have it all figured out. Of course, science is always evolving and making new discoveries that require reassessment of fundamental beliefs, but the soft sciences — from an outsider’s ignorant perspective, I admit — seem like “Lysenko was wrong, but in its essence and intention, Lysenkoism is correct.”

It’s a fascinating topic, because mankind is endlessly fascinating, but science? Conservatives might not “believe” in it, despite the novel and interesting ideas it might produce, but who cares? Worry more about the people who believe in something because the person at the head of the classroom has a glistening resume, like the late Arday. A PhD in the spongy-soft sciences doesn’t mean you know more than everyone else. It means you designed an interesting basket for a hot-air balloon and got it six feet off the ground in front of a thesis committee, half of whom believe helium is a social construct.

Jon Miltimore writes movingly about the great Jimmy Lai, who is currently imprisoned by Beijing’s reigning brutes.

Mike Munger and Richard Reinsch discuss Milton Friedman.

Politico reports on the GOP’s embrace of collectives economic fallacies and policies. (HT Scott Lincicome) A slice:

“There’s not a lot of daylight between — and there hasn’t been for a decade — [Sen.] Bernie [Sanders] supporters and MAGA supporters. Bernie and the president just have a little bit different ideas on how to deliver those results, but there’s a lot of overlap,” said Alex Bruesewitz, an outside adviser to Trump. “When the Republican message for a decade or longer has been, ‘Work harder, I pulled myself up by the bootstraps,’ that’s not a particularly effective message to these people. They don’t want to hear it.”

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… is from page 53 of Ludwig von Mises’s September 1949 Plain Talk essay, “The Why of Human Action,” as this essay is reprinted in the 2007 Liberty Fund edition, edited by Bettina Bien Greaves, of some of Mises’s essays – a collection titled Economic Freedom and Interventionism: An Anthology of Articles and Essays:

The social function of economic science consists precisely in developing sound economic theories and in exploding the fallacies of vicious reasoning. In the pursuit of this task the economist incurs the deadly enmity of all mountebanks and charlatans whose shortcuts to an earthly paradise he debunks. The less these quacks are able to advance plausible objections to an economist’s argument, the more furiously do they insult them.

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I asked Claude to use World Bank data to calculate per-capita GDP in the median landlocked country relative to per-capita GDP in the median non-landlocked country. No surprise: Per-capita GDP in the median landlocked country is a mere 44 percent of per-capita GDP in the median non-landlocked country.

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Ryan Bourne and GMU Econ alum Adam Michel explain what shouldn’t – but, alas, what nevertheless does – need explaining, namely: “The DSA can abolish bills — it can’t abolish costs.” A slice:

The Democratic Socialists of America’s (DSA) new platform promises a world without bills. In their utopia, you’d see no rent check. No health insurance premium. No student loan repayment. No electricity bill. Life’s basics, including food, education, medicine, and transportation, would all become “common goods and utilities.”

That might sound appealing to Americans struggling with the cost of living after a bout of high inflation. But it’s just an accounting trick. A bill reflects the price of the service you were provided and how much of it you used. The DSA can socialize that payment, charging an out-of-pocket price of zero while taxpayers cover the tab. It cannot abolish the underlying cost of providing the service.

Nor can it abolish scarcity. A doctor’s time is limited. Apartments in Manhattan are scarce. Only so much electricity-generating capacity is available at 6 p.m. on a hot day in August. All goods and services require finite resources, whether they’re skilled teachers, construction workers, bus drivers, farmland, or whatever else. This is the central constraint nonmarket systems face when suspending market prices.

Market prices help manage that scarcity by conveying information about supply and demand. If a harvest fails, a crop becomes scarcer, and its price rises. That discourages some consumption—often by shifting to similar, lower-price substitutes—while encouraging additional production.

But DSA-style socialists see rising prices as a moral failure. The virtue of prices is not that they identify who is most deserving; it is that they allow millions of strangers to coordinate what they produce and consume without the impossibility of a central authority knowing everyone’s circumstances.

So that leaves the question: if not market prices, then what? What system of rationing replaces it? And who does get the bill?

And that bill from the DSA will be huge – as is made clear by Reem Ibrahim.

Some of Comrade Mamdani’s supporters are surprised to learn that they are among the comrades who must pay for socialist utopia. A slice:

Mamdani has not helped matters by singling out successful individuals. The mayor recorded a video earlier this year outside the apartment building where billionaire investor Ken Griffin lives. The stunt was an uncalled-for attack on someone whose alleged sin is owning a penthouse in the world’s financial capital.

Mamdani’s list is still live, and the mayor’s office seems to have no intention of taking it down. Podcaster Scott Galloway, who previously supported the tax, complained that the list “doxed” him, and he accused Mamdani of using it as a “wanted poster.” A Democratic City Council member said she is rethinking her support for the levy after seeing her primary residence of 30 years included on the list and hearing from many angry constituents.

Written before Jason Array’s suicide, this piece on Arday by John McWhorter is nevertheless superb. A slice:

The problem is that what is obvious is probably not very complicated—never mind that what Arday thinks is obvious is a vast and self-indulgent exaggeration. Within this mental universe, Arday’s academic focus was not on learning new things and fashioning new ways of processing existence but on criticizing others’ morals. This is not intellection but advocacy, and that is frankly much easier than thinking. The term “scholar-activist” tries to finesse this by making the two appear to be alternate forms of the same endeavor. But the scholar-activist is often more activist than scholar, and Arday was an extreme example of the type.

Nothing in his work suggests intense engagement with a body of data (Arday himself has claimed that because of his dyslexia, he can engage only one page of academic prose in a sitting) or with a challenging way of analyzing that data. In academia, what is interesting is the counterintuitive, the discovery. Arday merely reinforced long-established and simplistic pieties. He became the equivalent of a full professor at Cambridge based on doing interviews with acquaintances about the racism they experienced, and then largely just presenting what they said. At its highest level, this could be good (but not great) journalism; it could not be academic work. On the level Arday worked, my 14-year-old could best him after some quick training in Latinate, Judith Butler-esque prose.

Arday was defrocked after the revelation that most of even this incurious nattering in the guise of research was plagiarized from others’ work. Claiming that his supposed autism made him think that learning was mimicry, he composed most of his work from generous tranches of cut-and-paste from other sources, often (but certainly not always) lightly reworded. But even if this performance art disguised as thought were all his own work, his elevation to such heights by Cambridge was an abomination.

As I might say (with palms out and widened eyes), arguing for the obvious is not brilliance. Even when it’s about black people.

Also written before Arday’s suicide, and yet also nevertheless excellent, is this piece by Brad Thompson. A slice:

This is, quite likely, the worst academic scandal of all time. There have been other academic scandals over the centuries, but nothing quite like this one. It’s the worst academic scandal not only because it indicts one of the greatest universities in the world, but because it indicts all higher education in the English-speaking world! The Arday case is the symbol and culmination of the kind of intellectual and moral rot that has been seeping into higher education for sixty-plus years.

If Cambridge University—an 817-year-old institution—is to be saved (and it’s an open question as to whether it can or even should be saved), all those administrators and faculty involved in hiring, promoting, and defending Jason Arday should be fired immediately. Nothing less will do if Cambridge is to survive.

The great tragedy of the L’Affaire Arday is that there may very well be scores if not hundreds of similar cases around the English-speaking world.

Phil Magness continues to document J.D. Vance’s astonishing economic ignorance.

Here’s a headline that surprises no competent economist: “Stock-Picking Funds Are Performing as Poorly as Ever.”