Dan Hannan writes wisely about this unfortunate fact: “The belief that industries exist to provide jobs, rather than jobs existing to create prosperity, is a two-hundred-year-old fallacy.” A slice:
The wistfulness people feel when they look back at the era of heavy industry stems from the widespread belief that economic growth exists to sustain jobs rather than the other way around. The early 19th-century French economist Frédéric Bastiat called this fallacy “Sisyphism” after the mythical Greek tyrant who was sentenced by the gods to spend all eternity pushing a boulder up a hill only for it to roll back down each day. Bastiat asked acerbically whether, by their own logic, the Sisyphists would prefer barren farmland, since it would take more people to grow food on it.
In our domestic lives, we recognise the advantages of labour-saving technology. No one laments the work “destroyed” by their dishwasher. But extend the same argument to industry and many of the same people turn Luddite, fretting that automation makes human tasks redundant.
Similar concerns surface in every generation. “The idea that the utility and importance of an industry are to be measured by the employment which it gives to labour is so deeply rooted in human nature that economists can scarcely claim to have taken the first step towards its eradication”, wrote the Canadian mathematician Simon Newcomb. That was in 1893. Today, the first step has still not been taken.
What the economist Bryan Caplan calls “the make-work fallacy” seems to be hardwired into our genome. In the late 18th century, there were widespread fears that mechanising agriculture would destroy jobs and turn farm-workers into vagabonds. These newfangled “manufactories”, clever men averred, would never employ enough people.
In the late 20th century, the same argument was applied to services. The “real” jobs, we kept being told, were in manufacturing. What were all the former factory-workers going to do? Cut each other’s hair? Flip burgers? Now, in the 21st century, the bogeyman is AI. And yet, every time, people end up being released from tougher jobs into better ones, and living standards rise.
Reason‘s J.D. Tuccille is correct that Donald Trump is a cartoonish mercantilist. Three slices:
Politics is an industry in which ideas demonstrated to be ineffective and morally reprehensible live on long after they should have died. That’s the case with President Donald Trump’s fondness for mercantilism, as he espouses hoary old nostrums about the alleged benefits of hoarding money and preventing Americans from using their capital to purchase desired goods from other countries. Like a throwback to the 18th century, the president mistakes accumulating the means of exchange for building actual prosperity, as if we’d all be better off with overstuffed wallets than with the things our funds can purchase.
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Of course, trade isn’t a collective endeavor. Companies, organizations, and individuals buy and sell all the time, often without much regard for whether they’re dealing with domestic purchasers and vendors or partners based overseas. So long as payments clear and orders arrive, everybody is happy buying what they want and selling inventory. If they weren’t reasonably content, they wouldn’t make deals.
The problem comes when we aggregate those uncountable separate transactions and treat them as a team sport in which countries lose if they use capital to pay for needed goods and services. It’s a weird collectivist treatment of what are actually a multitude of market transactions, one that Trump obviously buys into with his comments about “we lose” in trade, and we’d be better off “if we stopped trading.” It’s a mindset that hearkens back to the days of absolute monarchs boasting about galleons full of gold.
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With his continual grumping that Americans “lose” money by buying from vendors in other countries, the president at least gets an “A” for consistency. But he’s consistent at being wrong in his belief that we’re better off accumulating money than we are in exchanging it for things we want, such as food.
“Just think how rich you’ll be when you stop eating altogether!” Cato Institute economist Scott Lincicome snarked in response to Trump’s grumbles, evoking a vision of fat wallets at the expense of empty bellies.
Trade isn’t a team sport, and there are no losers—just different degrees of winners—when people freely buy and sell, exchanging money for the goods and services that satisfy their needs. Unfortunately, the president’s economic notions are stuck in the mercantilist past.
Colin Grabow reports that “the Jones Act waiver has moved more energy than official numbers show.”
Jeffrey Degner reminds us of an actual historical example of what Comrade Mamdani calls “the warmth of collectivism.”
Gabriele Mazzini counsels skepticism of the motives of AI CEOs’ recent doomerism. A slice:
A wave of corporate warnings and technical disclosures has flooded the media, with headlines worrying over “swarms” of rogue artificial-intelligence agents launching “unprecedented” cyberattacks, outsmarting their makers, and inching toward a terrifying autonomy. The most revealing part of this narrative isn’t what the software did. It’s who is telling the story—and why. When corporate leaders publicly insist that the systems they financed, engineered and deployed are suddenly beyond their power to contain, skepticism isn’t only healthy; it is essential.
For years, Silicon Valley has drawn scrutiny from civil society and global regulators over tangible harms such as youth mental health deterioration and systematic privacy violations. Today, industry figures seem to be trying to change that public image. Loudly blowing the whistle on their own systems—just as two of the leading companies were preparing for massive initial public offerings—lets AI executives position themselves as a new generation of leaders who have come to terms with their societal responsibilities. They seem to want us to believe that they no longer want to “move fast and break things” but will instead stand as vigilant guardians between humanity and a technological apocalypse.
There is one glaring problem: Software doesn’t rebel. A mathematical model possesses neither intent, malice nor the will to defy its creators, let alone extinguish our species. AI is a human artifact, engineered for profit.
When an agentic model in an evaluation sandbox connects to an unauthorized server or executes an exploit, it hasn’t staged a coup. It has tried to meet the human-defined objectives set out before it through a path its designers failed to constrain. It’s the digital equivalent of the King Midas myth, in which the king’s ill-defined wish turns even his food and drink into gold.
The Editorial Board of the Washington Post explains what shouldn’t – but, alas, what today nevertheless does – need explaining: “Conservatives cheering Trump’s exclusion of Politico, CNN and MS NOW from the White House are being shortsighted.” A slice:
President Donald Trump’s attempt to divide and conquer the media isn’t going well. On Monday, after the White House deactivated CNN’s press passes, each of its major competitors said they would halt video coverage of the president until further notice. That means less attention: the lifeblood of this presidency.
Fox News and its personnel have performed creditably in this episode. The news channel’s Washington bureau chief, Bryan Boughton, currently chairs the group of TV networks that pool resources to record all of the president’s public appearances. That role rotates every quarter. He announced the decision to indefinitely pause presidential pool coverage alongside ABC, CBS and NBC.
Fox News reporter Jacqui Heinrich, in her capacity as president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, issued a statement saying that Trump’s move to bar Politico, MS NOW and CNN from the White House briefing room violates the First Amendment.
Similarly commendable media solidarity was displayed in 2009, when Fox News was on the receiving end of presidential ire. President Barack Obama’s administration tried to bar a Fox News reporter from a television pool, but the news channel’s competitors showed a united front, and the White House backed down. That would be a welcome resolution in this matter, too.
Republicans now cheering the exclusion of media outlets from the White House would do well to keep the Obama example in mind. If Trump’s move against Politico, MS NOW and CNN stands, the next Democratic president might exclude Fox News and other right-leaning outlets from the briefing room.
National Review‘s Jim Geraghty decries Trump’s contempt for the U.S. Constitution. A slice:
Trump has not helped the government’s argument by making statements that suggest he does not recognize First Amendment rights, such as Friday’s statement, “I don’t think somebody should be allowed to come in and write fake stories, they’re fake news, and that’s why they have no credibility. That’s why — so, I had 96 percent negative coverage during the election, and I won because they have no credibility. . . . I mean, there’s something wrong with a country that can allow people to write purposely negative stories.”
The first thing a president does is pledge, so help him God, to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” If you do not believe that the First Amendment protects an American’s right to write purposely negative stories, you are not preserving, protecting, or defending the Constitution.
Charles Lane: “When Congress is silent, Trump expands his power.” [DBx: Yes – but so, too, does every president.]
About the hostility of young Americans toward capitalism, Arnold Kling asks: “Are young people objectively worse off? Or have they just been brainwashed by progressive educators?”
Although consumers may feel that they’re being ripped off when they see gas prices spike after a hurricane or realize that drugs are being sold far cheaper in foreign countries, there are in fact very subtle market mechanisms at play that increase supplies and eradicate market distortions. In these situations, the free market is working, and it’s ultimately working far more efficiently than any government-mandated controls would.
Since 1945 the case for a liberal international economic order has been made in terms of multilateral reciprocity: freer trade is good, providing all parties liberalise trade. This is the kind of thinking that became the conventional wisdom of the GATT from the outset. The belief that nations benefit only when other nations open their markets has dominated GATT negotiations; the liberalisation of imports is a ‘cost’ one has to pay, or a ‘concession’ one has to make, in order to gain from exports to newly liberalised foreign markets….
While knocking from their pedestals some of the “great men” of the past century, I also devote attention to debunking a variety of ideas and related programs that flourished along with these leaders, such as business-government cooperation, pump priming via government deficit spending, Johnson’s War on Poverty, Nixon’s New Economic Plan, and the antirecession “stimulus” and bailouts caring out recently by the Bush and Obama administrations. Such ideas cloak a frenzy of opportunism in which politicians snatch new powers and special interests enrich themselves at public expense, all in the guise of saving the day – more often than not, a day that needs saving only because of destructive actions the government has taken previously.
