Richard Ebeling identifies the poisonous root of the NBA’s recent kowtowing to the authoritarians in Beijing. In this slice, Richard makes the solid point that two wrongs don’t make a right:
In the hysteria of an American political election season, the worst thing that could happen would be if politicians and pundits now propose to legislate or regulate the response by the NBA or the Houston Rockets to the Chinese government. With all the chatter about the Chinese attempting to abridge the freedom of speech of Americans through the weapon of financial intimidation if they want to do business in China, it then would be the U.S. government dictating what those sports teams and their NBA representatives could say and agree to in trying to salvage their growing business in China.
More broadly on the same topic is George Will. Here’s his conclusion:
Unfortunately, however, [Beto] O’Rourke, [Elizabeth] Warren and [NBA Commissioner Adam] Silver demonstrate the tendency of too many progressives to cut constitutional corners, to despise and bully adversaries, and to practice theatrical but selective indignation about attacks on fundamental American principles, some of which they themselves traduce. Just what we did not need in our dispiriting civic life — additional evidence that there really is no such thing as rock bottom.
Ben Zycher exposes problems with ‘renewable’ energy. A slice:
In the larger context, the opposition to conventional energy that is the core of the GND is fundamentally anti-human, because one major implication of the opposition to fossil fuels is an aversion to increases in the value of human capital and other parameters that have the effect of increasing the demand for conventional energy. Moreover, the authoritarian implications of the GND are serious, however unnoticed.
In this letter in the Wall Street Journal, Tom Grennes again exposes the absurdity of the Jones Act.
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The most personal form of private governance is individual self-governance or internal moral constraints. Ignored by strict neoclassical economists, the importance of individual self-governance or internal moral constraints has been discussed by writers from Adam Smith to Immanuel Kant and Leo Tolstoy. Internal moral constraints are rules that people choose to follow even if other people do not impose them; these constraints are chosen from within. Manners, politeness, honesty, and trustworthiness are common examples of internal constraints that people commonly adopt independent of external rules.
Power doesn’t stay where you put it. It expands, and corrupts, other activities and other government officials.
Liberalism does not care who has power; nor does it care how power is acquired. All that matters is that the members of society are free to pursue their various ends, and that the polity is able to accommodate all peacefully.
I am sure that there was no man born marked by God above another; for none comes into this world with a saddle on his back, neither any booted and spurred to ride him.
The Great Enrichment doesn’t mean, of course, that there’s nothing more to do in helping the poor, especially by ending the numerous, monstrous, and yet politically popular policies that in fact damage them worldwide. But it does mean that it is mischievous to attack, as many political theories do, a “capitalism” that has done more than anything else to help the poor.
