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Writing in today’s Wall Street Journal, historians Larry Schweikart and Burt Folsom correct Pres. Obama’s mistaken history of American infrastructure.  Here’s their closing:

In all of these examples, building infrastructure was never the engine of growth, but rather a lagging indicator of growth that had already occurred in the private sector. And when the infrastructure was built, it was often best done privately, at least until the market grew so large as to demand a wider public role, as with the need for an interstate-highway system in the mid 1950s.

There is a lesson here for President Obama: Government “investment” in infrastructure is often wasteful and tends to support decaying or stagnant technologies. Let the entrepreneurs decide what infrastructure the country needs, and most of the time they will build it themselves.

UCLA’s Matthew Kahn takes issue with Peter Navarro’s economically uninformed call to protect U.S. businesses from having to compete with Chinese suppliers.

My colleague Bryan Caplan, over at EconLog, is aghast that Paul Krugman’s macroeconomics can be so obviously naive.

Also at EconLog, Alberto Mingardi – with help from my colleague Pete Boettke – defends the late, great Henry Hazlitt from Krugman’s misunderstandings.

Unlike the always-dreamy neocons – who are convinced that in far-off lands civil society, or at least ‘respect’ for America, can be made to flow like honey from the blasts of U.S. military weapons and the bank account of Uncle Sam  – Cato’s Doug Bandow is realistic about U.S. foreign ‘policy.’

Reason’s Peter Suderman offers yet more evidence that Obamacare is damaging the U.S. labor market.

Ed Lopez offers a tribute to the late Charles Rowley.

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