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Here’s a new mini-series inspired by George Orwell’s Animal Farm (and produced by my friends at the Fund for American Studies) [2].  (HT Patrick Reasonover)

Here’s my colleague Bryan Caplan at his very best [3].  A slice:

What about Americans’ right to “preserve their culture”?  I’m tempted to call it the nativist version of a “safe space [4],” but cultural preservation is far more totalitarian.  A “safe space” is but an enclave – a small corner of the world where politically-correct norms prevail.  To “preserve a culture,” in contrast, requires a whole country to impose traditional norms on everyone.  And this is crazy: You don’t even have the right to force your culture on your adult children, much less millions of strangers [5].

And here’s Bryan, on Open Borders Day, rightly celebrating an instance of liberalized immigration [6].

Mark Perry explains, in the pages of the Los Angeles Times, that Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are completely wrong on trade [7].  A slice:

To understand how economically backward Trump’s position is on trade, imagine him standing in the parking lot of a Walmart, Home Depot or Best Buy and shouting to Americans as they leave with their merchandise, “Hey, you just got absolutely crushed by those merchants who sold you cheap products made in China, Japan and Mexico. People overseas are now laughing at you.” That’s ridiculous. Consumers who voluntarily purchased those products, and who probably said “thank you” to the cashier as they left, did so because they valued the merchandise they selected more than the dollars they left behind.

Here’s another slice from Mark’s op-ed:

Virtually all economists support free trade and oppose protectionism. For example, a 2014 University of Chicago survey found that 93% of the country’s top economists agreed with the statement “Past major trade deals have benefited most Americans” and none disagreed (7% were uncertain).

(It’s sad that Paul Krugman is now making noises that heavily hint that he is not in that 93% [8].)

In The Hill, Michael Saltsman notes that it’s been 20 years since David Card’s and Alan Krueger’s minimum-wage book, Myth and Measurement, was first published [9].  (HT Howie Rich)  Mr. Saltsman understandably is unimpressed with the quality of the economics in this book.  A slice from Saltsman’s essay:

Today, it’s even clearer that the Card-Krueger conclusions in Myth and Measurement were without foundation. In a 2007 summary of the previous two decades of research, the economists Neumark and Wascher found that 85 percent of the most credible studies pointed to job loss following a minimum wage hike. A more recent literature review published by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, which included the latest and greatest research, still finds clear negative impacts on employment following a minimum wage increase.

Cleaned by capitalism! [10]  (HT Fred Dent)

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