Bruce Yandle rightly laments the predations of the stationary bandits who rule us.
My Mercatus Center colleague Nita Ghei highlights a crumb of hope for free trade.
My colleague Bryan Caplan is impressed by John Turner’s 2012 biography of Brigham Young. (What knowledge I have of Young is from the chapter devoted to him in Jonathan Hughes’s 1965 book, The Vital Few.)
During the recent welter of reports about the Clintons’ self-dealing through their charity that has been very charitable to them, the New Yorker, reporting her plans to uplift the downtrodden, quoted her aspiration: “I want to really marry the public and the private sector.” This would solve the Clintons’ problem of discerning the line between public business and private aggrandizement: Erase the line.
So, herewith the United States’ choice. Restore the House of Clinton. Or confer executive powers — powers that President Obama by his audacity, and Congress by its lethargy, have proved to be essentially unlimited — on another competitor in the sleaze sweepstakes, Donald Trump, who shares his opponent’s disinclination to disentangle the personal and the political.
Arnold Kling, reading Joel Mokyr’s new book, ponders the use of “culture” in social-science research. A slice:
My recommendation would be to replace the term “culture” with the phrase “socially communicated knowledge and behavior.” I think it is pretty obvious that a large subset of what we know is socially communicated through conversation, writing, teaching, on-the-job training, and such. A large subset of our behavior also is socially communicated. We imitate prestigious people. We obey authorities. We covet praise and fear being shamed by friends, family, and strangers.
Wisdom from Brittany Hunter. A slice:
In short, young people affected by these new [overtime-pay] rules will likely lose workplace flexibility.
Ideally, overtime pay should be an issue discussed and negotiated by the employer and the employee. When the government involves itself in the workforce, overregulation occurs and it is the employee who suffers the most.
