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Here are questions that George Will has for Brett Kavanaugh [4]. A slice:
Dissenting in Lochner, Oliver Wendell Holmes said the Constitution “does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer’s ‘Social Statics,’ ” a book advocating laissez faire economic policies. However, because laissez faire is what freedom looks like in economic life, is there some sense in which the Constitution, the purpose of which is to enable a free society, does foster it?
In this letter in the Wall Street Journal, Steve Entin explains some of the reasons why wage subsidies are a bad idea [5]. A slice:
Another reason for using more capital is growth of regulation. Regulatory-related capital (safety, environmental control, etc.) must earn a return like any other capital, which must come out of GDP, reducing income shares and levels of other inputs. Costs of regulation cannot be countered by raising taxes on capital to subsidize labor, as Mr. Galston suggests. That would reduce capital formation and wages.
Alex Tabarrok celebrates the rise of the middle class globally [6].
Virtually all research concludes that immigrants, especially undocumented immigrants, commit fewer crimes, including violent crimes, than native-born Americans (among other things, they do not want to draw attention to themselves). In 2016, the Cato Institute’s [and GMU Econ alum] Alex Nowratesh writes, “the homicide conviction rate for native-born Americans in Texas was 3.2 per 100,000 natives while it was 1.8 per 100,000 illegal immigrants and 0.9 per 100,000 legal immigrants.” In raw numbers, 32 undocumented immigrants and 28 legal immigrants were convicted of homicide in Texas, compared with 746 native-born Americans.
But the Republican Party won’t let such facts get in the way of calling for precisely the sort of big-government surveillance state against which conservatives used to rail.
And here’s more from Nick on the same topic [8].
GMU Econ alum Dan Mitchell documents Elizabeth Warren’s apparent desire to make cronyism great again [9].