Some Links

Tweet ^[1]

Jim Dorn rightly warns that the national-security card is too easily played to obstruct trade in order to enable special-interest groups to seize unearned riches ^[2].

My GMU Econ and Mercatus Center colleague Pete Boettke reviews Pierre Lemieux’s new book, What’s Wrong With Protectionism? ^[3]

George Will applauds Education secretary Betsy DeVos’s efforts to diminish Uncle Sam’s role in fueling insanity on American college campuses ^[4].

Dan Mitchell explains that value-added taxes are money machines to finance bigger government ^[5].

Speaking of taxes, Cato’s Chris Edwards finds that – surprise! – Americans are migrating to low-tax states ^[6].

Ron Bailey argues that artificial intelligence will be more economically significant than was steam power ^[7].

Here’s Richard Epstein on the intellectual poverty of today’s “new socialists. ^[8]” A slice:

The New Socialists in the United States live in a world of intellectual self-denial. They think that they can control the distribution of all the good things in life without undermining the economic and social institutions needed for the creation of that wealth in the first place. The words “competition,” “scarcity,” and “free entry” do not make it into [Corey] Robin’s constricted lexicon, and their absence explains why he botches the analytical issues concerning “freedom” thoroughly. His first sin is to ignore the simple truth that scarcity means that all of us cannot have all that we want all the time. His second sin is that of cherry-picking. Sadly, some individuals must grovel before their bosses to keep their jobs. But in a competitive economy, free entry allows many more individuals to quit their jobs for better opportunities, or even to be recruited away by another employer.

Competition leaves people with choices. But under the New Socialism, people will really discover what it means to be unfree when they only have this choice: work for the state and spend your falling wages on government-supplied goods—or starve.

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