Tweet [1]
My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy applauds universal savings accounts [2].
George Will rightly laments the cult of fragility on today’s college campuses [3]. A slice:
Explicit racism having been substantially reduced in American society, a multibillion-dollar industry for consultants (and corporate diversity officers, academic deans, etc.: UCLA’s vice chancellor for equity, diversity and inclusion earns more than $400,000) has developed around testing to detect “implicit bias.” It is assumed to be ubiquitous until proved otherwise, so detecting it is steady work: Undetectable without arcane tests and expensive experts, you never know when it has been expunged, and government supervision of everything must be minute and unending.
Mark Perry digs into newly released U.S. Census data and discovers good news [4]. A slice:
We hear all the time about “rising income inequality” in America (there are more than 100,000 Google search results [5] for that term), about “the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer,” the “stagnant or disappearing middle class,” all of the recent income gains going to the rich,” the lack of income mobility and other narratives of pessimism. In a December 2013 speech, President Obama described rising income inequality as the “defining challenge of our time” and promised that for the rest of his presidency, he and his administration would focus all of their efforts to stop the increase in income inequality. And yet, the data in today’s Census Bureau tell a much different story.
Here are David Henderson’s thoughts on antitrust and Amazon [7].
Eric Boehm documents yet another American casualty of Trump’s trade war [8].
James Devereaux explains how the rule of law is eroded by protectionism [9]. Here’s his conclusion:
But you can’t have it both ways. The rule of law is a constraint first on arbitrary rule. Allowing the government to openly side with selected industries, individuals, and businesses is to sow the seeds of degeneration. All forms of protectionism unavoidably undermine the rule of law.