Tweet [1]
David Henderson offers evidence of growing American prosperity [3].
Chelsea Follett celebrates how modernity saved her baby [4].
Jacques Delacroix reveals the poverty of democratic socialism [5]. (HT David Levey) A slice:
The fastest way for a country to raise the official, numerical productivity of its workers is to put out of work many of its low-productive workers. (That’s because the official figure is an arithmetic mean, an average.) This can be achieved entirely through regulations forbidding, for example, food trucks, informal seamstress services, and old-fashioned hair salons in private living rooms, and, in general, by making life less than easy for small businesses based on traditional techniques. This can be achieved entirely – and even inadvertently – from a well-meaning wish to regulate for the collective good. The more of this you do, the higher your productivity per capita appears to be and also, the higher your unemployment, and the less income is available to go around. I think the official high French productivity oddly distorts the image of real French income. I suspect it fools many French people, including public officials: They think they are wealthier than they are.
My Mercatus Center colleague Adam Thierer asks what Joseph Schumpeter would say about today’s hostility toward big tech companies [6]. Here’s Adam’s conclusion:
America’s seemingly inexhaustible supply of entrepreneurial spirit will surprise us with better alternatives than any regulatory wrecking ball Washington devises to demolish existing players or markets. Heed Schumpeter’s lessons and let change happen by getting incentives right such that another wave of creative destruction can work its magic.
David Smither explains that international trade refutes Hobbes’s notion of the state of nature [7].
When Progressives are in action, there’s no need to create straw men [8].