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Inspired by a recent New York Times op-ed on Switzerland, Scott Sumner rightly warns against thinking of countries as anecdotes [2]. A slice:

Anecdotes are a really bad way to think about countries.  America has launched an ill-fated trade war with China partly due to anecdotes about China stealing intellectual secrets. It’s true that China steals intellectual secrets, as does India, Vietnam, and lots of other developing countries.  But that’s no more an important feature of China than the US death penalty is an important feature of life in America.

Inspired by my GMU Econ colleague Bryan Caplan, Art Carden argues that the case for open borders is stronger than most people believe it to be [3].

Inspired by Times Square, Kerry McDonald celebrates spontaneous order [4].

Bradley Smith is rightly appalled at Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s endorsement of government control of speech [5]. A slice:

Dorsey thinks that government restraints on speech would be a good idea. He wants “regulators” to “ensure a level playing field.” Does that mean limiting the dollars that Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez can raise online? Does it require MSNBC and CNN to give equal time to conservative voices? Does it require Twitter to deactivate overly influential accounts? Limit their number of tweets concerning “issues?” How level must the field be, and who determines both the standard and when it has been reached? A primary reason why the Founders adopted the First Amendment was their recognition that we couldn’t trust government to decide what is “fair.”

Kevin Williamson brilliantly skewers those who wish to entrust the enforcement of morals to government [6]. A slice:

On Friday, I appeared opposite Sohrab Ahmari on a panel hosted by the William F. Buckley Program at Yale. He argued that the main duty of the state is not to protect liberty but to achieve the good, biblically defined. That’s what he said when he showed up, anyway — he was a little bit late owing to the fact that the state he would entrust to do God’s work here on Earth cannot quite manage to make the trains run on time, a fact that you might think would be of some interest to a bantamweight Mussolini.

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