When the U.S. House of Representatives voted to reauthorize the Export-Import Bank last week, special interests got their way in the swamp that is Washington. While advocates for the nation’s official export credit agency pretend it supports small businesses, grows exports and sustains growth, the reality is quite different. Ex-Im Bank is better described as a vessel for corporate welfare, mostly for the benefit of large domestic and foreign manufacturers.
George Will is an elite thinker. A slice:
“History,” said the sociologist Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923), “is a graveyard of elites.” Yes, but of everyone else, too. And elites have produced things — from vaccines to the globalized commerce that has reduced extreme poverty worldwide 70 percent since 1990 — that have made lives better and longer before graveyards beckon.
If actor Mark Ruffalo were to read this Facebook post by Todd Zywicki, I assume that he – Ruffalo – would be duly embarrassed. (Alas, likely not. Ruffalo is not an elite thinker.)
James Harrigan and Phil Magness ask “How many people must die to fix the planet?”
Here are Sarah Skwire’s five favorite novels with economic themes. (On my own such list, were I ever to make one, would be included William Dean Howells’s great 1885 novel, The Rise of Silas Lapham.)
Bravo for U.C.-Davis math professor Abigail Thompson!
