Tweet [1]
Also writing on the dangers of Elizabeth Warren’s appalling hubris is Max Gulker [3].
Eric Boehm reports on why stimulus spending is no vaccine against the coronavirus [5].
Pierre Lemieux – here [6] and here [7] – writes with economic wisdom about emergencies, prices, shortages, and the state’s role. Here’s a slice from the second piece:
[W]e learned, thanks to Reason Magazine [8], that eBay stopped allowing sales of coronavirus supplies out of fear of “anti-price-gouging” laws. It seems that Amazon, for the same reason, stopped its third-parties from letting customers bid up prices of such supplies, otherwise generally unavailable. There is too much top-down benevolence and not enough free self-interest in America and the world. Why not try free enterprise?
Sally Satel makes the case for compensating donors of kidneys and other transplantable body organs [9].
Here’s Deirdre McCloskey’s Preface to the Korean edition of her book, Why Liberalism Works [10]. Her opening:
Liberalism is the theory, by now only about two centuries old, that people should not be slaves—not Koreans as slaves to Japanese, not wives as slaves to husbands, not citizens as slaves to the State. A slave cannot say No. You can be a 100 percent slave, bought and sold, or merely a 14 percent slave, taxed at that rate. Being a slave to the State only on 14 percent of the days, only on Mondays, say, unable to say No, and beaten or imprisoned if you do, still means you are a (partial) slave. Liberalism makes everyone equal in permission to buy and sell, vote and protest, move and venture. No slaves.